Embracing Chaos

My girlfriend has a kindle that she very much enjoys.  One of the biggest benefits from it she gets is having a large amount of content in a very small device.  She is a scientist who is very much an information worker.  Having access to a great many research papers in searchable form is very useful for her.  (If only the PDF import worked on multi-column papers!)  She also tends to live out of a backpack, so being able to have several interesting things to read at any give time is very appealing.

So she’s often reading her kindle on the bus.  She’s noted one interesting difference between reading her Kindle and reading a regular book while on the bus.  When she’s reading a normal book, people will ask her what booj she’s reading or will look at the cover and just talk to her about the book itself.  With the kindle the question is always "how do you like the gizmo?"  Which gets old after a while.

Here’s a suggestion to Amazon on how to address this social problzem: offer full-color PDFs of the covers of books that you purchase for the Kindle, so people can print out their own covers.  These could slide into a convenient holder on the Kindle’s attractive leather case.  Long-term it’d be great to have a color e-paper cover for the book, but we’re not holding our breath for that one.

Here I propose an alternative explanation for iPhone scarcity: the difficulty in obtaining a new iPhone keeps people from complaining about problems with it.  I will explore this sophisticated marketing technique that Apple may or may not be employing to cover up quality problems with the new iPhone 3G.  Even if Apple is not doing this deliberately, I assert that it is a valid and potentially very useful technique if your product is lucky enough to have the prerequisites.

New iPhones are hard to get

The blogosphere is full of speculation about whether or not Apple deliberately made the iPhone scarce on opening day and since then.  Most assume that this is deliberate on Apple’s part for a variety of reasons, mostly to attract more attention, increase demand, etc.  I assume most of these rants are from bloggers who want their new iPhones but haven’t overcome the barriers to obtain one yet.

But if Apple’s goal was purely to meter out their distribution, why not sell them online?  To get a phone you need to place an order for one, wait a week or two, and then you can get it.  This seems reasonable in conditions of scarcity.  But to get an iPhone 3G, you need to walk into an at&t store to place your order, and then walk into the store again to pick it up.  Think about this.  If the limitation was purely lack of supply then there are several ways this could be easier for customers:

1. You could order a phone online to be delivered to your house.
2. You could order a phone to be delivered to your nearest at&t store.
3. You could call the nearest at&t store to place your order, but still have to walk in to pick it up.

Try asking them why you can’t do any of these things and they will answer with one word: policy.  Clearly Apple & at&t have gone out of their way to make it difficult for people to get their hands on a phone.   This goes above and beyond just preserving a limited supply.  You have to work to get an iPhone 3G.

New iPhones have Issues

From all the reports I’ve read, the problems with the new iPhone are in the software not the hardware.  I conclude this because my friends with first generation iPhones are experiencing the same problems as those with the new 3G iPhones.  Moreover everybody seems to agree that these problems only showed up after they upgraded their iPhone software.  Problems include:

• Frequent crashes of applications, especially Safari
• Increased lag in common operations
• Significant problems with large contact lists (>200 contacts)
• Extended delays before placing a call

Apple is legendary for their high quality software.  People buy Macs because they "just work."  It’s really not like Apple to release a buggy piece of software.  But it sure seems that they did in this case.  Why?  Obvious answers of fierce competition for high-end smartphones.  The more interesting question for me is "How did they get away with it?"  Which it sure seems they are.

Escalation of Commitment: The Hush-factor

There’s a well-document psychological principal at play which prevents people from objectively critiquing things that they are personally invested in.  Sometimes called escalation of commitment, or irrational escalation, the idea is the same.  If somebody works really hard to obtain something, they will blind themselves to its faults.  Imagine this conversation:

"Dude, I can’t believe you waited in line for hours to get that phone.  What do you think of it?"

"Actually, it’s just okay.  The applications crash a lot.  And it’s not nearly as fast as I’d hoped it would be — sometimes it just hangs for like 10 seconds.  But at least it’s pretty."

Very few people have the objectivity to imply that their personal sacrifice was not worth while.  This effect is commonly observed in people who buy high-end items. 

