Daniel Lyons's Blog, page 6

The real issue about Apple maps

The key thing in the maps situation is what this move says about Apple and the kind of company it has become. As Roger Kay points out on Forbes:

Does Apple care that its naked self interest is showing? Not at all, near as I can tell. Apple has always had disdain for what others think, even — no, especially — customers.

However, for a potential customer on the cusp of deciding whether to buy an Apple or an Android phone, this blatantly dishonorable move — to take away from consumers something that they liked and put in its place a home-grown but inferior substitute — is likely to push them definitively into the Google camp.

Speaking of “blatantly dishonorable,” there’s also the price gouging, the threats to cut back on retail, the shoddy treatment of workers at Foxconn which is driven by Apple’s relentless squeeze on its suppliers, and — finally — the patent trolling. Instead of competing in the marketplace, Apple is using lame patents and deep legal pockets to try to diminish competition. Apple doesn’t want to collect royalties. Apple wants to eliminate competition. This also hurts customers, including the Apple faithful, who benefit when Apple is forced to keep up with hungry rivals.

All’s fair in love and war, as Jethro Tull once said. But is this the kind of company you want to support with your dollars? Sure, most Apple customers are regular folks who sleepwalk into the Apple store and ask for the WiFis and the bigger gee-bees. They’re not even aware of any of this stuff. But if you’re reading this, you’re not one of those people. Why support this kind of behavior? Why spend money to take a step backward? Why do business with an organization that holds you in such contempt?

Here comes the map spin from Cupertino

The rule of thumb for following Apple is that if you want to know what Apple PR’s official line is, you just need to read the top-tier Apple apologists like John Gruber and MG Siegler. They’re pretty much operating as unpaid Apple spokesbots. Apple briefs these guys, but instead of having the balls to do it on the record, Apple feeds them some spin with the condition that they will write it up while attributing their info to “sources who are familiar with the situation.” It’s a bit like being a Kremlinologist and reading Pravda and Izvestia.

And, sure enough, in the wake of the Mapocalypse, today come Gruber and Siegler with Apple’s spin. Gruber pens “On the Timing of Apple’s Map Switch” and Siegler provides “Ripping Off The Bloody Band-Aid.”

Both fail to discuss the suckiness of the maps app itself and instead spin the story to one about timing. Meaning, why did Apple do this now? Why not wait and switch later? And, of course, in this version of events, Apple is doing the right thing. And, of course, the villain is Google.

So this is the best Apple can do. They can’t try to pretend that their maps app isn’t a huge step backward. They can’t try to pretend that they aren’t putting their own squabble ahead of the needs of their customers. They can’t try to pretend that they’ve actually devoted sufficient resources to solving a very difficult problem.

What’s left? Stories about Band-Aids, and timing. Yes, by all means, let’s all talk about timing. Timing timing timing. Let’s talk about why this happened now instead of next year. It’s called misdirection, and it’s mostly used by magicians and PR people.

Remember when Bill Clinton was on the ropes with the Lewinsky mess, and every day some Clinton shill like Lanny Davis would come on TV and raise a stink about Ken Starr’s law firm having some kind of conflict of interest, and try to spin the story to be about Ken Starr rather than about whether Clinton was lying or not?

Don’t look here, look there. Oh, hey, up over the hill — is that a flying saucer?

This is pure Apple. They knew — had to know — when they first showed off the new maps earlier this year that the app was a piece of shit. How could they not know? So they did what Apple always does, which is to go out full-blast saying that this new maps app was the bestest, smartest, superduperest maps app ever created in the history of mankind. Oh, and Flyover! Wow! Look at how amazing Flyover is! Why it’s so amazing that TechCrunch said it made Google Maps look antiquated! “Are you listening Mountain View?” is how they put it, saying Apple had just released its own “stunning” maps app.

Remember that now? Apple’s new maps were going to kill Google. This was the death blow. Same for Garmin and others who, the Telegraph noted, were stubbornly “not conceding defeat.” (Fools!)

See, this is how it works. When you’re foisting a turd off on your customers, you don’t call it a turd. You cover it with shiny sparkly fake jewels and call it a tiara. If it’s FaceTime, the videoconferencing that nobody uses and that just does what loads of other products have done for years, you talk about the Jetsons and how we’re entering a magical space age thanks to Apple and you make a call to Jon Ive and act like you can’t really believe it and oh my God are we actually looking at each other and talking to each other the same time?

