Many major movie studios are restricting movies from being rented (via Redbox or Netflix or other means) during the first 28 days after release. The belief is that the studios will sell more movies. This is stupid.

But before I get into why it is stupid, let me explain my own movie set up. First, my wife and I watch lots of movies. We are aficionados and have 300 or so movies in the house plus use Netflix, both rentals and on demand. We do not have cable (just the local channels and Discovery) as I could no longer justify paying the cable company $70 a month for crap so instead we have higher bandwidth Internet and our Netflix subscription. We don’t go to the theater much because most movies aren’t worth seeing on the big screen.

First, when my wife and I see a movie we want to watch, something just hitting theaters, we add it to our Netflix queue. We only know it is a “new release” when Netflix tells us so. With that, we could care less whether it became a new release four weeks ago or today.

Second, we only buy movies that we really would watch again. Since few movies are of that caliber we don’t buy many movies any more. In fact I would say we buy less than three movies/TV shows a year, whether they are in the new release window or not.

We devised a rating system years ago: buy, theater, rental, cable, no way. A “buy” movie has to be exceptional. A “theater” movie has to be best on the big screen. A “rental” is interesting but not qualified for the top two. “Cable”, a category we abandoned a while ago, is the recycled movies you find on standard cable and “no way” is, well, self explanatory.

So for you movie studios paying attention, it is not rent v. buy. It is more like watch v. don’t watch. And to be honest, lately you’ve been failing at that one, too.

Various observations from my week at Apple’s developer conference (WWDC):

• There were a few smokers at the conference and they would all go out on the patio on the third floor to smoke. None of them seemed to speak native English.
• Amazing how many people came in from outside the US for this. I met people from Canada, Columbia, Brazil, England, Germany, France, Spain and Australia, just to name a few off the top of my head.
• I always find it funny going to these conferences and seeing people I already know from Portland. In fact, I mostly see these folks, people who live minutes from my home and office, 1000 miles away rather than here in Portland.
• I also find it funny that I seemed to run into the same people all the time. For instance, I had breakfast with the same person every day. It wasn’t coordinated. It just happened that way.
• San Francisco is a lot dirtier than I remember it from six or seven years ago, the last time I spent any time in the city.
• I arrived on Sunday last week and left on Friday afternoon. Five days is exhausting. My brain didn’t slow down from the time I got off the airplane. It just kept running all week, day and night. On top of that, five hours of sleep a night — even without a running brain — isn’t enough sleep for me. I slept like crazy this past weekend.
• In one session the presenter asked how many had not shipped an app.  About 2/3 of the room raised their hands. That surprised me especially since the sessions were fairly advanced. It was in a session, however, for beginners, so the ratio might have been skewed. (I went to a few beginner sessions just to make sure I didn’t miss anything in my learning process. Every session gave me at least a nugget or two.)
• 5000+ people at Moscone was more people than at my high school, undergrad and grad universities combined.
• I have never stood on so many lines in my life. There were lines into the building in the morning, lines into the breakfast/lunch room, lines into every session, lines to sign up for labs, lines into the men’s room. (One of the few times the lines were shorter into the women’s room than the men’s, which is a sad statement about the number of female developers, I am afraid.)
• I went to an event here in Portland yesterday sponsored by Edward Tufte. Very interesting discussion of infographics, or the use of visuals to represent large chunks of data. There were about 500 people there. Even though the Tufte crowd was 1/10 the size of WWDC, there were way more women in the crowd.
• It was a good week. I learned a lot, met some interesting people. But I sure am happy to be home.

I had this dream* last night that I was working on powerOne software calculator for iPhone at some kind of incubator for iPhone development. It was a huge space — like a convention hall — and had all kinds of people there from small companies to big ones. Apple folks were floating around the building.

All of a sudden I had a brainstorm how to solve the problem of Adobe Flash on an iPhone. I realized that we don’t really need Flash to run automatically in the browser but that I just wanted to see Flash content — like the videos on my family blog. So I came up with this idea of an app that you’d paste in a url. The app would parse the html, pull out the Flash videos and show boxes for each one. To see it, I’d just click on it. No plug-ins would be needed and Adobe already had the ability to run Flash on an iPhone anyway since it’s creating a developer environment for creating iPhone Flash apps.

Because the app was an app and not a browser plug-in, Apple wouldn’t care and it could use a customized WebKit parser/browser for the html to keep it within Apple’s terms of use. To make sure Apple was okay with it, it would be smart enough to only show videos.

At first I tried to get John Gruber’s attention to talk to him about it. For some reason John had an office right around the corner from my desk, but he was always on the phone or busy with people so couldn’t get his attention.

So I took it to the Adobe people who were elsewhere in the building. They LOVED the idea and started working on it right away, figuring this was a way into the App Store. They said they rewarded people for bringing them great ideas and said they’d drop off the 30″ Apple monitor later on.