The flip side of this effect is buyer’s remorse.  But since the phone itself is not actually at all expensive (when compared to the monthly fees), that’s unlikely.  Also, it has become a positional good, whereby it has value simply because other people don’t have one.  That fact remains regardless of how unreliable it is.

Speculative Conclusion

I posit that Apple knew about the software problems with the iPhone 3G before launch.  They did manage to iron out all the performance and stability problems they encountered before launch.  They felt they needed to launch it this summer to get ahead of other notable smartphones like the Blackberry Bold, HTC Touch, and Android which are hot on their heels.  So they rushed it out the door at sub-standard quality.

In order to partially cover for this mistake, they have made this device especially hard to get.  This covers their tracks in two ways: people make even more noise about scarcity.  And those who do jump through the whoops to obtain one are far less likely to complain about it.

At long last, the world’s best digital music system has fixed a glaring UI hole.  With today’s release of v2.5 of their software, Sonos controllers (both hardware remotes and PC/Mac based software) can search for music by artist, composer, album, or track.  This feature works within your own local library or within music services such as Rhapsody. 

Up until now if you wanted to listen to an artist in Rhapsody that you hadn’t previously bookmarked, you would need to guess what top-level genre they were categorized under and then scroll through an enormous list to try to find the artist.  How many times have I scratched my head asking questions like "Is Pink Floyd Rock/Pop or Alternative/Punk?"  Much easier was to find a web browser, pull up http://www.rhapsody.com/pinkfloyd and bookmark music into your library.  That human-writable URL scheme is still one of my favorite accomplishments in the last several years.

I started beta testing this release last week.  As always, the update was fast, easy and works flawlessly.  My biggest complaint is that the search is not interactive.  Considering how fast results typically come back, I would much prefer to have a type-ahead style search where results start to appear as you type.  This would be especially useful considering the somewhat painful scroll-wheel-alphabet typing interface they provide.

Sonos is a great company that makes fabulous products.  They continue to advance the state-of-the-art in digital music systems.  By adding Napster support they have taken another step to commoditize Rhapsody’s music subscription product.  They’ve also released a new product called a ZoneBridge which acts as a WiFi range extender which would address one of my biggest complaints about the system.

A few months ago I wrote about why single-purpose devices will always have better UI’s than general purpose devices.  Here, always really means for about the the next 5 years.  I’ll explain why in a second.

In the iPhone, Apple has built a completely generic UI.  All the controls are software reconfigurable "soft keys" — you touch a part of the screen that has a picture of a button on it.  This offers a fantastic level of flexibility, allowing them to build a lot of useful functions into a small package.  But soft keys like this are intrinsically limited by the fact that there’s no tactile feedback — you can’t feel the buttons.  Which means you really need to be looking at the device to be using it.  Which means you can’t send text messages from an iPhone while driving.  Some might argue that you shouldn’t even try to anyway, but I’m sure people will try, and I’m also sure they’ll crash trying.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m very excited about this device, and will probably use it as an excuse to ditch my crappy not-so-smart phone.  And I’m guessing that in about 5 years somebody, maybe Apple or MIT or UW, will figure out how to put texture onto a display and solve this problem.  But until then, I maintain that single purpose devices will be better at what they do than generic devices.

A couple of recent product announcements out of Redmond have me thinking about the current big struggle in the software industry: GOOG vs MSFT.

Frankly, GOOG is eating MSFT’s lunch on the consumer software front.  But MSFT still dominates in the enterprise, and will for a long time.  GOOG’s model is hosted solutions, which enterprises are really hesitant to deploy.  And with good reason — if you were a CIO would you trust all of your company’s IP to somebody else?  Regardless of what promises they make, I wouldn’t.  So Microsoft continues to turn into IBM.

The two announcements I’m thinking about are Zune and Office Roundtable.  Strategically, Zune is an obvious one: they’re taking on Apple in the music space head on.  And they’re doing it MSFT-style: more features.  I think they’re really cool features and assuming they can make them work in a friendly manner (tbd), will make for a fantastic product.  But it’s worth noting that they’re building it entirely themselves, turning their back on PlaysForSure and their ecosystem of hardware -manufacturing minions.  (Perfect timing for RNWK to release an mp3-player firmware platform — oh wait, we did — but that’s another story.)  So MSFT wants to challenge Apple on their own turf.  Good luck I wish you well you’re not paying your industrial designers enough.

