Yearly Archives: 2010

Good Google/Bad Google

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It always amazes me the image that corporations craft for themselves. Some companies fully embrace that image. For example, HP has a very strong reputation that is reinforced by everyone at the company, in the end forcing out a very highly successful CEO over a few thousand dollars in expense report inaccuracies. Impressive in the least that ethics trumped “shareholder value” at least at this company.

But some companies don’t really stand up to their reputations. Google I am afraid, is one of them. Google has a two part reputation: one is for innovation and the other is for ethics made famous by their “do no evil” mantra. But both, in recent days, have proven to show the king for what he really is: naked.

The first is more cut and dry, the great innovation machine of Google. But is the company really that innovative? First let us define innovation. When I say innovation I mean a highly successful new idea that influences the markets. I could argue that Google has had only one major innovations in its history; no more, no less. Remember, that is a single breakthrough from a company that encourages democracy of innovation to the tune of 20% of their paid time.

This innovation? It wasn’t AdWords itself as they got the idea from somewhere else but rather how to incorporate ads in such a way that people would actually click on them. Everything else the company did was buying or ripping off others’ ideas. Email, documents, web site creation, operating systems are all just bought products and/or rip-offs of other people’s ideas.

The second, Google’s “do no evil” approach to business, is quickly being proven a farce. This is exemplified by the behind-the-scenes ranglings with Verizon over net neutrality. Net neutrality, if you aren’t paying attention, is the belief that all companies should be treated equally when it comes to speed and bandwidth use of the network infrastructure. In other words a company like Microsoft or Google or Apple can’t use their market power to buy favoritism with carriers and other internet service providers. In other words, a company like Infinity Softworks can develop a web service and get the same treatment as Nike when it comes to access to customers.

Google, destroying the last vestiges of their reputation, threw net neutrality under the bus by trying to cut a back room deal with Verizon. Net neutrality, they agreed before being outed by the New York Times, is fine for DSL and cable companies but wouldn’t have to be upheld by cell phone carriers. Now Google has to be treated as hostile to net neutrality rules, breaking them away from the rest of the technology industry, siding with their most critical US partner Verizon.

I think it was more than net neutrality thrown under the bus this day.

Market Share Doesn’t Equal Product Sales

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This just in: Android had a phenomenal quarter, Nokia’s market share is down 11% year-over-year and Apple and RIM are pretty much holding steady/slightly down.

So the questions come like they do each quarter: when are you going to stop being stupid and develop for <platform X>, which this quarter is Android?

The problem is, from a developer perspective, market share doesn’t equal sales.

Sure, number of devices sold plays a part in the decision but it isn’t the only one and, frankly, not even at the top of the list. So a customer wrote and asked when we were going to develop for Android. This is what I told him:

Thanks for asking. There are a number of factors [regarding us developing for Android], to be honest. One major one is that we are just a small company and developing the skill set for multiple platforms is hard. Once we figure out how to make money in the iOS world than it will be more feasible to look at other platforms.

That is a business decision. The technical issue that concerns me the most is Android’s fracturing. We dealt with this in the Palm world as the OS got licensed to 7-10 hardware manufacturers who all changed the underlying code. Android is even worse. There are over 150 devices and no one device remains popular for more then 4-6 months. On top of that all the major licensees are writing their own UI front ends or completely customizing the OS.

For us it is the calculator specifically that is a problem. It just doesn’t resize at all and has to be customized — rewritten — for every hardware change.

This doesn’t change my opinion of Android. I think it will do very well in the market and people will buy lots of Android devices, whether they are actually Android devices with Google’s direction or some offshoot of that. Hardware guys will love it because it is free (without Google’s apps) and they can put their own UI stamp on the device, especially with Microsoft setting the specific standard for Windows Phone 7. But I think it is going to be very difficult for developers in that market. So far, with 160,000 devices sold daily, there are no stories of developer success at all.

This doesn’t mean we won’t ever write for Android. It just means Infinity Softworks sits on the sidelines and watches, at least for a while longer.

Competing On Price Is Bad Policy

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Even though we are going to be $8 million in the hole that will require position and school day cuts, my hometown’s school board decided to give everyone raises [article here].

The money quote: “[Superintendent Mike] Scott recommended the board approve the raise, saying it could hamper the district’s ability to draw good candidates for jobs and may push some to other better paying districts.”

And he’s absolutely right if all he is going to do is compete based on money.

It’s a great lesson for all of us running a business. Competing on price is a lose-lose proposition. It is all about why people want your product, not what it gives them or how much it costs.

Same for my town. Our schools don’t have to pay top dollar for teachers and administrators if we compete on other grounds: excellent training, incredible support, fantastic curriculum, exciting opportunities.

No one goes into education for the pay, just like people don’t buy products because of the price. So why are we making it about the money?

The Silicon Valley Distortion Field

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Friday was a busy day for me. I had two meetings in the morning surrounded by telephone calls, and then more calls in the afternoon. In total, I spent somewhere between 4 and 5 hours on the telephone, all on my iPhone 4. I had one dropped call but that is because I wandered into a dead spot near the couch in the family room, not because of the iPhone. At the end of all my phone calls, after using the phone for Internet connections and hours of calls, I still had 75% of my battery remaining.

