Google Will Become an AI Company

Posted in tech on January 3, 2011 by themaroon

For quite some time I’ve been pretty down on GOOG. Not the company, Google, but the stock in it. The reason, I realized, is that I’ve been thinking of Google as a search company and search as a market is largely played out. There’ll be some growth from mobile, though much of it cannibalistic, and some further increases from local and just general demographic shifts as the web insinuates itself further and further into more people’s lives. But overall search will remain an industry measured in the tens of billions for quite some time, and their stratospheric stock prices have left better investments in many other corners of the market.

My thinking might have been wrong though because Google isn’t a search company. Right now they’re a product development company (and generally a poor one) funded by search. In the future, though, they’re going to transition to an artificial intelligence company. They’re already halfway there. Search is just the problem they first applied AI to, and the one they’ve grown to dominate. In the future they will have much bigger fish to fry. While Facebook is still trying to figure how to make money off of people sharing pictures, Google may be revolutionizing one industry after another by pushing the bounds of what software can do.

Take the automotive industry. That’s nearly two orders of magnitude larger than search. To put that another way, if Google managed to scoop up just 2% of that industry they’d have more than doubled their revenue. With their driverless car project, I think they’ve got a shot of taking a much bigger slice of the pie than that.

Imagine a world in which all cars drove themselves. Seriously think about the ramifications. Here are just a few:

1. Cars may be cheaper and/or higher markup. Mechanical drivers will eventually reach a point where errors are no longer a common occurrence, and as a result, safety regulations (which currently add significant expense to cars) could be greatly relaxed. The conversion to electric cars (which will have to occur, as fossil fuels won’t be able to accommodate the meteoric rise in drive time) will also eliminate expensive exhaust systems.

2. Children could own cars. Don’t feel like schlepping your kid to soccer practice? Just buy them a car. Age restrictions on driving only exist because children can’t be trusted not to kill themselves or others on the road. If a machine is driving for them that’s no longer an issue. Parental controls will easily alleviate other concerns.

3. The beverage industry will grow. Designated drivers are a thing of the past. Go to the bar, get wasted, have your car take you home. Hell, get a rum and Coke to go on your way out the door. How many times have you had a beer or two less than you wanted to because you knew you had to drive home? Never again.

4. Speed limits will be unnecessary. A mechanical driver processes information so close to instantaneously that mechanical limits will be the only factor restricting speed. Cars that can travel at 200 mph will become common and fetch premiums.

5. Traffic, too, will become a thing of the past. Slowdowns are caused entirely by human error. Accidents, people stopping abruptly, merging poorly, etc. Intelligent routing and better driving will mean that you’ll maintain top speed throughout your trips.

6. The map will shrink greatly. Right now I live about 30 miles from my office and the commute is on the very edge of what I can stand. Make my car driverless (freeing me up to watch TV, read a book, catch up on emails, etc.) and able to travel at twice the speed, and spend the entire trip at top speed (rather than slowing down and speeding up on the highway) and I could feasibly live as far as 100 mph away. Since the area of a circle is proportionate to the square of the radius my possible housing locations just grew by about 11x.

7. Urbanization will reverse. Why pay $3,000/month for a flat in Manhattan when you can get from 100 miles upstate to work in 30 minutes? That’s enough time to watch The Daily Show on the way in anyway.

8. Airlines will be devastated. Why fly from New York to Chicago? Just hop in the car, watch a couple movies (on the screen that is mounted where Wikipedia says that something called a “steering wheel” used to be) and you’re there.

9. Other forms of public transport won’t fare much better. A driverless cab won’t cost much more than a bus (which also will be driverless) but will be a hell of a lot nicer. Don’t even get me started on subways.

I could go on but you get the point. Whoever invents the driverless car is going to make a lot of money. Possibly more than anyone has ever made before by an order of magnitude. This could be Google. I’m not saying it will be them. There’s far too much standing in between us and the driverless future to predict something like that accurately, especially since many of the obstacles are governmental. But it does seem as if it almost has to happen eventually, and right now they’re probably the frontrunner.

