Archive for January, 2010

Giant Meh Redux

Posted in gadgets on January 29, 2010 by themaroon

Undoubtedly the most humorous thing about the iPad’s, umm, lukewarm reception (to put it kindly) is the Apple fanboy response which has been, largely, to post every quote where anyone ever said some Apple product wouldn’t work. Some people hated the original iPod (which sold like 8 units total). Some people said the original iPhone (also an underpeformer) wasn’t going to be that big.

This, to the fanboys, is practically evidence of its impending success. Of course, nobody is pointing out quotes from people who said the Apple TV or Macbook Air were duds too.

I think there’s a large difference between the iPhone and iPod and the iPad. When the iPod came out, people were using MP3 players. A lot of them. I’d already had a few different models by then. It was a small portion of the eventual market, for sure, but nobody ever thought to themselves “Why would anyone want a tiny device that can store every song you’ve ever heard, half of which you downloaded for free on Kazaa, on it?” They debated whether people would buy that device from Sony or Creative or maybe Apple, but not that people wanted it.

Same with the iPhone. The smart phone market had existed for years before its release. Nobody with half a brain ever said “Why would anyone want to be able to surf the web and answer emails on the go?” People were already doing that. It was more like  “Why would anyone pay $600 with a 2 year contract for this?” or “Will anyone switch to AT&T for this?” or “Will a virtual keyboard be even remotely tolerable?”. Etc.

The question with the iPad is: “Does anyone want a device in between a smart phone and a laptop?” It’s not an issue of who they want to buy it from, or how much it costs, or what features it has. It’s whether, like the Apple TV, it needs to exist at all. If you go down a list of features and compare it to HP or Sony or whoever else jumps onto this market, it might well be like every other Apple product. It might look inferior on paper, and outsell them 10:1 anyway. That I would not put past Apple.

Almost as humorous as the twisted logic is the freetard reaction which is, humorously, that Apple is (or may be becoming) evil. On the one hand, it’s hilarious to see the farm animals, who’ve been decrying Microsoft for far less egregious things than the App Store for over a decade, react in real time when they realize the pigs have become human. Four legs good, two interns capriciously rejecting fart apps better.

I didn’t buy it about Microsoft then, and I don’t buy it about Apple now. They’re just doing what corporations do, trying to make the most money they can. That’s their job, and this is how they think they’ll accomplish it. If their tightly-controlled user experience does become too restrictive, people won’t buy it and Windows, Android, Ubuntu, or whatever else will win out. There’s not good and evil, only optimal and suboptimal, and time will tell which Apple’s chosen.

iPad: Giant Meh

Posted in Uncategorized on January 28, 2010 by themaroon

So the big news of the day before, you know, that whole State of the Union thing, was, of course, the announcement of the iPad. Love ‘em or hate ‘em (and don’t tell anyone I said this, but I actually moderately like them) everyone pays attention to Apple. They’ve been disruptive to the music industry, are running the show in the high-end PC market, and have sparked a wave of innovation in the mobile phone one, so when they launch something new it’s worth attention.

This particular product has had more speculation than any device since the original iPhone. I may be wrong, but unlike the iPhone, it feels like everyone is underwhelmed. Except, perhaps, their competitors, like Amazon and HP, who are probably ecstatic.

If I were an OEM already making a tablet, I would be very happy about today’s announcement. The only thing surprising about it was the total lack of surprises, which is unusual for Apple. Everyone’s been expecting basically a large iPod touch with books in its app store. That’s exactly what they got, and it doesn’t even have that many books either, with only a few publishers signed up.

So if I were prepping a tablet of my own, or the Kindle, the iPad we saw today would be what I’d consider best case scenario. It would be what I’ve been planning around for the last six months to a year. I would have been holding my breath, waiting to hear “Oh, and one more thing, it can READ YOUR MIND!” at the end of the Jobsnote, and when it didn’t come, uncorking a bottle of champagne that cost about the same as the 16 GB version.

