I can't has cheezburger

I was reading this article about an aviation company near my hometown that is growing and came across this gem:

However, he told the airport authority that property taxes are the company’s biggest challenge and that a 10-year tax abatement on the paint facility the company built in 2003 is about to expire. Hyland said property taxes will increase from the current $150,000 to about $220,000 in 2013.

Really? You are making investments on the order of millions of dollars and your biggest roadblock to creating 300 jobs over the next ten years is $70,000 a year in taxes?

This is the epitome of Republican politics that just pisses me off. There are far too many companies that are growing right now, yet they feel they are above having to pay the taxes that pay for the infrastructure that protects them.

These coo panties jump to brag about all the jobs they’re creating and may even imply that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes because of the jobs they’re creating. They feel that their workers should pay taxes on their income, but they ought to be exempt from it.

From a business standpoint this is a logical way to improve revenue. Instead of actually doing work to improve your revenues, just ask the government to give you a tax break and bat your eyes talking about all those jobs you created and how it would be a real shame if those jobs weren’t in the area anymore.

Then, when the local government realizes it’s in the red, it’s these business leaders that are telling citizens how they are living out of their means, expecting too many government services when in fact citizens have been silently paying all of the taxes they are expected to, and these businesses are the real ones getting a free ride. This isn’t okay, and we need to let go of this notion that we need to bend over backwards to have a chance to eat the leftovers left by these businesses’ massive success.

Nothing particularly recent comes to mind, but in the past few months, the public perception of Google in tech blogs has been growing ever more negative. People are reaching out to predict Google+’s failure out of what could only be spite.  Recent changing up of Google execs have people claiming they have a leadership crisis going on. It seemed like a few years ago, everyone loved Google. Now, people are paranoid that Google is “the man,” and that its users are their product, and their customers are their advertisers. What happened? I think it’s a lack of perspective.

The public seems to love a bitter rivalry. We have had the Apple vs. MS wars that followed the Apple vs. IBM war, the browser wars, and even a bit of rivalry between Facebook and Twitter. Meanwhile, Google’s been trying to reach out beyond search, and they’ve gotten pretty aggressive about it. Google’s productivity suite is incredibly capable. Chrome took sizable market share in a very short time. And they’ve got this mobile phone platform, you might have heard of it?

First off, I resent the notion that Google’s primary business purpose is selling user data, and that as a side effect, they provide this search engine that a few people use.  This thinking completely ignores Google’s history. Google started off as a search engine, and the sale of advertising simply enables them to pay the bills so that they can make the products that people like. Furthermore, Google can’t sell ads without a product that human beings want to use and are using en masse.  And just because no money is exchanged between end users and Google for using its search and other services, doesn’t mean that it isn’t Google’s primary product. Google’s ad products largely couldn’t exist if not for the products end users are using, and that doesn’t make those ad products sound like they are Google’s primary product.

The other thing Google’s taken so much flak for is that they don’t ever go with their gut instinct, like Apple does. Apple’s all about the feel of things, people say, and Google is so calculated in everything they do. They A/B test everything and they back up all their decisions, right down to layout changes of their web site, with data demonstrating that this is the right thing to do. Apple’s approach is vastly different. Apple is famous for rejecting the use of focus groups, and although their design process involves a ton of iteration and testing of their own, it’s understood to be based a lot more on the “feel” of something than any tangible data.

But to say that Google is worse off for this than had they not been so hell bent on having statistically significant data backing everything they do completely ignores the massive successes that Google has enjoyed with their products. Conversely, Apple has demonstrated on several occasions that their approach doesn’t work when they try making a product that is in a space Google dominates.  Remember iAd? It offers a great user experience.  Well, I think it does. Truth is, their fill rate is so abysmal that I haven’t seen an iAd that actually is an ad.  Let’s not forget MobileMe, either.  Apple has transitioned its webmail several times, and the service availability is interrupted during each transition (i.e. you can’t actually get a new account when Apple’s transitioning the product from one name to another. You can’t get a MobileMe email address right now, but you can’t get iCloud yet either). Clearly Google’s approach is winning in more than a few of the spaces they compete in.

Google’s stated mission is “to organize all the world’s information.” It’s a lofty goal, and some might even characterize it as Orwellian. Note the absence in this mission of anything about selling ads to people. Google’s focus on the advertising is only as important to them in the sense that it keeps them running. We all depend on water and oxygen, but few of us are exclusively focused on obtaining these things; we just do because we know that we need to.

