There’s been a lot of talk about the licensing terms of iBook Author today. Apple’s new application for creating e-books is cheap, but books created with it can only be distributed through the App Store unless they are free. Gus Mueller wonders about the precedent this sets for Apple’s other tools:
I really hope Xcode doesn’t ship with the same restrictions some day. “Binaries created through Xcode can only be sold through the App Store, and you can’t charge more than $15.99″.
Apple is free to distribute its tools under any terms that it likes, what I am pondering is what authors should do.
As an author, I can say that this doesn’t seem fundamentally different from signing a contract with a publisher. If Publisher A agrees to publish my book, that usually means I can’t also let Publisher B publish it as well. When you use iBooks Author, Apple is your publisher. If you want to give it away for free, that’s fine, but you’re not going to be able to sell a Kindle version published using Apple’s tools.
That doesn’t strike me as horribly unreasonable. The big difference, though, is that if Publisher A publishes my book, it can be sold in any bookstore, online or offline. In the new electronic world, choosing a certain publisher means that you are also choosing only one channel of distribution. If you choose iBooks, you’re also constrained in terms of devices. There are Kindle apps for most platforms, but iBooks is iOS only. It’ll be interesting to see if going with iBooks turns out to be a better economic proposition for authors, or more precisely, to see which authors benefit from going with iBooks rather than Kindle.
It’s a lot to think about, in any case.
Back in July, I argued that Apple’s labor costs should be higher. The company is very profitable, and it wouldn’t cut into their profits much to better compensate employees. This week, there have been a lot of developments on this front. Employees at a Foxconn factory in China threatened mass suicide if they were not given better pay. Also, Mike Daisey, who has travelled to China to observe working conditions there himself, appeared on This American Life to perform part of his one-man show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”
Today, Apple has made some announcements that indicate it is taking more responsibility for labor conditions in its factories. They have released a full list of their suppliers along with a detailed report on working conditions in its factories. Apple has also joined the Fair Labor Association and will allow independent inspections of its factories. Hopefully other electronics makers will follow suit.
Addressing the issues Apple has found in its inspections will cost the company more money, but they can afford it. Here’s to them spending even more in the future. As an aside, I can’t help but wonder whether this is happening now because it’s something that’s more important to Tim Cook than it was to Steve Jobs.
Lots of thoughtful posts are cropping up about the new restrictions Apple plans to implement for OS X applications that will be distributed through the App Store. The occasion is, I suppose, the news that Apple is pushing back the deadline for all applications distributed through the App Store to be Sandbox-compliant from the middle of this month to March 2012.
For a basic rundown of the new rules and what they mean, check out this post from Pauli Olavi Ojala.
For an argument that Apple could take a more realistic, less restrictive approach to securing applications, see Will Shipley. In it, he explains why entitlements and code auditing may be useful in theory, but certificates are a more straightforward solution:
But, in the real world, security exploits get discovered by users or researchers outside of Apple, and what’s important is having a fast response to security holes as they are discovered. Certificates give Apple this.
His proposed solution makes a lot of sense, I’d love to see Apple adopt it.
Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop blog has a useful post on the sandbox features in OS X Lion as well.
Marco Arment speculates on what an Apple television might be. He talks about the beauty of on-demand television, and the fact that DVRs are a poor substitute:
Cable TV customers have attempted to gain these benefits with the DVR, but it’s a bad hack. Even the best results are more like an automated VCR than true on-demand video, and almost nobody reliably gets perfect results. The way to escape the dysfunction of broadcast TV isn’t to record it and play it back later.
I want to talk about this part of his post.
As a long term TiVo customer and reluctant user of a DVR provided by Time-Warner Cable, I agree with this. Here’s the thing, though. When TiVo arrived, it was incredibly disruptive. The ability to pause and rewind live television as well as easily record shows and watch them at your convenience was something completely new in the world. Even today, the DVRs provided by cable companies cannot compete with TiVo in terms of user interface.
TiVo’s original capabilities are particularly impressive when you consider the network infrastructure available when it was introduced. For a very long time, TiVo downloaded its guide data over a telephone line using a built-in modem overnight. Broadband wasn’t pervasive enough for TiVo to ship a product that could assume a persistent Internet connection.
I, and a lot of other people, thought TiVo would become a major player in the television industry, mainly because once people experienced television on a TiVo, they would never go back to watching television without it. I was right about that — once you’ve had a DVR, you can give up on TV, or you can shift to a fully on-demand lifestyle, but you can never go back to regular broadcast television. It’s too painful.
