Wired: First Look at the Xbox One 

Peter Rubin:

At this point, fewer than 2 million Surface tablets have been sold. Windows Phone has a 3.2 percent share of the smartphone market. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, has sold 77 million units and has been the bestselling game console in the US for 28 straight months. Not to take anything away from Microsoft’s other consumer products, but there’s no longer any question which side the company’s bread is buttered on. And if the Interactive Entertainment Business division gets this right, the Xbox One is going to be a very, very big piece of bread.

Xbox is Microsoft’s foothold in the post-PC world.

NYT Live Coverage of Senate Hearing on Apple and Corporate Taxes 

Senator Rand Paul:

Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, has taken the floor with a very different tone. He says he is “offended” by the hearings. Who, he said, doesn’t try to minimize their own taxes?

“Tell me what Apple has done that’s illegal,” he said.

And on Twitter:

If there is anyone to blame here it is not Apple, it is Congress and the tax code it created.

Monday, 20 May 2013

The Talk Show, Live 

Speaking of The Talk Show, we’re doing another live audience episode in San Francisco on Tuesday 11 June, the second day of WWDC. Last year’s show was great, this year’s should be even better.

All New Flickr Design 

Big week for Yahoo.

‘See You on Larry’s Island’ 

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, with special guest Merlin Mann. We cover important, serious, issues, such as whether Larry Page more resembles a Bond villain or Magneto. In other words, the usual.

Brought to you by two great sponsors:

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Apple’s Prepared Testimony Before U.S. Senate 

An interesting read, including this:

Apple does not use tax gimmicks. Apple does not move its intellectual property into offshore tax havens and use it to sell products back into the US in order to avoid US tax; it does not use revolving loans from foreign subsidiaries to fund its domestic operations; it does not hold money on a Caribbean island; and it does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Apple has substantial foreign cash because it sells the majority of its products outside the US. International operations accounted for 61% of Apple’s revenue last year and two-thirds of its revenue last quarter. These foreign earnings are taxed in the jurisdiction where they are earned (“foreign, post-tax income”).

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

The One-Person Product 

Marco Arment on the Yahoo/Tumblr deal. Great perspective from the inside.

Two Takes on Google Glass at I/O 

Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company: “Even Google’s Own Developers Won’t Be Seen Wearing Google Glass”:

Those of us who believe in the future of Glass technology can identify other culprits: We can blame price. We can blame availability. We can blame battery. We can blame the silly aesthetic. We can even blame it on the rain! But imagine if Apple announced their new iPhone, yet almost no one at Cupertino felt the need to carry one. Or imagine if Ford announced a new car, but their execs insisted on biking to work.

If Google’s own cohort doesn’t feel compelled to wear Glass in spite of its perfectly predictable shortcomings, why would they ever expect that the rest of us will?

But then here’s Pete Pachal, writing for Mashable: “Google Glass Stole the Show at Google I/O 2013”:

The glaring omission didn’t stop Glass from stealing the show for the rest of the conference, though. Day 2 of I/O was packed with sessions on Glass, including one where official Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr apps made their debut. The sessions themselves garnered the kind of lineups usually reserved Lady Gaga tickets. Many developers were walking around wearing Glass, but it was the looks of jealousy from the Glass-less that underscored just how much interest there is in Google’s head-mounted gadget.

One of these guys is wrong.

Samsung’s Share of Android Hardware Profit 

Andy Boxall, writing for Digital Trends:

Analysts broke it down like this: Globally, it’s estimated the Android industry made $5.3 billion profit in the first quarter of this year, while the profit estimates for Android phones shipped by Samsung comes in at $5.1 billion for the same period. The exact figure quoted is 94.7 percent profit share, and that’s not including tablets either.

According to Strategy Analytics’ chart, in a (very) distant second place is LG, with 2.5 percent profit share, while all the other Android phone manufacturers — think about it, that’s everyone from Sony and HTC to Huawei, Acer and ZTE — are lumped into an Others category, which totals 2.7 percent.

Rather remarkable.

Yahoo Acquires Tumblr 

Marissa Mayer, on her Tumblr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster. […]

I’ve long held the view that in all things art and design, you can feel the spirit and demeanor of those who create them. That’s why it was no surprise to me that David Karp is one of the nicest, most empathetic people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most perceptive, capable entrepreneurs I’ve worked with. His respect for Tumblr’s community of creators is awesome, and I’m absolutely delighted to have him and his entire team join Yahoo!.

Humanely written. Love the “We promise not to screw it up”, because it’s a direct acknowledgement of every Tumblr user’s primary concern. That’s a weird sentence to put in a billion-dollar deal announcement, but I like it.

