Linked List: May 28, 2015

Thursday, 28 May 2015

Bob Lefsetz’s harsh take on Recode:

They couldn’t make it on their own.

Walt Mossberg, one of America’s two most famous tech columnists, shot himself in the foot. He left the “Wall Street Journal.” They’re finding out in news what we already know in music, you can go it alone, the internet allows you to do this, but in a chaotic world he with the established presence wins, the major record labels figured out the internet and the big news sites still rule.

I don’t agree with Lefzetz entirely, but he makes some good points.

My take is that if you’re going to go indie, you need to stay lean and mean. You don’t have to stay as lean and mean as I have — I have no employees, and to date, no one else has ever written a word for Daring Fireball. In fact, a one-person show might be too lean to get off the ground today. But then again, there’s Ben Thompson and Stratechery.

The tidbit that stood out to me regarding Recode is that they had 44 full-time employees — plus a few contractors. That’s not lean and mean. The advantage the internet provides to new publishers is that there’s so little overhead. You can go really far with a really small talented team. 44 employees sounds like Recode was trying to go head-to-head with the Wall Street Journal on the business/tech beat. Rather than start small and grow big organically, they wanted to start big. And so to start big they took on investors, and next thing you know, they had to sell.

Matt Buchanan: ‘A Series of Wholly Unrelated Observations About Vox Media’s Acquisition of Recode’ ★

Matt Buchanan, writing for The Awl:

When Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg launched Recode in 2014, NBCUniversal News Group made a “strategic investment and content partnership” in Revere Digital, the parent company of Recode and its Code conferences. Its content was distributed “across NBCUniversal News Group’s multiple media platforms,” while CNBC became “Revere’s media partner for its global conferences.”

NBCUniversal News Group, which includes NBC News, CNBC, and MSNBC, is a division of NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast.

Yesterday, Vox Media, which has received millions of dollars from Comcast Ventures, announced that it would acquire Revere Digital, which had received an undisclosed number of dollars from NBCUniversal News Group, in all-stock deal.

It’s Comcast all the way down.

Federal Court Serves Apple Shit Bromwich ★

Joe Palazzolo, reporting for the WSJ:

A federal appeals court rejected Apple Inc.’s efforts to rid itself of a corporate monitor appointed after a judge found the company liable for conspiring to raise the price of e-books.

Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general, began assessing Apple’s antitrust compliance policies six days after he was appointed in October 2013 by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, who held the company liable for a price-fixing conspiracy in a July decision that same year.

Since then, the technology company has been trying to shake him off, arguing that he began work prematurely and exceeded the scope of his mandate, and that his $1,000-an-hour fees were exorbitant.

Previously in this saga.

Google Photos ★

Lots and lots of news from today’s 7-hour I/O keynote, but one that stuck out to me is Google Photos. Looks like a great, simple service:

Google Photos gives you a single, private place to keep a lifetime of memories, and access them from any device. They’re automatically backed up and synced, so you can have peace of mind that your photos are safe, available across all your devices.

And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google Photos, you can now backup and store unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free. We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos, and store compressed versions of the photos and videos in beautiful, print-quality resolution.

You can use it from the web, and from native apps for Android and iOS. Obviously, it’s a lot like iCloud Photos in terms of functionality and scope, but storing “unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free” sure is different. It also sounds like Google is doing more AI-backed / “machine-learning” image analysis for things like face detection and identifying things like snow or a beach.

See Also: Steven Levy’s interview with Bradley Horowitz, Google’s “vice president of streams, photos, and sharing”, is a good read. Horowitz calls it “Gmail for photos”, which is a pretty compelling three-word pitch. Horowitz:

We heard from our Google Plus photo users that we had great technology, but they didn’t want their life’s archive brought into a social product, any social product. It’s more akin to Gmail — there’s no button on Gmail that says “publish on the Internet.” “Broadcast” and “archive” are really different and so part of Google photos is to create a safe space for your photos and remove any stigma associated with saving everything. For instance, I use my phone to take pictures of receipts, and pictures of signs that I want to remember and things like that. These can potentially pollute my photo stream. We make it so that things like that recede into the background, so there’s no cognitive burden to actually saving everything.

Avie Tevanian Was Named Chief Software Technology Officer in 2003, Left in 2006 ★

This completely slipped my mind when I wrote about how few C-level executives Apple has had in its modern era (which I loosely define as starting when Steve Jobs took the “interim” CEO title):

July 8, 2003 — Apple today announced that Avadis “Avie” Tevanian Jr., Ph.D., will become the company’s chief software technology officer and Bertrand Serlet will be promoted to senior vice president of Software Engineering. In his new role, Tevanian will focus on setting company-wide software technology directions, and Serlet will now report directly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs and lead the company’s OS Software Engineering group.

Tevanian left the company three years later, in 2006.

So, there is some precedent for an Apple senior executive getting a promotion to a C-level title on their way out the door. One notable difference between the two situations, though: Serlet reported directly to Jobs; Apple’s new vice presidents of UI design and industrial design (Alan Dye and Richard Howarth) report directly to Jony Ive.