Linked List: January 9, 2014

Thursday, 9 January 2014

The Verge: ‘Closing Windows: Microsoft and Its Platforms Are Nowhere to Be Found at CES’ ★

Tom Warren:

Although Apple and Google officially sit out the biggest tech trade show of the year, their platforms are well represented by the third parties that create thousands of products for their platforms. This year it feels like Microsoft is simply being left out.

How and When the iMac and Mac Pro Can Go Retina ★

Marco Arment:

All Apple needs to do to deliver desktop Retina is ship a 27″ 4K Thunderbolt 2 monitor and enable the software scaling modes for it in an OS X update.

Sounds about right to me.

Tim Bray on the State of Software Development in 2014 ★

Tim Bray at his best: broad perspective, well-informed, measured voice.

The Record ★

Great new podcast co-hosted by Chris Parrish and Brent Simmons:

The Record brings you the stories you should know about the Mac and Cocoa development community.

iOS Device Stats From David Smith’s Audiobooks App ★

Interesting, but not surprising. Two that caught my eye:

The iPhone 5s appears to be outselling the 5c by around a 2.5-to-1 margin.

Across all device types around 80% have retina screens. On iPhones this is 97%. On iPads it is only 52%, due in large part to the widespread use of the iPad 2 and iPad mini.

Barnes and Noble’s Nook Sales Hurt by Amazon’s Lower E-Book Prices ★

Brad Stone, writing for Businessweek:

Some of the blame here lies with the U.S. Department of Justice. Its successful lawsuit against Apple and major book publishers, for conspiring to set fixed, industrywide prices on e-books, now allows Amazon to set its own often ridiculously low prices. “The Justice Department came in at a time when agency pricing was weakening Amazon’s hold and dispersing the e-book market,” says Mike Shatzkin, CEO of the Idea Logical, a book industry consultancy. “By eliminating fixed prices for e-books, they have handed the advantage back to Amazon. Now everyone else is losing share.”

So the result of a successful DOJ antitrust case is that the undisputed market leader, Amazon, is better able to destroy smaller competitors through predatory pricing. Got it.

Google Plus and Gmail, Sitting in a Tree ★

Dante D’Orazio, reporting for The Verge:

A new Gmail setting lets you choose whether you want people to be able to send an email to your Google+ profile — even if they don’t have your email address in their contacts. […]

By default, the setting will allow anyone on Google+ to send you an email through Gmail. To be clear, Gmail users will be able to type anyone’s name into the recipient field and even if you don’t know that person’s email address. Google will auto-suggest the names of Google+ users, though your actual email address will not be revealed unless you reply to the email.

This has to be a mistake. Surely Google will change this from opt-out to opt-in.

Charles Arthur:

The conclusion? As before - don’t put your belief in market share numbers. When Nokia had a 63% market share of smartphones (back in the third quarter of 2007), the entire smartphone market comprised just 17m handsets for the quarter. These days, you’d get that many Android handsets sold in a week. The reality is that the only people to whom market share matters is the people who sell the stuff, and they’re probably more focussed on total numbers - and profitability.

Truly remarkable, clarifying analysis. Arthur has just been killing it on “market share”. In the above quoted bit, he touches on something that I think has largely gone right over most industry watchers’ heads: that smartphone share numbers, expressed as a percentage, don’t tell the story in a market where in 2007 smartphones constituted only a sliver of the overall phone market and just six years later now account for a majority of the market. All phones will soon be smartphones.

Phone market share, period, has always been the number to watch. There’s a natural cap on the size of the phone market: the number of people on the planet. Apple has always had their eye on the ball here — seven years ago (today, in fact) at the iPhone introduction at Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs’s stated goal was one percent of the phone market, not some percentage of the “smartphone” market.