Do you think the cell phone OEMs, when they saw the first iPhone, said “yeah, that’s about what we expected”? My guess is their reaction was quite the opposite. Guys at RIM and Motorola were probably thinking "holy shit, I didn’t know a phone could be that good looking or good at web surfing." They still weren’t going to shut the company down and give the money back to investors due to the iPhone’s exorbitant pricing and single carrier, I’m sure, but you know they were steaming. It was a curveball. They caught what they knew was at least a glimpse of the future, and they were already a year behind.

Does HP feel that way right now? It seems doubtful. Their Slate device has everything the iPad does, except the App Store. But is the App Store better than having available to you every program made for Windows? You can’t play League of Legends or World of Warcraft on your iPad. (You may not want to on your Slate, depending on what’s under the hood.) You can’t play Flash games from Kongregate or chess on Yahoo Games.

And while the App Store is the best thing to happen to the iPhone, it’s raison d’être, as Gabor Cselle points out it’s largely due to the iPhone’s limitations: slow processing and a tiny screen. And, I’ll add to that, the inability to run the programs you already use. The App Store isn’t a feature; it’s a clever hack.

Even Apple didn’t allow apps for the first year because they thought web apps would be sufficient. (Also Apple did not understand what I call Maroon’s Law of Platforms, which is that any sufficiently popular technological platform will evolve into little more than a method for playing games, but they get it now.)

The iPad doesn’t seem to have those limitations, or at least if it does, they’re self-imposed. Same goes for it’s competitors. They’ve got laptop-like screens, and will probably have way better processors than whatever you’re reading this on now within a few years. They can run Windows, and could probably run full-fledged OSX if Apple decided to put it on there.

But the question people seem to be asking the most is “why?” Why would I want this?

I admit, it would make a good toy. It’d be fun to play with, and that’s good for some number of sales right there, but at $500 not many. Anyone who has an iPhone, Android, or WebOS phone will tell you that web surfing on it is somewhat painful. Far less so than on the Treo 650 we had previously, but still no picnic. There’s all this pinching and swiping. It’s kludgey. Even the sites and apps designed for it entail fat-fingered misclicks and slow page loads.

But you put up with it because it’s always with you and it takes no extra effort. You don’t surf the web that much from your phone at home (other than maybe on the john, if you don’t have a PC in your bathroom yet) because you’ve got a computer right there. But when you’re walking down the street and you need directions, or you get stuck in a traffic jam, or you’re in line at the grocery store, or any of the other hundred reasons you find yourself bored on a daily basis, it’s a godsend.

The iPhone and it’s generation of smart phones kicks ass when you’re on the go. It’s always with you, and that’s why it works. Nobody wants to carry a laptop everywhere, and even if you did, you couldn’t use it while walking. You wouldn’t pull it out and start surfing in a line at Starbucks. And that is true of a tablet.

It’s no more convenient than a laptop. You can use it pretty much only when and where you could use a laptop. It’s better for some things (surfing the web from your couch, perhaps) but no matter how much effort they put into iWork, are you really ever going to want to do real work on it? Can you imagine editing a spreadsheet on that thing? Typing has to be less brutal than the iPhone, but it’s still going to be painful relative to a keyboard.

Unlike the iPod , it doesn’t replace your Walkman. Unlike the iPhone, it doesn’t replace your crappy clamshell. Unlike the Mac, it doesn’t replace your PC. It doesn’t look very compelling as a book reader, so it won’t make you ditch your Kindle or good old papyrus. It has to create it’s own usage case somewhere in between, and that’s tough.

So I’m sticking with my guess before that this is going to be about as successful (or failureful) as the Macbook Air. It won’t be a total flop (Apple TV) but it won’t be an iPod Nano either. It’ll be something you hear about for awhile, then becomes just another item on the shelf behind the Genius Bar. 

