Saturday, February 9

My C4[1] Talk...

Mr. Rentczchxh has posted my talk from C4, and if you would enjoy watching a talk without paying, you can watch it. It's on hype, and how I generate it, but it also touches on other topics concerning having your own software company, like making good software, bundling, getting into stores, having sex with cylons, &c.

Watch it!

Or don't.

Labels: advice, business, code, interface design, mac community

Tuesday, January 15

MacBook Air Haters: Suck My Dick

I thought of a lot of titles for this post, but, really, the first one that came to me seems the best.

I've read nothing but whining about the MacBook Air on Mac news sites since it came out this morning. Honestly, I just want to shake these people. Not, like, shake some sense into them, but shake them like you're not supposed to shake a baby.

The criticism all basically goes like this: "It's not like a MacBook Pro!"

No, really? Seriously? I mean, they introduced this new product, and it doesn't have the same specs as the MacBook Pro? God, that is bizarre. I wonder why they gave it a new name, and continue to sell the MacBook Pro, then, if it's not going to be exactly the same. I mean, that hardly makes sense, does it?

Ok, fine, there are some people who want, like, an extra battery Pack. But let's admit amongst ourselves that the overwhelming majority of people out there have never pulled the battery out of their existing laptops, and didn't even know or care that it comes out. In fact, if something goes wrong with their battery, this majority -- whom we'll call "NORMAL PEOPLE" for convenience -- will just take the damn machine to the store and get it fixed, whether it's user-serviceable or not. Because we don't want to hassle with it.

And there are people out there who do video editing on their MacBooks and want FireWire. Great! I respect your choice! You should buy a MacBook! It's an awesome machine! If you want to do that! Which I don't!

I've read journalists complain that you can't get at the hard drive in the MacBook Air. What? I have no fucking idea where the hard drive is in my MacBook Pro, and even if you drew me a damn diagram with labels and numbers and gave me a replacement drive I wouldn't open my machine even in exchange for a year with Zooey Deschanel. Ok, yes I would, but you get my point. I'm sorry, Zooey, I didn't mean it, baby.

Some journalists get so close to the truth it hurts, yet miss the large print. "OMG! The unit is all sealed and self-contained like the iPod!"

Yes... the iPod. That huge failure. Also, the iPhone. Stunning disappointment that it was. I mean, jeebus, why would Apple make ANOTHER device incredibly simple? Clearly the market has spoken, and it wants tons of ports and screws and geegaws and flippers... no, wait, no it doesn't.

You guys are TECHNOLOGY JOURNALISTS. You are GEAR HEADS. There is no shame in this, but, come on, recognize that what you think is cool is NOT what my mom thinks is cool, or what an executive thinks is cool, or what a lawyer who just wants to write a deposition on her laptop thinks is cool.

I'm a programmer. I just want a machine I can write software on. Once, I loved gadgets, too, but now I really just want a gadget that (a) works, and (b) is beautiful and easy-to-use. Sure, my iPhone doesn't have as many raw features as my lawyer's Blackberry + RAZR combined (she carries both). But I understand my iPhone, and I don't have to learn it, because it's learned me. I can take a photo in three seconds, and so can she (we tested) even though she'd never seen an iPhone before.

I'm not the freak, here. In this one instance. I'm with the majority. All software developers should be hailing the advent of the computer-as-appliance, because it means we'll be reaching into markets that are afraid of self-service machines.

I can't take apart my Kitchenaid blender. If they come out with a new motor, I'm screwed. It's not upgradeable! And when the motor blows (as it DID... grrr), I have to send it back. I can't take apart my car. When Lotus came out with a bolt-on supercharger, I had to (gasp) take it to the dealer to have it put in. Somehow I survived.

I don't buy a laptop because I want to replace its drive in a year. I buy it because it seems great and meets my needs today. If my needs magically morph over the coming year, I guess I'll sell it on eBay. Or pay Apple to throw in a different drive, or something. Honestly, I think we need to admit that just because machines get faster every year, doesn't mean that the majority of people need faster machines.

In two weeks I'll be writing Delicious Library 2 on a MacBook Air, every day. Because it's simple and beautiful, and I crave those things.

And all you haters can... well, buy one in six months, when you realize how nice it is.

--

Update 2/4/2008: My MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM and 1.8 GHz cores and the SSD compiles Delicious Library 2 from scratch in 1:59.4. My MacBook Pro with 3GB of RAM and 2.3GHz cores and an HD compile it in... 2:04.3.

MacBook Air FTW.

Labels: business, interface design, mac community

Saturday, December 22

Are You a Genie in a Bottle?

Oh...
You feel your brain's been locked up tight
Writing good code at only at night
Waiting for a job
To challenge you


You're cracking your knuckles, trying to code my way
But that don't mean I'll hire you right away
Laddy, Laddy, Laddy
(Lady, Lady, Lady?)


Yo yo...
Your mouth's saying hire me
Oh woe...
But my brain's saying let's see C


If you wanna work for me, laddy
There's a price you pay
I'm a stickler for design
You gotta write code the right way
If you want an ADA
I can make your wish come true
You gotta make a big impression
I gotta like what you do


I'm a stickler for design, laddy
Gotta write code the right way, money
I'm a stickler for design, laddy
Add, add, add, and then cut out


The iPhone's coming and AAPL's so not low
One more release of Library to go
Waiting for someone
Who impresses me


Fingers racing at the speed of light
And not just because I'm in a Twitter fight
Laddy, Laddy, Laddy
(Lady, Lady, Lady?)


Yo yo...
I only have one engineer to go
Oh woe...
But I'm still going to hire slow


If you wanna work for me
And then Apple someday
I'm a stickler for design
You gotta write code the right way
If you want to get low pay
I can make your wish come true
Send me sample code, laddy
And maybe I'll hire you


I'm a stickler for design, laddy
Gotta write code the right way, money
I'm a stickler for design, laddy
Send, send, send your sample out

Labels: business, humor?, mac community

Thursday, October 11

Open systems, closed systems, and the future of Apple TV.

I own an Apple TV. (Yah, I'm the one.) I turned it on when I first got it, thought it looked really pretty, then turned it off and never touched it again.

BUT! I think Apple TV will be an amazing device, and a massive success for Apple... after they make a few changes.

Why did I turn mine off? Well, because in my TV room I also have a Mac mini hooked up to a 2TB drive. The Mac mini runs Front Row, just like the Apple TV, so it could be looked as a more-expensive version of the same device.

However, the mini also runs iTunes, so I can buy new shows on the same system on which I'm watching TV. With the Apple TV, I have to have my laptop downstairs and turned on, and buy and download a new movie on the laptop before I switch over to my Apple TV to watch it. Clunky! (The situation is worse if you have a Mac Pro with your media on it -- what are you going to do, run upstairs to the computer room every time you want to buy a song or show?)

And because the mini has a huge drive hooked up to it, it also acts as a content server to the rest of my house, so I can have a unified home for all my music and TV shows and movies, whether ripped or bought from iTunes -- it's my "Windows Home Server" without the Windows. Unlike with the Apple TV, which can't have an external disk, I never have to bring a second system into the equation, so the mini ends up being cheaper than the Apple TV, because the Apple TV requires a separate computer.

And now I don't even have to bother storing my movies on my laptop, which is great, because my drive is already pretty damn full of porn. Uh, I mean builds of Delicious Library 2. In fact, nowadays if I want to buy a new movie and I'm not downstairs, I remotely access my mini from my laptop using Apple Remote Desktop and buy it from the version of iTunes running on the mini, so it's right on my server where I want it. Again, possible because the mini is running a full OS, not just Front Row.