The events of the last few weeks surrounding Apple’s iPhone 4 and the antenna problem have bordered on hysterical, at least if you are in the Silicon Valley distortion field. There are various distortion fields around the country — movie industry in LA, media in NYC, politics in Washington — but it seems over the past 15 years the Silicon Valley field has grown to rival these others in size and depth and influence.

Here’s the reality: no one cares about this problem except Silicon Valley and those of us who are connected to that world but live outside it. And I think this Valley distortion problem has gotten worse. A decade ago there were strong technology companies outside the Valley: Microsoft dominated the northwest, Dell dominated the south, IBM dominated the northeast. Sure, Apple, Oracle, Cisco and the bulk of companies were in the Valley but at least there were outside voices.

Now these three behemoths have faded in importance and Google, a Valley company, has risen in its place. As if the epicenter of tech activity wasn’t squarely in the Valley before, not it really is.

Watching Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, berate John Gruber of Daring Fireball and MG Siegler, a TechCrunch writer, on air brought this problem front-and-center for me. It seems to go like this: If it doesn’t pass mustard with the technorati in the Valley than, by God, it must be lousy technology. Unfortunately the screwy nature of the Valley is as likely to render good tech bad as bad tech good, at least in how the rest of the world views it.

Arrington, if you missed it (video here if you have 20 minutes to waste), road rough-shod over Siegler and Gruber again and again, proclaiming loudly that he can’t make a phone call with an iPhone 4 while in the heart of San Francisco, a place where you couldn’t make a phone call on ANY AT&T phone, period. The entire time he does this while holding a Sprint Android-based EVO, a device that Arrington uses and admits gets 20-25 minutes worth of battery life. Not exactly a strong leg to stand on there, Michael.

What the world really thinks of the iPhone 4:

  • Apple has sold 3 MILLION iPhone 4’s in three weeks.
  • Only 1.7% of those phones have been returned.
  • Apple has a 3 week wait, if you order an iPhone 4 today.

And Apple hasn’t even shipped the white iPhone 4 and will add 7 new countries in the next few weeks.

For some reason, I don’t think the antenna problem is as much an Apple weakness as a Valley one.

A City in Mourning, Again

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I don’t write often about sports, even though I am a fan of the Cleveland teams (baseball, football, basketball in that order). Fred Wilson wrote a post about LeBron James leaving the Cavs and I responded. It is hard for people not raised with the Cleveland sports mentality to understand. So I wanted to include my comment here, mostly for my own history.

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Unless you are from Cleveland (I was born there but moved to Portland, OR in college) and are a sports fan of its teams, there is just no way to understand the emotions of the city right now. (And for those of you critcizing Dan Gilbert, you are absolutely right. It was silly and probably stupid but that letter was not aimed at players; it was aimed at Cleveland fans. And every fan in the city wanted to give Gilbert a ticker-tape parade just for saying it.) Some of this is about LeBron James but most of the reaction is to a lifetime of heartache, of almost wins and our players bringing championships to other teams and teams moved and hopes dashed. It is visceral and emotional and had absolutely nothing to do with LeBron leaving. Well, not totally anyway. It is anything but rational.

It is a long history of this. It is Michael Jordan’s shot over Craig Ehlo when the Cavs were the best team in the league, it is Jose Mesa imploding in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1997 World Series to an expansion team that bought a championship. It was about Earnest Byner fumbling on the one yard line that would have sent the Browns to the Super Bowl and John Elway driving 98 yards for a touchdown and the win in another playoff game with one minute left on the clock. It was about Bill Belichek cutting Bernie Kosar and Manny Ramirez winning multiple World Series’ in Boston and Cliff Lee and CC Sabathia facing each other in game one of the World Series last year both playing for different teams. It is about Brian Sipe’s interception in the end zone that cost us the Super Bowl appearance in 1980 and about 30 years of futile owners and managers who traded away championship players for over the hill nobodies. It is a little about LeBron James and the fact that our best hope for a championship in a long-time was unable to do it even when the Cavs surrounded him by five [actually, four as LeBron was the fifth] former All-Stars. And it was, most of all, about Art Modell ripping out the heart of the city and selling it to Baltimore in the back of an airplane (and then that team winning the Super Bowl shortly thereafter).

Rationally you and your commenters are right. The balance of power in the NBA has shifted to the players. There are four major teams in the NBA and the rest are also rans: Boston, LA Lakers, Orlando and Miami. Each team has multiple All-Stars who were brought together in circumvention, you could say, of the intention of the rules of the league. And I don’t think anyone in Cleveland would begrudge LeBron for saying he wants to win championships and he feels his best chance of doing that is in Miami with Wade and Bosh. He happens to be right, in my opinion, given how the NBA works. Even Clevelanders would say we have lost good players before and will in the future, too. Sure, the initial hurt feelings would have been that but that is not what drove fans into the street to burn LeBron jerseys. What drove fans into the street was the way he did it.

What did LeBron do? He signed a three year contract and, one year into it, started courting the media and talking about free agency, giving the impression he was just waiting out his time. He didn’t tell the Cavs until he was on the air, giving Cleveland no chance to sign another top notch free agent (whether they could or not), he did it with an in-your-face style that is completely not Cleveland, and he did it in the most narcistic, self-serving way. It was an embarrassment for the city and an affront to the state.

And given everything else, given all the close calls and stolen dreams, it was completely unexpected from a Cleveland native son.