Daniel Lyons's Blog, page 12

Is Apple waging "thermonuclear war" on Android — or just shooting blanks?

So far Apple's legal "thermonuclear war" against Android phone makers isn't going so well, as I point out in this week's Newsweek. "Nearly two years after the first salvos were fired, Apple's war on Android has accomplished almost nothing. And it's starting to look as if Apple's patent portfolio isn't nearly as lethal as Jobs seemed to think."

Symphony of Science

HT to Andrew Sullivan.

PanderDaily is funded by the very VCs whose startups it aims to cover. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's my new business plan: I will get Google, Samsung, HTC and Motorola to fund my Android blog. I know it seems like a glaring conflict of interest, but is it really? I mean, really? Okay, it really is a conflict of interest. It really, really is. It's disgusting, actually. But you know what? It sure beats trying to make money by selling ads. These days the cool kids in the Valley hackery have moved beyond mere "journalism" and instead are all about finding ways to "monetize influence." That seems to be the strategy for Sarah Lacy's new blog, PandoDaily, a publication funded by the very same VCs whose startups she aims to "cover." From now on, if you're a startup company, you won't need to go hire PR people to go pitch those nasty hacks — because your investors will just get you covered by that sexy blog that they also happen to own. And if some other nasty publication starts writing critical things about you, well, your VCs have a pal in their pocket who can bash away on your behalf. This all makes perfect sense.

Seriously, if anyone reading this knows Andy Rubin, call me up. Half million each is nothing for Google, Samsung, HTC and Motorola, and a very small price to pay to have an influential friend in the press. Look at it like a kind of insurance. Or a protection racket, as I believe it is called in some quarters. Pay up, and you get "most favored nation" status on our blog. Nothing icky about that, am I right? Next up: The Windows Phone blog, funded by Microsoft and its hardware partners. After that? Every vertical you can possibly imagine, funded by the main companies in those verticals. Potential investors, please get in touch. My email address is posted here.

BTW, if you think this is not what every investor in PanderDaily (and CrunchFund, for that matter) was thinking when they wrote their checks, I have some very nice real estate in Florida that I'd like to talk to you about. Or, better yet, a new blog. Huge returns, guaranteed! Because everyone knows blogs are huge money makers. Why else would all the hot VCs in the Valley be investing in one?

The guy who is complaining about Google "Search plus Your World" also once complained about Caller ID being a massive invasion of privacy

Much is being made of the fact that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has called upon the FTC to investigate Google for tying its Google+ social network to its search results.

Some of the more excitable members of the hackery seem to have leapt to the conclusion that if EPIC writes a letter then inevitably an FTC investigation will follow. From the hysterical tone of some articles, you'd think the government has already filed a lawsuit, and that Google had already been found guilty.

But one letter from EPIC does not an antitrust case make. For one thing, EPIC's director, Marc Rotenberg, has long had an erection for Google — he hates Google even more than MG Siegler, and that's saying something.

What you also might not know is that Rotenberg has a long history of bitching about tech companies invading privacy, and that one of his most curious crusades was against Caler ID. Rotenberg's argument was that before Caller ID, you were the one who controlled whether to give out your number, but with Caller ID the phone companies had taken that control away from you.

EPIC's Web site has a page devoted to Caller ID. Here is an article from the LA Times from 1990 where Rotenberg discusses the scourge that is Caller ID. And here's one from the New York Times in 1995.

Funny thing is, I learned about this from Elliot Schrage, Facebook's communications guy, in 2010 when Rotenberg was going after Facebook for pushing its members to share more info about themselves. Schrage was trying to make a point about Rotenberg being the kind of guy who freaks out over new technology.

Now, of course, Rotenberg is going after Google, and (kind of) carrying water for Facebook. My sense is Schrage and his team might have a higher opinion of Rotenberg now than they did last year.

My Galaxy Nexus just arrived, and I can't tell it apart from my iPhone 4S

Seriously, this is outrageous. I ordered a Galaxy Nexus on Verizon and it just arrived today. Here's a photo of the box next to the box for the iPhone 4S that I got a couple months ago. Can you tell which one is which? I know I can't. (I'll just tell you. It's the one on the right.)

Things only get worse when you open them up. Look at this shit. Samsung, have you no shame? How do these people keep getting away with this crap?

Is Google trying to leverage its way into Facebook's data?

It's a theory anyway, laid out in an article I just did about Google's "Search plus Your World" on The Daily Beast.

Further evidence that the rise of Android is driving Apple fans out of their minds

Check out the video below or view it on flickr. It's from CES in Las Vegas. A guy from Samsung is showing off a window display that turns a glass window into a computer display. With the touch of a finger you can flip the "blinds" open and shut, change the color of the blinds, pull up marketing reports, play video and so on. It's pretty amazing stuff, and may be related to a breakthrough that Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology announced last October which involves "single crystalline Gallium Nitride on amorphous glass substrates." Samsung has been tinkering with this idea for a while and showed off something sort of similar back in 2008 and showed more transparent display stuff in November 2010.

Now — view the video on

Samsung crushing it at CES

Business Insider: "Samsung is Already the Big Winner at CES."