Sunday, 19 May 2013

All Things D: Yahoo Board Approves $1.1 Billion Acquisition of Tumblr 

Kara Swisher:

As part of the deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who got a windfall of cash from the deal — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain much control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure.

If they treat Tumblr the way Facebook has (so far) treated Instagram, I think this will work out well.

Saturday, 18 May 2013

EA Sports Developer Calls Wii U ‘Crap’ and Nintendo ‘Walking Dead’ 

Owen Good, Kotaku:

At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn’t developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports’ Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as “crap” and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether.

Bloomberg’s Lazy Apple Bias 

Starting to get silly at this point.

Friday, 17 May 2013

‘Blinking or Winking, as They Relieved Themselves’ 

Nick Bilton on the pervasiveness of Google Glass at I/O.

Everything Apple Needs to Introduce at WWDC to Appease the Internet 

Justin Williams:

With WWDC just a few weeks away, I thought it’d be beneficial to the Internet at large to compile a working list of everything that is expected of Apple during their Keynote and subsequent “State of the Union” addresses in order to appease the Internet. Failure to introduce each and every one of these features and updates will result in another stock price plummet, calls for Tim Cook’s ouster and an infinite amount of comments on tech blogs decrying that Android is superior to Apple’s iOS.

Google Hangouts Drops Support for XMPP 

Open always wins.

All the Mashed Potatoes

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Ian Betteridge spoofed my “Google Versus” piece from yesterday, using this oft-cited quote from Steve Jobs speaking at Macworld Expo back in 1997:

“We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose,” Jobs said. “We have to embrace the notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. If others are going to help us, that’s great. Because we need all the help we can get. […] The era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over.”

Betteridge is off the mark on this one. That quote from Jobs was very specific. It came at a time when Apple was not making great products, and when Apple’s fans and perhaps even employees were locked into a mindset that the wrong platform — Windows — had won. That Windows’s almost unimaginable success, its spectacular rise to worldwide ubiquity, was an injustice — one that only Apple could right. He wasn’t claiming that for Apple to succeed no one had to lose, only Microsoft (and, really, Windows in particular — as opposed to then-future initiatives like MP3 players and mobile phones, where for Apple to succeed it certainly helped that Microsoft lost).

Note too that Jobs’s message was bitter medicine. He was surrendering a war that the audience wanted Apple to continue fighting. As Jason Breitkopf noted in a comment on Betteridge’s piece, Jobs was booed, resoundingly,1 by the Macworld audience several times during his announcement. Page’s message at I/O was greeted with applause. Page was telling the I/O audience what they wanted to hear, that Google is something other than a ruthless, greedy competitor.

I’m not arguing that Apple is not also a ruthless and greedy competitor. In fact, my piece yesterday had nothing to do with Apple — only Google. (I should have left Android and the iPhone out of it, as that was the only oblique reference to Apple.) The difference is that Apple hasn’t claimed otherwise. Again, Jobs wasn’t claiming in 1997 that no one had to lose for Apple to win. The drum I’m trying to bang here is not that Google is a greedy competitor, but rather that Google is a greedy competitor that presents itself as anything but — as a sort of peaceful, whimsical, happy-go-lucky techno-futurist corporate utopian — and that rather than see this pose as absurd, many people, Googlers and Google users alike, buy it.

All organizations have aspirations. You’re welcome to roll your eyes at Steve Jobs’s spiel about Apple existing at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, or this from Jony Ive:

“We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn’t to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it’s the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, we will make money,” he said.

Mere spin? Perhaps. But those statements from Jobs and Ive are not absurd. If they’re not the absolute truth, they’re at least truthy. Whereas Larry Page’s pablum regarding Google not being pitted against other companies is farcical. Tim O’Reilly had a good line about Microsoft a decade ago:

Microsoft gets a lot of heat for not leaving enough on the table for others. My mother, who’s English, and quite a character, once said of Bill Gates, “He sounds like someone who would come to your house for dinner and say, ‘Thank you. I think I’ll have all the mashed potatoes.’”

That’s Google today. What major tech giant has Google not pitted itself against? Whose mashed potatoes do they not seek to take? Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Oracle, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon — Google has made enemies of all of them. The difference between Google’s predatory rapaciousness today and Microsoft’s of yore is that Microsoft wore it on their sleeve, they owned it, celebrated it.

What rankles about Google is their hypocrisy. 