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God’s Wrath According To Pat Robertson | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Posted in Uncategorized on January 20, 2010 by themaroon

God’s Wrath According To Pat Robertson

700 Club founder Pat Robertson stated that the earthquake in Haiti, which may have killed 100,000 people, was God’s punishment for a deal Haitian slaves made with the devil 200 years ago to get out from under French rule. Here are some other tragedies and Robertson’s explanations for them:

  • Eruption of Mount St. Helens, 1980: Divine wrath was incurred when people were too busy enjoying the natural beauty of Washington state and not spending enough time appreciating God
  • Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion, 1986: Ten-year-old Walt Sudul, of Racine, WI, made friends with a Jewish boy at school
  • Oakland Hills Firestorm, 1991: Emily Garrity pointed out a logical inconsistency in the concept of an omnipotent god to her Sunday school teacher
  • Magic Johnson Tests Positive for HIV, 1991: An ardent Portland Trail Blazers fan, God was horrified to see His team lose 4-2 to the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1991 Western Conference Finals, and thus decided to give the winner’s best player AIDS
  • Crash of American Airlines Flight 587, 2001: Though the flight was filled with pious individuals, God was distracted by a masturbating 14-year-old in Boise, ID and was therefore unable to keep the aircraft from falling apart in midair, like all planes would without His loving intervention
  • Columbine High School Massacre, 1999: Tinky Winky
  • Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004: Newlyweds Todd and Nancy Tate experimented with non-missionary sex during their honeymoon
  • Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Divine retribution for Girls Gone Wild: Mardi Gras (Volume 3)
via theonion.com

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Undressing the Terror Threat – WSJ.com

Posted in Uncategorized on January 9, 2010 by themaroon

I’m not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky set shot and a bad knee, I can’t hold my own in a YMCA pickup game, let alone against more organized competition. But I could definitely beat LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. The game just needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and when I score, I win.

We might have to play for a few days, and Mr. James’s point total could well be creeping toward five figures before the contest ended, but eventually the gritty gutty competitor with a lunch-bucket work ethic (me) would subject the world’s greatest basketball player to a humiliating defeat.

The world’s greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

[W3Feature1] Photo illustration by John Kuczala

Read More

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day.

via online.wsj.com

Tech Predictions for 2010

Posted in tech on January 7, 2010 by themaroon

What sort of blogger would I be if I didn’t make a bunch of predictions for the next year that you could laugh at (some now, some in 11 months). Rather than making a bunch of vague statements that can’t even be evaluated a decade from now (I’m looking at you, The Economist) I’ll try to make right-or-wrong predictions so one of us will get to stick our tongue out at the other on New Year’s Eve.

Mobile

1. The iPhone will remain solely on AT&T, much to the chagrin of iPhone users. Android and Palm will gain market share as a result, probably more the former than the latter. Customers will continue, for the most part, choosing their carrier and then their phone as they’ve done since the industry began.

My reasoning behind this is that the only network that matters to Apple is Verizon, and Verizon won’t give them much of a deal. AT&T clings to the iPhone like a drowning man to a life raft. It’s all they’ve got, and they’ll give Apple all of the control they expect in return. I wouldn’t be surprised if Randall Stephenson is washing Steve Jobs’ car every Sunday.

Verizon won’t play that game because they know that in the long-term, that means irrelevance for them, and if there is one thing Verizon has shown all along it’s that they are the mobile network most capable of thinking long-term. If Apple wants to play on their playground, they’re going to have to follow the same rules as all the other kids, and Steve Jobs won’t ever let that happen.

Verizon has been growing their business just fine without the iPhone, and for the first time they’ve got solid competition (Droid, Storm [though I hate to call that hunk of junk competition, it sells] and soon the Pre) for the consumer smart phone space. They’re looking back to 2007 when they passed on the deal the first time because Apple wanted too much money and too much control and laughing about how right they were. AT&T might have gotten themselves the hottest phone on the market, but they got it at a price that hasn’t helped them stop the bleeding, and if anything has put them in worse shape than they were then. They’ve hemorrhaged customers even despite bringing in millions with the iPhone 3G, and Verizon has gained a big chunk of them.