If it’s Siri, the voice assistant that doesn’t really work, you talk about the power of the revolutionary artificial intelligence that is going to change human civilization and is the product of profound research that has taken decades to perfect and now is “heralding the future,” as Siegler gushed on TechCrunch.

Fortunately Apple still has shills who will carry water for them. But it seems significant to me that they’re down to only Gruber and Siegler on this one. I’m sure Apple is briefing others, but so far it appears they’re not going for it. Even Pogue couldn’t bring himself to hold his nose and read from the script this time.

For what it’s worth, there’s still no word from Gruber and Siegler on how they never noticed any problems with maps when they were writing their original reviews. Siegler, for the record, wrote in his original review for TechCrunch that he’d “come away impressed” by the new maps, saying “they’re not bad by any stretch of the imagination.” Now it’s like tearing off a Band-Aid.

And, painful as that might be, it’s actually a good thing. See how we did that? The new maps app sucks, but we’re ripping off the Band-Aid quickly, so that’s a good thing.

Steve is dead, but the reality distortion field lives on.

Pogue goes rogue!

The brainwashed brown-noser pens a vicious critique of Apple’s new maps app. Apparently he just noticed that the software is terrible:

In short, Maps is an appalling first release. It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.

Question remains: How did Pogue not notice this when he was preparing his original glowing review? The one in which he said the new maps app was one of the “chief attractions” of the new phone?

Did Pogue write his original review without even looking at the maps app? Or did he know how bad it was and just neglect to mention it for fear of pissing off Apple?

It’s hard to believe any reviewer could not look at the maps app at all. The new maps app was a big deal. It was the kind of thing a reviewer would have high on his or her list of things to check out.

It’s also the kind of thing that an editor at the Times might get pissed about when he sees that everyone is ranting about these messed-up maps and the situation is so bad that someone has even created a Tumblr to mock them and yet his own world-famous and notoriously Apple-conflicted reviewer failed to notice any problem.

So, maybe that.

Here’s the song that the RIM BlackBerry band should have covered

To hell with the weird remake of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Lovin You.” Here’s the song that captures the essence of RIM.

Killer app?

Much is being about the problems with the new maps issue on iOS 6. The best piece I’ve seen so far is this one on The Verge. The key angle to this story, the one that might resonant with customers, is this: “Apple’s decision to swap out Google Maps is a rare example of the company openly placing its own interests above those of its customers,” write Nilay Patel and Adi Robertson.

I’m not sure how rare that is, but anyway. I don’t expect to see anyone getting out of line at the Apple store just because the maps app has some flaws.

But the Mapocalypse does raise a question: If the new maps app is truly this bad, how come none of those glowing first-round reviews made any mention of this fact? Thousands of words were devoted to the thinness, the lightness, the wonderful way it feels when you hold it in your hand, but there was hardly a quibble about maps.

Mossberg did the best job of covering his ass, writing that maps was the “biggest drawback” and “in other ways a step backward” — but he also pointed out that the new maps app “has one big advantage” over its predecessor, meaning turn-by-turn navigation.

Scott Stein of CNET also quibbled a bit wasn’t too upset, saying, “Odds are, you’ll own a couple of maps apps and swap back and forth.”

Pogue called the new maps app one of the “chief attractions” of the new iOS.

MG Siegler of TechCrunch wrote, “Testing the maps these last few days, I’ve come away impressed.”

Jim Dalrymple of Loop Insight wrote, “I really should mention Maps, Apple’s new turn-by-turn direction app on the iPhone. I love it. I used in Cupertino and I used it at home — it worked equally well in both places.”

Ed Baig of USA Today touted the new turn-by-turn navigation, saying “Apple has generally done a very good job with its own turn-by-turn feature,” and made no mention of any problems with maps.

Gruber’s review ran several thousand words but made no mention of maps at all. (Though yesterday, after people started howling, Gruber conceded that, ahem, the new maps app is “a downgrade.”

This is weird, isn’t it? How could all of these top reviewers have early access to the device, test it thoroughly, and not notice anything wrong with the maps app?

I’m sure there’s a good explanation.

Apple adds Samsung GS3, Galaxy Note to list of targeted devices

Hell, why not throw in TVs, refrigerators and microwave ovens? Sue everybody, right? Punitive damages.

 

 

How soon until Apple sues Lenovo?