Note that a lot of the movies and TV shows I want to watch aren't from iTunes -- but since the mini is an open system, I can download Perian, an open source QuickTime add-on, and play movies AVI, FLV, MKV, DivX, and a billion other gibberish words. Hell, I don't even know what an FLV is. But, the point is, some of the content I want to play is in these formats, and Apple doesn't support them in QuickTime natively, so I can't play them on my Apple TV, since it's a closed system.

If a friend brings over a DVD, I just pop it in the mini and we watch it. The DVD player under OS X has a much nicer interface (and remote!) than any other player I've had, so I put my super-expensive multi-region player into cold storage. The Apple TV doesn't have a DVD drive, and you can't hook one up, since it ignores external USB devices.

For my personal DVDs, I can rip them using Handbrake and store them in my Movies folder, and Front Row magically finds them! No more pawing through stacks of DVDs! I finally have a DVD jukebox, the ultimate geek dream. The Apple TV doesn't allow me to install any third-party software. Heck, I can't even rip my CDs on the Apple TV, since it doesn't run iTunes and doesn't have a CD drive.

--

To sum up: Apple TV doesn't allow developers to get at its UNIX underpinnings. It doesn't allow for modifications of its system software. It doesn't allow people to hook up an external disk or a DVD drive. It's a completely closed system. And, as of right now, it's pretty much a failure.

Apple took a guess as to what features the market would want, and because Apple didn't allow for third parties to tweak and optimize what their system does, their guess had to be perfect the first time. It wasn't, and the Apple TV stays off in my house.

There appears to be a battle being fought inside Apple, on whether Apple will be a company that provides solutions or provides tools. iTunes and Front Row are solutions -- really great solutions, sure. They are very friendly and they solve very specific problems beautifully. But they aren't particularly extensible by themselves. We can't make new functionality with them. (Note that if we have access to the underlying machine, as we do with the Mac mini, we are given the tools to modify these solutions -- we can make Front Row play MKV files by adding QuickTime components, even though it was written before MKV existed. We can make iTunes play WMVs.)

Having a system be open, having it able to freely accept peripherals and new programs, turns it into a tool as well as a solution. Each customer can decide what she wants the system to be, and developers can create new solutions -- and if those solve compelling problems, the entire system will be that much more successful. And, at the end of this cycle, the makers of the original tool can integrate these third-party solutions, so the tool grows for everyone.

The amazing thing about the Mac mini vs. the Apple TV is it perfectly encapsulates the debate between providing solutions or tools to your customers. They are very similar boxes, from a raw-capability point of view, but one was closed and the other open. The Apple TV is a solution, and right now it's desperately searching for people who have the problem it solves.

With the Mac mini, Apple provided us with a mix of solutions (iTunes, Front Row, etc) and tools (expandability, compilers, access to UNIX, access to plug-in directories). And, as a set-top box, the mini is incredible. Now, obviously, I have no idea what the mini's sales numbers are, and Apple hasn't really pushed the mini as a set-top box, and it does cost more than the Apple TV, blah blah blah... but it's clear to me that if the Apple TV did what the mini does, the Apple TV would be a GREAT set-top box and home server. It would own the Microsoft Home Server so hard that Ballmer would wake up with a sore back.

--

Why doesn't Apple just fix their solutions themselves, you say? If we all want MKV movies so much, why doesn't Apple just include support for it?

Well, first off, they probably should, in this particular example. But Apple only has so many engineers on QuickTime, and besides it may not be particularly popular to add support for bizarro file formats from other companies, especially when Apple is pushing MPEG-4 (aka QuickTime) as the One True Wrapper.

Second off, third parties can afford to sometimes make very limited or kind of half-baked solutions to dip a toe into the water, and if those are popular they can be fixed up later. Open Source projects don't make headlines in the NY Times when they push a major release that has some bugs, so we collectively get to invent a TON of different things let the market figure out which ones are pursuing. Consider the original CoverFlow, which was originally just a (really cool) demo by a third-party, in search of a problem to solve. Now Apple's bought it and put it into everything it ships except for iPod socks.

Apple can't anticipate every change that is coming, or which changes will end up being popular. No, I don't think they should give up trying to do so, but I do think they should share the burden. For instance, I've never seen an "FLV" file. Let's pretend for a minute that Apple did spend a bunch of time writing an FLV component for QuickTime, instead of speeding up h.264 encoding or something. And then, it turned out basically nobody used FLV, and Apple wasted their time and lost other neat functionality because of it.

Now, the nice thing about FLV support being add in Perian is that Apple essentially has a bunch of suckers (I use the term lovingly) taking all the risk for them. If nobody cares about third-party movie formats -- well, Apple didn't spend any time on it. Shrug! If EVERYBODY cares about them -- well, there they are! Go download 'em! In fact, hey, these are open source -- Apple could just start bundling with them. No effort spent on Apple's part, but their marketshare just got a lot bigger.

This is the beauty of open systems. Apple has a ton of very talented designers and very smart engineers. But they shouldn't have to be the ONLY smart people in the world, who must anticipate everything every customer might ever need. It's asking too much.

--

This whole post is ironic because Apple pays its AppleScript evangelists to say exactly what I'm saying, but back to us developers: Add scriptability to your apps! You can't anticipate everything the customer will want, but you can make your app into a tool! Allow other vendors to tie into your system and everyone wins!

--

I expect Apple will rev the Apple TV soon. One thing they could announce is that you can now rent movies over the internet, or maybe they'll announce you can access the iTunes store from directly inside Front Row. Either of these would be nice, sure. But they'd just be more pre-made solutions -- maybe they'd be popular enough to make the Apple TV a decent success, maybe not. But we would never know what Apple TV could be.

What I want Apple to announce is that they are merging the Apple TV with the Mac mini, and making it a hybrid closed/open system - a machine that boots into Front Row but can be used as a standard computer if you press some magic keys. A turn-key solution that can be opened up by advanced users and developers. The first mainstream consumer device that is infinitely hackable.

The world is waiting for such a product. Apple's the company to do it.

Set me free inside an Apple TV, see what I do for you.

Labels: business, mac community

Wednesday, September 19

iPhone & iPod: contain or disengage?

Back when we had commies to worry about, someone came up with the concept of "engage and contain": eg, rather than avoid them as we'd been doing, we should trade and talk and travel there, and by doing so be able to contain their evil.

Similar ideas exist today on China and Iran (And, honestly, people -- do we really worry about being attacked by Iran? Really? Is this even on our RADAR?) Google is infamous recently for installing government-censored Google in China, with what I think were the purest of intentions -- the idea that more knowledge naturally makes the country more democratic.

But even Google executives have recently said they think they've made a mistake, because by getting too close to the Chinese government, they've had to make compromise after compromise, until finally Google finds themselves an accomplice to evil instead of an adversary to it.

--

So it is with iTunes. Apple has engaged two of the most cock-thirsty and money-grubbing conglomerates in the United States -- the movie and record industries -- in what we all wanted to believe was an attempt to engage and contain them. And, initially, we all agreed Apple was doing good: they had, for the first time, made legal downloads more compelling than stealing music. For a single data point, I've personally bought 915 songs from the iTunes music store, and hundreds of TV episodes and dozens of movies. I own six iPods and have bought 18 iPhones to give away.

And we all took heart when Steve published that letter saying how much he hated DRM, and how he'd drop it if the labels would, and even if the rumors are correct and EMI was already planning to drop DRM and Steve just rushed in and took credit, it was still a bold stance for him to take; a challenge to the rest of the industry. And I immediately upgraded all the tunes I could to iTunes Plus, and bought a bunch more albums. And it was good.

