Linked List: May 4, 2010

Tuesday, 4 May 2010

The LA Times on the Disneyland Maintenance Crew 

Walt Disney:

“When I started on Disneyland, my wife used to say, ‘But why do you want to build an amusement park? They’re so dirty.’ I told her that was just the point; mine wouldn’t be.”

The pursuit of perfection. (Thanks to DF reader Austin Brown.)

Bloomberg: Adobe Complained to Feds 

Bloomberg:

U.S. antitrust enforcers are considering an investigation of Apple Inc. following a complaint from Adobe Systems Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

Adobe says Apple is stifling competition by barring developers from using Adobe’s products to create applications for iPhones and iPads, said the people who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the case.

Surprise, surprise.

‘H.264, Patent Licensing, and You’ 

Great piece by Nilay Patel at Engadget on the licensing and patent issues surrounding H.264.

Google Voice Web App for iPhone and Palm WebOS 

Cross-platform mobile development, no App Store in sight.

Top 10 Luxury Brands’ Sites Fail to Work on iPad 

PSFK:

Out of the top 10 luxury brands ranked by Forbes in 2009, none of their websites worked sufficiently to match their desktop-web-experience. […] The key issue is that all the key luxury brands have designed their sites to use Adobe’s Flash.

(Via Kottke, who points out that this reflects poorly on these brands, not on the iPad.)

‘Interesting Work for Interesting People’ 

Max Chafkin profiles Tim O’Reilly for Inc.:

“This is a lifestyle business that got out of control,” O’Reilly said when we first met. O’Reilly is 55 and has a craggy, weatherworn face, and he speaks with the warm self-confidence of someone who knows a lot more than you do but is happy to share. “My original business model — I actually wrote this down — was ‘interesting work for interesting people.’”

And:

O’Reilly says he sometimes wonders what would have happened if he had raised venture capital and given his company a chance to get really big. But he sounds more amused by this question than truly troubled by it. “Money is like gasoline during a road trip,” he says. “You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.”

(Via Liz Danzico.)

Pedal to the Chrome Metal 

New faster beta release of Google Chrome for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Don’t miss the speed test video.

Hey Bill Gates, 1999 Called and They Want Their Stylus Back 

Bill Gates:

“Microsoft has a lot of different tablet projects that we’re pursuing. We think that work with the pen that Microsoft pioneered will become a mainstream for students. It can give you a device that you can not only read, but also create documents at the same time.”

Steve Jobs:

“If you see a stylus, they blew it.”

‘But Still’ 

Republicans vs. the Bill of Rights. John McCain:

It would have been a serious mistake to have read the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing his Miranda rights, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.):

“Did they Mirandize him? I know he’s an American citizen but still,” King said.

Don’t forget “independent” Joe Lieberman.

Michael Malone Cites the Supreme Court’s Landmark Finders v. Keepers Decision 

Michael Malone, in an opinion piece for ABC News, says the Gizmodo/iPhone prototype story shows that “journalism has lost much of its muscle”:

A couple weeks ago, Jason Chen, an editor/blogger at the tech site Gizmodo (part of the large gossip blog family Gawker Media) found himself in possession of a prototype of the new Apple G4 iPhone and proceeded to post photos of it on the site. As you can imagine, all hell broke loose as the Web buzzed with speculation about the source of the images, whether the device was stolen, and whether it really was Apple’s newest super-product.

What we now know is that the device was indeed a G4 iPhone, not scheduled for formal introduction for weeks hence; and that it wasn’t stolen, but accidentally left by an Apple employee in a Silicon Valley beer garden. Whoever found it was knowledgeable enough to know what it was — and proceeded to sell it to Gawker for a purported $5,000.

There’s a whole swath of criticism regarding Apple’s decision to report the incident to law enforcement, and law enforcement’s decision to break down the door to Jason Chen’s home and confiscate his computers, that goes along the lines of Malone’s argument above. (Cf. Jon Stewart’s segment on The Daily Show last week.)

To wit: Ignoring that the phone was stolen. California criminal law could not be more clear: the finder of a lost item must either return it to the owner or hand it over to the police; to do anything else is theft. “Finder keepers, losers weepers” is not the law. You don’t have to break into someone’s house or pickpocket them to steal a phone. If you pick up a lost phone and treat it as your own, you’ve stolen it.

Jason Chen did not “find himself in possession” of a prototype iPhone. Jason Chen and Gizmodo bought a prototype iPhone from someone who they knew had stolen it. At least Jon Stewart’s take was funny.