And that’s just one industry. Imagine customer service. A program that could do as good of a job as a real call center rep could simultaneously decrease costs and improve service. It would replace millions of employees nearly overnight. How much could that make? There’s almost no industry that can’t be greatly improved by AI.

So while as a search or mediocre product development company GOOG is starting to like more like a blue chip, I think as an AI company, Google has a shot of generating massive growth.

51 Comments »

Net Neutrality

Posted in tech on December 22, 2010 by themaroon

The FCC passed it’s long-awaited Net Neutrality rules (promise by President Obama during his campaigning) and reaction has been mixed. Mostly they’ve been negative, but they’ve been negative in opposite directions, with the rabidly pro Net Neutrality advocates slamming it for being not tough enough, and the people on the opposite side saying it’s going to run ISPs out of business.

The complaint of the EFF-types is largely that wireless broadband carriers are exempt from the Unreasonable Discrimination clause, which states that:

A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic over a consumer’s broadband Internet access service. Reasonable network management shall not constitute unreasonable discrimination.

What this means is that Comcast cannot charge you for watching Netflix streaming, even though it competes with their Hulu service, or accept payments from Yahoo to make Google searches really slow. Wireless carriers, however, can do this if they choose.

I’m quite alright with this. The government has long regulated natural monopolies, and it’s a system that, while not perfect, works pretty well. Wired broadband is functionally a natural monopoly, or perhaps more accurately a natural duopoly since both telephone and cable lines have been repurposed to provide broadband data.

Wireless broadband, like wireless phone service, is far from a natural monopoly. There are four major carriers in the U.S., and scores of regionals and MVNOs, all competing on margins. There are also data only wireless services like Clearwire and Aircell and a few satellite providers. Prices have been steadily decreasing (though services have increased). I now pay less for boundless minutes, unlimited text and 4g data than I paid for far fewer minutes, pre-3g data, and 100 SMSes a month a few years back on the same carrier. I used to suffer from overage fees regularly, now with the free mobile to mobile, earlier nights and weekends, and unlimited SMSing I don’t even come within 500 minutes of my cap.

Wireless broadband doesn’t need to be regulated because the market will take care of it. As long as the government doesn’t allow any further M&A in the space, which I don’t think they will, we can let the free market act. If Verizon starts slowing down Google searches, I’ll switch to Sprint, who I’m fairly certain never will. The first rule of the FCC’s regulation, transparency, does not exempt wireless carriers from being forced to disclose this sort of behavior and that’s enough.

What I think we’ll see, instead, is usage caps. The networks are strained not by average people, but by those (unfortunately myself included) who use the internet as a replacement for everything. Those of us who get our TV shows and movies streamed from Netflix or downloaded via BitTorrent, purchase (or obtain by other means) our music online, etc. are going to have to pay extra for the privilege. But thanks to the Net Neutrality regulations we won’t have a situation in which ISPs exert undue influence on whether you shop at Amazon or Buy.com, or search via Google or Yahoo.

Supporting Multiple Types of DRM Is Not The Same As Being Open.

Posted in Illiterature on December 7, 2010 by themaroon

Google launched their eBook store yesterday. As a die-hard Kindle fan and avid read I’m quite disappointed. As an author I’m excited. It’s as if I have split personalities fighting over the last drumstick at Thanksgiving, and either way I both win and lose.

The promise behind Google Books, it was rumored, was that you could read the books everywhere.  As Google themselves said “We designed Google eBooks to be open.” Unfortunately what that means is they’ll run on any device that plays nicely with their DRM. Supporting many forms of DRM on many locked-down devices is not the same as being open.

In fact, I can’t tell what’s “open” about it at all. In my browser I can’t seem to select text or right click, so I can’t copy and paste the book. (I haven’t had time yet to open up Firebug and figure out what’s going on, it might just be something simple.) I don’t see any way to get a DRM-free document that I could convert to run on my Kindle.

