Way to Compete, Guys…

Microsoft’s app store … sure, why not? But that’s not the bit they need to take on Apple.

Microsoft and the smartphone is really a funny/ironic/sad story depending on who you are.

They had a true next-generation mobile OS starting back in ‘01 … It was really easy to code for – like GUI-builder, point-and-click web services, run-your-regular-.Net-code easy. And they were outselling pretty much everyone in total device count a couple of years later. By ‘06 they even had consumer friendly devices, in the Moto Q series and then the Samsung Blackjack. They were poised to challenge RIM for the big shiny belt.

And then Apple came along and wiped the smirk off everyone’s faces. What’s surprising is that no ‘softie seems to have circulated an “Internet Tidal Wave” memo about mobile. Or, if they did, no one paid any attention.

In the last two years, we’ve seen a continuing proliferation of Windows Mobile devices, but no fundamental change – or even speed-up – on platform evolution. If anything, we’ve seen a slowdown, as Mobile 7 devices seem to be at least a year away, and the “app store” is going to launch on Mobile 6.5

In case anyone didn’t already notice, v 6.5 is a great OS if it’s 2005, but a non-entity in the iPhone era. An app store? well, maybe … but a store by itself has never been the magic sauce in mobile (remember Verizon’s “vending machine”).

And with a “logo validation” scheme for each app? Developers violating the logo cert guidelines is not the problem. The problem is that there are too many different form factors for Win Mo devices. Used to be, practically anything could run the OS. Around the 5.0 era, they reduced the number of supported screen configurations, and a few other things.

But there appears to be little escape from the compromise Microsoft made to be successful on the enterprise side: it’s really easy to code a simple utility/productivity/line-of-business app that will run great on almost any Windows Mobile device. And it’s equally hard to write anything really cutting edge, because there is simply too much variation in device capability and performance, and that genie's not going back in the bottle.

Perhaps Microsoft’s best chance lies in forking a “consumer” mobile OS, with stricter controls over the handsets. On the other hand, Apple is clawing into the enterprise, so an artificial separation of consumer vs. enterprise offerings may be hopeless at this point.

New iPhone App Store Rules Take a Step Closer to Scriptable Apps

A lot of folks commented today on newly-approved web browsers appearing in the App Store. Or, more precisely, a handful of apps using the existing web browser widget to offer a slightly tweaked browser experience.

While iPhone apps could include the UIWebView component before -- and indeed this has proven a popular route to getting hybrid native/web apps up and running quickly -- today's change is about allowing apps that "duplicate" a built-in feature of the phone. And one of the fundamental characteristics of any web browser nowadays is that it is thoroughly scriptable.

If you build an app this way, it already includes a scripting environment ... so the question (since scripting and dynamic apps are verboten on un-jailbroken iPhones) is how far one can let the scripting go and still pass muster with the App Store overlords.

Using stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString we can inject script into the browser ... including script that pulls data back out.

And although the JavaScript bridge is "one directional" compared to the OSX desktop API, there are workarounds such as registering a protocol handler to receive scripted "requests" from inside the page ... or by hooking decidePolicyForNavigationAction with a script-initiated navigation request (disclaimer: I haven't checked to see if this is in the phone API, but it seems plausible) to signal the availability of data.

So native code becomes effectively scriptable. Or, for an even less controversial but perhaps equally powerful route: just inject a bunch of JavaScript API libraries into the browser and keep the scripting (and more of your app) in Safari. That's not too different from pointing a browser at a web site (where the page loads various scripting libraries) ... except that underneath it all we are in native-caps mode ...

Unless I'm missing something here, a somewhat ambiguous situation has gotten thornier with the admission of this new class of general purpose browser apps.

iPhone Brings New Attention to AT&T's Existing 3G Problem

The wave has been building for a few days now, with consumers, Apple, and AT&T sparring over the problems with the iPhone 3G staying connected (and on 3G).

Today seems to be a local maximum and the mainstream media are starting to look.

If you read this blog regularly, you're probably expecting me to blame Apple for the problem, then blame Apple again for denying there's a problem, then blame Apple fanboys for putting up with it all for so long then suddenly acting betrayed.

Surprise!

As much as that might be a valid argument -- especially the part about Apple denying there's a problem -- this one is really not their fault.