I headed back to my desk and when I got there, the Apple reps were waiting for me. It was a woman — someone I seemed to know — and she took me off to a room where it was just me and a bunch of Apple people. They were mad and started grilling me about how I came up with the idea and why I would share it with Adobe. They threatened to kick me and Infinity Softworks out of the App Store and were discussing amongst themselves how to unwrap this mess.

And all I kept saying is, I just wanted to see the video of my children.

That’s when I woke up.

(* Yes, it really was a dream. The fact that I am dreaming about this stuff is probably the saddest part of the whole dream.)

UPDATE: I’m completely wrong. I had a friend who had worked in the industry straighten me out. It turns out “voluntary” is a misnomer. It’s only voluntary because the government says recall or we’ll make you and the “voluntary” part is for PR purposes. What a shame. What my friend said to me:

You’re giving Toyota too much credit.  Coming from working in and growing up with the auto industry my entire life, I will tell you that there is no such thing as a voluntary recall.  It’s always one of those gun-to-the-head things, believe me. Don’t want to burst your bubble or anything. The gov’t probably gave them the option to voluntarily recall (for PR’s sake) or they would be forced into it.  There’s a whole process.  I worked in safety restraints testing, which is strictly regulated, tested, and monitored for potential recalls (and has lots of lawsuits because no one wants to admit that they weren’t wearing their seatbelt).  Having the option to ‘volunteer’ to recall is also based on the severity.  And when you volunteer, you also get more flexibility on how you manage it, to minimize your costs, etc.  No one wants the gov’t in their business.  Plus no one wants to do an expensive recall unless they absolutely have to.

I also could tell you a thing or two about Japanese quality, having worked for both Japanese-owned automotive suppliers and American-owned automotive suppliers.  It’s all a facade, really.  A lot of cover ups and saving face happens. Bottom line, I will give to you is that the Japanese are much better at ‘managing their customers’ especially at the dealership level.  The American cars get a worse rep because they don’t deal with a problem and fix it right away.  The Japanese automakers might have a lot of problems, too, but they fix it right the first time so the customer is immediately satisfied and doesn’t let issues fester.  But this is a good practice in any industry.  Some get it and some don’t.

Before the recall — before I thought Toyota had done the right thing — I had mixed feelings about my current Toyota vehicle. As mentioned, I had owned multiple Toyota cars and trucks before my latest RAV4 purchase. And while I did a little research, I didn’t think twice about buying a Toyota. They always got the little things (and big ones) right.

The RAV4 felt different to me. The airflow was odd, the way the spare tire worked was weird, the way the car started was strange. For the first time I’m not getting better than listed gas mileage with a Toyota. I’m way under. There were a bunch of little things that made me question the car’s quality.

I’m not saying I’d never buy a Toyota again, and the recall won’t dominate my decision. But next time I’ll do more research and drive more cars to see which one I like best.

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ORIGINAL: If you missed it, Toyota recalled 2.3 million cars, trucks and SUVs, announced last week. There is concern that the acceleration pedal could stick. This follows a recall regarding floor mats that could slide and get lodged under the break pedal. Both recalls were voluntary. Toyota also announced that they stopped production of these vehicles until the problem can be resolved. This pedal problem is believed to have caused 19 deaths here in the U.S.

So I’m listening to the radio this morning on the way to the gym and hearing that Toyota is taking a huge hit because of this, that people are uncertain about buying Toyota cars now.

I can understand how that would be an initial reaction. After all people trust their car to keep them safe and not go all HAL on them.

But, folks, this is foolish.

Toyota just voluntarily recalled 2.3 million U.S. automobiles over 19 deaths. The tobacco industry lives with those deaths every millisecond. If anything, it reconfirmed my belief in Toyota. After all they could have swept this under the rug and ignored the problem. Instead they will incur hundreds of millions of dollars in recall costs, production costs and sales — not to mention the likely hit to its reputation.

If anything, I have more faith in Toyota doing the right thing in the future.

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Disclosure: My wife and I own a Toyota RAV4 that is not in the recall. The two of us have been driving a combined 36 years, have owned three Toyotas, including the RAV4, plus six other cars including three Hondas, a Nissan and two Pontiacs.

Two thoughts on Major League Baseball and the World Series:

1. This disparity in baseball between the haves and have-nots is so great it’s hard to get too excited about pro ball. I love the sport and I love the Indians and will always be a fan, but it’s really hard to get worked up over the rest of the league. I’ve been a major fan most of my life, listening to games (the Tribe plus anyone I can hear), going to stadiums just to see baseball, knowing the stats of every player in the league. I just can’t do it anymore.

2. The Indians were all over this World Series. C.C. Sabathia pitched for the Yankees; Cliff Lee pitched for the Phillies. They are the last two reining Cy Young award winners (best pitcher in baseball). Since this disparity is so great and the Indians can’t really do anything about keeping their own players once they approach/reach free agency, I’ve decided to feel more like a proud father than a jealous boyfriend when our players move on. Thome, Vizquel, Ramirez, Lofton, Lee, Sabathia, Martinez… they will always by my kids.