Looking at the comments of any major tech blog, and many a mainstream newspaper website one would think that as soon as Apple’s exclusivity contract with AT&T runs out (thought to be in 2010 sometime), the California-based computer firm will leave the mobile network behind. I would be wary of over-speculating about AT&T being in a headlock from an Apple tough-guy position. I think the danger to AT&T of losing exclusivity has been exagerated by some commentators.
Take the following example Megan Lavey’s position in a recent TUAW post:
AT&T has long been the subject of grumbling from the community of US iPhone users who want to use their phones legitimately. Ever since the original release back in 2007, it feels like AT&T has been trying to play catch-up when it comes to service and tower availability. But, the release of the iPhone 3G S might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The ramifications for AT&T will come when it sits down at the negotiation table with Apple to extend its current gig as exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the United States. Apple won’t forget that AT&T didn’t have key features in place when they needed to be there. If Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, or any other carrier can convince Apple that they would be ahead of the game while AT&T lags (and, believe me, it wouldn’t be that hard of an argument to make), Apple will take its toys and go elsewhere.
I don’t think this is going to happen, and here’s why. Just by chance I watched Steve Jobs’s interview with Walt Mossberg at 2007’s All Things D (D5) Conference, and I was struck by the sense of loyalty that Jobs expressed when referring to how Cingular took a risk on Apple in accepting the iPhone to their network while Verizon (we hear) wouldn’t give them access. The quote arrives just before the two minute mark:
“I think Cingular invested in us, they took a gamble on us, and likewise we took a gamble on them. So, I will never forget that.”
AT&T, at the time called Cingular, may not be the strongest network, but as CEO Randall Stephenson mentioned in this year’s D Conference, the top complaint for all mobile phone networks in the US is signal; it’s not unique to Cingular. There’s no saying there will be any less of a mob decrying Verizon signal strengths were Apple to release an iPhone CDMA version. I imagine Apple could likely keep a level of pragmatism and institutional memory in its decision making process – it wants the best business result but it also wants a carrier in the US that it can actually deal with, and back in 2007 (let alone 2004 when they started working on the iPhone), Verizon was so locked up in their own software packages, network restrictions and carrier lock-ins, I can’t imagine how a pairing of such companies would have worked. The cultures are, ironically, too similar; both Apple and Verizon want to have full control over their ‘product’ and thus a melding of minds just wouldn’t have worked at the time.
This is not to say that there is no possibility of Apple adopting Verizon as a partner, but I think the importance of institutional memory and personal relationships is incredibly within Apple, evidenced by the number of times that key employees have been hired and rehired again after any attempts to jump ship, taking people like JonRubinstein and Craig Federighi as obvious examples. Who knows whether Verizon will care about Apple’s products once they’ve got them. For the moment the iPhone is AT&T’s golden egg and thus they work to retain it. Once it’s gone how will that relationship with Apple play out? Will AT&T remain accommodating? Verizon might be added as a carrier, but it won’t be without considerable fight and, I’m guessing, significant anguish.
These friggin guys just don’t quit, do they? They’ve ruined computing. …Now they’re going after household furniture too with this “Surface” computer. Just think. Soon you can sit down and start cursing at your coffee table when it freezes up or needs to reboot or warns you about some security alert. Jesus.
A new display technology to be released by Microsoft today called Surface could be a dangerous threat to Apple Computer (as well as others like Philips, Sony and Nokia). It’s essentially a multi-touch screen embedded into table that allows the user(s) to interact with it through using their hands as well as objects placed on the table itself. You could use your fingers to grab the edges of a photo to make it bigger or just drag it ‘into’ a mobile phone that’s laying on the ‘Surface’ and in connnection with the device. This dragging move would simply drop the image into the mobile phone’s storage. It could be used (according to Microsoft) to plan directions to or from a location (such as if it were placed in a coffee shop/airline departure or arrivals lound/museum).
