The Perils of Punditry

The company releases a very spiffy new 17″ MBP, slick new versions of iLife and iWork, and a new deal with the music labels that will finally kill music DRM for good, and it gets reactions like this:

Yet ANOTHER u n d e r w h e l m i n g MacWorld. Instead of going out with a BANG for their last MacWorld, they go out with a WHIMPER.

Sure, there are always sharpshooters out there ready to dismiss whatever Apple offers as overpriced, underperforming, or otherwise lame. But Macworld has become a pressure cooker for Apple. For years, the company managed to deliver on all they hype, squeezing an incredible amount of free press out of the event as they climbed out of the trough they got themselves into in the ’90s. But now Apple is a colossus, and Macworld has become a lead weight around its neck.

If I were anyone in the executive suite at Apple, I’d be saying good riddance.

Last week saw a lot of teeth-gnashing about Apple’s withdrawal from Macworld Expo. Tanya Engst bemoans the loss of what, until now was a wonderful family reunion. Jason D. O’Grady figures Steve Jobs must have lost faith in his company: “Why else would Jobs would stick a dagger into the heart of his most loyal customers?”

I’m with John Gruber on this one. Apple is leaving Macworld because Jobs is more afraid of not changing than of change. Gruber points out how tradition can distort our perspective:

Likewise, it has somehow come to feel normal that on a Tuesday morning in early January each year, thousands of people from around the country come to San Francisco to stand in line for hours — hundreds of them waiting all night long in a queue stretching around the block — to sit in a large auditorium and watch the CEO of an electronics company announce new products. That is not normal; it is extraordinary.

Steven Levy’s Wired piece on the 25th anniversary of the Mac (written before Apple’s Macworld departure) portrays Jobs as anything but nostalgic. He is adamant that survival and change go hand in hand: “If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

I doubt that Jobs has ever been much of a sentimentalist. His experience with cancer may have only reinforced this perspective. I noticed that after my father took on cancer, he seemed even more eager and anxious to seek challenges than he had before. Holding on to things that no longer matter doesn’t make sense when you’re trying to create something new.

I’ve been to Macworld three times. The last one in particular was mind-bogglingly well-attended, and a lot of fun. I was looking forward to going to the next one, and I still may attend. But on the years I haven’t gone, I haven’t missed the lack. Apple now has a variety of mechanisms for rolling out new products, and they can do so at their own pace. One thing that has always bothered me about Macworld is that it raised so many expectations about what Apple would pull out of its hat.

This sort of delivery pressure is probably a healthy incentive to creativity inside Apple, forcing developers and designers to operate inside of the kind of tight constraints that often give birth to amazing products. But the hype around Macworld has also produced a bizarre Inverse Reality Distortion Field, in which a non-announcement of a long-rumored product leads to negative press and a drop in Apple’s stock price. Apple has, over the years, become a master of controlling its message. The unhealthy expectations that come out of Macworld conflict with that tight message control.

Speculation about the health of Steve Jobs aside, he has obviously built a tremendously capable executive team. Schiller, Ive, et. al. have been hitting home runs for almost a decade. Taking some of the spotlight off of the CEO is good for the long term viability of Apple, because at some point, whether by choice or not, Jobs will no longer be running the show. It makes sense to shift the public face of the company in gradual steps now, before that inevitable moment comes.

Trade shows (as opposed to the WWDC, which still makes a great deal of sense to me) are in many ways relics of a bygone era that saw its heyday before the rise of the Internet, Apple Stores, and the Blogosphere. It is tremendously expensive for Apple and all the vendors who set up shop at Macworld, and the ROI is probably not easily calculated. For example, does Adobe, which already has a stranglehold on the graphics market, really get much out of Macworld? Although Omni Group is no goliath, does it gain much from attending, given that it has created its own well-fortified niche in the productivity market? I’m not even sure that small up and comers get much out of Macworld. Perhaps they do, but I haven’t seen much response from them about Apple’s departure.

