Daniel Lyons's Blog, page 22

You meet some of the nicest people in the Apple community

This guy just tracked me down on a vacation with my family in England. I guess he took issue with my post suggesting that Google pulled a fast one on Apple and Microsoft. I don't know what came over me. Of course no company could outsmart Apple. Especially not Google. Google people are stupid and evil. Their products are all crap, and worse yet, they are based on stolen IP. No one buys Android phones. No one wants them. They all get returned. That's why Google is so desperate. I'm sorry that I stepped out of line. It won't happen again. I'm going to visit the Regent Street location and do a location on myself so I can de-stimulate from my incident. I'm not a suppressive person. Thanks to all who have sent in the constructive criticism. I deserved it.

Google's original bid for Motorola was the Euler-Mascheroni constant divided by the distance in meters between Mountain View and Schaumburg, but Sanjay Jha told them to stop fucking around and make it a real number or he'd sell to Microsoft

Counting down the seconds before someone does the math and posts a comment saying this actually makes no sense.

Apple busted for presenting flawed evidence

Allegation is that Apple created images where they changed the dimensions of the Samsung Galaxy Tab to make it look more like the iPad — to convince a German court that Samsung's product is a clone and a ripoff. Hard to believe that Apple would do this. The GT may violate all sorts of Apple patents — who knows? — but in terms of physical size you would not mistake one for the other. Nevertheless, Computerworld has the photos and makes the case against Apple.

Suck on it, AppleSoft — Google pulls a rope-a-dope

Everyone was baffled when Google made those crazy bids for the Nortel patents last month. Remember? They bid things like the distance from the earth to the sun, the number pi, and some other wacky numbers from mathematics. Which led ultra Apple fanboy MG Siegler to crow that Google had got "pi in the face" and was "living in a dream world" and "look like huge asses in retrospect." Then MG went on to drool about how Android was doomed, penning a ridiculous piece that compared Apple to James Bond and Google to La Chiffre, the evil villain in "Casino Royale."

And today it all makes sense. Google just sandbagged its rivals. The whole thing was a rope-a-dope maneuver. Google never cared about the Nortel patents. It just wanted to drive up the price so that AppleSoft (those happy new bedmates) would overpay. Today, with the Motorola deal, Google picks up nearly three times as many patents as AppleSoft got from Novell and Nortel. More important, Google just raised the stakes in a huge way for anyone who wants to stay in the smartphone market.

Better yet, Google got its rivals to spend a few weeks defending the practice of using patents to attack other companies. Apple fanboys bent over backward to say that Apple was doing the honorable thing here by suing everyone in sight. All this slimy patent warfare that is so despicable when others do it becomes magically noble when Apple does it. Teaming up with other companies, including the evil Borg, to gang up on Google is all perfectly legitimate, par for the course, smart business practice, blah blah.

So now Google fires back, makes a huge acquisition, gets into the hardware business, buys up the best IP portfolio in the mobile space — and can position itself as a victim that's just trying to defend itself against this gang of bullies. The Nortel auction just helps Google get approval for the Motorola purchase. Does anyone really believe this $12.5 billion acquisition just got thrown together in the last few weeks as a response to the AppleSoft patent grabs? Doesn't it seem likely that Google and Motorola started talking long before the Nortel auction?

As for those crazy bids in the Nortel auction — that was just a way to leave a little "fuck you" in the paperwork for Google's pals in Redmond and Cupertino to look back upon. That move is pure Larry Page. This is a smart, hyper-competitive guy with a mean streak and a nasty sense of humor. Kara Swisher recently compared him to Bill Gates, and now I see why. Page is turning out to be a better CEO, and more fun to cover, than anyone could have imagined.

The real reason that everyone hates Google all of a sudden

MG Siegler of TechCrunch says everyone hates Google because Google is trying to do too much. Meaning: Apple was fine with Google until Google decided to invade Apple's turf by making a smartphone operating system, and then started having some success. Keep in mind that MG is an Apple fanboy who recently compared Apple to James Bond and compared Google to Le Chiffre, the villain in Casino Royale. This was when Microsoft was so desperate to screw Google that they (a) actually spent money to buy patents for which they already had a license and (b) held their noses and teamed up with Apple, their longtime nemesis.

I would point out one thing. In tech, whenever you see companies teaming up and forming partnerships and alliances against one company, it always means the same thing: that company is winning.

Out with the old: I just bought a MacBook Air

Much love and thanks for all the advice on my post about the saga of my crashing MacBook Pro. I got a lot of good tips, especially from people on Facebook. Maybe it's the fans. Maybe it's some wire. Maybe it's a thermal issue. The MBP is still out at the Burlington Mall store, and higher powers at Apple have become involved, and I know they're all doing their best to deal with what is admittedly a really tricky problem — intermittent glitches are the worst — and maybe they'll be able to fix it this time and maybe they won't, and anyway the thing is off warranty and never had Apple Care so if it's gone it's gone.