And Google’s numerous forays into social networking have largely been duds. Google+ managed to get larger initial user growth than Facebook, but it’s not yet clear whether it will take off.  Facebook already offers a lot more.  People are strangely convinced that Google can’t succeed if they don’t end up with a successful social strategy.  Yes, social networks have grown quite a bit, but they don’t really replace anything on the internet, except maybe earlier IM services. It’s a whole new space, and it’s not really going to replace any of the other stuff that people use the internet for.  I’m not saying it’s not of some strategic importance for your product to be social savvy, but it’s not the be all end all that people seem to think it is.

As Google has entered other companies’ spaces and has turned previous partners into competitors through entering these spaces, their different approach to things has admittedly led to an inferior product. Android feels in many ways like an iPhone wannabe, mostly following Apple on adding features (though the notification center was Android’s first by a long shot, and I salute Google for such innovation).  However, for us to tell Google that their approach is wrong on these products would be harmful to innovation overall.  It’d also be ignoring the fact that there are more Android users than iPhone users. But by having Google develop new ideas on their own, even if they are quite distinct from Apple’s thinking, it gives us more new ideas.  Google will continue copying some of Apple’s ideas that it likes (and get sued for it), and Apple will continue copying Google’s ideas as it sees fit. Apple and Google need to be ripping each other’s ideas off, because the consumer ends up winning.

Peace out. Namaste.

Perhaps the biggest concern Apple aficionados have about Steve Jobs’s departure from Apple isn’t that Apple will suddenly fall apart, but that there won’t be any breakthrough new products like Mac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad.  It’s a fear of mine as well, but I think the next area Apple’s going to revolutionize is the living room through Apple TV.

Apple’s had the Apple TV and despite anemic sales they’ve kept it around as a “hobby” of sorts in terms of their sales performance expectations. Apple knows there’s something there, but they haven’t quite put enough into it to really hit it hard.  However, if you look at the markets Apple has gone into in the past, this one is a really perfect logical next step for them.

Let’s look at the four major product lines Apple has made that revolutionized computers.  You could even say there are five. They are the personal computer (Apple //), the reinvention of the personal computer (the Mac), the MP3 player with iPod, cell phones with iPhone, and then the tablet world and even perhaps another reinvention of personal computers with iPad.  Let’s look at each of these product categories and see if we can find a pattern:

Before personal computers, you bought computers in kits and had to assemble them yourself at the component level. Some had no monitors at all and instead had some blinking lights. You often had to make the case for the computer yourself.  It was a major geek tool.  Apple came along and changed the computer into a product you could use right out of the box, complete with monitor and keyboard. Very little assembly was needed.

As these computers grew in popularity, they still remained something that not every household had. After all, there was quite a bit of a learning curve associated with using a computer, and interacting with a computer by using keyboard commands isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Apple sought to solve this first with the Lisa, but then tried again with Macintosh, an all-in-one computer that featured a graphical user interface that you interacted with using a mouse. This was a ground up rethinking of how the computer worked, even though it a lot of the components appeared similar.

Then, for a really long time, no game changing products came from Apple. Sure, there were clever things like Newton coming out (and let’s not forget about Pippin!), but half-baked implementations left them doomed. Steve Jobs was gone, and though that didn’t necessarily mean Apple had to be doomed, the leadership that replaced him were incapable of making great products.

But after Jobs returned, we soon after saw a new market arrive.  MP3 players were around at the time, but they all either had pathetic capacities (like 32 megs, enough to hold maybe 10 songs if you’re lucky) or if they were hard drive based players, they were bulky, because they had a 2.5″ hard drive in them. And using them was a pain. They had USB connections to the computer, and it took a really long time to copy tunes to them. And the UI wasn’t that friendly. It was analogous to a CD player’s UI.  Then, iPod came along. iPod solved all of these issues. It had a huge hard drive (5 gigs was insane at the time), a great 10 hour battery life, and it was the size of a deck of cards. And it had a great UI, and it was easy to browse through a large library of music. Copying music to it was easy, too. You just plugged in the FireWire cable and you copied a song or two per second.