Perhaps Macworld will soldier on without Apple, and perhaps it won’t. But perhaps the primary reason Apple continues to rack up success after success stems from the company’s ability to break with the past. It is no surprise that this risk-taking element of the company’s DNA goes hand in hand with a culture of creativity.

From the Wikipedia entry for Creativity:

Another adequate definition of creativity is that it is an “assumptions-breaking process.” Creative ideas are often generated when one discards preconceived assumptions and attempts a new approach or method that might seem to others unthinkable.

That definition seems to apply here.

I originally posted this to a now defunct blog almost exactly three years ago:

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Bill Gates made this bold pronouncement in January, 2004. So has the spam problem been licked?

I asked a few friends, all of whom are very computer-literate. Some use Macs, some use Windows, and some use both plus Linux. Just to be clear, I was asking my friends about this not out of curiosity alone. I’ve been working with Bob Cagle of Open Field Software [now CEO of productOps], producers of Ella for Spam Control to help make his website more attractive to potential customers. I wanted to gain some insights into the state of the spam problem as of December, 2005. Here are some of their responses:

A friend who works for an organization that provides IT services to nonprofit organizations writes:

[Our] spam filtering is fairly bad. A lot of mail that should
be rejected at the server level is passed on to clients. Maybe it’s
just me since I get a lot of spam. I think they have gotten better in
the past two years but they’re still not doing a great job of handling
it.

Personally my email host is doing a pretty good job of filtering spam.
I get a few alarming false positives, but with diligent application of
the whitelist I’m able to avoid that. I still have to review my spam
folder on a daily basis to avoid problems and there is a ton of mail
in there.

I feel like the only mail service I have used that has really
excellent spam filtering is GMail. Unfortunately I cannot yet use
GMail with a personal domain name.

I believe there are excellent anti-spam tools out there, but they are
not well understood by smaller organizations. I’m consistently
horrified by what people put up with as part of their daily routine in
some organizations. They think manually deleting massive amounts of
email filth is just a normal part of their daily existence and there’s
nothing they can do about it. Yikes.

This friend [Spence, also now with productOps] runs an elaborate digital design office out of his home:

Spam? What Spam?

I have spamassasin set to “balanced” on the server, greylisting enabled and virus checking enabled(server side). Here at the farm, I use Thunderbird’s spam filter.

I see virtually no spam at all,… now does that mean people are failing to connect with me? Possibly, but if they’re really interested, they can call me from my number on the website…

So,… Yes, I see MUCH LESS spam nowadays than I did even a year ago,… it would be nice if [Ella, a client-side spam filter] ran on Thunderbird too, I’d disable the iron gate on my server and see whats really getting blocked… I guess if I had a ton of time and interest, I could parse the (currently 20 megabyte) spam text file that gets deleted every month,… but I gotta learn CSS this week.

This friend works for a large organization:

I have three accounts monitored daily. The work account uses something called ASG and it catches at least 80% on any given day and probably 95% over a month. Some people who shop online a lot at work have more, I have heard, but the tool seems pretty good. I don’t know what my home ISP’s account uses, but I never get much. Having a small local ISP may help. Microsoft Outlook applies a second layer spam filter that is hilarious. Monday it calls the TicketMaster email a spam, Tuesday it lets it through. Spam filter, Now with the Alzhiemer’s Algorithm. Gmail, which is a well known address is, as [he] said, amazing. I have had a Gmail account for a ~ year and a half, never gotten a spam. Lotsa creepy ads in the sidebar, never a spam.

My experience with GMail has been different. I only use my GMail account for things like online purchasing, subscribing to some newsletters, and so on. Basically it’s a throw-away account. But I get an awful lot of spam in that account - on the order of 30 or so a day, about 10 of which get through. The Mail.app software on my Mac receives about 10 spam messages per day for three POP addresses and usually correctly identifies all of them. Sometimes, perhaps three or four times per week, a spam message makes it through.