--

But recently, well... the generous view would be that Apple's screwing up, and the non-generous view would be that they are just plain getting greedy.

No, I'm not talking about the iPhone price reduction. Honestly, I was happy to see the price go down, even though I could have personally saved $3,000 if I'd waited to buy the 15 phone I bought before the reduction. I mean, c'est la vie, it's technology, baby.

But why is the iPhone locked to a single carrier, so I can't travel internationally with it? There's really only one viable reason: Apple wanted a share of the carrier's profits, which meant giving AT&T an exclusive deal. Which meant, we get screwed so Apple can make more money. It's that simple.

And the iPhone is a closed system, like the iPods before it, so third parties can only develop software for it if they are EXTREMELY close to Apple. This is an incredibly frightening trend. As Apple gets more and more of its revenue from non-Mac devices, they are also getting more and more of their revenue from devices that simply exclude third parties.

I know Steve Jobs; he's actually amazingly like my old business partner Mike Matas. They both love closed systems, for a simple reason -- they both know they're smarter than anyone else on the planet, and they don't need anyone else mucking up their systems. Steve would rather have no third parties for Mac OS X if he could get away with it -- Apple, of course, would do a much better job on anything, but since customers insist on Photoshop and Office and other apps, he puts up with them. (Well, except, now Apple has their own office suite.) Steve knows that on a computer, having a broad spectrum of apps is more important that having them all be Apple-perfect.

But on iPods, Airports, Apple TVs, and now iPhones, Apple wants every app perfect. Which is nice, in theory. In practice, it means innovation only happens at Apple's pace. The marketplace of ideas is much smaller, and the devices are much poorer because of it. (Example: Why can't I stream music from my iPhone or iPod touch to my Airport Express?)

There are some third parties making money from the iPod -- hardware accessory makers. But even then, Apple is trying to charge them a "Made for iPod" sticker tax... for adding no value. And since Apple controls the stores in which iPods are sold, they have a pretty effective stick to use against those who don't comply - you won't be where the players are. But with the latest iPods Apple's gone a step further, and disabled some docking stations that don't have a special chip in them provided by Apple; forcing customers to use only Apple-approved accessories. Apple's emulating the most pernicious qualities of Nintendo and the Microsoft XBox -- you pay us a tax or you don't work with our systems.

But Apple's "approval" just comes from Apple getting a cut. It's a measure of greed, not quality. We're not talking about THX-certification here, we're talking about extortion. This kind of lock-in seems very appealing for the company doing the locking early on, but it always, ALWAYS ends up biting the company in the butt. Ask IBM with their ubiquitous 970 servers and their extortionist service contracts. Oh, wait, those don't exist any more.

Consumers suffer from this. We suffer from increased prices and decreased competition and innovation. We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money. The core of Apple users has supported Apple for years -- we were there when Apple was hurting, we stuck with it, we nursed her back to health. It's our money she has now, and she's turning on us now that she's rich off it.

Then we come to ringtones. Every phone I've owned in the last ten years has allowed to make my own ringtones. I could upload MP3s all I wanted. Many had little tune editors built into the phone.

But since Apple is so close to the record companies, and they are already so grumpy with Apple, Apple did a deal that benefits record companies and Apple. Not artists, certainly not consumers. In order to use a 15-second snippet of some random song, I now must buy it not once, but TWICE. The amazing thing is that I must buy it THREE times if I own the song on CD -- I have to buy a DRM'ed version from the Apple Store, then buy the the ringtone, on TOP of the CD I already bought.

Oh, but wait, most artists haven't given permission for their songs to be used as ringtones. The vast majority of my collection simply can't be put on my iPhone as a ringtone. I could, if I wanted, manually press play on those songs whenever I see a friend calling, but that single "if" statement it'd require for the phone to do it -- well, that's simply Not Allowed.

Not that, uh, we have to pay attention to what the record companies think is Not Allowed, because we have already licensed the song for playback on any device if we bought a CD -- we are allowed to play it on our iPhone already. Just not in response to someone calling us. The record companies have MADE UP some new, retroactive copyright and Apple is enforcing it for them. The result is, a million customers don't get to do something cool with their iPhones.

Because of greed.

Honestly, I can see Apple saying, "Well, you see, the record companies would have been upset with us if we hadn't charged anything for ringtones." Yah, well, that's the price you get for engaging. The price for owning the distribution of the content and the hardware and the software is that you end up making compromises in the hardware and software in order to protect the content.

These are EXACTLY the compromises Sony has been making for years -- and because Sony's music and movie arms have been telling the Sony hardware arm to never do anything new or interesting without building in a ton of customer-unfriendly restrictions, Sony is now completely in the toilet. They have gone from an incredibly respected brand to a complete joke. Every time they introduce some new, crippled standard the industry kind of looks away in embarrassment, like Sony is the oafish guy at the party who is parked in front of the meatballs tray eating directly from the dish.

Now we see that iPod owners who upgrade to a newer iPod must re-buy the games they've already bought, because the new iPods are incompatible with the old. No credit given for having already bought an identical game. Imagine upgrading to a new computer, and having to buy a brand new copy of Windows Vista for it... Oh, wait, Microsoft does that, don't they? MICROSOFT does.

--

What should Steve do? Well, for starters, give up on trying to control everything. It's only going to keep hurting Apple, more and more, to control content and hardware and software. It's going to make them into the kind of mega-monopoly that we always, ALWAYS end up hating. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. 100% of the time.

Apple should license FairPlay, or allow iPods to play PlaysForSure (ha! I love that doublespeak) music. Either one. Basically, Apple should allow other music stores to sell DRM'ed music that works on iPods and iPhones.

Why? It's simple -- then Apple could tell record companies "go fug yourself" if they don't like Apple's terms, but Apple would still have a full range of music to play on its iPods. Remember, Apple makes all its money selling the hardware, not the songs. All Apple needs to do is to make sure there is a broad range of content available for iPods, it doesn't have to sell all that content itself.

And, in fact, it hurts Apple to sell all the content itself, because it makes Apple a focus for battles between the record industry and consumers. If there were a range of stores selling iPod-compatible music, with a range of different DRM rights, then the market could decide what terms it liked best.

The iTunes store could be the white knight -- it would only sign deals with record companies willing to "give" consumers the same rights they've had for years with CDs; eg, we can do whatever we want with our music as long as we don't broadcast it or give it to others. Other music stores could sell restrictive DRM'ed music, and, well, if the record companies are right, people would go to those other stores, and we consumers would all get what we deserve.

But if I'm right, then those other stores would be soundly ignored, and the record companies would come crawling back to Apple with their tails between their collective legs (where their balls should be, but aren't) and agree to reasonable terms.

Sure, we've seen some of this with Apple's negotiations with NBC, but unfortunately this one is all-or-nothing for Apple, because there's no alternate method for NBC's content to get onto iPods. Apple needs to be able to say, "Look, NBC, you want to be dumb-asses and try to sell people crap they don't want, fine -- we're still going to sell iPods that'll play your programs, we just won't sell your programs on the nicest internet store in the world. Your loss, suckers, call us when you change your mind."

Second, Apple should announce that it's going to write frameworks so third parties can write applications for iPods and iPhones. No, it won't be easy. But, seriously, there's no excuse. I mean, with the iPhone they could hide behind AT&T wanting assurances people won't use their phones off-network, or behind consumers wanting their iPhones to never crash. Which are both reasonable points, I admit. And, for the record, I've never written a line of code for the iPhone, although one of my employees has (in his spare time). I don't like to screw with undocumented APIs, life's too short.