Paul Thurrott on What Microsoft Can Learn From the iPad 

Advice to Microsoft from Paul Thurrott:

And if you’re looking to copy Apple’s success — and you are — then at least do it right. It’s not about the products at all. What Apple does right is marketing. It’s form over function, plain and simple. How else could the world be so excited over an unnecessary over-sized iPod touch? Because it’s from Apple, that’s how. And the press markets it for them, and makes people believe that this is somehow a big deal. It’s a self-replicating back-patting, buddy system, plain and simple.

Needless to say, I think he’s got it all wrong — that the iPad’s success is all about the quality, design, and price (remember, in January, most people expected Apple’s tablet to start at $999) — of the product itself. Their marketing for it, just like that of the iPhone, is simply about showing people what it does and how it works. Someone who doesn’t see the profound appeal of the iPad, though, is bound to disagree with my assessment.

And you’re not part of the circle, Microsoft. How else can you explain the ginormous Windows 7 sales that get no attention, and certainly no love from Wall Street? You’ve sold over 100 million licenses of this thing in record time and all anyone can talk about are lost iPhones and the iPad. I mean, give me a break.

The way Wall Street works is fairly simple — albeit, not always reasonable or fair. What drives stock prices forward are new endeavors. Stock prices rise when investors predict fantastic growth ahead. Windows 7 has indeed been a grand success for Microsoft. I’ll bet Office 2010 will be too. But these are the same two grand successes Microsoft has had for 20 years. Windows and Office, over and over. Their stock has been stagnant for a decade because their growth into new markets has been stagnant for a decade.

Apple’s stock is rising because Apple seems poised to capture a new market.

A Good Problem to Have 

Terrific piece by Mike Davidson on Apple’s position in the market:

Until people either start abandoning their products because of this or they do the opposite and adopt their products at a rate which creates a monopoly, they will continue operating at their current clip: high innovation, high profits, and high control. […]

If you don’t want to contribute to their success because their behavior is distasteful to you, then don’t; but don’t forget how fortunate we are to have such a ruthlessly innovative company at the helm of the ship at this point in time.

A must-read.

Another Microsoft Employee Defects to Google 

Brad Abrams, until last month a product manager at Microsoft for the .NET Framework and Silverlight, is going to Google. Am I missing the reports of Googlers defecting to Microsoft, or am I right that this is a “rats leaving a sinking ship” one-way scenario?

Stephen Shankland: ‘Is H.264 a Legal Minefield for Video Pros?’ 

Spoiler: No.

MarsEdit 3.0 

I’m using it to write these very words.

Reuters: ‘Regulators Mull Antitrust Look at Apple’ 

Reuters:

Apple said allowing third-party tools would result in “sub-standard” apps. But critics say the company is abusing its position.

“For us and the whole developers community, it really locks us into a single platform,” said Michael Chang, chief executive of mobile ad network Greystripe, of Apple’s rules.

Chang said a basic iPhone app might cost $75,000 to build on Flash, and a few thousand dollars more to convert it to work on Google Inc’s Android mobile platform. But with the new restrictions, a developer must spend another $75,000 to build the app from the ground up for a non-Apple platform.

This guy isn’t a federal regulator, but he seems to be arguing that he has a right to use Flash, or at least some sort of cross-platform solution, to develop for iPhone OS. Why not write web apps, then?

One developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Apple’s new app development rules were just “incredibly broad. The fact that you can’t use any other tools to build your app is just ridiculous.”

But he acknowledged that apps built using Apple’s tool look and run better than those built with third-party technology.

So the new terms are “ridiculous”, unless you’re concerned about how apps look and run.

WSJ: ‘Apple Draws Scrutiny From Regulators’ 

No more grains of salt; now the WSJ is echoing the New York Post’s report from yesterday:

U.S. antitrust enforcers are taking a keen interest in recent changes that Apple Inc. made to its licensing agreement with iPhone application developers and are likely to open a preliminary investigation into whether the company’s actions stifle competition in mobile devices, according to people familiar with the situation.

Could be more about mobile advertising than Section 3.3.1, though:

Apple’s new language forbidding apps from transmitting analytical data could prevent ad networks from being able to effectively target ads, potentially giving Apple’s new iAd mobile-advertising service an edge, executives at ad networks say.

One wireless-advertising executive said he was contacted a few weeks ago by an official from the FTC who wanted to talk about how the mobile-ad industry works, the Apple developer agreement and how it could affect the executive’s business.

But what if iAds itself also follows the new stricter privacy terms?

Exploded Pad T-Shirt 

A sequel to the great Exploded Phone t-shirt.