Sadly, TiVo has not been doing well for a long time. Here’a report from earlier this year describing TiVo’s shrinking subscriber base. The question is, why has TiVo performed so poorly given their entry into the market as an incredibly disruptive force?
I can think of a few reasons, not all of which are entirely TiVo’s fault.
TiVo’s biggest problem is that they were unable to successfully license its software to cable companies. Cable companies don’t build their own DVRs or write the software. For whatever reason, they have gotten into bed with companies that provide awful hardware with slow, difficult-to-use software. The remotes are terrible, the units are unresponsive, and the on-screen interfaces are embarrassing. TiVo’s software would have been infinitely better. Unfortunately, those licensing deals never happened. What the cable companies offer instead is good enough for most people. The inferior boxes from the cable companies cost less per month and you don’t have to buy the hardware yourself. Most people, given the choice of hundreds of dollars in up-front costs (TiVos cost less now) and upwards of $10 a month, will instead choose to just tack on $5 to their cable bill for the lesser but still functional DVR.
The second problem for TiVo is digital cable and switched digital video. TiVo was at its best when the box at the end of the cable line just needed an analog cable tuner in order to work. Then the instructions for the TiVo just involved plugging the coax into the back of the TiVo and giving it power. When digital cable arrived, you had to connect an IR transmitter to the TiVo so that it could change channels on the cable box your cable company provided. When HDTV became available, the government mandated that cable companies support a standard CableCard interface so that people could tune in HD channels on their televisions. Theoretically, this should have simplified things. TiVo added CableCard support, but the cable companies have never done a good job of supporting them, and in practice, getting a Tivo set up with CableCards has traditionally involved multiple phone calls with the cable company and often a home visit from cable technicians.
Finally, cable companies started using switched video, which requires even more intelligence in the client. My TiVo has two CableCards and a separate tuning adapter, which is required to tune in switched videos. The setup is very flaky and the TiVo fails to record shows on a regular basis. None of that is TiVo’s fault, nor is there much they can do about it. They are dependent on the cable companies, who are ambivalent if not actively hostile when it comes to supporting anything other than their own boxes. The complexity of the required setup has eaten away at the user experience TiVo provides. It was once rock solid and dead simple, but that’s no longer the case.
And the third problem is that TiVo missed the boat on video-on-demand. TiVo supports most of the popular on-demand video services now, but that’s a minimum requirement for anyone who wants to sell you something to connect to your television these days. Netflix, Hulu Plus, Apple, and Amazon.com are the ones making money from video-on-demand. Netflix captured a bunch of subscribers via DVD rentals and has been moving them to video-on-demand. Apple is selling on-demand video through iTunes, and Hulu has key deals with broadcasters. TiVo could perhaps be in a better position had they offered a service that provides downloadable videos (as many people thought they would) long ago, but it’s certainly too late now for them to become a player in that market on their own.
What’s interesting to me is that TiVo clearly saw that cable television was just a data stream that they could tap into in order to let people watch whatever they want on their own time. Before downloading high-quality video of television shows over the Internet on a regular basis was really feasible, tapping into the cable stream and picking what you wanted really was the best option available. I don’t know whether TiVo didn’t see that transmitting shows directly over the Internet was in the nearer future than they predicted, or they saw it but were unable to put the deals into place to become a player in the on-demand market, but their inability to do so perhaps cements their decline.
It really is a shame. I am still a happy TiVo subscriber, and it’s still much, much better than the alternatives if you want to watch cable programming. Services like Hulu Plus and Netflix Instant aren’t viable options if you want to watch sports, or Food TV, or plenty of other channels. But it’s hard not to look at TiVo and think about what might have been. In spite of all of the difficulties, they still offer the best product on the market. The TiVo Premiere Elite looks awesome. You should ask for one for Christmas.
I encourage you to read Mike Daisey’s New York Times op-ed eulogizing Steve Jobs. It is both tough and fair.
For what it’s worth, I think that Apple’s move toward a closed model of computing, which I have discussed before is justifiable as a technical choice. Is it what I would prefer? No. But it provides customers with both benefits and costs, and each of us can choose whether we think the tradeoffs are worth it.
The more damning indictment is that Steve Jobs failed to lead Apple to a more humane and fair labor arrangement when it comes to manufacturing its devices. I’ve written about that before as well. Apple generates huge amounts of cash — if they wanted to move all of their manufacturing to Long Island over the course of a decade, they could. Sure, it wouldn’t be easy, but it would be truly world changing. At a time when other technology companies are importing sweatshop conditions to America, it really would be a way to Think Different.