  1. Seriously, watch the video. E.g., around the 2:30 mark, when Jobs announces that Internet Explorer will be the new default browser for Mac OS. The audience is outraged. (And Jobs, clearly, was prepared for the reaction.) ↩

Thursday, 16 May 2013

Jeffrey Zablotny on Apple’s ‘Photos Every Day’ TV Spot 

Jeffrey Zablotny:

This is a spot by TBWA/Chiat/Day for Apple, called ‘Photos Every Day’. The craft is fantastic, and there’s some subtle, unusual attention to detail in it.

The more I see it, the more I like this commercial.

Google Plus Still Looks Like Facebook 

James Russell:

As I posted a couple of days ago: Everything Is a Remix — so I have absolutely no problem with these two platforms sharing ideas and inspiration… but let’s not pretend one has struck off in a bold new direction.

(Via Om Malik, who sees non-cosmetic differences.)

Tim Cook Doing Interviews in Advance of Congressional Hearing 

Tim Cook, in an interview with Politico:

He also defended his company’s conduct. “I can tell you unequivocally Apple does not funnel its domestic profits overseas. We don’t do that. We pay taxes on all the products we sell in the U.S., and we pay every dollar that we owe. And so I’d like to be really clear on that,” Cook said.

And to The Washington Post:

“If you look at it today, to repatriate cash to the U.S., you need to pay 35 percent of that cash. And that is a very high number,” Cook said in an interview Thursday. “We are not proposing that it be zero. I know many of our peers believe that. But I don’t view that. But I think it has to be reasonable.”

Google Sends Microsoft Cease-and-Desist for Windows Phone YouTube App 

Peter Bright, writing for Ars Technica:

Though the app included account support, playlists, commenting, and most other aspects of YouTube, there’s one thing it was missing — advertising. It also had two features it shouldn’t have had — the ability to download videos and the ability to play videos that the creators have blocked from mobile devices.

As a result, Google sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist demand ordering the company to stop distributing the application by May 22nd.

Microsoft’s response:

We’d be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs. In light of Larry Page’s comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers.

Peter Kafka posits that Google played right into Microsoft’s hands on this.

The Three Types of Specialist Necessary for Any Revolution 

Kottke, quoting Vonnegut.

‘My Gut Told Me to Say Yes’ 

Outgoing Intel CEO Paul Otellini tells The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal that Intel passed on a chance to produce CPUs for the iPhone:

“The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini’s voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. “The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,” he said. “My gut told me to say yes.”

Curious whether that was an ARM chip — and if not, what was it?

Update: Ben Thompson says it must have been XScale, which was ARM-based.

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Howard Johnsons Children’s Menu 

Great find by John Sisson. Chock full of spoilers, though.

Mariano Rivera Breaking Bats 

Drew Sheppard, writing for FanGraphs:

Enjoy him while you can.

‘Nothing But Lando’ 

J.J. Abrams takes suggestions for the upcoming new Star Wars movie from The Jimmy Kimmel Show audience. (See also: Harrison Ford a few weeks ago.)

DeadDrop 

Kevin Poulsen on the story behind DeadDrop, the new open source anonymous inbox for journalists he created with Aaron Swartz. Now in use at The New Yorker.

Google to Sell Its Own Nexus Version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 

Brian Chen, reporting for the NYT Bits blog:

Google on Wednesday said it would sell a version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 running its own “stock” version of Android, not Samsung’s modified version. The device will go on sale in Google’s online store, called Play, on June 26, according to Hugo Barra, vice president of product management for Android. The phone will cost $650 and will come unlocked.

DF reader Jim Lipsey asks:

Why doesn’t Google buy up a mobile device company and offer their own phone rather than resell a Samsung handset?

Great question. Why doesn’t Google do that?

Google Versus

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

Larry Page, on stage at I/O today:

Every story I read about Google is “us versus some other company” or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative isn’t how we make progress. Most important things are not zero sum, there is a lot of opportunity out there.

Google fans seem to eat this kumbaya stuff up, to really believe it. But Google is the company that built Android after the iPhone, Google Plus after Facebook, and now a subscription music service after Spotify. They entered the RSS reader market, wiped it out, and are now just walking away from it. Gmail? Webmail but better. Think about even web search: Google search wasn’t something new; it was something better. Way, way, way better, but still.

Consider maps. Google Maps entered a market where MapQuest and others had been around for years. That wasn’t something great that didn’t already exist. It was a better version of something that already existed. Google is a hyper-competitive company, and they repeatedly enter markets that already exist and crush competitors. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work, and Google’s successes are admirable. But there’s nothing stupid about seeing Google being pitted “versus” other companies. They want everything; their ambition is boundless. 

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

Passages From Isaacson Book Part of DOJ Case Against Apple in Ebook Price-Fixing Case 

Reuters:

Apple disputes this in a second filing, also made on April 26 and released on Tuesday. It says that e-book demand “exploded” with Apple’s iPad launch, and the average retail price of an e-book dropped to $7.34 from $7.97.