I’m sure the closed nature of the system is not Google’s choice, that’s probably demanded by the publishers. But as Judge Judy would say, Google is peeing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. I know open when I see it, and Google Books is not open.

I can see why publishers wouldn’t allow a truly open book store. Scott Adams says that in the near future there will be no such thing as a professional writer, which would mean that there would be no such thing as a professional publisher either. Publishers aren’t stupid, they want to remain in business. There’s a lot of money in remaining in business.

And to be honest, I think they’ve got a real shot of pulling it off. The reason DRM can’t work in music is that record companies still sell the same exact songs on CD. It only takes one unlocked copy of the file to propagate, and then all people who want to download the music illegally for free can do so. Books, by contrast, are  usually not sold in any DRM-free digital format, and book scanners are out of reach for most people. As long as publishers can maintain the upper hand in the cat and mouse game of DRM vs .circumvention they can avoid the fate of the music industry.

Right now I can trivially find any song or disc you can find on iTunes, plus many more, in seconds. I have yet to have the experience of searching for some music I know to exist and not finding it. I can find a decent number of books too, but far from all of them. And a lot of the ones I can find are in a PDF format without text reflow, meaning converting them requires using OCR which is ugly.

So perhaps it’s my own wishful thinking, as a past and potential future author, but I think DRM is here to stay in books. And I think Google’s new product is evidence of that.

App Stores Are Here To Stay

Posted in Mobile on December 1, 2010 by themaroon

Fred Wilson wrote, a few days back:

I saw two HTML5 apps yesterday. One running in my Android browser. The other running in the iPad browser. They looked and worked exactly like their mobile app counterparts. It was a mind opening moment.

…

I’ve always disliked the idea that we have to download apps on our phones when the apps we use on the web are loaded in the browser on demand. But I’ve accepted the mobile app paradigm as something we will be living with for the next five years.

I’m not sure it’s five years anymore.

As an app developer I hope he is correct but I think he’s perhaps misunderstanding why native apps are so appealing. As far as I see it native applications have three primary benefits: technology, distribution, and monetization.

As far as technology goes, Fred may be right. The number of things you can do in HTML5 will continue to increase. HTML5’s geolocation functionality (already supported on many devices) takes care of one of the big ones.

Unfortunately the one thing you can’t make in HTML5 right now are rich games, which is exactly what people are using. You can make pong, but you can’t make Angry Birds. If and when WebGL is ready for prime time the number of apps you’ll actually need to make native will decrease significantly. I’m always hesitant to put a timeline on standards being finalized and adopted (remember the 802.11n debacle) but 5 years might be realistic for usable WebGL on most major smart phones. I wouldn’t bet on much sooner though, and as long as games are driving what people use the platforms for, which you can always safely bet on, native apps aren’t going to disappear.

However I’m far less hopeful that the other two advantages will disappear in five years. Right now Apple has a huge lead as far as monetization goes, even over Android. The iOS advantage comes from the network of credit cards Apple has stored on their servers. Almost everyone who owns an iOS device has a payment method already in Apple’s database that enables 1-click purchasing. Nothing quite like it exists on the internet in terms of ease of use. PayPal is possibly a viable competitor for Android, Google Checkout seemingly has not been.

And then there’s distribution. Right now a top free app in the app store gets hundreds of thousands of downloads a day. Multiple apps achieve this milestone every week. It’s extremely hard to do this on the web, and it would probably be even harder on the mobile web. There’s no one central place where people can see all of the cool new websites every day, sorted by category, and ranked and reviewed by other users. The App Store is the Amazon of native apps, and there’s just nothing like that for web apps.

Web apps have other distribution methods, of course, that are a mixed bag. Search, recommendations, Facebook/Twitter connect, etc., offer unique advantages and disadvantages over the centralized app store model. But I can’t think of one mobile web app that’s achieved mass market success yet the old-fashioned way. Most mobile web apps are simply extensions of already existing desktop web apps. If anyone is having any success yet trying to change this I have somehow missed hearing about it. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen either, but it’s going to be a long hard slog from here to a world where mobile web apps can compete with native ones for users.