The death of Steve Jobs is, of course, sad, and is also notable. He is arguably the greatest businessman of his generation. If we’re going to dwell on it, it should be to reflect on which aspects of his legacy we should emulate and which we should discard.
A blog post I read earlier by Jesse Brown that’s sophomoric in both premise and conclusion has stuck in my brain, so I may as well write something about it, if for no other reason than so that I can move on to other things. His colleague makes the following assertion:
No company—probably not even Google—and certainly no individual has made as much of a difference or changed the way things work over the past 10 years as Apple has under Jobs.
First, he denies credit to Apple:
Add it all up, and Apple’s biggest impact has been aesthetic. Their products look great and have changed the way lots of other things look. But that’s just it—Apple is all about things. It’s essentially a hardware company, and it’s ill-prepared for a world where objects mean less and information means more. There’s no new God-gadget coming from Cupertino—all Apple can do once it’s done sticking cameras on things and offering them in different colors is to release cheaper iPhones and cheaper iPads, devaluing their gear until the gee-whiz factor is totally gone. This has already happened to the iPod. You probably have a three-old version in a drawer somewhere.
Then, he gives credit to Google:
More than anything, Google has been an accelerator of the greater ambitions of the Internet. Ten years ago, techno-utopians spoke of a future where anyone could be a publisher. Google made random blogs findable and made reader visits bankable. Ten years ago, we heard starry-eyed predictions that any kid could soon have the tools to become a pop star or a filmmaker from their own basement. Now, thanks to Google’s acquisition of YouTube, we take it for granted that this is so. Google preaches “openness,” not because it sounds good, but because the more open and accessible the Internet is to us all, the more money Google makes.
First of all, in his argument against Apple he changes the debate. The question at hand isn’t which company is most likely to change the world over the next ten years, it’s which company changed the world the most over the past ten years. Secondly, he gives credit to Google for acquiring YouTube. Did that really change the world? YouTube was already well on its way when Google bought them out. Anyway, I don’t want to nitpick.
I’ll boil it down to the most world-changing contribution by each company over the past ten years.
Google is the company that improved search engine results enough to really open the Web to the masses. They didn’t invent the search engine, but they did invent PageRank, making search significantly more useful, especially for those who were not search engine experts. Awhile back, I saw a service truck with the terms to use to find them with a Google search painted on the side as part of their contact information. That pretty much says it all.
Apple is the company that brought a real Web browser to the pockets of millions of people. There were other phones that provided “Web browsers,” but before the iPhone the mobile browsing experience did not in any way resemble the experience of using a real Web browser. Once the iPhone was available, it was clear that if you wanted to be a player in smart phones, you needed a device with a screen that was as large as physically possible and that supported a browser that provided a high quality browsing experience. The arrival of the iPhone was the most significant event in telephony since cellular phones were liberated from cars.
Of course both companies have done many other things, but I don’t think any are as significant as those two. Which one made a greater impact? You tell me.
Today Steve Jobs announced what I have expected and dreaded for awhile — that he’s stepping down as CEO at Apple. I think Apple will be fine but it’s certainly too soon to say goodbye to Steve Jobs.
The news brings me back to the commencement speech that Jobs gave to Stanford graduates in 2005, which I have read many times. In it, he talks about facing mortality:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Read the whole thing.
Just for fun, in light of Apple’s becoming the most valuable company in the world, I thought I’d take a look at Wired’s June, 1997 cover story 101 Ways to Save Apple. There’s some good advice, some bad advice, and a number of suggestions included to inject some levity into the proceedings.
A lot of the suggestions were to be more like Microsoft and embrace the Windows platform. Apple, obviously, rejected that path and has benefitted greatly from doing so. It’s hard to remember now, but many people thought that Apple should drop their operating system and instead turn to making high end Windows PCs. I think we’re all glad they never went that route.
On to the suggestions on the list:
I’m not the only person who has taken this on. Derek Warren compiled a detailed look back in February. I found his piece after I wrote this one.
I don’t really know what conditions are like in the factories where Apple’s products are assembled in China. On one hand, you have Apple’s supplier responsibility page. On the other hand, you have suicides at Foxconn factories where Apple products are assembled.
Today I noticed some manufacturing estimates for the iPhone 5. Apple is rumored to have placed an order for 15 million iPhone 5s from Pegatron, a manufacturer with factories in China. Apple sold 18.65 million iPhones last quarter. I can’t help but wonder how much better working conditions would be if Apple spent $5 more per iPhone on labor costs. Apple has at least $60 billion in cash and had profits of around $6 billion last quarter. Spending $5 more per iPhone would cost them less than $100 million per quarter.
