Linked List: June 6, 2016

Monday, 6 June 2016

Ken Segall, in a preface to a post headlined “Has Apple Lost Its Simplicity?”:

Last week, I wrote an article for The Guardian with the above title. It was a question, not a conclusion, and I tried to offer a thoughtful opinion. Sadly, The Guardian chose to give it a bait-click headline that contradicted my point of view. So, for the record, here is the complete article as originally intended.

The Guardian’s headline: “How Apple Lost Its Way: Steve Jobs’ Love of Simplicity Is Gone”. If you read Segall’s article, you can see that it isn’t apt at all. Everyone knows what clickbait is, but even though we, collectively, are aware of it and presumably attempt to defend against it by not taking headlines at face value, it’s really amazing how much a provocative headline can affect the interpretation of a non-provocative article. I don’t do much writing for other publications these days, but at this point I would insist on approval over the headline.

I think Marco Arment did this to himself with this piece a few weeks ago. His original headline was “Avoiding BlackBerry’s Fate”; within a day he changed it to “If Google’s Right About AI, That’s a Problem for Apple”. Simply by changing the headline, he seemed to drastically change readers’ interpretation of his argument.

Whichcraft ★

New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris on that vs. which. Usually I can play this by ear, but she cites a few examples where it’s a very close call.

Nest’s Time at Alphabet: A ‘Virtually Unlimited Budget’ With No Results ★

Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

It’s hard to argue with the decision to “transition” Fadell away from Nest. When Google bought Nest in January 2014, the expectation was that a big infusion of Google’s resources and money would supercharge Nest. Nest grew from 280 employees around the time of the Google acquisition to 1200 employees today. In Nest’s first year as “a Google company,” it used Google’s resources to acquire webcam maker Dropcam for $555 million, and it paid an unknown amount for the smart home hub company Revolv. Duffy said Nest was given a “virtually unlimited budget” inside Alphabet. Nest eventually transitioned to an Alphabet company, just like Google.

In return for all this investment, Nest delivered very little. The Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Protect smoke detector both existed before the Google acquisition, and both received minor upgrades under Google’s (and later Alphabet’s) wing. A year after buying Dropcam, Nest released the Nest Cam, which was basically a rebranded Dropcam. Two-and-a-half years under Google/Alphabet, a quadrupling of the employee headcount, and half-a-billion dollars in acquisitions yielded minor yearly updates and a rebranded device. That’s all.

Whatever you want to say about Tony Fadell’s leadership style, I don’t see how anyone could deny that Nest has nothing to show for its time as an Alphabet subsidiary. It’s not even like they launched stuff that failed. They’re still the same thermostat/smoke detector company they were before Google bought them. Kind of bizarre, really.

E.W. Scripps Buys Podcast Company Stitcher ★

Steven Perlberg, reporting for the WSJ:

Stitcher is a free app that streams more than 65,000 podcasts from publishers ranging from NPR to MSNBC to The Wall Street Journal. It will operate under Midroll Media, the podcast advertising company that Scripps acquired last year for $50 million, plus $10 million more over three years if the company hits certain milestones.

Midroll sells ads for about 230 programs like “WTF with Marc Maron,” “The Nerdist,” “StarTalk Radio” and “The Bill Simmons Podcast.” But podcast listeners these days have a handful of ways to actually tune into shows, through the likes of Apple’s podcast app or Google Play Music. Stitcher, one such service, has 8 million registered users and is installed in about 50 car models.

Midroll owning Stitcher is not good for the podcast ecosystem. Stitcher is popular, but my show is not on Stitcher because Stitcher re-hosts the audio, compresses it to hell, and unless you opt out, inserts their own ads. That’s not how podcasting is supposed to work. I firmly believe podcasting should be open, like the web. (This is also why I don’t have my show on Google Play — they insist upon hosting and re-compressing the audio as well.)

I worry that it’s toxic to combine advertising sales with an exclusive app for playback. Advertisers want tracking? You got it — in Stitcher. The end goal here is lock-in, and so I think it’s worth fighting right from the start, even at the expense of a few thousand additional listeners for my show. Maybe they’ll never become dominant. Maybe even if they do, they won’t do anything to promote lock-in. But now is the only time to resist the possibility that they’ll grow dominant and abuse their position. It’s too late once it happens.