So to hell with it. The best advice I got was to just go get a new machine. And this morning that's what I did. Got the 13-inch MB Air and this time I got the Apple Care plan too. I ordered online, so unfortunately I won't have it in time for my trip to the Bay Area this week. But I'm excited to get my hands on it, and I'm grateful to the guys at the Apple store who have been really great about trying to find and exterminate the ghost in my old machine.

I'm told that I sound "bitter and angry"

This because yesterday I posted an item wondering if the market collapse means the IPO window has shut down again, and if so, what happens to the VCs who are sitting on a bunch of deals where they've paid ridiculously high valuations? They were hoping to flog this stuff off to bigger fools in the public markets — which is why they were going around repeateing the "there is no bubble" mantra. But now they're stuck with this stuff, and will have to fall back on the rhetoric about being patient, long-term investors who are so proud to be associated with these wonderful entrepreneurs.

Last night I got an email from a VC in the Valley saying that I sound "bitter and angry."

I had to admit that the guy has a point. But as I told him: Look, I'm Boston Irish. "Bitter and angry" is what we do around here. It's our normal state of mind. The stuff that normal people see as anger and bitterness is stuff that in Boston we think of as cheeky humor.

No hard feelings, Valley investors. Your eternal optimism makes the world a better place for all of us.

Oh, and today comes word that Dropbox is raising money at a $10 billion valuation. And so many VCs are fighting over the deal that Dropbox has told them to submit their best offers and then Dropbox will choose whose money they want to take.

I don't know when this stuff is going to wind down, but it will, and when it does, as they said in that movie: There will be blood.

"Yuri wants his money back"

If the markets melt down I'm guessing the window for overpriced tech IPOs will be shut again. Which means that (a) Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn proves once again that he's the smartest guy in tech; and (b) all those other late-stage investments at crazy valuations suddenly don't seem so smart anymore.

How will companies like Andreessen-Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins explain to their investors that they are carrying on their books a lot of stuff that they can't get rid of for anything close to what they paid? I suspect we'll see a shift in rhetoric and the guys who have been going around saying "There is no bubble" (hoping to flog this stuff to the public) will now start talking about how they have always been patient, long-term investors who believe in these companies and are proud to be in this for the long haul as committed partners, blah blah — even as they start wiggling out of everything they can and negotiating down rounds and beating the crap out of the same entrepreneurs they've recently been hailing as geniuses and heroes.

But the scary scenario, the one that the fiction writer in me likes to imagine, is the one captured in the headline. What happens if Yuri Milner of DST decides he's not going to just sit here and take a bath on these deals like all these other VC schmucks? What if Yuri wants his money back? Yuri owns pieces of Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga, Spotify, Airbnb. What if Yuri wants to be bought out at whatever price he paid?

I can imagine the kind of snotty prick response that Mark Zuckerberg might offer in that situation. Then I can imagine Zuck suddenly finding out that he's not dealing with the Winklevoss twins. Yuri and Putin and their friends aren't going to go whining to Larry Summers for help.

Or maybe Yuri and his investors don't care if their investments in tech companies decline in value. Maybe, as has been suggested to me, Yuri and the other nice oligarchs whose money he handles were just looking for an easy way to get a lot of money out of Russia by turning it into shares in tech companies which at some point could be converted into clean U.S. dollars. If they end up taking a haircut, and losing 20% of their money, who cares? They still took billions and moved it out of the country. And whatever risk they were taking by investing in profitless tech companies was offset by (a) the chance that a bubble would form and they could make ridiculous profits; and (b) the opportunity for a repressive regime to buy up stakes in new media companies and thus exert control over outlets that could in theory become a threat to it. (See: Egypt uprising, role of Facebook & Twitter in.)

Or hey, maybe the markets will soon be bouncing back and the economy will be booming and that $8 billion valuation on Twitter will be the smartest investment in the history of mankind. Time will tell.

Cyber attacks from China — is it time for us to start fighting back?

Early on during the Second World War there was a period known as the Phoney War, a point when everyone had declared war but nobody was actually attacking anyone yet. The exact opposite is what we're seeing right now with online cyber-attacks. Officially no one has declared war, but the attacks are happening all the time, so much so that it seems ridiculous to keep talking about the imminent threat of cyberwar — the war is already taking place all around us.

Worse yet, we're losing.

I wrote about this today on the Daily Beast in a piece headlined "China's Secret Cyberwar."