IMHO Microsoft Office Roundtable is exactly the kind of product MSFT should be building right now.  It’s an MS-branded hardware product built for the enterprise.  This is a fertile space that MSFT could completely dominate.  Phones, teleconferencing gear, photocopiers, faxes, whiteboards, etc.  By being the shepherd for all hardware device drivers over the decades, they’ve developed a unique skill-set of interfacing gadgets to PCs.  But more important, selling hardware is a great hedge against GOOG eating into their software business.  Building enterprise office hardware will further cement their hold on the enterprise software market, ensuring that businesses continue to need Windows on all their employees’ desktops.  Even if they’re primarily running Google software!

I’m not sure if this is a conscious choice for MSFT yet or not.  But If I were Ballmer right now I would be thinking hard about how to leverage my device driver and hardware experience into protecting some core aspects of the business.  Not that they should give up on fighting GOOG head on.  I honestly think Live search has a lot going for it beyond Google — for one thing it updates its index really fast, whereas changes on the web take weeks or months to show up in Google.  But that’s just one place where MSFT has caught up because they put a lot of effort and some fantastic people on it.  While GOOG continues to build better more integrated consumer software applications at an impressive rate.

A little while ago, I got my hands on a MacBook Pro.  I’ve been slowly switching over to it as my primary machine.  It’s pretty.  It’s fast.  When using it, I feel calm and happy as if I’m sitting in a japanese garden.  (I bet if it wasn’t so expensive, this effect wouldn’t be so pronounced.  But that is part of the charm too.)  I haven’t had the guts to switch over to it as my mail e-mail machine yet, but maybe the new .mac email will convince me.  Here are a couple of thoughts on why I’m liking it better than my Dell Latitude.

Power management.  It wakes up instantly when you pop the lid, and it doesn’t need to blunder around trying to reconnect to the wifi network — if it was connected when you closed the lid, it will be connected when you open it.  It dims & then blacks the screen pretty quickly.  But unlike a windows machine, I don’t feel a need to stop it, because I know it will wake up again.  It never gets stuck in this half-awake mode that windows laptops seem to love.  And I’m confident I will never open the lid to see it saying "Hibernating…" and then have it shut down.  A friend who works at MSFT once sang me a jingle that goes something like "Power management in windows isn’t very good.  They say it will be better in the next version.  They always do."

Filesystem.  When you erase a file, it goes away.  OS X never sits there pondering "Can I erase this file?  I wonder.  Hmmm.  Maybe.  If I erase it, what could happen?  Hmm.  I wonder.  Let me think about this for a minute."  While I generally don’t think much of unixy/open-source GUIs, having a rock-solid filesystem behind this machine is really nice.

Light-sensitive.  Here’s one of those really nice subtle touches that most people will never notice, but just makes the machine work better.  The MacBook has light-sensors under the grills on the sides of the keyboard.  If you’ve got one, try covering them up with your hands.  The screen dims.  It uses this to automatically adjust the screen brightness to the ambient light in the room.  Nice touch.

MagSafe power connector.  I never need to worry about tripping over my laptop’s charger and having my expensive laptop flung off the table.  That’s a nice patent.  I wonder how broad it is.  Really, alot of plugs could be magnetic.  But honestly I think that most new consumer electronics won’t need any cables in about 10 years.  In about 5 years, Bluetooth (or its ilk) will handle data interconnects, and in another 5 years, we’ll be charging our batteries without plugs either by using inductive battery chargers or smart wire arrays that automatically couple to any device placed on them.  I also have to say that while the magsafe plug is great, Apple has a few things to learn from Dell about how to build the charger unit.

A few annoying things:  The keyboard controls for editing text just aren’t as full-featured in macworld as they are in windows.  You are expected to use the mouse.  It’s hard to type as fast. 

But hands-down the best feature of the MacBook Pro: MacSabre.  Props to my old friend Jon Bell for a nice logo.

I also got Woz to sign it the other day.  Woz is rad!