Business Insider: "Wow, Samsung Beat Apple to a Voice-Controlled TV."

TechCrunch: "Why Samsung is the new Apple."

Funny, because supposedly Apple was going to "win" CES without even attending.

"I compare it to someone unleashing the contents of 20 prisons, a dozen mental institutions and a NAMBLA convention into a 1000-yard radius."

That's a friend, who is on his way to CES, describing the show. Sounds about the same as my experience, which is why I stopped going a few years ago. It's too crowded, you can't get anywhere, you spend all your time schlepping around, wandering through halls gazing up at flat-panel TVs or standing in endless cab lines. The executive briefings you get are useless — 15 minutes in the back of a booth with some guy running through a canned script that he's already run through a hundred times with other filthy hacks who got there ahead of you. Then come the dinners hosted by some big company where you have to sit next to a marketing guy who has been trained in the skill of talking and talking without saying anything. As for the nightlife: I don't gamble, don't drink, and have seen enough naked ladies that the novelty has worn off. So, thanks but no thanks.

More thoughts on Samsung

Someone on Google+ responded to my post, "Enough with the Samsung bashing," by saying that I have no idea what goes on inside Samsung and therefore I should not assume that they're not a bunch of thieving cloners.

A few thoughts on this.

You're right, I have no idea what goes on inside Samsung. Neither do the people who say Samsung does nothing but copy Apple. We can only go by what we see in the market. Yes, there are Samsung products that look a lot like some Apple products. Who knows? Maybe there really has been a concerted effort inside Samsung to copy Apple. Maybe these guys have had direct orders from the top down to just blatantly rip off Apple at every turn.

But if that's the case how do we account for the fact that Samsung's flagship phone, the Galaxy S II, the first real hit they've had, looks nothing at all like an iPhone? How do you argue that Samsung does nothing but copy Apple when this huge glaring exception is staring you in the face? The GSII is the phone that Samsung pushes in advertisements. It's the phone that put Samsung on the map in the U.S., and it is the phone that helped make Samsung the top seller of smartphones. And as I pointed out in my post, it looks nothing at all like an iPhone. The Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy Note have even less in common with the iPhone. The differences are numerous and range from huge to trivial. They charge via microUSB rather than the proprietary Apple connector. They run on 4G LTE networks.

Nobody buys a GSII, or Galaxy Nexus or Galaxy Note, because they saw the device in a store and thought it was an iPhone. For one thing, they have the word "SAMSUNG" stamped in big capital letters on them.

Nobody is getting tricked into buying a GSII. Nobody gets confused and walks out thinking they bought an iPhone and then gets home and is shocked to find out they bought a Samsung GSII.

Nobody buys a GSII or Nexus or Note because they really wanted an iPhone but thought that "this is just like an iPhone, only cheaper." (For one thing, they're not cheaper. And last I knew, in the U.S. you could get an iPhone 3GS for zero dollars with a contract. If you really want an iPhone, there's nothing stopping you.)

Believe it or not, millions of people are buying these new Samsung high-end phones because they believe these phones are better (for them) than the iPhone.

A lot of those people looked at both phones, put them side by side, and decided they wanted the Samsung — not because of the ways in which it is like an iPhone, but because of the ways in which it is not like the iPhone.

Think about it. If you want a phone that's just like an iPhone, you would get an iPhone.

Also: many millions of people do get the iPhone, and will continue to. It's a fantastic device. I've had every version since the 3G.

But it's not for everyone. Some people — a lot of people — want something else. Different strokes for different folks.

Maybe the people who buy the GSII or Galaxy Nexus want the bigger screen. Maybe they want 4G LTE. Maybe, believe it or not, they like Android.

I know this may be hard to believe, but every day 700,000 Android devices are activated and I think it's safe to say that most of those 700,000 people made a conscious decision to buy the device they wanted and understood the trade-offs they were making when they went with Android versus Apple.

And the tradeoffs are significant. For one thing, there's no iTunes. In fact managing media on the GSII is a very different (and more pain-in-the-ass) experience than on an iPhone. This is not a subtle difference. Media management is a huge part of the iPhone experience and one of the device's biggest advantages.

When you buy a Samsung you do so knowing that you are giving up iTunes, and if, like me, you have all your music and movies stored in iTunes, you know that buying the Samsung means you're going to have to work a little harder to get stuff on and off your phone.

Beyond that there is the app experience. There are more apps on iOS, and you might argue that the iOS App Store is better run and easier to use than the Android Marketplace. They're certainly very different creatures. Even apps that run on both iOS and Android often look and feel very different on the two platforms.

Despite all these differences, millions of people are choosing Samsung and other Android phones over the iPhone. Not because they're uninformed. Not because they're being tricked or getting confused.

Keep in mind, this is a huge market opportunity. It's not a zero sum game. Apple is going to have a great business, no matter how well Samsung and the other guys do. There's room for everyone. I had lunch recently with a guy who works in the mobile space and I asked him who he thinks is going to win — Apple, Android or Windows Mobile. His answer: "All of them." That sounds about right.