Lenovo just leapt past Apple to become the #2 smartphone seller in China, after Samsung. Guess what? Lenovo’s phone, the K800, looks exactly like the iPhone. Meaning: rectangular, with a glass screen, and a phone icon that looks like a phone and a mail icon that looks like an envelope. This must not stand! Especially since Apple’s share in China has fallen to 10 percent, despite the fact that the iPhone is the original smartphone and the best smartphone and can do magical, wonderful things. To be sure, Apple will regain share when the new iPhone 5 ships, since it will have a slightly longer screen, which will make it massively, magically more magical and spark a new boom in sales. Nevertheless, Lenovo must be punished.

 

Flashback: John Doerr says Zynga is “our best company ever”

Ah, remember the good old days, by which I mean November 2010, less than two years ago, when there was no bubble and all those crazy valuations in the secondary market made perfect sense because, as John Doerr pointed out here, Zynga was “the most profitable, the fastest growing and has the happiest customers” of any company KPCB had ever invested in. Yay! Back then Zynga was valued at $6 billion and it seemed like the sky was the limit.

Cut to today: Zynga is valued at $2.5 billion. The stock is down 70 percent from the IPO. When you read about Zynga it’s stuff like this saying they should sell if they can find a buyer. And when you read about John Doerr, it’s stuff like this, talking about the “end of an era,” and how these days KPCB looks like a clown running across a minefield.

For me the sign of the end times was captured in this photo of John Doerr trying to look hip by wearing a hoodie (a la Zuck) and announcing the social fund in Oct. 2010.

Oh well. Just because Zynga is struggling doesn’t mean the whole investment thesis was wrong. I mean there’s still Groupon and Facebook. Oh wait.

HP jumping on “that cloud thing that everyone is talking about”

The Onion strikes again. Much love to Dave Thackeray for passing this along. Made my day. Sort of.

Don’t know if Apple will make a 7-inch tablet, but they should

I know the Great Man Himself once said that the iPad was the perfect size and that 7-inch tablets were “tweeners” (too big to be a phone, too small to be a tablet) and thus would be “DOA.”

But I’ve been using the Google Nexus 7 for a few days and it has already become my go-to device. It’s small enough to toss in a bag, and small enough that you can sit with it in a cafe and not have this huge thing out on the table in front of you, small enough to keep on the table by your bed and just grab to take a quick look at email — and yet big enough that the screen and keyboard are comfortable.

And the Nexus 7 costs only $200, versus the new iPad, which starts at $500 and goes up over $829. What’s not to love?

Now Bloomberg and others are reporting that Apple is indeed defying the Great Man’s words and working on a smaller tablet. It’s a great idea, and a smaller iPad, priced to move, will be a huge hit.

One thought: Apple as it exists today is so powerful and so successful in the mobile (post-PC) space that that the only tablets that can even remotely be considered to be credible competitors to the iPad are the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7, and both those devices are priced so low that their makers at best break even and possibly lose money on each device.

In other words: Even with tablet products that are sold at or below the cost of making them, these guys still can’t knock off the iPad.

Another thought: It seems to me that the form factor that needs to die is the one we today call the smartphone. Why not just put phone capability into a 7-inch tablet like my Galaxy Nexus and let that be my phone, with some kind of Bluetooth earbud or wired headphone to go with it? And/or build telephony functionality into your Google Glasses?

The whole idea of having this phone-sized thing that you hold up to your ear, this slab of plastic and glass with some kind of keypad (physical or virtual) on it — isn’t this just another example of another way in which we’ve created digital tools that simply mimic the tools we used in the analog world?

Mobile phones have evolved lot since this one. Basically over the course of 40 years they’ve become smaller and smaller, until now, in reality, the “phone” part of a smartphone is really just an app on a tiny mobile computer.

The phone itself has disappeared, but we cling to the name, and the form factor, because we like to stick with what seems familiar. As John Gruber points out, smartphones aren’t really phones at all. They’re portable computers. Apple called the iPhone the iPhone in part because that’s what people thought they wanted, but the name itself was a bit of misdirection, Gruber says.

But what is the point of a portable computer with a 3.5-inch (or 4.3-inch, or 4.7-inch) screen? That device is the one that starts looking like a “tweener” — caught between embedded/wearable devices, and tablets.

I can envision a time, maybe not so far from now, when I won’t carry a “phone” at all. If my Nexus 7 could make phone calls, I’d be there today.