(Everyone is also claiming that Verizon won’t do much to market the Pre because they want the Droid to be their iPhone. I don’t believe that either. Verizon wants the hardware companies competing tooth and nail. They didn’t want to be a king maker for Apple, but doing the same thing for Motorola wouldn’t be any better for VZW in the end. They’ll put their muscle behind a new phone every couple months just as they always have. The Pre and Pixi will be up to bat pretty soon, then it will be someone else’s turn at the plate.)

The only other network I could see the iPhone landing on is Sprint. They’re CDMA and therefore can roam on Verizon’s towers. They’re just big enough to matter (because really, what’s joining up with T-Mobile going to do for Apple?) but in a bad enough position that they might give Apple more than Verizon.

2. Palm will put out a successor to the Pre that does even better. I’m not talking about the rumored Pre Plus that will be launching on Verizon shortly, I mean a second generation. If you forced me to nail down features, I’d say video (which may be on the original by then), Flash (ditto), a better keyboard (I hope) and of course the obligatory more memory.

Their ease of development (already the easiest, and going to be even more so once Ares launches) will give them the highest app count to user base ratio, though that won’t count for much in the grand scheme of things because as anyone who actually has one of these phones knows, you only need one app that makes fart noises. The quality of an app catalog does not scale in direct proportion to quantity, in fact it’s more of a logarithm with a large base number.

WebOS will continue to be the best mobile OS, especially once it gets Flash, which will be the most popular feature ever to hit smart phones, but will still not eclipse the iPhone or Android in total sales yet. Hopefully for Palm’s sake they’ll ditch the creepy marketing campaign for one that works.

3. More Android units will ship that are highly-regarded and will land on every major carrier. 2010 might not be the year my prediction from 2008 comes true, but it might be the last where it doesn’t.

4. Apple will launch a tablet of some sort. It won’t be a roaring success like the iPhone 3G. It probably won’t even be anywhere near the middling success (or middling failure, depending on your point of view) of the original iPhone. It won’t be a total dud (Apple TV) either. Think along the lines of the Macbook Air.

Apple does product development as well as anybody though, maybe better. The original iPod sucked. So did the original iPhone. In both cases, Apple watched what users did, figured out what mattered and what didn’t, and successive generations got better and cheaper. So to make this clear, I’m speaking only of the first generation.

I would guess most people don’t want to carry a device around 24/7 unless it fits in their pocket. It will be a device for lounging around the house, but people already have notebooks and smart phones for that.

And if people have to have some sort of carrying case for a computing device whenever they leave, they’ll want a full-featured computing device, especially at any price point over $500 since you can get a reasonable notebook for that these days. It’s unclear to me what a tablet can do that an iPhone can’t, and what it can do as well as a notebook, let alone better than, while still remaining price-competitive.

I expect the tablet will be what the Kindle should have been. Apple will realize (as they always have) that nobody cares about battery life. They’ll deal with 5 hours if it means a color screen and the ability to watch video and surf the web. Apple will also realize that even a digital keyboard is better than that monstrosity on the Kindle, that Wi-Fi is better than Whispernet, and that a web browser is better than all of the books and magazines in the universe.

My guess is the product will have a 3G data card built in, cost $599 subsidized through a carrier with data service (which is why I’m putting this in mobile) and maybe $799 with no service contract. That will be way too much. I’m just spit-balling there though.

Web/Software

1. Facebook and Zynga will both IPO (their valuations will be very much tied together) and a previously thawed tech market will heat back up. Social games will continue to grow,and maybe get a second IPO from someone like Playdom, though not at the astounding pace they did in 2009.

2. Twitter won’t exactly fade back into obscurity, but it will garner fewer and fewer media mentions, and new users, as time goes on. It may end the year with fewer daily actives than when it started as people tire of the enforced inanity of a 140 character limit.

