Linked List: May 31, 2014

Saturday, 31 May 2014

My thanks to Igloo for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Igloo describes itself as “the intranet you’ll actually like”, and it’s about to get even better with their next major release, Unicorn. One of the headline new features in Unicorn is social task management, providing the perfect balance between project management and getting your day-to-day work done.

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Kontra’s Law ★

Another one worth a re-link. Kontra, back in 2008, “Why Apple Doesn’t Do ‘Concept Products’”:

Apple would gain nothing from telegraphing its intentions and capabilities by releasing public conceptual products. The company is being more than prudent by not displaying their unconstrained fantasies to competitors, media, investors or customers.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, this inexorably leads us to Kontra’s law:

A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

From the DF Archive: ‘The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos’ ★

Yours truly, back in 2011:

“We’re like Apple in 1987” is not a badge of honor — it’s a flashing red warning light.

This is why I’m so skeptical about Google today. Their biggest, splashiest product announcements are for things like Glass and these new self-driving cars. They’re closer to being real products than Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator, but they’re not real products. The seeds of Apple’s 1996 nadir were sown a decade earlier with unfocused pie-in-the-sky stuff like “Knowledge Navigator”.

See also: “Products for Nobody”, from earlier this year.

Matt Yglesias: ‘Google Wants to Reinvent Transportation, Apple Wants to Sell You Fancy Headphones’ ★

Matt Yglesias, writing at Vox:

There were two striking pieces of business news this week from America’s leading technology brands. On the one hand, Google unveiled a prototype of an autonomous car that, if it can be made to work at scale, promises to end mass automobile ownership while drastically reducing car wreck fatalities and auto-related pollution. Meanwhile, Apple bought a company that makes high-end headphones.

Which is to say that Apple’s playing checkers while Google plays chess.

I’m usually a big fan of Yglesias, but this comparison seems like a dud to me. Even if you think Google’s self-driving car announcement is a big deal, and think that Apple’s acquisition of Beats is a bad one, the fact that they hit the news in the same week is mostly coincidence. (It’s possible — I’d even say probable — that Google unveiled their new car prototypes this week to take some wind out of Apple’s sails in the lead-up to the WWDC keynote Monday, and it’s also possible that Apple wanted to get the Beats deal announced before WWDC, which is why I say “mostly” coincidence.) What if Apple’s Beats deal had happened at the same time as Google’s (similarly-priced) acquisition of Nest? Somehow I doubt Yglesias would have written a “Google Wants to Sell You a Fancy Thermostat; Apple Wants to Sell You Fancy Headphones” piece.

Google tends to show its hardware initiatives early (exhibit A: Google Glass). These cars haven’t even hit actual roads yet, let alone hit the early adopter/enthusiast market, let alone the consumer mass market. Apple doesn’t do that. It could be that Apple is completely bankrupt creatively and has nothing truly new in the works. Or, maybe they do. Either way, it would look the same to us on the outside.

Update: Jon Snyder, on Twitter:

Maybe a better headline for Yglesias: Google may get around to reinventing transportation. Apple wants to sell headphones tomorrow.

Right. It’s foolish (but alas, common) to judge Apple based on what it is actually shipping today against what other companies might ship in the future. And in the case of self-driving cars, we’re talking the distant future.

Update 2: I feel like I’m repeating myself.

Comparison of the Day ★

Jim Edwards, preaching for the Church of Market Share:

Branding and quality are important, of course. Apple usually wins there. And Apple’s business model is to only do the most profitable thing, not the most widespread thing. So loss of share may not bother Apple CEO Tim Cook. It may, in fact, be good for both margins and shareholders.

But the history of computing has one iron-cast lesson for us all: Devices get cheaper over time, and better over time. The high-priced seller usually loses. This is why nobody uses $8.8 million Cray computers anymore.

Yes, that’s what Apple’s iPhone business resembles: Cray. OK, sure.

Update: The 100 supercomputers in the world today. About 20 percent of them are from Cray.