Key thing in the story was comments from Richard Clarke, former head of cybersecurity in the US, who says we need to start retaliating for when China attacks us. I asked, Won't that invite retaliation from the Chinese and create the risk that we'll just escalate things still further? Clarke says it will, "But it's better than lying there prostrate having all your research and development and intellectual property stolen and doing nothing about it." The piece has received a good number of comments. Apparently Clarke's call for fighting back struck a nerve.

Ghost in the machine; or, the saga of my crashing MacBook Pro

My 15-inch MacBook Pro is three years old — I got it in the summer of 2008 — and it has been a wonderful, beautiful, powerful computer, a constant and beloved companion, traveling everywhere with me. I've written mountains of words on this thing. But a few months ago something strange started to happen. First, last fall, I noticed that the MBP didn't seem to last very long on a charge anymore. Last November, suspecting a fragged battery, I'd bought a new one. But in May, things got worse. For no apparent reason the MBP would just put itself to sleep, or sometimes shut itself down, for no reason, with plenty of power apparently left on the battery.

I went to Apple store. They found nothing wrong but said I'd been using the wrong charger. (My wife has an older MacBook with a different charger and I had been using that to charge my machine.) Diagnosis: User error, start using the right charger again, and you should be fine. Okay. Just to be safe, I also ordered yet another new battery, figuring that maybe I'd fried the one I bought in November.

Problems persisted. Back to Apple store. Nice guy tried wiping everything off the machine, all the apps, everything, and installing Snow Leopard. Went home — still having crashes.

Back to Apple store. This time they turned the problem over to a higher power. I didn't have an extended care warranty for this machine, but for $310 they could send it out and the "depot" would fix anything wrong — hard drive, logic board, whatever.

I paid the man and hoped for the best. Two or three days later the MBP arrived on my porch with a new logic board — and it was still crashing.

Back to the store. Sent it out again but this time the guy in the store said I should have it sent back to the store so they could check it out thoroughly before giving it back to me. Fine. We did that. Got the call, come pick it up, she's all set.

Got there and found that the experts at the depot had simply replaced the battery. The almost brand new battery that I just bought in May.

I told the kid at the store, Um, this isn't going to fix the problem. Kid shrugged and said, Uh, well, that's what they did.

On the way home I called Apple Care. Nice guy there said I should go home and try it because maybe it really was the battery. Also, he said, I could try doing an SMC reset — something I'd tried before when the problem first started happening.

The guy also said maybe the machine was getting too hot, and I told him yeah, it gets really really hot, so hot that I can't put it on lap anymore, and he said the MBP is not actually a "laptop," meaning you're not supposed to use it on your lap. "We call them portables, not laptops, and that's for a reason," he said.

Okay, I said, I'll go home and try not putting it on my lap.

But, guess what? It shut itself down.

But, still feeling hopeful, I tried doing the SMC reset again. And just to go the extra mile, I bought a Targus fan thing that you put the "portable" computer on and it blows cool air up into the bottom of the machine.

Guess what? This time it worked — for a couple of weeks.

And now it has started shutting down again, crashing so often that I basically can't use it.

A friend who works at Apple said I should call back to Apple Care but this time, "Insist on speaking to Customer Relations."

Okay, I did that this morning. First explained to one woman what was going on, so she could write it all down and tell the person in Customer Relations. Fine. I sat on hold, waiting.

Finally got through to "Natalie," in Customer Relations, who was not a native English speaker, and who asked me what's going on. I explain that my MBP is shutting itself down intermittently, that I've been to the store several times and it's been to the depot twice, and it's still shutting down.

She says, Yes, so what is the nature of your problem?

I say, I just told you, it's shutting down for no reason. It does this so often that I can't use it. And I've been to the store numerous times and they keep saying it's fixed but it's not.

She says, Have you tried taking it to an Apple retail store?

I say, Yes, several times.

She says, Well I am sorry but I cannot diagnose your problem over the phone I think you should take it to the retail store.

I say, Yes, I know, but someone who works at Apple said that before I do that I should call Customer Relations so that you can make sure that this time when it gets sent out it actually gets fixed, because last time they just put in a new battery which was ridiculous.

She says, Well, I have not seen your service history.

I say, Well, can you look up my service history there using my serial number?

She says, Yes, I'll put you on hold and read it.

I waited. And waited. I contemplated hanging up and dialing back in, hoping to get someone better — but just as I was about to hang up she got back on.

Okay, she says, you should go to the retail store, I will set up appointment for you, there may be a new charge for the repair.

I tried to get some clarification from her on what kind of new charges there might be, but after a series of back-and-forths I just gave up.

So, off to the store I go.

Yes, I know I could just get a new machine. And maybe I should. I got three good years out of this one, so why throw good money after bad?

Anyone have any advice?