3. Application developers will slowly start to shift away from iPhone and Facebook to the good old-fashioned internet once again. The iPhone platform’s terrible distribution system will, despite insanely high RPUs, prevent the business case from being realized by developers. Facebook’s platform (which has great distribution but much lower RPU) will go through a rough patch with major changes that makes developers ask “why am I not just building this on a website again?”

4. Google Wave will gain virtually no traction at all. The DoJ will take firm action against Google for anti-trust violations.

5. Facebook’s growth will slow because there are only so many people on the net. Their revenue may hit $1 billion.]

6. Bing will gain a little market share, but not enough for Google to worry about. Most of it will come from Yahoo anyway.

Games

1. Pundits will finally realize that the real success story of the previous generation of consoles wasn’t the Wii, but the Xbox 360 (All gamers already realize this, pundits can’t see beyond unit sales.) just in time for rumors of the next generation to start circulating.

2. Starcraft 2 will finally launch, after years of teasers. It will be critically acclaimed and very popular, but not as popular as it could have been a year or two ago due to many former RTS players having moved on to MOBA games like DoTA and League of Legends.

3. Flash will come to mobile devices, sparking a massive upsurge in the casual games industry. The number of game apps on any mobile platform is trivial when compared to the number of Flash games out there.

That’s all I’ve got. Please tell me where and how I am wrong.

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The Bottom Feeder: Make Your Game Easy. Then Make It Easier.

Posted in Uncategorized on January 4, 2010 by themaroon
People will happily forgive a game for being too easy, because it makes them feel badass. If a game is too hard, they will get angry, ragequit, hold a grudge, and never buy your games again.

via jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

I really couldn’t disagree with this article much more. Easiness and depth are almost mutually exclusive and both have their place. If you want high user numbers and low RPU (think Farmtown) then yeah, dumb it down until you can’t dumb it down anymore. Think to yourself “could the average person who owns a Sarah Palin t-shirt play this game?”.

If you’re going the opposite way though, with relatively low sales volume and high RPU (like any console game or my latest Facebook game, Starfleet Commander) then you want the game to be hard. Difficulty is directly proportional to engagement.

And by that I do not mean hard to use of course. A good model to look at is Ocarina of Time. The puzzles and the game were as difficult as anything out at the time short of maybe Myst, but the controls were as intuitive and easy to use as the many 3d RPGs still being made a decade later.

I think this is the direction in which Facebook games are moving too because the RPUs of a real game are obscene. Engagement is directly proportional to RPU (revenue per user, by the way) and higher RPU means you can spend more money acquiring a customer. With organic growth stalling, or on the web where it’s largely unproven, squeezing dimes out of users is going to be extremely key to long-term success.

If Facebook’s invite system removes organic growth like a lot of people suspect, you’ll see the flood of Farm games and other easy to play, low RPU, high volume Flash games turn into a trickle.

And there’s a line there clearly, difficulty and engagement don’t scale together forever. At some point it becomes just painful. But difficulty (which, even in an RPG, does not necessarily equate to a player dying) is not something to be shunned.

Transitioning

Posted in Startup on January 4, 2010 by themaroon

Paul Graham wrote an article not too far back called What Startups Are Really Like that mentioned a number of things the people he had funded were surprised to learn over the years. Lots of good stuff there, and I wholeheartedly agree with most. (Especially #12, It’s Hard to Get Users. You grow up hearing that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. That, it turns out, is sadly untrue, as the fact that Apple spending a few hundred million dollars a year marketing the iPod proves empirically. In fact I think that if I were running one of the many startup funding groups using Y Combinator’s model, I’d start by putting together a team of people with experience in user acquisition to run it. That would be about the only way to compete.)