So spam is much less of a hassle for some of us than it used to be. Then again, the sample audience I’ve been discussing this with consists of people who use computers to make a living. They’re not exactly a representative sample of the overall computer-using public.

Still, it’s fairly obvious that the Gatesian dream of eradicating spam hasn’t yet come to pass. There are solutions. Some people doubtless use Gmail with excellent results. Others rely on server-side filtering tools like Spam Assassin and don’t worry too much about false positives (messages that are flagged as spam even when they’re legitimate messages). Open Field Software’s client-side spam filter for Outlook and Outlook Express makes a lot of Windows users happy, judging by the email Bob receives. I get great results with Apple Mail filtering.

As we turn the corner on 2005 and head into 2006, it seems there is no silver bullet, no system that has slain the spam menace. There are many different approaches to dealing with spam, ways to turn it into an only occasional nuisance. Curiously none of them are coming from Microsoft. To be fair, spam is a big problem. It’s likely too big for one entity to conquer, even if that entity is Microsoft. Still, the next time I hear someone from Microsoft make bold claims about eliminating spam, I won’t hold my breath.

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Now that we’re approaching 2009, I don’t hear much about spam from most of my friends who work in the technology world. But I wonder if this is a representative sample, and whether there is still a lot of frustration out there about spam.

ESPN.com gets monster traffic. Huge traffic. Zillions of daily pageviews. That’s wonderful, but ESPN is interested in making money. So they’re redesigning the site.

Here’s an interesting exercise: Take a look at both of these images and think about which one is likely the existing site (no fair if you’re an ESPN.com junkie), and which is the redesign. Why is one better than the other? Why would advertisers prefer one over the other? Which one provide better revenue opportunities for ESPN? Millions of dollars in ad revenue are riding on this decision.

An interesting NY Times article about the ESPN.com redesign reveals the answer, but if you need immediate validation, the top image is the new ESPN.com home page. Is simpler truly better, or would you have done it differently?

My company uses Basecamp, the project management app from 37signals. There are things about it we don’t like, and there are things we’d like to add to it. In fact, we’re evaluating alternatives to Basecamp at the moment. I wouldn’t say Basecamp sucks, but it certainly isn’t for everyone.

Someone out there has gone to a lot of trouble to say that Basecamp does suck. I’ll use the male pronoun because odds are it is a man, but it could be a martian for all I know. The anonymous guy behind Whybasecampsux.org raises some good (if debatable) points about 37signals and Basecamp.

Yes, Jason Fried has an inflexible philosophy of software development. Yes, 37signals is very careful about adding even oft-requested features. Yes, they’ve made some missteps in communicating with customers.

Here’s one thing 37signals has always done: Every time they communicate with customers and the public at large, they put their individual names on their messages. They engage with people. They make mistakes, but they don’t hide behind a faux corporate veneer.

What’s the early 21st Century equivalent of the faux corporate veneer? The nameless sharpshooter. The guy, like Mr. Whybasecampsux.org, who engages his opponent at stand-off range. Fried and company may know who is behind Whybasecampsux.org, but if they do they haven’t outed him. But if they don’t know who he is, it must be more than a bit annoying to be taking shots from someone who is completely covered and concealed.

Why should I trust Mr. Whybasecampsux.org? He hasn’t told me who he is. Does he work for a competitor? Is he a disgruntled former friend of 37signals? How does he stand to benefit when 37signals customers visit his site?

Wait, I know the answer to that last question. He stands to benefit because he’s advertising on his site. That’s right! You can advertise for $100/mo. (cheaper if you order several months at a time), and several Basecamp competitors have taken him up on his offer. He tells us “at first this was just a bitch page,” but now “I think it’s fair for me to monetize this site a bit.” Monetize is a weasel word for make money.

I don’t have a problem with Mr. Whybasecampsux.org making money. Hey, I try to make money too. But I don’t do it under a .org domain. If Whybasecampsux.org were being run by a company, the first thing I would want to do is try to determine who the people are behind the facade. Who is running the show? Can I trust them? What’s their agenda? What’s their background? Would I do business with a company that cloaks itself in secrecy and makes money by sharpshooting someone else’s product?