Cell phone use was growing in the mid-2000s, but as they were trying to get more sophisticated, they sucked at it.  Cell phone data plans charged by the kilobyte and were extremely expensive.  Using the internet on one of these things was an exercise in futility. You often had to view things with a crippled browser with no JavaScript or any rendering resembling anything like the web page. The phone was riddled with buttons everywhere, and navigating through the UI of the phone itself was painful. Then, after long awaited rumors and endless mockups by users, Apple does come out with a phone. It’s simple and elegant, having only two exterior buttons (plus volume control and a silencer). The screen is large and all touch based.  It’s an order of magnitude easier to use than any other smartphone that’s ever existed. And smartphones have never looked the same since then.

Fast forward a couple of years, and you’ll see that there is a growing murmur that Apple is hard at work on a tablet computer. People seem to love the concept of tablets, but none of the ones on the market are particularly good. They are all running essentially the same desktop Windows OS which isn’t well optimized for a tablet, or it’s using a proprietary tablet OS that doesn’t have many apps available for it (see: Archos).  Apple releases iPad, an elegant tablet that runs the well established iOS, is very thin and relatively light, and thanks to Apple’s now sizable clout in the supply chain, has a price $300 lower than what pundits expected. Competitors are struggling to make a competing device that matches iPad’s price, let alone beats it.  iPad has a level of simplicity that desktop computers have never managed to achieve because iPad throws most of the conventional desktop UI patterns and metaphors out the window.

Picking up on a theme here? Apple looks at existing devices or classes of devices whose user experience is poor, and it simplifies them. A lot of anti-Apple pundits brush this effort off, as if redesigning phone UIs is nothing more than putting a paint job on something. If making the product Apple-caliber were as simple as these people say it is, then every other company would be doing it too.

But picking up on this theme and following Apple’s very public statements every quarter that Apple TV is a project that they see something in, I think Apple’s moving into the living room next with a reinvented TV experience. I might be going out on a limb here, but I think it might actually be a full blown TV.

TVs are a race to the bottom right now. They’re very much a commodity, and they’re made by various Japanese companies that pile on meaningless features and numbers onto the TV’s box hoping that it will make consumers feel like they’re getting great value. The TV’s remote control manages to have dozens of buttons, despite the fact that people only use a few of them anyway and don’t know what most of them mean (even technical minded folk like me are included in this).  The TV has an array of ports on the back that most don’t understand, and each TV is a little different to use from other TVs. When you go to someone’s house and they have their own TV/home theater setup and you want to watch something, you have to ask your host exactly what the hell you need to do to get the TV working. Though setting a TV up is usually straightforward, it sure isn’t friendly, and companies like Best Buy have been eagerly capitalizing on it by charging hundreds to send a minimum wage worker to your house to set it up. Profit margins on TVs are laughably low, and even though the TVs have a seemingly huge amount of functionality on them (as evidenced by their myriad remote control buttons) we usually derive all of our functionality from the devices we connect to them. These are the set top boxes. Nobody likes them, yet everybody has several. And inevitably, each set top box has its own overly complicated remote control.

It’s a fucking nightmare.

I think Apple’s next product is going to be a TV that eliminates all of this complexity in a major way. The new Apple TV will not be riddled with a ton of ports on the back. In fact, it might not have any at all. Maybe a way to connect speakers, and maybe a USB port or Thunderbolt port just in case.  The remote control will be simple. It might even be a simplified handheld iOS device with the Remote app.  Or maybe it won’t come with one at all, because you’ll be expected to use your own iOS device to control the TV. There will be no DVD player. No cable set-top box. No TiVo.

Instead, it will get all of its content from the internet. With iCloud you’ll be able to access and listen to all of your music and TV shows and movies. It will be powered by iOS and there will be an SDK so that developers  and content providers will be able to make their own apps that are sort of like channels. You will be able to subscribe to these on a per-network basis, or maybe even a per-show basis, and pay smaller subscription fees for just what you use. Netflix will be there, MLB will be there, NBA will be there, perhaps some other sports channels will be on there.

iOS has grown into an incredible gaming platform, and this will happen around Apple TV as well. I think selling Bluetooth game controllers a la Wii would be a bit too conventional. Perhaps iPhones will be the controllers for those games. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a controller with some buttons so I could play some platform games with a lot of fun, but it’s not very Apple-like.  These probably won’t be games for the hardcore gamer, but they’re going to be really great casual games for the families with children and people like me who don’t have much patience to spend hours gaming.