I realize that Apple doesn’t set the pay rates in its suppliers’ factories, but of course they can put anything they want in their supplier compliance agreement. They could limit hours per week worked or require manufacturers to offer paid vacation. I wonder what Apple’s costs would look like if they required overseas manufacturers to comply with all U.S. labor laws except our minimum hourly wage?
The excuse has often been made that low margins in the electronics business lead to the poor working conditions in overseas factories. Apple’s margins aren’t low — I’d like to see them do even more in terms of helping out the people who assemble the gadgets we all love so well. And to be fair, I’d be glad to pay a bit more for gadgets if the money were going directly to the people on the assembly lines.
Apple announced a whole slew of new features for iOS 5 and OS X Lion today, and some of them step on the toes of popular third party applications. The New York Times has a helpful list of threatened applications. To gauge the reaction, check out the results of a Twitter search for “sherlocked.”
Platform vendors build in functionality that’s already being provided by third party applications all the time, and this has always been the case. It’s also always been the subject of some controversy. I’m old enough to remember when Dave Winer was feuding with Apple because AppleScript competed with Frontier. And of course, Microsoft’s decision to bundle a Web browser with Windows rather than ceding that turf to third-party developers like Netscape got them into trouble for abusing their monopoly on desktop operating systems.
Of course, today nobody can imagine operating systems without scripting languages or Web browsers. They’re fundamental features and both platform vendors and users benefit from the fact that they’re always available.
When deciding whether or not to add a third party feature to their platform, vendors have to do the math. Competing directly with popular developers costs them some good will with developers, but it also puts that feature in the hands of more users than any third party developer ever could. That, in turn, may help the growth of the platform.
For features that are infrastructure, making the feature part of the OS may in turn make life easier for other developers as well. For example, iCloud Documents clearly competes with Dropbox. For developers who want to be able to share documents through the cloud, iCloud is much more compelling than DropBox because every iOS user will have it. Adding iCloud Documents is a no brainer, no matter how unhappy Dropbox and its fans are about it. (For what it’s worth, I’m a huge fan of Dropbox and I expect that they’ll be fine.)
When it comes to other features that are more about convenience, the case is less clear. For example, Apple has added a new Reading List feature to Safari that enables users to store articles for later in an easy-to-read format. There’s already a wonderful third-party solution to this problem called Instapaper that Reading List competes with directly. The author of Instapaper, Marco Arment, publishes an excellent blog.
Reading List is something to brag about, but it doesn’t add anything fundamentally new that other iOS developers can build on. And it competes directly with a very, very popular third party iOS application. On the other hand, Instapaper is amazingly convenient and basically makes the concept of being bored while waiting in line obsolete. I’m sure Apple’s developers decided that the functionality was too great not to build into the platform. Why shouldn’t every iOS user have it?
This is the thing every third party developer has to worry about; will Apple or Google or Microsoft or whoever look at their application and decide that the core functionality should be built into the platform. More importantly, they have to figure out how to build a sustainable business in a world where that’s always a possibility.
In the end, I’m not entirely sure that this sort of competition is always bad for application developers. In 2007, Slate published a piece explaining why Starbucks was actually good for independent coffee shops. Starbucks teaches people to appreciate fancier coffee and soon discover that independent shops offer better coffee at a lower price than Starbucks does.
Instapaper is almost certainly already better than Reading List will be when it’s released, and even if it isn’t, Marco has a few months to make improvements that will make it better before iOS 5 is out. In the meantime, people who are intrigued by Reading List can go out and get Instapaper right now. In the future, people will try Reading List, and some of them may decide that they want the more powerful features Instapaper offers, just like Starbucks customers eventually try independent coffee shops.
So while Reading List can clearly be seen as a threat to Instapaper, it may also turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to it, depending on how Marco responds. And I’d say the same for many threatened applications.
The real worry isn’t fair competition, but rather the ability of platform vendors to make life harder for rivals. Platform vendors can use APIs that they don’t provide to third parties, and of course Apple can abuse the application review process in any number of ways to cut off third party developers. As customers, that’s where we need to be attentive. Adding a feature to Safari that competes with Instapaper is fair as far as I’m concerned. Later denying Instapaper access to the App Store because its functionality overlaps with a feature provided by Apple would not be.
Addendum: I should note that for a long time I was on the other side of this debate, and fiercely argued against platform vendors adding features to their platforms that cannibalized the work of third-party developers. What I realized was that this sort of thing is inevitable and often a positive for users. It’s not debatable that Microsoft creating Internet Explorer was good for end users and was of course great for the Web. Some of their business behavior was problematic and probably illegal, but Microsoft was completely right to go into the browser business.
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