What’s interesting about the technology is that the brains behind it are not all that revolutionary. Many of the techniques shown have been displayed in other forum like Jeff Han’s multi-touch talks at the 2006 and 2007 TED conferences, the music browsing application’s technique of flipping the album cover art to show a track listing (showed at Steve Jobs’ January 2007 Macworld(iPhone) Keynote). Embedded dots on the bottom of an article would read the pre-programmed intentions of an object (like a higly reduced Datamatrix machine readable barcode). The underlying technology isn’t new but screwing it all together in a pleasing way is. This is the realm of Apple’s strengths and Microsoft, in a number of areas of late, has been showing its design acumen is not as faulty as sometimes thought.
This device could be a success for Microsoft, and ironically if Apple were to have made it I don’t think it would be. Why? Because the technology relies on interaction with other companies and partnering with groups to place the device, something that Apple is very weak on. A great example is the iPhone currently on the route to release. It may be a fantastic product but months after its announcement, developers still don’t know if it will be open to outside applications or whether it will be locked down to only Apple-approved initiatives. Of course Microsoft isn’t always successful in this field: see technologies like its Spot watches and other devices that are based on FM radio transmissions of data over the air. The project is still running but never gained anything like the momentum Microsoft must have hoped it would attain.
What’s most dangerous about this development is that it makes Microsoft look cool and hip. If you can simply place your iPodZune onto your Surface at home and it starts piping music through your home theatre system without the hassle of having to network it up with your PC then that makes Microsoft look good. Even better if you can do that with your Zune at a friend’s house. Or a friend’s player at your house. It’s the social interaction that is key and makes devices like this work. Getting maps at a coffee shop has limited appeal after a while. There’s no reason why you’d rather do it there than your PC at home, but sharing photos or videos of a recent vacation is much more fun at a local third-space than in your office cubicle.
The technology is amazing because it’s not the technology that’s interesting. It’s the content partners and the network of locations that counts. This isn’t perhaps the type of thing that’s going to be in an average home for some time yet but it’s the perfect thing to have in a B2C environment like a coffee shop/dentist waiting room or even a corporate foyer. These play directly into Microsoft’s strengths, and Apple’s weaknesses.
The WSJ’s D-Conference joint interview today between Jobs and Gates should be interesting.
“For everything sold on iTunes, we get the majority of the 70-79p per unit sale price,” [one independent label owner] said, then added: “But for everything sold on the Ruckus Network we receive the princely sum of £0.005 per unit. That’s half a pence. My distributor then takes their 25 per cent off of that, leaving myself and the artists to dish up the remaining fractions of a penny between us.”
It’s not much better through Real Networks, he informed – for sales through that service, his label receives a penny per track, he claimed. The thousand tracks sold so far have accrued £10 to the label (to share with the artists) rather than, “the £790 or so we’d have got for the same amount of sales through iTunes.” MacWorld: iTunes income substantial for music partners
I’ve been looking at jobs this afternoon after a bit of prompting from a friend. I’ve been interested in technology and one of my key interests has been as a typical ‘Apple fanboy’. Paint me with that brush. I’ve also somehow diversified in my interests in that I’m also really interested in the financial markets, banking and investment. I don’t have any experience with any of this of course: I’m a student and students by definition don’t have any money. I tell a lie, I do have a little bit of experience, but not something serious. Some years ago, I flirted for about five minutes with the BBC’s Celebdaq game which attempts to act as a fake stock market for the star power of various celebrities, based on media coverage and traffic in selling ’shares’ in the celebrity and so forth. I tried it, and hated the fact that it was so subjective. I like to really know about a subject so that if I think about actually investing in it I know I’m not being silly. I don’t need to invest in someone like Britney Spears and then find that one fine day she’s shaved her head.