If anything what we’re seeing right now is the opposite of what Fred is predicting, with web apps going native. Apple’s new Mac App Store is trying very hard to push things in the opposite direction. Magazines like Time, Wired, The Economist, and new ones like Project are launching iPad apps that could easily, from a technological perspective have been web apps. They’re doing it for the same advantages of monetization and distribution that native apps enjoy. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Microsoft do something similar with Windows soon, and if they don’t OEMs will.

As long as Apple remains an influential player, they’ll keep abusing and improving those advantages, especially the last two, and maybe even restricting the technology available to HTML5 to keep control over what’s running on their devices. All Apple has to do to ensure that the majority of apps remain native is not support WebGL and/or Flash.

Apple has strong financial incentives to see a healthy app store. It monetizes directly and it also drives hardware sales. Try as hard as you might, you can’t hammer “there’s an HTML5 app on the web that runs on any phone including ours for that” into a catchy slogan.

Free Engraving and Occam’s Razor

Posted in gadgets on November 29, 2010 by themaroon

I read an article this week asking the question “Why does Apple offer free engraving” on it’s iPods, iPads, etc. The conclusion the article came to was that it is to reduce Apple’s secondary market. While an interesting thought, I suspect it’s far off the mark.

People look at buying used gadgets about the same way they do at buying used underwear. People do it, for certain, and you can probably find a host of used iPods on sale on eBay, but only because they either can’t afford new ones, or they’re extremely thrifty. The number of people who buy a used iPod instead of a new ones is probably negligible.

The way mp3 players work is more or less the following, ranked in order of frequency.

Can afford a new iPod: If so, buy a new iPod.

Can’t afford a new iPod and aversion to buying a used gadget outweighs brand loyalty: Buy a Sandisk Sansa or some other mp3 player.

Can’t afford a new iPod but really want one: buy a used one.

The reason Apple.com gives free engraving is pretty simple, it’s so you’ll buy from Apple.com. There’s often no other reason to buy anything from them. Apple’s website is probably the highest-priced place to buy an iPod online. They sell almost all Apple products (other than refurbs and occasional sales) for MSRP. Amazon, a much more widely-used online merchant, sells almost all Apple products below MSRP.

Apple also is forced to charge sales tax in any state in which they have an Apple Store, which by now means most people. Amazon charges sales tax in only 5 states. For comparison, I added an iPod Classic 160gb to my cart on Apple.com. Total cost (with free shipping) was $265. On Amazon the same item (also free shipping) is $228. That’s an extra $40. The price is about the same at Wal-Mart, though they may have to charge sales tax too, I’m not sure.

Apple, of course, doesn’t get to keep the sales tax but they are getting $249 from the sale. Presumably when Amazon sells it they do so at some markup (probably a small one) meaning that every iPod sold on Amazon probably nets Apple less than $220. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon is buying them for something like $200.

Apple’s “free” online engraving is thus not free to Apple. It nets them probably at least $30-$50 every time someone chooses to buy their iPod from Apple directly rather than through Amazon. The cost of engraving is probably on the order of a buck or two.

Apple doesn’t need any nebulous and possibly inconsequential reasons like reducing the size of the secondary market to offer free engraving. They do it because it makes them money.

2 Comments »

How Intellectuals Talk

Posted in Uncategorized on November 24, 2010 by themaroon

I posted yesterday’s post about quitting Hacker News right before lunch. (I’d actually written it the week prior but never got around to posting it because I had a business trip to Chicago to deal with.) When I got back from lunch I had a long list of emails from WordPress full of comments which is the telltale sign of a front page article on HN, and sure enough it was #1.

So a few thoughts on the responses. For one, I didn’t mean to imply that I wouldn’t visit the site anymore, I’ll still lurk. I like the links. I think there are some great people on the site. I think good discussions do occur, though you have to dig for them. I just don’t think it’s worth getting in 20 discussions to have one where I learn something.