But with the iPod Touch, what's Apple's excuse for locking up the platform? Why can't I write programs for this device? Who might it hurt? Why is Steve announcing that he's playing cat-and-mouse with developers who intend to do so? Is Apple so far removed from its customers that even when the latter overwhelming votes for extending a device (by downloading iPhone programs in the hundreds of thousands), Apple's response is, "No, you can't do that. We know what you want, you don't. You want AJAX apps, you just don't know it yet."

That sure reminds me of the old, crappy Apple. The one that almost went bankrupt because of its hubris.

I don't write programs for Apple because I worship Apple. I write programs for them because they have the best development environment. But I've always said that I will move from the platform the day Apple starts acting like a monopoly -- trying to make money by using its marketing position to extort money from users, instead of innovating so quickly that users willing throw money at Apple.

Sure, Apple's still doing a ton of innovating. I love Leopard. I love iPhone (x19). I love my iPods (x6). And I love the engineers at Apple and all my friends throughout the company.

But Apple has to always remember that simply making money CANNOT be its point of existence. The point of any company should be to make customers want to give it money, NOT to get money from customers. It's a subtle distinction that is the difference between good and evil.

Labels: business, mac community

Thursday, August 2

Insider info on AAPL!

I know you're all chomping at the bit or champing at the bitte or biting and chomping or some such for me to post some more code, but, honestly, I'm not allowed to post Objective-C 2.0 code here (I asked) and I don't really use Objective-C 1.stinky any more, so... tough it out a little while longer. I've got something great in the cooker, just waiting for Leopard's release and my ungagging.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of stock market crooks everywhere, I thought I'd post some Apple news that I'm privy to that has nothing to do with me wanting to buy more stock at a falsely deflated price.

1) Apple has decided that cell phones "are for losers" and won't make any more after Thursday. I have it first-hand that they've called their suppliers and told them, "good luck, suckers."

2) Apple is also completely abandoning their computer business, in a bizarre turn. My friends on the inside said, "Look, Steve gets bored easily."

3) Basically, Apple is going to fold into itself and die. So, please, please, SELL SELL SELL that stock. Come on, be good little sheep, daddy needs a new Tesla. Seriously, you can trust me, because there's NO POSSIBLE WAY I could profit from Apple's stock price going down, unless I were to something incredibly complicated like buy it when it's low and then sell it when it bounces back again.

Labels: business, humor?, mac community

Friday, June 8

Wired.com: Yes, I had permission to talk.

Just in case anyone is wondering (especially people, say, at Apple), I got my entire interview with wired.com cleared with Apple PR before sending it off. (And, no, they didn't ask for any changes.)

In general, talking about the features of their unreleased OS would be a violation of my NDA(s) with Apple, but in this case Apple had already put up public web pages about the CoreAnimation features I mentioned, so legally speaking that creates an exception to my NDA.

But there may be other terms in the Leopard prerelease that I didn't notice, and, as you might imagine, I wanted to make EXTRA SURE I didn't step on anyone's toes, so I got explicit sign-off on my interview from the mother ship. Nobody can call me Jonathan Schwartz. (Interesting fact: Jonathan gave me my first contract when I formed The Omni Group, 16 years ago.)

--

I actually tried to get an exception for my blog, as well, so I could write a pimp-my-code article on how cool Objective-C 2.0 is. Sadly, no dice, so you'll have to wait until October. Not that I'm saying it's cool. Or not. I'm not saying one way or another. I offer no opinion at this time.

Labels: business, mac community

Sunday, March 18

I ♥ spam.

William,	"Wil."
I would like to introduce myself and our company to you.	"Our company?" Do you *also* have a frog in your pocket? Mine's name is Sir Jumpy!
We provide customized software systems to businesses like yours that allow you to control your brand more efficiently and disseminate your materials instantly.	Businesses like mine? Exactly which businesses are like mine? Are there other monster-themed-independent-Mac-software-companies who are having trouble getting their brand in line and/or disseminating their materials? Also, why does that latter sound kind of naughty? Look, where and when I choose to disseminate is my business. And can't I already disseminate materials instantly? I feel like I can. I've got this blog, I've got AdWords, I've got press releases going to major Mac sites... yup, seems like I'm rocking this "instant" thing.
Our system handles all mediums from print to broadcast and everything in between.	I would assume that the word "from" in the phrase "from this to that" pretty much automatically connotes "everything in between." I mean, if someone asked you to recite the alphabet from a to z, you wouldn't say, "a, z" and be done, would you? And how would I know if a particular medium is "in between" print and broadcasting, or is before print or after broadcasting, and thus is NOT included in your system. Would it have been so hard to just enumerate the media you handle? There really can't be that many. Plus, you've got the source code to your customized software, so you could, like, just copy and paste the list of media from the release notes or something.
By doing so, you will realize immediate savings that can free up even more money for your marketing efforts.	I'm going to save money that I can then spend on the same activity? I have another idea -- why don't I start eating less so I can eat more? And where exactly is this savings going to come from? Are you saying that I'm going to be able to fire my immense marketing department? "Look, guys, thanks for everything... I know it hasn't been easy for you... disseminating my materials, night and day... and you guys have tried, I know that. But there's this guy on the internet who says he can do it instantly. And, let's face it, I think we all know that recently our brand has been a little... well, out of control. I mean, c'mon, Bob, remember when you branded that sorority girl? Seriously, what were you thinking? You're lucky she was black-out drunk, or we would have been facing a hellacious lawsuit."
If you could spare 30 minutes, I would appreciate the opportunity to meet you and show you just how powerful our system is and how it can help your company in so many ways relating to marketing.	If I could spare 30 minutes, I wouldn't own my own company. Seriously, I think you're going to have to be more specific on this custom software and what it does -- I mean, BESIDES dissemination and/or brand control, sure, I understand THAT perfectly.
I've not seen one person feel this is a waste of time yet,	You can see feelings?
but rather literally be blown away with our system.	Literally blown away? Really? You sure you're using "literally" correctly, here? Because, I've gotta be honest with you, this doesn't sound that inviting to me.
I look forward to hearing from you, thank you in advance for your time!	Well, now you've heard, and you're welcome.

Labels: business, humor?

Tuesday, February 20

"Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth"

Thus spake Ballmer.

First off, someone kill me if I ever talk about "sources of revenue growth" intead of "making really cool products that people actually, you know, like and stuff."

Second, how freaking out of touch is this guy? He told analysts 'the company might "dial up" the intensity of antipiracy technology baked into Windows Vista as part of an effort to squeeze more revenue from China, India, Brazil, Russia and other emerging markets.'

Damn, that's a fine idea, Steve! Those freaking Chinese are sitting on piles of gold! They pirate your software because they are a greedy, greedy people, not because Windows Vista Basic costs $295 in China and laborers rake in about $160 a month.

It's perfectly reasonable to expect people to save up for two months to buy Vista, Steve. Really. You'd be willing to spend $150,000 of your money on Vista Basic, wouldn't you? I'm sure all you need to do is tighten those screws, and the giant Chinese turnip will start squirting sweet, sweet blood to sustain you.

--

Seriously, did Ballmer even look at the names of the countries he feels are under-performing in the business of making him stinking richer? These guys have poor citizens. Microsoft makes more than these countries do.

If "poor nations" is really your target market, you've got a problem. Why not make "Microsoft Vista / Homeless People Edition" as well, genius?