So out of this interest in Apple, and an interest in investments and stocks, I end up reading quite a lot of financial news. One of the companies that is best known in the analyst sector is IDC, a data analysis firm that offers guidance to investors on market trends in much the same was as others such as Gartner. They collect data or carry out their own research operations and form opinions on their findings. In looking at their jobs on offer today I found what I think has to be one of the most comprehensive lists of things they absolutely don’t care about in their employees.
I get the impression that they actually just want the best employees and don’t really care about anything else. This is the kind of company I could work for.
IDC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. IDC does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, ancestry, sexual orientation, disability, handicap, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy-related conditions, or political beliefs.
Following on from ‘Microsoft is Dead‘, I’ve just read another long essay in which Paul Graham, a computer programmer, author and venture capitalist, muses on the potential of the young, how large (technology – in his concept) companies should really be buying small startups instead of trying to hire all the good people direcly as well as the quandry of whether to stay in school or start your own business. Graham’s basic thought is that ‘the youth of today’ have immense power because we can take all the risks in the world and largely, come out unscathed from them. We can create our own companies and see how they almost value themselves within the marketplace rather than having to rely on a corporate master for a dollarEuro value on a paycheck. He acknowledges the risk that people take when considering leaving college, grad school or business school but also counsels that it may be the best decision one can make. It’s all a question of timing and of your own and your colleagues’ personal skill.
Here are some quotes, which I’ve shuffled around in order and context to make work here. The essay is worth reading in full. The link is below.
Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high….The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean…. I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it’s true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds.
Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. They may feel they have nothing to invest. But that’s not true: they have their time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks… Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less demand for them. Extreme choices like starting a startup are so frightening that most people won’t even try.
What’s an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to the user. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own company.
The market is a lot more discerning than any employer. And it is completely non-discriminatory. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you’re 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. If you’re really productive, why not make employers pay market rate for you? Why go work as an ordinary employee for a big company, when you could start a startup and make them buy it to get you?
They’ve been backdating stock options. Slap on the hand coming. The company is restating financials by $84 Million. Appleinsider has the story. The stock was 80.87 on the close last night and is now sitting, at 11AM EST, at 85.04. That’s quite a jump. ‘Lire la suite’ as they say: Google Finance AAPL
In other news, my family are going skiing. We’re leaving in about an hour. I’m looking forward to it so much. This Christmas has been fun but uneventful. Nothing really that anyone would want to read about and hence, I haven’t written about it. I assume that’s cool. Belgium beckons when Switzerland has finished. Straight from one to the other which means big bags to lug about through the whole trip.
UPDATE:
I do have to say, what with the announcement of the new iPhone and so forth, it’s rather amazing how the stock is up, currently, $7.10, which is 8.3%. That’s just since the start of trading today. Of course over the last five years the stock has risen over 80 dollars, which is 681 percent!
Anthropomorphizing the icons of today’s ‘popular’ web browsers (Netscape?!), the viral video pokes fun at Firefox’s competitors without actually showing how it’s better than the rest. It’s an ad for those who already love it: Firefox is all about the browser just working, not much else…
Screw democracy! The IHT is running a story today that makes me wonder where the French ideas of equality and liberty have gone. In a debates about new copyright laws, in which the Senate wanted to make its classicly-French mark on European copyright law, the legislators ran into unprecendented lobbying, emails and contact from members of the public. Surely that would make you think again about your proposals, but the story goes on to quote Michel Charasse, ‘a senator since 1981′:
“Rarely in parliamentary life have those elected by the nation – deputies and senators – been subjected to so many letters, e-mails, menaces and pressures,” Charasse, said during the debate, to resounding applause from his colleagues. “I would ask the Senate staff to rigorously clean the corridors of the lobbyists from all sides who jump on us as soon as we leave the hall.”
Clear the corridors?! What, so they could get out without having to encounter the rif-raf of the public! I’m embarrassed for the French public that they have such disgraceful politicians as this! IHT: In Paris, ‘iPod law’ unleashes lobbyists