One person said of HN

as far as I know is still one of the few sites with a large community and a strong bias towards intellectualism and knowledge sharing

I wish I believed that, I’d still be  commenting there if I did. It’s not biased toward intellectualism, it’s biased toward nerdiness. Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic. Nerds have partisan conversations about geeky topics. HN isn’t intellectual, it’s nerdy. There’s a big difference.

Most smart people aren’t intellectuals. It’s not their fault, they largely haven’t been exposed to other intellectuals. It’s easy to confuse talking about esoteric things for talking about things intellectually. I’ll give a few examples to help.

One  common thread over the last year or two is that people are often focusing on how HN has changed as it’s grown. That’s a common topic on the site. Some people say it’s gotten better, some people say it’s gotten worse and whenever you hear people generalize like that, you know the result is not going to be an intellectual conversation.

An intellectual would discuss the community changes in a nuanced way, which would be to talk about specific facets of it that have gotten better or worse and implicitly admit the possibility that words like “better” or “worse” are useless when applied as generalities. I will say that the community has changed in the time I’ve been there, in some ways I would consider positive and some I’d consider negative, but that’s a post in and of itself, and to be honest not the one I’m interested in writing now, but you get the picture. The point is that there are things about it that are better, and things about it that are worse, and whether it’s better or worse overall depends greatly on what you visit the site for.

Another total failure of intellectualism: some people mistook my leaving to be the result of the glut of TSA articles. That’s like saying the guy who suffered from AIDS for the last ten years died of a cold. It might have been the nail in the coffin, but it was just a result of something deeper, which is that the lack of down-votes leads to annoying trends and makes vocal minorities overrepresented. 

And, for the record, I’m not in favor of the backscatter machines. I actually agree with the community sentiment on that from a very high level which, admittedly, doesn’t say much. I just recognize that the issue is incredibly complex and the discussions I’m seeing there don’t reflect that at all. I hesitate to even bring it up here, as I don’t want people to think this post is about the TSA either, or even about the glut of TSA stories, but it’s a great example of how conversation could be better.

The issue is right up there with abortion in terms of complexity. There’s the issue of the TSA itself. What knowledge it has (perhaps there’s a legitimate reason that someone with a lot more information and experience preventing terrorism than me feels these are worth the expense and invasion of privacy).  Who is making the decisions and why, who is enforcing them and how? There’s the issue of civil liberties issue (i.e. even  if these things do make us safer, are they worth it? What’s the tradeoff?). There’s the health issue (these things use X-rays, is there a cancer risk to travellers? What about to TSA agents?) There’s the issue of enforcement (how much culpability do the ground level TSA agents have? If the system is immoral, does that make the TSA agent amoral for accepting that job? I personally feel that way about telemarketers, but not TSA agents, why?) There are the questions us travellers who think they’re a bad idea should be asking, most specifically what do we do about it? The answer clearly isn’t being a douche to some TSA agent at the airport, but beyond that it gets murky.

My problem is that what I’m not seeing is that nuanced discussion of any of these myriad of facets. Even if we accept that this issue is on-topic for Hacker News (which I don’t, it’s no more relevant than abortion, which is verboten, or any other civil liberties topic) I’m not seeing the sort of discussion I should from a community that routinely pats itself on the back for being so intelligent. I’m just seeing senseless partisanship. If I wanted that I’d watch cable news.

And that was my point. I’m not quitting the discussions because they are too frequently about the TSA (which seems to have abated anyway) or that they aren’t intelligent, it’s because they aren’t intellectual. I don’t learn anything from them.

11 Comments »

I Quit Hacker News

Posted in Uncategorized on November 23, 2010 by themaroon

Last week I finally gave up and ditched my Hacker News account. I just changed the password to some long random string so I’d never be tempted to log in again. Lack of password recovery isn’t a bug there, it’s a feature.

