Archive for January 2010
The Apple iPad will reinvent consumer computing
Apple announced the new iPad yesterday, essentially a large format iPhone. Some are disappointed that it is not more revolutionary with respect to the iPhone. I think the device is exactly what it needed to be.
Many of my friends and colleagues who own iPhones have noted that they already use their home computer much less, instead simply using their iPhone. The iPhone is already a decent replacement for a home computer if you are just surfing the web, playing games, reading email and looking at photos.
What it needed to be is bigger. So they made it bigger.
I think Steve Jobs did not position the device entirely honestly in the release announcement. He positioned it as sitting between the PC and the smart phone, implying that it was a device that consumers needed in addition to these products. I believe he did this because he knows the early market already owns the other two devices. If you want the Apple faithful to buy the product then you have to convince them they need an additional device.
I wrote in July 2007 about the iPhone’s potential to herald in a new age of consumer computing and my views about operating systems for consumers. The real impact of the iPad won’t be felt for some time. The iPad has the potential to replace the personal computer for the casual user who is not a knowledge worker. If your mom needs a replacement for her aging computer, the iPad would be a great recommendation. If she occasionally likes to type long emails, get her the optional keyboard. Even for knowledge workers, the iPad will work just fine when they are doing things other than work.
I don’t believe the iPad will help the newspaper or magazine industry much. The iPad is an information appliance and the forces that are eroding newspapers and magazines will continue unabated. In books, its nice to have another player selling the media.
I agree with Jeff Bezos that avid readers may still buy a purpose built device for quite some time. And I agree with Jobs that most people will buy a more general purpose device that can read books. Long term trends favor the iPad; the greater user base will pay for more advanced development and we will see the same cannibilization from the low end that we see in photography and GPS devices.
As for what percent of books will be able command charging anything or whether the basic format of a book will survive is a larger open question.
Facebook's New Privacy Defaults Devalue Relationships
A couple of months back, Facebook changed their default settings so that wall posts (those status messages everyone creates) would be open to the public. Then facebook took everybody through a wizard asking that they take on the new defaults.
Recently, in an interview with Michael Arrington, Mark Zuckerberg started explaining why he made the changes. He says that the world is becoming more open and young people are more comfortable sharing more of their life online. If he had to start facebook again, he would default all wall posts to open.
The utility of facebook, as it was worked previously, was that it helped you remain connected to the people who were important to you. In a sea of information, facebook enabled you to maintain private relationships with your true circle of friends.
In Zuckerberg’s new world, there is little difference between whether your are friend with a person are not. Either way, they can read your daily thoughts. He devalues the importance of relationships to individuals and it shows a lack of respect for the individual.
Having a set of close private relationships permits people to hide the complexity of their lives from the rest of the world. We keep some people closer than others so that we stay competitive with our fellow human beings, so that we can present an abstracted version of ourself that lacks all the nitty gritty detail that would be overwhelming.
For many of the same reasons that facebook, as a company, does not divulge every thought, every half-baked plan, and the notes taken at internal meetings, human beings have a legitimate interest in privacy.
Zuckerberg claims that encouraging everyone to share more and more widely will make the world a more empathetic place. I don’t see there being any strong barriers today to people sharing their every thought if they so desire. Further, I can use information on a person’s inner state of mind for good or evil. The information does not care. Hence, empathy may not result. Maybe marketers want to pray on a person when they are down and offer them products that play on their insecurities. Does that make the world a better place? Does it make the world a better place that a potential employer can find out details of your family and relationship situation before hiring you, basing their hiring decisions on their value judgments about your private life?
Friends in their 40s come to me and ask whether they should try facebook. They express concerns over privacy. I used to tell them facebook was a very private place, a place where you information was locked down by default unless you chose to share it. But now, I have to warn them they they need to read the fine print because facebook wants the world to be more empathetic.
The question is, does Zuckerberg really believe the stuff he is currently saying or are there other pressures? Is he concerned that he can’t expose the facebook data to search, google style? Is he trying to stay ahead of twitter, which defaults information to public and does not require reciprocal relationships? Or is he just collapsing under the enormous weight of his personal success and the success of facebook? It can’t be easy to run a company where 300MM people have an opinion.
For some good background reading on the topic, read
Marshall Kirkpatrick’s ReadWriteWeb piece where he argues that rather then reflecting reality and trends, Zuckerberg is trying to influence those trends. Kirkpatrick also wrote a follow-on piece arguing that Zuckerberg is fundamentally wrong about the need for consumer privacy.
Happy New Year – My hard drive failed
I returned from vacation to find out that the 3 year old Western Digital boot drive on my Mac Pro failed and the machine would not boot. That gave me pause for reflection on what I really needed to recover to get up and running. Here is my list:
- Need to install OS X on a new drive. ($99 from Best Buy).
- Need to install Apple Aperture to do initial culling of photos and videos that I take before uploading to Phanfare. I also do minor editing in Aperture. (some day Phanfare will solve this problem)
- Need to install MS office because I still have some legacy files on NAS in my house.
- Need to install VMWare because I still use Outlook for email. My Windows image was stored on a SW raid in the same machine so that is intact.
- Need to install iLife so that I can test iPhoto with Phanfare. I don’t use much of iLife very often.
- Need to install Firefox and Chrome. I still can’t decide what browser I want to use. Firefox has become a memory hog. Chrome lacks Java support on the Mac.
- Need to Install dropbox. I am trying it out as a substitute for the NAS in my basement.
- Need to install Skype. I use it mostly for text chat.
That’s it. My music was on the RAID partition so I did not lose that. Music seems to be the last remaining data challenge to get running off the cloud. Apple probably has some ideas there with the acquisition of Lala. I wrote a post on how I would like to see the music service work at Apple.
An Engineer 