According to a blog post comment, the reason for Mr. Whybasecampsux.org’s anonymity is simple:

More importantly I’m relatively well-known in certain web designer/developer circles and that’s why the site is anonymous. I badly wanted to legitimately vent my disgust but didn’t want to create enemies among all the 37 Signals and Rails fan-boys.

In other words, “I wanted to take potshots at people without having to face them.”

Sure, the Internet gives us the ability to say whatever we want anonymously, which can be a very good thing. But when you’re making money by attacking someone else’s livelihood from cover of darkness, you don’t exactly come off looking like a knight in shining armor.

P.S. - Yes, I know this post boost the visibility of Whybasecampsux.org.

In April I wrote a rather lengthy piece about Apple’s distribution strategy. My central thesis was that Apple’s success over the last few years stems as much from the company’s creation of new distribution channels as from excellent product development. I also wondered whether Apple’s tight requirements for third-party iPhone app development would hamper growth of the iPhone as a distribution channel.

I expected to have to wait longer than nine months for the answer. But it is already clear that the App Store is a winner. Over 10,000 applications have been added to the iPhone in that short interval. A staggering 300 million instances of apps have been downloaded. That’s roughly the population of the United States. The iPhone itself already accounts for 16.6% of the global smartphone market and is breathing hard on the heels of RIM, the folks behind the BlackBerry.

Various observers bashed the iPhone for a variety of reasons, from design to price to carrier choice to general disbelief that Apple could navigate the treacherous waters of mobile telephony. But they’re still waiting for an “iPhone Killer” that can cut the iPhone down to size. In fact, there’s even an iPhone Killer website, which features all kinds of information about various devices: Nokia’s N97, the BlackBerry Storm, and so on. The fascinating thing about this site is that it sticks completely to hardware and the software that comes with it.

That would be more than adequate if we you believe that the iPhone is just a device, divorced from the App Store. But just as the iPod can’t be properly evaluated without looking at iTunes, the iPhone and the App Store constitute a platform. If you were buying a personal computer, you would look at the applications available for the operating system; why wouldn’t you examine a smartphone the same way?

There are over 15,000 Windows Mobile applications in the wild. There are over 9,000 Symbian applications. Symbian OS 6 rolled out in 2001. If we’re generous to Microsoft and count back only to the first use of the term Windows Mobile (formerly PocketPC), that OS was rolled out in 2003. So Apple caught up to Symbian’s seven-year lead and Windows Mobile’s five-year lead in less than six months.

Of course, quantity does not equal quality, and more apps doesn’t mean your platform will thrive. Just ask Palm. There are over 50,000 PalmOS apps, but that wasn’t enough. Palm sold off its own OS and is struggling to survive.

But here’s the kicker: Apple has been so successful with iTunes, its earlier distribution Trojan Horse, that when you read a story about iPhone applications in Time Magazine, the article includes and inline link that opens up iTunes to show you Apple’s app rankings. Even if you don’t have an iPhone, you probably have iTunes. So Apple has a convenient tool for showing off the most successful third-party apps and whetting your appetite for an iPhone.

That’s what I call leveraging all of your distribution channels.

I’ve been evaluating all kinds of microblogging tools, and Pownce has recently come out as my favorite. It balances ease of use with power, and the interface is clean and a joy to use. Unfortunately (at least for now) the Pownce team is being absorbed by Six Apart. I sincerely hope that in 2009 Six Apart can roll out a Pownce-like app that is (I can hope, can’t I?) even better.

Congrats to Leah, Mike, and Ariel for creating such a nifty tool, and for the deal with Six Apart.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before

Passionate Debater #1: “Apple is a hardware company. Just look at all of those iPods, iPhones, and Macs they sell.”

Passionate Debater #2: “No, it’s a software company. MacOS X and the iApps differentiate them from other PC vendors. Plus, Steve Jobs himself once declared that Apple was a software company.”