Meanwhile, Mac OS X doesn't have anti-piracy measures, and yet, somehow, it fumbles along, continuing to gain market share. Funny dat. Some might say it's actually BECAUSE Mac OS X doesn't annoy, limit, and intimidate its legitimate users with crappy activation codes and automatic degradation of the operating system if it feels you are a pirate, or you've upgraded your machine, or it's a Tuesday.

Here's my announcement for analysts, as the CEO of an international software firm: I'm NOT going to spend any time going after pirates in China, India, Brazil, or Russia. It's not worth my time and effort, and it's not worth alienating my real, paying customers with clunky copy-protection. I'd rather add cool stuff to my software than add anti-piracy cruft. And the pirates ALWAYS win, anyways. Always. If you fight hard enough, you end up with a situation like we have in the online music industry, where it's more convenient for consumers to get an unprotected, pirated song than to get a legitimate one, and then you actually DO lose paying customers.

So I'm putting pirates on notice: Meh!

Labels: business, mac community

Wednesday, February 7

Steve Jobs v. Underwear Gnomes

"Eliminating online DRM appears to us to be an overly risky move that eliminates the potential for a future digital-only distribution model free of piracy," Deutsche Bank analyst Doug Mitchelson wrote in research note Wednesday.

"As easily as Mr. Jobs lectured the music industry on their DRM policies, he could have lectured the software industry (which includes Apple) for its complete unwillingness to pursue an industrywide DRM standard or make any effort to help music companies in their fight against digital piracy by working to make their media players recognize and not play pirated songs," Mitchelson wrote.

That's from an AP article on the record labels' response to Steve's call for them to stop requiring copy-protection on internet sales of music.

I told myself I was going to stay out of this, since everyone, his dog, and his dog's uncle are writing about Jobs' pseudo-blog post. Also, am I the only one who's a little jealous that Steve's first blog entry gets linked from the front page of Apple.com? Seriously, I suspect he pulled some strings there. My blog's never even gotten linked off Apple's "Hot News" page. (But, hey, I was once Google's Blogger of the Day, so I guess SOME big companies like me.)

Anywho, my point here, and I have one, is that this analyst is clearly an idiot. It's amazing, because he works for this huge bank, and you know he's making, well, bank, but he didn't even bother to read Steve's post.

Steve clearly said that every DRM scheme relies on secrets, which, eventually, someone either leaks or someone reverse-engineers. ALWAYS. There has never been a uncrackable copy-protection scheme, and, in fact, if you think you've invented one, I think some computer science professors would love to talk to you about the halting problem.

So, Doug, your first wrong assumption is this: there is no future of digital distribution that is "free of piracy." Period. If I can actually hear music, with my two ears, then I can copy it. You think going to analog and back is going to discourage pirates? Have you seen the handicam versions of Hollywood movies for sale in China, before they are released here? Also, who is this "us" that thinks the move is overly risky? Do you have a frog in your pocket, as well? (His name better not be Sir Jumpy.)

Ok, but that was just your first sentence, how about your second... oh, wait, you're wrong again. Twice. First, you say Apple should work with the industry to make a single standard, but Steve clearly said he'd be willing to license FairPlay to others, but he can't because of the music industry's terms with Apple that require prompt patching, and because the secrets that make DRM work at all would be broken and/or leaked all more quickly.

Seriously, Doug, you gotta use your noggin a bit. I want you to re-imagine your statement like this: "I think all banks should standardize the master combinations on their vaults, because that would make us all safer." Abitchanalystsezwhat?

But one dumb thing per sentence isn't enough for you, is it? Sure, those analysts who work for Credit Suisse may settle for less, but you're working for a German bank, dammit! So, go ahead, throw in some good old underwear-gnome-style magic, while you're on a roll: Apple should "help music companies in their fight against digital piracy by working to make their media players recognize and not play pirated songs."

Sure, right, you've demonstrated a real expertise in security theory, Doug, why don't you explain exactly how this system would work. I mean, it sounds great on paper — as does stealing underwear — but HOW should iPods detect pirated songs? You don't even have to code this; I just want to hear your theory, here. Broad outline.

I'll help... let's see... "recognize pirated songs"... so, the iPod would have to somehow recognize which songs loaded onto it were copyrighted and which ones weren't... so it'd need access to some giant database somewhere of every song and audiobook protected by the RIAA, so if you loaded a new song onto it, it could compare it to every song every recorded and see if that song is copyrighted or not, right? Ok, ok, this is all very do-able...

But, hmm, the nefarious user's computer may not be connected to the internet when she loads up pirated music onto her iPod, so the iPod itself would have to connect to this huge database — wirelessly, of course, because what pirate is going to willingly plug her iPod into the internet just so it can check up on her? So we need to build wireless transceivers into iPods — no problem, we wanted that anyways — and we need to have them programmed to automatically sign into any network they find. Maybe we should have them satellite-phone based, in case there are no 802.11 networks around? I'm just spitballing, here.

Of course, some of the DRM-free, copyrighted songs on iPods have been legitimately purchased by the iPod owners, and then legally RIPped into MP3s. So, it's not enough to just see if a song has been copyrighted, we also need a database of every tape, record, and CD every person in the world has ever purchased, plus whether or not they've ever sold or given any music away, so we can see if the particular owner of this iPod really has the right to listen to this song.

Nope, no technical hurdles so far.

Maybe I'm being to harsh on you. Maybe what you're saying is that iPods should detect songs that are currently protected by DRM and are loaded onto the iPod in violation of the terms of the DRM's license.

In which case, hey, guess what — iPods already do this. The "RM" part of "DRM," it is. So, don't you look smart for suggesting it.

—

Look, the computer industry is not holding out on you, OK, Doug? We've been fighting piracy of our wares for thirty-five years, now, and we've lost every round. If you want to be a pirate, you can go online right now and download enabling codes to all your favorite programs (including mine). Why do you think we can do better for the recording industry?

—

Seriously, why does the press keep calling analysts for quotes? It's pretty clear these chuckleheads don't know the first thing about computer science. Three major errors in two sentences... I feel like the AP could have made up facts and had a better chance at being correct. "The music industry feels that anyone buying an iPod should first give the RIAA some money, because it's pretty clear they are going to pirate music. I mean, just look at them... the way they are dressed... Also, the music industry feels all iPods should be made of candy, so that lime iPods actually taste like delicious limes, and we don't chip our teeth again."

Next time, AP, call me, I'll give you a damn quote. Here, the first one is free: "It's about time record execs pull their heads out of their asses, and, after the giant 'schloORK' sound is done ringing in their ears, they start treating valued customers like they are valued and/or customers, instead of like a seething criminal class. Yes, there will always be people who steal music. So either offer the rest of us a compelling alternative to being one of them, or die the dinosaur's death that you so richly deserve."

Labels: business, mac community

Tuesday, January 16

Ad nauseam...

A couple years ago when I'd brag about Delicious Library (which I hardly ever do) I'd say, "All this without ever advertising!"

I stopped saying that because we do advertise now, and lying is bad. ("We" in this case is me and the frog in my pocket. I call him "Sir Jumpy.") I thought I'd share the little I've learned about advertising as a smallish software company. (Again, the Sir Jumpy and I incorporated a while ago, for tax reasons.)

- Advertising in magazines: pretty much sucks. Well, it might not suck, but you'll never know. First off, nobody reads magazines any more. Proof: what are you reading right now? Is it a magazine? No. There -- what more do you need? (If a single data point doesn't define a trend, then I guess our entire war on terror was a huge mistake?) Second, even if people did read magazines, you'd never know which ads of yours were effective, since there's no really good feedback mechanism of which I know. Third, magazine ads typically cost big bucks.