People will lose their shit at the thought that Apple has the audacity to make a TV that doesn’t have the expandability of being able to add extra set-top boxes. There may even be some fear of planned obsolescence given that iOS sees a regular release cycle and people expect their TVs to last a decade or so. People will complain that Apple is killing the DVD too early. People will complain that Apple is doing this to hold back customers from having the control to add things to their TV. Really, this is just a simplification of something that is way too complicated. We’re ready for DVDs to die, and we’re ready to see the TV become smart.

Alternatively, I could see a universe in which Apple doesn’t quite go so far as to sell the TV itself (it is admittedly a race to the bottom) but I can see them revamping the Apple TV set top box to do all of these things.  That would be less bold for sure (and I’d be stuck having that monstrous TV remote around just to turn the TV on and off) but it would be a crowd pleaser. Still, it isn’t characteristic of Apple to take that road.

I am confident that things are about to happen to Apple TV, and the potential market for it is huge. I’m pretty excited to see what Apple comes up with.

The initial reaction to Microsoft’s unveiling of the Ribbon in Windows 8′s Explorer.exe has mostly been sour.  Of course, most of these people are using Macs and they see this as an over-complication of the UI.  Those defending Windows accuse Apple of “dumbing down” Finder to “make it look pretty” (seriously, this is a direct quote from the top comment on TechCrunch).

Though Windows isn’t my OS of choice (for a lot of reasons), I was pretty fond of Microsoft’s design choices when they switched MS Office to use the Ribbon, on the surface an uncharacteristically bold move for a company that has always been very conservative with moving things forward.  Of course, the boldness here is really pretty superficial because it mostly amounts to an (admittedly good) rearrangement of all the stuff that was already there.

Microsoft knows that its users will backlash whenever they make a UI change whether it’s good or bad, because most users just hate software companies mucking around with their internets and such.  And given that Microsoft already deals with corporations whose upgrade cycles are painfully slow, they don’t want their product having a bad reputation.  Even if it’s completely unfounded, the perception that the changes are bad has the potential to influence big wigs at corporations who will tell IT not to move forward with the upgrade. So Microsoft is pretty timid when they present this stuff, and they started off their blog post with a ton of explanation of the research they’ve done.  The conclusion: some small percentage of commands make up 90% of what people do, and these commands are buried in awkward places (I’m paraphrasing, also I only skimmed it, but believe me, that’s what they said).

So, they put those 90% in one place:

I still really don’t get the whole thing with the name “Home” for the main tab, but whatever. All the common things you might want to do with a file are right here.  And the things you want to do more frequently have larger icons than the things you don’t do as often.  I haven’t played with a beta or anything, but this one screenshot looks really nice.  It’s long time that the Ribbon made its way to other Windows applications.  Microsoft has way too many UI schemes in Windows and the more they can cut down on this, the better.

Though I think these are real improvements, the way Microsoft solved these issues is still very Microsoft-ian.  I can best characterize Microsoft’s approach to these issues versus Apple’s with the following metaphor: if you found that you had to cross a swamp, Microsoft’s solution would be to give you a pair of boots to cross it with.  Helpful.  Apple’s approach, however, would be to drain the swamp.

As you can see above, Microsoft assumes that you want to manipulate your files in essentially the same way that you would have with a command line; that is, performing a command on a file (or files).  When the GUI came along, Microsoft decided that the best way to deal with this would be to let you use commands to manipulate the files.  On the Mac, the main approach to manipulating files is more physical.  Instead of issuing commands, you do a lot more dragging and dropping.  And in Mac OS, the GUI is designed very clearly for this to be the way for you to manipulate your files.  You have spring loaded folders, the toolbar doesn’t have many commands on it for the file, and Apple disables the “cut” action in Finder to keep you from cutting and pasting files.  The ability to “reveal” a file in the Finder is very important so you can get to the file to do what you want to it. it’s a lot more common in Mac OS than in Windows.

Is one approach better than the other? Hard to say. I admit, I manipulate my files using Alfred quite a bit.  However, I salute Microsoft for coming up with an original UI pattern and sticking with it enough to start putting it in other core Windows apps (I know the Ribbon made its way into several core Windows apps in Windows 7, which excited me as well). Of course, Microsoft’s choices aren’t all great ones like adding the Ribbon to things.  There is this nagging notion of Microsoft basically splitting Windows 8 into having two UIs because Microsoft wants you to have the same OS for your tablet and desktop computer, ignoring the fact that you basically are just shoehorning two very different user experiences into one. That one, I just don’t get.