I’m going to avoid writing one of those stereotypical flameout posts that users with lots of karma who quit usually write. I’m not bitter about any time I spent there, and though I perhaps regret the amount of it, that’s nobody’s fault but mine. But I do see some problems with the community that I’m going to enumerate here. Many are probably endemic to any online community.

1. Lack of a down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. How many Hacker News users really want to see 5 stories about the TSA body scanners every time they log in? It doesn’t matter, because as long as 10% of them up-vote every story on the topic it’s going to flood the top page with them until they move on to something else.

Some people will say “they have flags” but flags are not down-votes, and even most people like myself who wish there were down-votes don’t use them as such. Flagging is for spam, trolling, etc. I may not like what you have to say, but I’ll fight for your right to not be flagged for saying it.

2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments for adding value to the conversation and down-vote only for detracting. I’d much rather see something well-reasoned and well-stated that I disagree with than just another guy confirming my own opinion about something. That puts me square in the minority on Hacker News and, to be fair, probably just about any site with voting. In fact it probably puts me less in the minority on Hacker News than it would be on most similar sites, but it’s still problematic enough that karma isn’t really a quantification of the value you bring to the community but rather the popularity of your viewpoint within it.

3. The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. Everyone talks about the intelligent conversation, and it does happen, but far more times it’s just the same clichés repeated over and over.

You know whenever you see a post about Microsoft’s revenues going up that the first thing you’ll see when you click comments will be the old internet standby of “Yeah but it’s all Windows and Office and those will be worthless in 5 years”. People said that on Slashdot 10 years ago, and they’ll say that on whatever comes after Hacker News 10 years from now.

You know that any comment that could be conceivably taken as anti-Apple or in favor of any big corporation other than Apple will be down-voted for disagreement (not lack of value) and the opposite will be true as well. Fluff posts from John Gruber, who rarely says anything at all of value (and I say this as someone who spends most of my time working on iOS projects) are extraordinarily popular because it fits within the community’s ideology

The ideology is often anti-corporate to the point of naiveté, and that’s nothing compared to how anti-government it is. These are the result of a larger problem (which is certainly not endemic to HN, and is in fact ruining discourse everywhere) which is that everything is always discussed in extremes. There is only black and white, with little room left for shades of gray. The term “evil” (the silliest and most counterproductive word to enter tech discussions ever) is thrown about haphazardly.

4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. This is a community of white collar workers who quite frequently look down on blue collar workers. I’m sorry but it’s true. A TSA worker, to them, is not some guy without a college degree who is feeding his family, he’s an amoral pawn of an evil bureaucracy that exists solely to ensure that peaceful Americans have to get their junk touched by the back of someone’s hand before boarding a plane.

5. It’s a time suck. That one’s self-explanatory to anyone who has used the site.

6. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site. When you read a blog post, then click back, then comment, you’ve greatly reduced your chance of speaking to the author. Unless he’s an HN user (which has grown increasingly more likely as the community has grown more insular and self-referential which is a problem in and of itself) you’re not even going to get the perspectives of a wide range of people. You’ve instead decided to converse only with a very specific subset of the people who read the same thing which, in and of itself, is a somewhat self-selected subset of the overall population.

7. It reduces blogging time. My thoughts and ideas belong here where people who are interested can easily see them aggregated, not in an out-of-context threads paged linked to from a profile page on another site that. I like that my comments are recorded here for posterity.

So from now on, for all those reasons and more, I’ll be opting out of pretty much all sites of that ilk. What little writing time I have is precious and should and will remain public, rather than a response to a response to someone who can’t tell the difference between being a freedom fighter and being a douche to a guy who makes $12 an hour trying to stop planes from getting blown up.

56 Comments »

Fragmentation

Posted in Mobile on November 18, 2010 by themaroon

One thing I always hear when reading about mobile development is fragmentation. Steve Jobs, who talks about Android so much because he isn’t worried about it, harps on it relentlessly. Just today I read, on an Android blog, the following quote:

In an iOS world, you only have to write code once and know it is optimized for every phone that’s been sold.