Magazine guys have told me, "Hey, advertising isn't to generate sales, it's to generate exposure!" OMGWTF?! If I wanted exposure I'd move the L.A. and go clubbing every night with Paris Hilton and her growing menagerie of hangers-on and/or venereal diseases. I WANT SALES, DAMMIT! I'm not paying for some squishy "exposure" thing. Give me money. That's what I want.

Also, magazine ads are really hard to compose, so you'll spend a bunch of time and effort trying to make one that looks all professional and shit, but you're a software developer, not a professional ad-making-type-person (hmm, there's probably a better word for that) so, if you'll forgive me for saying so, your ad is probably going to look like shit. And, you're probably going to forget to bring teh funny in your effort to look all professional, so you'll just end up alienating your core market of crazy independent thinkers with your attempts to look all sophistomicated. (Remember this is a community where the most remembered ads are a lady smashing a T.V. and "It sucks less.")

- Advertising on Mac-specific web sites: pretty good for me. My advice for this is the same advice I give for picking stocks: pick the sites that you yourself really like. (As opposed to "you notyourself" -- that guy has no taste.) I advertise on Crazy Apple Rumors because I think that guy is teh hilarious (that's two -- if I use "teh" one more time it's going to be funny, given the comedy rule of threes) and because it's a tiny site and he basically was willing to sell me the ad space for a hot dog and a cup of coffee.

Now, I don't get complete sell-thru data from C.A.R.S. (see next section), but I *do* get to track referrals from them to my site using the cool tools provided by my web host (in my case, it's called "Urchin"), so I can measure some of the efficacy of this, and I've found that, per dollar, C.A.R.S sends as many people my way as Google's ads. Since C.A.R.S. readers are also clearly Mac fans and have demonstrated their superior intellects by reading such a fine site, my estimation is they are more highly qualified customers than the generic Google referral, so this advertising was worth it to me, even though the total volume of hits I get is, of course, an order of magnitude smaller than with Google.

- Advertising on Google Adwords: good if you are VERY careful. For the two of you who don't know already, Google makes its zetazillion dollars a year by allowing advertisers to bid on placing ads on (a) search results pages, and (b) blogs and the like (called the "content network"). Because Google is made up of a bunch of well-massaged, well-fed, lovable computer wonks (seriously, Google employees are the Kobe Beef of computer programmers), they've designed an incredibly rich set of tools for setting up and monitoring your ads.

The basic idea is that the advertiser (me, in this case) says, "I'll pay up to 10 cents for Google to display my ad on a page that mentions 'Collecting' and 'DVDs'." If I'm among the top six or so bidders for any given page, my ad gets displayed. If my ad never makes it into the top six, or if nobody ever clicks on my ad, Google automatically disables it and tells me I better up my ante.

One of the coolest parts of their system, though, is that they automatically track customers who have used AdWords to get to my site, and I can tell Google if a particular "session" ended with a sale, so, for what I believe is the first time in the history of advertising, I can actually track exactly which ads, run where, cause customers to buy my product, not just "eyeball" it or be "exposed" to it or whatever. This is truly amazing.

There's a bunch of other factors in all this, but that's a rough outline of how it works. So, what's the problem? Well, the first thing scammers started doing was clicking on their competitors' ads; if you sell library software and you see an ad for your competitor, you might think, "Hey, I can just sit here clicking this link all day, and it'll cost him 10 cents every time! MUAH HA HA!" Now, I've set up a limit on AdWords on how much I'm willing to spend per day, but even so, if you false-click enough of my ads, they'll stop showing up for legitimate customers for the rest of the day, so you can essentially do a denial-of-service just by leaning on my ad, in addition to costing me money. CURSE YOU!

Sucks, huh? Well, Google claims they've figured out how to detect this, but of course isn't giving any details. In my experience, this kind of "click-fraud" isn't the primary problem with AdWords, but it's something to think about.

The latest form of fraud I've read about works like this: some unscrupulous site picks a bunch of words that are close to the words you'd use to advertise your product, but not quite (for example, common misspellings). They then bid, say, a penny for those words, since they are so uncommon. People who search for those words are led to a page on their site which contains Google content ads for YOUR site, for which you're paying ten cents a pop. Sure, it's not illegal, but it's kind of a sucky thing to do, in that it ends up getting around Google's automatic suggesting of similar, more successful searches, which would lead people directly to your ad and/or your site without your ad.

I don't know exactly of what kind of shenanigans I was the victim, but a couple months ago (November-December) I discovered that my cost-per-conversion (that's how many dollars I spent on advertising to generate a single sale) went from around $29 per customer to around $75 per customer. Yipes!

Now, even $29 per customer may seem high on a $40 product, but I like to fudge it in my head and think, "Sure, but think of the exposure!" I mean, there is a certain value in just having your name repeated, over and over, so I factor that in to how much I value AdWords. Also, there's a value to getting a customer for a 1.0 product at any price, because once gotten (gotten?) you don't have to advertise to her to get her to upgrade to 2.0.

But $75 per customer? So I'm losing $35 for each customer I get through AdWords? What am I, Sony?

So I started diving into Urchin, and the first thing I discovered is a VERY VERY high percentage of referrals to our site (ONLY during the months where I started losing money) came from some place called "www.losmejores-juegos.com/g-common2.googleadd.php". Take a good look at that URL... it just kind of sounds suspicious, doesn't it? I mean, a whole page just for "googleadd"? Why not just call your page "clickfraud.php"?

I went to that page (now defunct) and it was very much just a referral page full of ads. Hmm.

Then, on AdWords, I discovered that my ads on the "content network" were sucking up all of my ad budget every day, in just a couple hours, so I wouldn't run any ads for the rest of the day, in either the content network or for search pages.

Hmm and hmm, I say.

The smoking gun, however, was that these "content network" ads, while claiming to reach hundreds of thousands of people a week, were generating NO revenue. I mean, literally NONE. None of these "people" who were clicking through these ads (remember the user has to click on an ad for me to have to pay for it) to my site were ever buying my product!

Well, I know from earlier statistics (back before I was getting boned by los dickheads) what ratio of people normally buy Delicious Library after clicking through to our site, and it was WAY more than, say, 0%.

What was the solution? Well, in this case, I did two things: one is, I assumed that losmejores-juegos.com was up to no good, and added them to my AdWords list of sites that are simply not allowed to run my ads any more. Screw you guys, I'm going home.

Second, I discovered that historically, "content network" ads on Google really kind of suck -- they suck down the majority of my ad budget and almost never generate conversions (sales). So, to hell with them -- I lowered my bids on the content network down to almost nothing.

Result? My cost per new customer averaged $13.20 for the first ten days of January, instead of $75. Hooray for Zoidburg! Everything's coming up Millhouse! And other Groeing quotes!

I also wrote Google about all this (twice), but received a stock responses that basically said, "If you decide you don't want your ads on a certain site, just exclude them" and then "We watch for clickfraud in general, we're not going to look into this particular case."

So, to summarize: Google AdWords can be really good, but don't depend on Google to make sure you don't get boned. Concentrate on the search ads, and don't bid high for any ads on the content network right now. Honestly, the content network never really paid off for me even when I wasn't being actively defrauded, and recently it made me not only waste my entire ad budget, but also made me thus miss advertising to legitimate customers on the search side, because my budget was drained.

Sir Jumpy says: Google content network == teh suck.

Labels: business, mac community

Sunday, December 17

Marketing Irony.