I’ve recently come to realize there’s one thing I’d add to the list, which is that a startup is hard when it’s not yet succeeding (either because it’s too early or it’s just struggling) and then once you start doing well, it gets even harder. That’s unintuitive I think, and if you’d have told me that when my startup was struggling I might not have believed it. The hard part is transitioning.

When you first start off, it’s you and one or two other people and you’re doing everything. All of the high-level work. All of the grunt work. Everything in between. You’re a lawyer, accountant, designer, programmer, customer support person, and whatever else you need that day. You hopefully communicate well with your cofounders in order to divide up labor, and then you each go out and do everything that needs to be done because there isn’t anyone else to do it.

However if you think about Google, you’ll realize quickly that Larry and Sergey aren’t doing that. I’m not sure what exactly they do (though I’ll bet they do a lot of whatever it is) but you can be pretty sure they aren’t trying to tweak the colors on the main page or iterate the Page Rank algorithm anymore. In fact even at a startup of 50 people, that’s clearly not going to fly.

So among software companies that succeed, the founders probably start off doing one thing and end up doing something else. I can’t say for sure what the end-point is like because I haven’t gotten there yet, though I promise to share if I do. But I can tell you what comes in that transitional period right after the early stages and it’s pretty hard.

At first you’re working part-time on hiring (probably a totally new skill set for you) and the rest of the time you’re still getting things done. Then you hire a couple people, and you’re working on hiring, getting things done, and managing the people you hired (another new skill set, and one that often does not come easily to people who get things done well themselves) to make sure they’re not only getting things done, and done well, but getting the most things done well that they possibly can.

That in and of itself, when it comes to programming, business, and other mainly mental tasks, is a chore so onerous that many books have been written about it. In fact large businesses have multiple layers of people in their org chart dedicated entirely to that, but you’ve got to do that yourself and hire new people (because the work keeps on piling up) and keep the servers running, all at the same time.

So you keep on trying to juggle the three but you realize more and more that you just can’t do it. One or two of them get done well, and one or two of them get totally neglected, and its almost certainly the new and hard tasks like management that get pushed to the side.

Then maybe you wake up one day to find that when you were hiring, you hired people who didn’t have the same skill sets as you because you were hiring them to compliment you. You were figuring you’d keep doing what you’d been doing, and they’d do these other new tasks. But now you really can’t do what you’ve done for the last couple years because you have other responsibilities and you need new people to step up and do what you did, and you maybe don’t have them because that wasn’t what you were hiring for.

Even if not though, you’re still in a pretty tough spot because your natural inclination is to minimize the other crap and keep getting things done. That’s what got you where you are, and you’re in a good place, so you tend to keep on doing it. You’ve spent months or maybe even years doing what needed to be done when it needed to be done but now you’ve got to not only trust the people you hired (the end results of the hiring process you totally pulled out of your ass because you had no experience hiring and maybe even had no experience being hired before) to get things done when needed, but also monitor how they do it and help them do it better.

The next step, which is where we’re getting to now, is where you transition entirely to managing and hiring, and your employees get everything done. This is a letting go process, I imagine, much like sending your kids off to college, except in this case if your kids party too much and fail Calc II you just lost the business you spent years building. In business, though, you adopted your children and can send them right back to the shelter at any point, so its your fault if they do not succeed, which doesn’t make it easier when you’re nervously trying to determine whether or not to write up that job offer letter or can the employee who might be underperforming.

And then after that I suppose you’re hiring and promoting other people to do the hiring and promoting, and focusing on higher-level stuff. And after that I guess you’re sitting next to your Gulfstream V on a beach acquiring a taste for Mai Tais or something, who knows.

But during the ugly duckling phase, where you’re not quite a General yet but not quite a Private First Class anymore, transitioning is extremely tough. It’s a great problem to have, but it’s perhaps the most stressful thing you’ll deal with in the early life of a startup.

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Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy – GOOD Blog – GOOD

Posted in Uncategorized on January 2, 2010 by themaroon
via good.is

But hey, who needs health care reform anyway?

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