Bahahahahaha. Yeah right. I do iOS development, and let me tell you, fragmentation there is a huge problem. First off, there are different OSes on different devices. Here’s a chart of that:

clip_image001

Compare that to Android:

image

Pretty similar. Android in this case has the benefit of having fewer OSes in play.

Our newest app (not yet released) uses Gamecenter, which runs on iOS 4.1 or later only. Which means that when we move to the iPhone we’ll have to do two apps or simply be unavailable to half of the population. Even on the iPad, where we are developing now, it remains to be seen how many people will upgrade to 4.2.

If I make a website and buy ads for it on Google, I don’t have to filter my users out by operating system. If I buy ads for my iPhone app I’m doing it somewhere that will let me choose to show my ads only to people on 4.1 or better.

Then there’s  the hardware. Good luck developing anything for any iPhone before the 3Gs. I can’t find how many of those are left on the market (thankfully probably not too many, at least in the US) but if you want to support them you’re going to be adding a decent amount of extra work. Same for the first couple generations of iPod Touch which, by the way, don’t get upgraded nearly as quickly as phones.

And then there’s the display. We’re making a universal binary of our game that we want to work on the iPad, the iPhone 3GS, and of course the iPhone 4. As a result we have to do a bunch of extra work to get things to display properly on both handsets.

There’s plenty of fragmentation on iOS. It might not be as bad as Android. It just depends on what you’re doing. For some apps it won’t matter much at all on either platform. For some it will be impossible to support all devices. For many it will fall somewhere in between.

The post on the Android blog I mentioned earlier was inspired by Angry Birds, which has had some performance issues on older Android devices. But a little Googling shows it has issues on even the iPhone 3G.

 

Angry Birds Speed Test

Mobile devices will always have fragmentation because they’re evolving so quickly. They are right where PCs were 10 years ago, where hardware is improving quickly, developers are finding new ways to take advantage of it, and as a result users are upgrading frequently.

Nowadays you buy a PC and it lasts forever. I have a laptop that’s about 4 years old and it still feels more than good enough. But I’ll upgrade my phone every year or so for as long as Sprint lets me.

As a developer fragmentation isn’t a deal-breaker, it’s just another line in your cost-benefit analysis. And odds are it isn’t nearly as important as unit sales (where Android is now crushing) or ability to monetize users (where iOS has a healthy lead, though I suspect Android will close the gap significantly with PayPal) or distribution (also in iOS’s favor at the moment for most apps, though not all).

In the end developers will go where they earn the most money, and betting on fragmentation to stop that from being your opponent’s platform you’re making a big mistake.

5 Comments »

Mobility

Posted in Mobile on November 4, 2010 by themaroon

Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday, in Facebook’s mobile announcement, that the iPad is not mobile. For some reason this has been controversial, but I think he’s right in principle. Clearly semantically he’s incorrect, but then a desktop computer is mobile too because I can pick it up and carry it, so the semantic argument is useless in the context of mobile app development.

The real question is how do people use their iPad, and it’s important to keep this in mind when developing for it. You don’t develop the same things for a device that is used largely in the living room that you do for a device that people carry with them 24/7. Of course there’s a lot of crossover, just as people use Facebook both on their home PC and their cell phone, but there are differences too.

It’s a mistake to think of the iPad as just a larger iPhone, it’s not. For one, it is substantially less mobile. You don’t carry it with you everywhere you go. You won’t use it, for instance, to occupy time spent riding in a cab, in the line at the supermarket, on the john at work, etc. Since iPad sales are largely at the low-end, Wi-Fi only model, it probably spends a relatively decent amount of time offline entirely, whereas an iPhone rarely is.

And all this isn’t to say, of course, that people won’t use Facebook on the iPad. They’ll use Facebook on their napkins if someone makes one with a Wi-Fi connection. But he’s right that tablets have to be treated much differently than phones. What people will do on Facebook on the iPad will substantially differ from what people will do on their mobile.