Those of you in the Mac community may have noticed a bit of a kerfuffle happening over the last week concerning MacHeist and whether it is good for small developers. I won't recreate a laundry list of links for you here, if you've missed out just follow this google search. As well, I've already stated my opinions, on Ars Technica, so I'm not going to go over them again here in my little vanity blog.

However, I did want to mention one ironic point that gives me a chuckle. Several of the independent developers who are complaining how unfair MacHeist is treating the software companies that have participated in their bundle seem to be, well, almost disgusted by marketing. Marketing is this nasty thing that lessens the value of whatever it is you're trying to sell.

I, obviously, don't mind marketing, and in fact some might call me (without malice) a marketing whore. This is a difference of opinion, though, and I am not going to try to evangelize my position on this. If you think marketing is dirty, well, ok. Nobody is getting hurt with your opinion, except possibly you. It's not like you're saying, "I think we can't tax oil because grandmothers would freeze in New England," which statement I would feel compelled to refute.

So, the irony here is that EVERYONE is making out like bandits because of this controversy. Every day this week another blog or journal or tech site has written about the controversy, and it makes headlines on the various meta-sites, and more people click through the stories to MacHeist and the individual sites of the various software developers in question, and all of our sales increase. The guys who participated in MacHeist, the guys who objected to it -- we're all getting paid now. And we're getting paid to keep arguing with each other. Seriously, if I were a crasser man (yes, there is a limit, thank you) I would be writing other developers right now, saying, "Ok, now you call me a stupid-face, and then I'll call your mom fat, and then..."

When you're a small developer, eyeballs == sales, because your biggest problem is simply that people haven't heard of you. It really is the case that any publicity is good publicity. I don't care if you came to my site because you heard a rumor that I like to keep a goat and a chicken in my bathroom, you're still going to end up reading about my product, and about one in ten people who read about it try it out. Ka-ching.

Extremely cynical viewers might even assume this entire scandal was cooked up by the indie community as an attention-getting measure. Personally, I doubt the original objectors were that scheming, but I do get a chuckle out of the idea that they have, accidentally and unwittingly, used the basest form of marketing (scandal and controversy) and increased their sales, in their effort to decry the evils of marketing.

--

Imagine you spotted someone who was yelling in the middle of the street for some damn reason, and you approached them and asked them to keep their voice down in public, and someone else walked by and said, "Good point! Here's $1,000!" With that boost, that vote of confidence, wouldn't you, maybe, start looking for other arguments you could make in public? And if you got paid $1,000 again, don't you think you'd maybe take that positive feedback and eventually spend all your time arguing in public, maybe even standing in the middle of the street yelling?

I wonder if they'll give away this dirty money, or let themselves be infected by it. I'm going to keep it, myself -- I didn't start this argument, I just signed up to be in a bundle I thought would be a lark. But, hey, thanks for the extra customers, guys. If you'd like to debate, say, politics next time, I'll be right here.

-W

PS to other developers: Your mom really is fat. Seriously. She's so fat she has a trash bag for a sock. When she hauls ass it takes two trips. She's so ugly you could press her face in dough and make monster cookies. She's so hairy it looks like she has Don King in a headlock.

Labels: business, mac community

Sunday, January 15

Thinking, boxes, & what kittens can do to them.

Recently a fifteen-year-old developer wrote me:

Quite often I find myself outside lighting left over sulfer-powder mixes from the fireworks last 4th of July and thinking of product ideas. However I just can't think of a single unique idea that would actually turn out to be a hit. Everyone just tells me to think "outside of the box." Honestly, that never works for me.

Do you have any suggestions on how I might increase my developer creativity?

Delicious Library is what mostly sparked my mind, this is probably the most unique and yet still useful application released for Mac OS X.

Aw, I'm blushing. No, wait, I'm hungover. I get those two confused.

First off, left me discourage you from playing with homemade fireworks. My earlier advice notwithstanding, as a programmer you'll need your fingers and sight.

Second, my inclination is to tell you to think INSIDE the box. Because, honestly, when I think back to ideas that have changed the world, they aren't really that crazy. They're pretty normal when you think about it. It just took someone to put the pieces together and DO A GOOD JOB OF IT.

Let's take the canonical example, the iPod. Now, portable music players have existed for a long time. So that part was obvious. Digital music was completely taking off, led by iTunes. That part was obvious. Portable hard drives were very common. Obvious again.

So someone at Audible says: Gee, people like music to go, they have music on their computers, and we now have tiny hard drives that are portable... hmm, I could come up with a new device here. And Audible makes the first MP3 player. And the world yawns, because it's not that amazing and because it doesn't have a great user experience for downloading all the music you've stolen from the net. And Audible marketed it for audible book downloads (surprise!), which is frankly not nearly as exciting to our nearly illiterate, constantly gum-snapping country.

Then someone at Apple says, "Hey, we can deliver the whole experience, and make a device that's really beautiful, because we've got iTunes and we've got good engineers and we've got Jonathan Ives who is good at making things look sexy and is bizarrely muscular himself and was recently knighted but we don't have to call him sir."

So Apple makes the iPod, and everyone says, "Wow, they totally invented the MP3 market," which they totally didn't. They just did a good job of it. Hell, to this day Creative still sells some P.O.S. MP3 player called the Bedouin or some shit and nobody even acknowledges their existence. Creative is like that ugly guy who shows up to the party with bizarre, wispy, patchy facial hair and parks himself by the food table and everyone pretends not to notice him so they don't have to actually talk to him. (Note to ugly guy: sorry, man. Try shaving and eating right.)

THAT is the key. (No, not shaving.) The key is taking an idea that the world obviously wants and doing a GOOD job of it. This is how I've made my living.

I've only had like seven truly original ideas in my life. Three of them are in OmniGraffle 3 (see if you can find 'em!) and a couple more are in OmniWeb. (iSight barcode scanning is one, as well.)

All the others are just refinements of other people's ideas. I stand on the shoulders of giants, which weighs them down a ton, and frankly they probably resent it, but it works great for me.

Delicious Library was not an original idea. It was a new approach to an idea that's been around for as long as computers. Hell, longer. I think the first cavemen carved on rocks when they lent out their, uh, sticks to other cavemen. Which wasn't efficient, but still worked better than Microsoft Windows. There are many other shareware programs that do approximately the same thing as ours, in theory, they just kind of bite. We took the idea of a media cataloging app and we made the friendliest, most fun version of it we could. But the basic idea was NOT ours. We don't ever claim it was.

So, think inside the box. Look at what people are using right now. Can you do a better job? Is there any chance people will switch to yours, or is there a market leader that's so entrenched you're going to get killed? Or can you write a simple version of what is now a program only for professionals? Can you do the converse? Can you adapt an idea from one market to another, like making a word processor for screenwriters? (Don't really do this, it's been done.)

I mean, sure, don't write a generic word processor, even if you think you are a super-genius. Word is a de-facto standard, and you don't want to mess with that. And don't re-write Excel. But, for example, when the Excel product manager got up on stage at MacWorld several years ago and said, "We've found that 85% of our customers use Excel just to make lists and outlines," we (Omni) said, "Shoot, that'll be our next product. We can do a GOOD job of making lists and outlines, and sell it for a lot less." And OmniOutliner was a pretty decent success.

Use all kinds of software yourself. Play with Final Cut Pro even though you don't make movies, because there are metaphors in there you need to know. Talk to people about what they do with software. Watch everyone around you and what they are doing, and not doing, on their computers. If there's a solution out there to some problem, but it's so complicated that most people don't use it, then there effectively IS no solution; it's a wide-open market. In my experience, programs don't get simpler in subsequent versions. You can kill your competition if you come out of the gate with something simple and friendly and cheap, even if they have a head-start with a crappier program.

