Linked List: August 23, 2011

Tuesday, 23 August 2011

Aaron Swartz on What Google Means by ‘Evil’ ★

Aaron Swartz:

If you look at their examples of evil deeds, they seem rather mundane compared to cackling supervillains and mass murderers. They specifically name three: only showing relevant ads, not using pop-ups or other annoying gimmicks, and not selling actual search results.

Hardly the stuff of comic books. But what do these three have in common? They’re all instances of refusing to make things worse for your users in order to make more money. […]

When you stop to think about it, it’s wild how many companies have done just that: Printer manufacturers who put chips on their ink cartridges, so you can’t refill or recycle them but instead have to buy a new full-price cartridge. Apple preventing the Kindle app from having any sort of ebook buying functionality. Web publishers who break articles up into 20 pages so that you have to load 20 different ads just to read one article. These are pretty banal evils, but it’s striking that I can’t think of any example where Google has done anything like that.

Sounds more profound when put this way, but I’d argue that Google’s entire business model should be deemed “evil” by this lofty standard. It is certainly true that the ads Google shows in search results and Gmail are far less annoying than typical web ads, but they’re still ads. Search results are worse with ads than without. How can anyone argue that Gmail is better because it puts ads next to your email? Almost everything is worse with ads than without. The trick is to do it with taste and respect for the reader/viewer/user — to have the ads make the overall experience only ever-so-slightly worse, rather than a lot worse. Google does that, and, really, that’s what I try to do here at DF, too.

So instead of “Don’t make things worse for the user in order to make money”, I’d say a better rule, and one which applies to Google, would be something like “Maintain a high amount of respect for your users’ time, attention, and happiness.” That’s the line you don’t want to cross.

More ‘Finally’ ★

“Storefront limited to 10.7 for several days.”

‘Finally’ ★

“A full week”.

Mozilla Introduces WebAPI ★

Ambitious mobile web API, spearheaded by Mozilla:

WebAPI is an effort by Mozilla to bridge together the gap, and have consistent APIs that will work in all web browsers, no matter the operating system. Specification drafts and implementation prototypes will be available, and it will be submitted to W3C for standardization.

WSJ: Sprint to Get Apple iPhone 5 ★

Another option for those fed up with AT&T.

Samsung Cites Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ as Prior Art Against iPad Design Patent ★

Odds that I would link to this: 100 percent.

iTunes Store Revenue ★

From Seeking Alpha’s transcript of Apple’s last quarterly finance call:

The iTunes store generated strong results with revenue of almost $1.4 billion. iTunes revenue was up 36% year-over-year, thanks primarily to continued strong sales of music, video and apps. With more than 225 million accounts, iTunes is the #1 music retailer in the world and customers have downloaded more than 15 billion songs today.

Note: that’s $1.4 billion in revenues, not profits. And that includes the music side, which is almost 10 years old. And further note that Apple doesn’t mention profits from the iTunes Store at all. If they were making big bank, Apple would brag about it. I’m pretty sure the iTunes Store is profitable, but it’s insignificant in the grand scheme of Apple’s income. And yet that’s the business Mike Arrington thinks HP should focus on while selling piece of crap $200 tablets.

How to Get $12 Billion of Gold to Venezuela ★

Felix Salmon ponders an interesting problem: how to move $12 billion in gold from England to Venezuela.

Profit Profit Profit ★

I knew Mike Arrington was a dummy, but I didn’t think he was this big a dummy:

If HP were to knock the screen quality down just a bit and figure out a cheaper storage solution, the BOM (bill of materials) on their device could be significantly lower than $200. Normally they’d retail that at $400 or more. But if instead they sold it for cost, and sold millions of them, a very robust developer network would pop up around WebOS. See Apple and Google for great ideas on monetizing apps on devices by grabbing up to 30% of revenues and also trying to control app advertising.

It’s easy to sell a bunch of $500 tablets for $100. That doesn’t mean you’d sell a lot of $200 tablets for $200. And even if they did sell, it’d be for little-to-no profit. Apple’s 30 percent cut of app sales is a nice side business, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to their hardware sales. App advertising is an even lower margin business.