If I had to guess, I’d say the mobile experience will lean heavily toward pictures, status updates, and things you do on the go. It will be more about content creation. The iPad, on the other hand, is a content consumption machine. It will be more about browsing profiles, looking at others’ pictures, etc.

It’s not a mistake for Facebook to attack tablets differently than mobile devices, even if tablets are technically mobile.

Switching To Android

Posted in Mobile on October 28, 2010 by themaroon

I bought my Palm Pre on launch day, in June of 2009. I remember the day well, since my wife and I were going to Detroit to watch game 5 of the Stanley Cup finals at the Joe Louis Arena. I got up early, called around, found the one Sprint store in the area that had a few units left, and rushed up there to pick it up. I set it to charge on the drive and played with it incessantly for the rest of the day.

At the time, I had already written my prediction that Android would become the #1 selling smartphone operating system, which just recently came true, but at that point it was still too rough around the edges. After using WebOS a bit, you start to feel like even iOS is unpolished. WebOS is just that much better than everything else out there.

The Pre has served me well over that time, nearly a year and a half. Unfortunately for Palm it didn’t serve them quite as well. Their team built the best mobile operating system of all time, then struggled to cash in on it. They aired one bad commercial after another, didn’t update their hardware in a timely fashion, didn’t roll out their developer program quickly enough, waited far too long to get onto Verizon (by which time they launched their first big Android phone, the Droid) and didn’t respond well enough to a couple build quality problems.

They chose Sprint as a launch partner, rather than Verizon, which was dumb for them. In hindsight I’m glad they did. I switched from Verizon to Sprint to get the Pre, and I’m now dumbfounded that everyone isn’t on Sprint. Their coverage is best in class, especially since you can roam (even for data) on Verizon’s network. Their prices are substantially lower than Verizon’s. They’ve now got arguably the two best Android units on the market in the Evo and the Epic 4g. Their customer service is pretty good, at least at the stores by my house. They’ve replaced two Pres for me at no charge (one of which they really were not obligated too). I’m not surprised that their network is finally increasing in popularity again, they’ve just executed phenomenally well over the last couple years. I’m probably going to pick up a few shares of S this year given what I’ve seen.

And now, with the Pre 2 launching first on Verizon, I’m giving up on Palm. Don’t get me wrong, the new Pre looks good. WebOS 2.0 looks great, in fact it seems they’ve extended their lead over the other major OSes in terms of both usability and functionality. They fixed two of my three main hardware complaints, by going to a glass screen and fixing the USB door. Having double the processing horsepower and a lot more RAM looks great too. And you have no idea how much I will miss the Touchstone, unless you have one, in which case you probably have a hard time imagining having to plug a phone in like I do. Had Palm improved the keyboard (my one major complaint with the hardware, and probably the biggest) and made a 4g model I might have hung in there another 6 months.

But they didn’t, and it’s time for a change. Besides, I have lots of experience with iOS, obviously also with WebOS, and am, amongst people I know, pretty much the only who can really compare the two. I’d like to be able to say the same about Android. Most people you hear talk about the merits of one or the other OS or phone have only a passing familiarity with the one they don’t own, and swear by the one they do. I’d like to be able to actually experience all three as a user. And if anything I’m giving iOS a favorable bias since I’m using it on the iPad and iPod Touch and not as a phone, which has always been its Achilles heel.

I haven’t decided which model to get yet. I’m thinking the Epic 4g. The screen on that bad boy is fantastic. The keyboard is spacious, and it’s shockingly thin and light for a slider keyboard. It’s got 4g data, which I’ve heard has significantly lower latency (the true problem with 3g data) and should be rolled out in my area this year. The Evo looks great too, though I’m still not ready to go without a keyboard, even with Swype. I’ve used the keyboard on the new iPod Touch and iPad, which have to be at least as good as Android’s, and I’m just constantly frustrated by it.

So we’ll see. I’ll probably get one in the next month or two, and will of course post thoughts.

 

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