Labels: business, interface design

Monday, December 12

Sock Puppet Marketing...

Just today I was taught the wonderful term "Sock Puppeting," which is when someone creates extra accounts to post in online forums and agree with themselves: "Oh, man, I totally support Bob's crazy position... he's so smart!"

Well, I'd like to introduce the term "sock puppet marketing," which is when someone from a company reviews his own products and fails to disclose he's not a neutral party.

I started noticing that every time I see Delicious Library mentioned on any site on the web, someone inevitably posts a comment about MediaMan, which is a program for Windows that completely ripped off our interface. Like, enough so that we should sue. I mean, go ahead, go to their site, and look at their shelves. Tell me that's not copyright infringement. And I should mention, as it will come up in a bit, that MediaMan used to be free, but now costs $39.95. (Seriously... they even copied our price.)

Now, sure, some mentions of competitors are to be expected, but we have several competitors on Mac OS X and several more on Windows and Linux, yet the one I keep seeing mentioned in the comments, over and over, is MediaMan.

So let's look at some web forums I found that wrote articles about Delicious Library, and the comments left on those sites by user(s):

From Delicious Construction Kit | B.Mann Consulting

Hmm. Sure, Christoph could just be a fan of MediaMan. I mean, hey, people recommend Delicious Library all the time, so people could be recommending MediaMan.

Wait, though...

From Vestal Design Blog: Deliciousmonster, not Delicious Monster

Wow, that Christoph likes MediaMan so much so that he was the only person to post a response here. It seems like now matter how little the site, Christoph is the man on the scene if they mention Delicious Library...

From VMUNIX Blues » Delicious Monster and Delicious Lattes

Boy, you can't beat that free price, can you, Christoph! I mean, if it were true. And you were one of only two people who left comments here! But, I wonder, did you catch that mention of Delicious Library in "Richard's Notes"?

From Richard's Notes >> Blog Archive >> Delicious Monster

Free! Wow! That sounds great, except it's not.

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Now, I invite the reader to click on Christoph's name up there, to see what Christoph set as his home page in Blogger. It's a live link that I copied from the actual web pages. Christoph's home page is imediaman.com. Notice he doesn't mention any affiliation with that company in his text, when he was gushing over how great the look and feel of MediaMan is.

Could this Christoph be none other than Christoph Janz, whose e-mail is <cjanz@imediaman.com>, according to this now-deleted, Google-cached Word document I found from iMediaMan site? (And is this the same Christoph Janz of the blog Christoph Janz on Web 2.0)?

Honestly, that's not a rhetorical question... it seems likely to me, but I can't know, of course. And it's not like I'm accusing Chistoph of doing anything illegal here, although if he were working for iMediaMan back in June or July, I believe what he did highly unethical. Some might find it just to be a clever marketing, but they'll certainly never get a job with my companies.

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But, hey, the phrase "Sock Puppet" is funny, like, "Monkey" or "Galooly."

Labels: business, mac community, stories

Saturday, November 19

Failure is Success.

While I hate to lend credence to the current Republican habit of double-speak ("Fighting is Safety", "Dissent is Terrorism", "Religion is Hate"), there are some dissonant clichés which actually make sense.

So it is with, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," for example. Now, obviously, we DO have other things to fear, like, say, having our democratic government completely co-opted by corrupt, tiny-minded men whose only interest is in gathering and preserving wealth and power, at any cost.

Wait, where was I? Oh, that's right. Fear. I think what our friend was trying to warn us away from was something I've been trying to fight all my life, which is a fear of failure which is greater than the consequences of actually failing.

I mean, if someone asked you to jump out of a plane, you might rightfully say, "Uh, if this fails, I'll be a thin layer, so, no thanks." And I'm not going to take you to task for that.

But if I say, "Hey, if you want to design games, you should look at modding some current games and then put them out there on the web," and you say, "Well, I could, but I'd probably suck at it, so it's easier to sit here and watch Blind Date," then I'd have a problem, and I might even give you a stern lecture during that extra-long commercial break that comes after the second date wrap-up and just before the "Hall of Shame," which is never really very good anyways.

Irrational fear of failure is endemic in our society; I think it's the primary factor keeping most people from doing the great things they're meant to do. I've personally never met anyone who worked hard and fearlessly at a field and did NOT succeed. I know there must occasionally BE people who fail despite their best efforts, because I've heard "the stories," but there are SO MANY MORE who simply won't try because they've heard that you can't win.

Failing is to be strived for! If you aren't failing, you aren't at the edge of the envelope of your abilities, and if you aren't at the edge, you aren't stretching yourself, so you aren't learning, so you're just wasting time. Failing is how nature succeeds. Evolution works through failure of the poorest (they get et) more than survival of the fittest. Muscles grow because you work them to failure, and they then respond by getting stronger. Your spinal cord learns not to touch fire by getting burnt. Failure is not just handled gracefully by nature, it is critical.

So, seriously, have you failed today? If not, why the heck not? I mean, think of the consequences of failing, and if they aren't deadly and/or permanently disabling, then go ahead and bite off more than you can chew. Try to cook something that you just made up. Take a bike ride that's too far. Take your car into an empty parking lot and do donuts until you learn where the tires give. Start a project that might be too big for you.

What's the worst that's going to happen? You'll get laughed at? By Erin Martens, that cute girl you had a crush on in 11th grade? And she'll say, "That's why I never went out with you, you stupid idiot, it's because you're such a failure all the time"? And you'll die alone and unliked, and they won't discover your body until it's half-eaten by your cats, who actually had enough food, they just ate you out of spite?

You're right. When's Blind Date on?

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Blog redesign: You may notice my blog looks a wee bit different. I'd like to thank everyone who sent me entries; there were many lovely ones. 20-year-old Spaniard Alex Bendiken's struck me the right way, so he gets 15 seconds of fame (from me, at least), and his iPod will be sent off as soon as he sends me his address. Congratulations, Alex!

Labels: business

Friday, July 1

Student Talk Reloaded: The Podcast

So, my WWDC slides have been downloaded 26,000 times since I put them up a week ago. Yipes!

A number of people asked me to post a podcast of the talk, as well, so last night I stayed up for an extra hour and a half and tried to replicate what I said when I originally presented the slides, so if you're a glutton for punishment you can now have an extra sense filled with Wil goodness. [This is actually an expanded version of the talk, since I had lots of time.]

Here's a smaller version of the slides (same content, exactly) that a nice reader sent me, to save my bandwidth:

Slides of the talk

And here's the exciting podcast:

Podcast, to go with the slides

Labels: business, stories

Saturday, June 25

Piracy...

Some people on the arstechnica forums asked me to weigh in on piracy, and I posted this in response. It's something I meant to include in my main talk.

The basic deal with piracy is simple, and I wish I'd remembered to put this in my talk (I think it's on the O'Reilly roundtable MP3 that's on the net somewhere)...

Don't worry much about piracy. If you spend more than a couple days a year worrying about it, you're fooling yourself.

Here's the simple facts: pirates steal applications. They don't pay for them. It doesn't hurt you to have something "stolen" that (a) is virtual and (b) wasn't going to be purchased. In fact, it helps you in a small way, as pirates usually are also young, loud, early-adopters. Which is to say, if pirates love your stuff, you've got a bunch of advocates on your side.

Look, I used to steal games when I was a kid. Thousands of dollars worth. I d