Passionate Debater #3: “Wait, Apple is actually a media company. They’re selling music and movies hand over fist, and they’ve always been about tools for media creation and delivery.”

The Tyranny of “Or”

In their masterful book “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies“, James Collins and Jerry Porras take note of the destructive effects of zero-sum thinking in business. Here they refer to highly visionary companies:

They do not oppress themselves with what we call the “Tyranny of the OR” – the rational view that cannot easily accept paradox, that cannot live with two seemingly contradictory forces or ideas at the same time. The “Tyranny of the OR” pushes people to believe that things must be either A OR B, but not both.

The Straightjacket of Outdated Classifications

Companies that can embrace “The Genius of the AND” are able to get past simplistic and unimaginative classifications. One of the reasons we habitually fall into the trap of the “Tyranny of the OR” is that we allow ourselves to be defined by definitions that are no longer relevant.

For example, what does “hardware company” mean? In most contexts it likely means a company that makes the bulk of its profit selling hardware, rather than software. But Apple sells hardware that runs Apple software. So it is selling hardware AND software. The two are an indistinguishable part of Apple’s value proposition to customers.

If you assume that the standard way of thinking about computers is that the hardware is made by a vendor like Dell or HP, and the software is made by Microsoft, then Apple’s approach is bizarre and difficult to reconcile. It is also hard to handle if you think of computer specialists as “hardware people” or “software people”. Industry specialization has led to excessive separation of disciplines that are inherently intertwined.

Great Companies Define Themselves

I cofounded a software product development company called productOps. We decided early on that perhaps our biggest differentiator would be our emphasis on combining right brain and left brain pursuits. We are programmers and quant jocks, but we’re also artists and marketers.

It isn’t easy to embrace the “Genius of the AND”. Tools and techniques are often designed for one audience or the other, but not both. Habits ingrained through years of experience in companies that have focused on either “creative” or “developer” talent means that we have to push hard to create our own unique workplace culture.

Apple springs immediately to mind as a company that has embraced the “Genius of the AND” not only in market integration (hardware, software, media, mobile communications) but in product integration as well (aesthetics, usability, capabilities). I’m always on the lookout for more examples of companies that refuse to let others straightjacket them with the “Tyranny of the OR”.

Visionary Companies That Embrace The Genius of AND

• O’Reilly (excellent technical reference books, forward-looking industry conferences, and innovative online learning programs)
• Pixar (cutting-edge technology, beautiful artistry, and superb storytelling)
• Trek (ultra-advanced elite cycles and bikes for everyday riders)
• USAA (a narrow customer base and carefully managed growth)

It’s a bit early to be digging the grave for FireWire, but the writing is definitely on the wall (to mix metaphors). David Pogue says as much in his review of the new MacBook, which lacks a FireWire port. Pogue spoke with Steve Jobs, who explained that the impending demise of digital video tape was the real reason Apple decided to start phasing out FireWire support.

Apple brought FireWire to market back in the mid-1990s, and it was good. I still remember the first time I saw a FireWire-equipped external drive in action. Faaaaast! It became the standard connector for miniDV camcorders because it could move large chunks of digital video footage from camcorder to computer rapidly. But miniDV is being supplanted by super-small, high-capacity disks.

FireWire won’t disappear any time soon, which is good. I plan on using my FireWire external drives as much as possible, until the day comes when something demonstrably better comes along.

Google’s new web browser is built on WebKit, the open source underpinnings that hold up Safari. Right now Safari is the third most used browser (6%), behind IE (72%) and Firefox (20%). But if Chrome picks up any steam, those few web developers who still persist in not testing against WebKit when building their apps will be forced to do so. This will in turn make make it easier for Safari users, who still have to occasionally turn to other browsers for some stubborn web apps.

WebKit continues to advance, spurred on by the success of Safari on iPhone. Now Google rolls out a WebKit-based browser (ironically for Windows only at the moment). Browser War 2.0 is heating up.