In a filing released on Tuesday, the Justice Department said that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO at the time, “conceded the price-fixing conspiracy” when he told his biographer that Apple had “told the publishers, ‘We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.’”

If anyone else at Apple had revealed this to a writer, they’d have been fired (by Jobs) immediately. I question Jobs’s judgment in picking Isaacson to write the book in the first place, but no matter who he’d chosen to write the book, he should have held himself to the same standards he held his employees to when it came to keeping the company’s internal workings private.

NYT: ‘U.S. Now Paints Apple as “Ringmaster” in Its Lawsuit on Ebook Price-Fixing’ 

Edward Wyatt and Nick Wingfield, reporting for the NYT:

In July 2010, Mr. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive, told the chief executive of Random House, Markus Dohle, that the publisher would suffer a loss of support from Apple if it held out much longer, according to an account of the conversation provided by Mr. Dohle in the filing. Two months later, Apple threatened to block an e-book application by Random House from appearing in Apple’s App Store because it had not agreed to a deal with Apple, the filing said.

After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to “the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,” the filing reads.

Eddy Cue, hardball player.

David Trainer: The Man Who Figures Apple Is Worth $240 a Share 

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

I watched Trainer’s CNBC appearance (best line: “Steve Jobs was the Bo Jackson of CEOs”). I read his blog post. I looked up ROIC in Investopedia. I studied his Apple model.

I couldn’t make any sense of it. Maybe you can.

Nope, me neither. (Keep in mind, at the end of last quarter, Apple held $153 worth of cash and investments per share. Just cash. Trainer is saying Apple’s entire future is worth about $90 per share, about $85 billion total.)

Update: Ethan Jewett on Trainer’s weird math and wrong numbers.

Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Square Stand 

Turns an iPad into a point of sale register. Given how many small businesses I already see using Square, I think this is going to sell well.

Update: Square says, “Square Stand works with iPad 2 and 3 (30-pin connector) and costs $299. iPad not included.” Only working with 30-pin connector iPads seems pretty short-sighted, no? Those things are probably going the way of the Dodo bird. And why does it cost $299 if it’s just a stand, a power adapter, and an integrated Square reader? (They send you the dongle readers for free when you sign up.)

Facebook Home and Dogfooding

Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Josh Constine, writing for AOL/TechCrunch:

Facebook didn’t realize just how important widgets, docks, and app folders were to Android users, and that leaving them out of Home was a huge mistake. That’s because some of the Facebookers who built and tested Home normally carry iPhones, I’ve confirmed. Lack of “droidfooding” has left Facebook scrambling to add these features, whose absence have led Home to just 1 million downloads since launching a month ago. […]

The lack of droidfooders didn’t have serious consequences until Home, Facebook’s new “apperating system”. It replaces the lock screen, homescreen, and app launcher of compatible Android phones with a Facebook-centric experience. It offers Cover Feed, a big, beautiful way to browser the news feed the second you bring your phone out of sleep. It’s missing the ability to build real-time information widgets, put your most used apps in a persistently visible dock, or organize your collection of apps into folders.

Constine is jumping to some unsupported conclusions here. Is it possible that Facebook Home has fallen flat on Android because it was designed by iPhone users? That’s certainly possible. But more likely, it seems to me, is that Facebook Home is just a bad idea. As I said last week, it’s a well-designed implementation of an idea no one wants. Would iPhone users want this? I can’t see why. And if the problem is that Facebook Home designers are iPhone users, it might explain why they didn’t see the appeal of widgets, but how would it explain the lack of a persistent app dock or app folders? The iPhone has those. I suspect most iPhone users would miss them if they were able to install Facebook Home.

Facebook Home isn’t an iPhone idea. It’s just a bad idea. Facebook is an app, not a platform. A good home screen interface is one that accommodates any app or service, not just one.

There is a dogfooding lesson here, though. Does Mark Zuckerberg carry an HTC First, or any other Android phone with Facebook Home installed? Does Mike Matas? (Doesn’t look like it, judging by the “via Twitter for iPhone” metadata on his recent tweets.) Why not?

It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself. Why does everyone I know who works at Apple carry an iPhone? Every single one? Not because they have to. It’s because they want to.

Turn Facebook Home into an interface that Facebook designers and engineers want to use, not merely feel obligated to use, and then they’ll have something. But if it remains something that even Facebook’s own designers and engineers do not prefer over the iPhone (or stock Android, or any other platform), if it remains something that the company needs propaganda posters to promote even among its own employees, then Facebook Home will remain what it is now. A dud. 

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