Peace out. Namaste.

Evernote posted a remarkably cool product in their blog (http://blog.evernote.com/2011/09/02/htc-tablets-and-evernote/) by HTC. Understanding that this is a major thing to me to say, it’s the first time I have seen an awesome feature in a non-iPad tablet that made me want to replace my iPad with it.

This new notebook app is a full blown Evernote client, and it allows for a super natural method of note entry. You can type in text as needed, you can scribble as needed, and you can annotate the text with scribbles when needed. You can record audio. The audio syncs with the keystrokes you type so you can very easily get audio context when you are taking notes for something. I admit, I’m not the heavy note taker that I used to be, but I would have absolutely loved to have had this when I was in school. This is a killer feature.

And Evernote should be thoroughly embarrassed that a third party had to come out with this before they did. It’s not like Evernote doesn’t know people want these features. Evernote has been anemic at coming out with all of its most requested features. We’ve been demanding rich text editing for, I don’t know, three years now? It just came out last week. I wouldn’t complain about this so much if Evernote was focusing on making their app super high performance, but it doesn’t really perform that well in that respect. They brought their Windows client up to par after realizing they needed to do a rewrite in native code instead of managed code (surely no small feat and I salute them for it) but on the Mac client it takes seconds for a new note to appear when I click the new note button. I can forgive up to a half a second or so, but 3-4 seconds is just brutal for a task like that. For comparison, Mail.app provides me with a system largely like Evernote (a large searchable library of snippets of information) and I have well north of 100,000 messages in Mail. I’ve yet to see Mail lag, even on hardware that is relatively slow (and I’m running Evernote on good hardware). If Evernote blew me away with its core functionality I wouldn’t be complaining as much because they could point to their app and say “it takes effort to get the fundamentals right, so STFU”, but in reality it is pretty mediocre execution. It’s forgivable for a young company, but Evernote is past that point.

I understand that Evernote can’t grant every user’s feature requests and they realize that too, and they tried mitigating this with Evernote Trunk, a curated collection of apps that integrate with Evernote. I usually don’t see very good integration (mostly it’s a “click a button to manually send a PDF of this to Evernote!” type of integration rather than really being baked into Evernote) and although I assume this was supposed to leave Evernote to focus on core functionality rather than loading its clients up with extra features most users don’t need, but I didn’t really see any progress being made. Usually even though I store all things I want to look up later in Evernote, the reality is that I can usually just Google something and get my answer a lot faster (for instance, yesterday I needed to find a note I made for setting the hidden flag to false for ~/Library on the Mac. I spent 2 minutes searching for terms I knew were in the note, and Evernote never found them because its search algorithm ignored it because the word didn’t start with what I was searching for. I never found it in Evernote. I googled it and found the answer in under eight seconds). On the mobile clients, performance is worse yet.

Evernote just closed a round of funding even though they have all of their last round in the bank still and despite the fact that they are still profitable. This puts them in a great position for the future, and it enables them to be around for 100 years, which is their goal. That’s an important goal for a company that wants to be relied upon by people as their second brain. I listen to what the Evernote team has to say about feedback and it is quite clear that they are aware of what people want. They are also moving in the direction that people want them to be moving in. But they’re really slow at doing it, and it occurred to me that HTC being able to make this notebook app that is a full blown Evernote client with features Evernote clients probably won’t have for years if ever in a fraction of the time it took Evernote’s team to add rich text editing to its iOS client shows that this really needs to be a wake up call for the Evernote team. But they’re oblivious to it. Instead, they’re thrilled to see a developer making these great features and truth be told, they should be. Those suckers at HTC just made Evernote an app for free, and now Evernote doesn’t have to listen to its HTC tablet users beg for months for Evernote to make a client for them.

It’s really important to keep in mind here that you don’t hear me uttering a single complaint about any of the many other note taking and information management options out there. Know why? It’s because I don’t use them at all. They’re all missing some really important feature to me that Evernote already has. Evernote may not do any of what it does well, but it does do the essential things I need it to do well enough that I don’t look elsewhere. Evernote manages to always do just enough to keep me from getting rid of it.

I guess that’s a decent strategy.