My house pretty much always has music playing in it.  Generally the same music is playing throughout the entire house.  I do this through a fairly complex involving a pirate radio station, a PC dedicated to playing music, and a set of custom perl scripts and remote-control applications to be able to select music from any of the house’s internet appliances.  When it’s working (most of the time, actually) it’s a fantastic system.  I wander around, and hear the same thing, and it’s pretty much always something I want to be listening to.

For everybody else out there who didn’t grow up idolizing Larry Wall, there’s a better solution: Sonos.  They’ve built an amazing digital home stereo solution that blows away every other Digital Audio Receiver on the market.  And to make it even better, they just hard wired it into Rhapsody which means you have instant access to a huge catalog of almost 3 million songs anywhere and everywhere in your house.  If I hadn’t invested a ton of energy into my home-grown system, I would have a Sonos system, because it’s just that well done.  I’m actually tempted to throw away what I’ve built.

At CES a couple years ago I shared a booth with some engineers from Sonos.  They’ve done some amazing things with Wifi.  Their amp units have audio inputs as well as outputs, so you can plug your DVD player into a sonos amp in one room, and have the same audio play simultaneously in another room.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you consider what’s actually going on under the hood.  They’re encoding the audio into some digital format (probably mp3 or aac or some such), and transmitting it over wifi to another amp unit.  Beyond that, they have to buffer the transmission to account for potentially dropped packets.  The truly amazing part is that they can do all this with such a short delay that you don’t even hear an echo in the audio between the two rooms.  Streaming audio over the internet typically requires 5-10 seconds of buffering.  Sonos does buffering and encoding all in I’m guessing <50ms.  Very well done.

This level of detail and engineering skill is maintained in every aspect of the system.  The UI of the remote control will long be held as the gold standard home audio remote control.  As I mentioned earlier, their business team knows how to rebuild the digital home audio market, basically from the ground up.  (Like iPod docks were ever anything more than a pothole in the landscape of consumer electronics evolution.)

It’s a pricey system, but if you can afford it, it’s well worth it.

I finally got my Chumby running.  It’s sitting happily between my couches in my living room showing me pictures, telling me the news and occassionaly insulting me in middle english.  It’s very cute.  Chumby is a really neat idea — a fun hackable platform for small information appliances.  It’s embedded linux running a flash viewer.  It’s got wifi network access and a really pretty touch-screen for UI. 

The designers encourage hacking of both the software and the hardware — I’ve seen chumby-units sown into all sorts of pillows and stuffed animals.  The bread and butter of customization is writing custom flash
modules for displaying information.  For example, right now there isn’t
one for showing the weather forecast — if I knew flash, I doubt it
would take more than a couple hours to fix this.

As a business I really hope Chumby succeeds.  Their challenge will be to make the initial product cool enough that it gets aspirational appeal.  At about $150 retail, it’s going to need some solid functionality or solid other appeal to justify a purchase.  If they succeed there then the company will stick around long enough to bring the price-point down through economies of scale and lower-end models. 

There are a couple of things they could change that I think would make the product more successful.  For example, I think the touch-screen is unnecessary for the majority of useful functions in the chumby, and replacing it with a display-only screen would lower the price significantly.  My personal opinion is that single-use devices will always have a usability appeal over general-purpose configurable devices.  I’d love to see $50 chumby’s that just did one thing.  Then you could put a photo chumby in your living room and a news chumby in the kitchen and a weather chumby in your closet.  Having a battery-powered model that recharded inductively (or otherwise without needing to be plugged in) would also be a great addition to the product line.

The marketing strategy of starting with a fantastic device that is priced high is a great way to define a new market segment.  Sonos is doing this right now to re-define digital living-room audio devices.  Their first product was a $1200 stereo that everybody who used absolutely adored.  Is $1200 too much for a stereo?  That depends.  For most people yes.  But if it’s really great then some people will pay it.  And everybody else will just wish they could afford it.  And then Sonos slowly releases lower and lower end models until everybody can afford one.  Think ipod->mini->nano->shuffle.  It also means that with your first few units your marginal profit is high enough that you know you’ll be able to cover support really well.  This was our big mistake with my first startup.  It’s a solid strategy — a great way to get people to understand a new kind of product. 

The Chumby is a cool idea and I hope they live long enough to pull it off.