It's kind of AT&T's fault -- and kind of GSM's fault -- and kind of just mediocre engineering.

A while back, I wrote about similar experiences with my Samsung Blackjack on AT&T. I've also seen the same thing with the AT&T 8525 (Cingular 8525 / HTC TyTn), as this was one of the first multi-protocol, multi-band 3G devices on that network.

Most people don't have any idea what this is all about, since their devices cannot experience this specific sort of problem because they don't support 3G, and so never have to resolve between 3G, EDGE, GPRS, etc.

In this case, AT&T argues that one suspect, the Infineon chipset, is not to blame because it's the same one in Samsung devices, with which they have had little problem. I don't think that's their strongest argument: others appear to be having as much trouble as I do with the Blackjack/3G. We just never made as much noise as the iPhone folks.

Perhaps a better argument would be that it affects all the EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA devices on the network and then maybe blame GSM for having such a funky data transport technology roadmap over the last 10 years.

I'm not saying AT&T could easily do better -- maybe they need more capacity and a tune-up of switching algorithms. A CNET article points to GSM carrier T-Mobile Netherlands having the same problem. And even though CDMA is worlds better as a technology, it's nice to have a little competition out there: two CDMA carriers for the U.S. out of four majors is enough.

So what does all this mean?

First, I'll tip my hat for once to the iPhonosphere and the obsessive media that love them: this is a real issue and we all know it takes a lot of volume to be heard talking to a telco.

Second, even Steve Jobs' strong-arming of the carriers worldwide (and good for him on that one!) doesn't mean everything is really under his control. According to this Sydney Morning Herald story, Apple didn't provide any test units to some carriers until the day before the product release, hoping it would all "just work."

To paraphrase someone I used to work with, in technology "hope is not a strategy."

On the Other Hand...

Yesterday I wrote about the potential of the iPhone to break the longstanding wireless app logjam in the U.S.

Today the Free Software Foundation blogs about the other logjam we might be getting into with the device, namely that the app development and publishing community is just as locked down and controlled as the DRM on iTunes tracks. Wait, actually the app side is even more locked down (since there's a low-tech path to extract songs by way of audio CDs, whereas the app infrastructure requires jailbreak).

I'm curious whether this passage from the FSF post will have the fanboys plugging their ears and whining "I can't hear you" or just shrugging their shoulders and saying "who cares":

"Apple, through its marketing and visual design techniques, is manufacturing an illusion that merely buying an Apple makes you part of an alternative community. But the technology they use is explicitly chosen to divide people into separate digital cells, and to position Apple as sole warden. When your business depends on people paying for the privilege of being locked up, the prison better look and feel luxurious, and the bars better not be too visible."

If not a prison, it's still a walled garden. Like Verizon's mobile app vending machine (odd are you've never even hard of that one) or the old America Online. Maybe it can work, but there are better alternatives.

iPhone App Store: Let's Hope It's Not All Fun and Games

The iPhone phenomenon seems to be a kind of Rorschach test, where you can find whatever you're looking for ...

There are all sorts of posts on data from the App store, looking at, for example, pricepoints in the app catalog, or the kinds of apps available.

These data are far from perfect (though worth a look), and in any case I hope that VentureBeat's post on the prevalence of Game and Entertainment apps turns out to be wrong.

Why? Mobile apps and mobile net usage have been waiting to "break out" in the U.S. for nearly 10 years. It's tempting to agree with the sentiment that mobile net use is reaching critical mass thanks to iPhone, but everyone in the industry has made that mistake many times before.

Successful off-deck software on phones in the U.S. has been more or less limited to games. So when I read the headline "Fun! Nearly half of all the iPhone App Store apps are games or entertainment," all I could think was "let's hope that it doesn't stay that way!"

I have no problem with Super Monkey Ball per se. It's just that if all the top app activity is in games and entertainment, then the mass psychology around the iPhone / App Store ecosystem is in danger of slipping irretrievably in the direction of "diversion" and not the enormous opportunity it really is.

Before you say I should just chill out about the Monkey Ball, consider:

Blackberry, because of its email device pedigree, was pigeonholed as a "corporate email/organizer device" years ago, even though it could do many other things. Despite RIM's attempt to sex up the brand, boost the hardware, cut prices and improve the design, it looks now like the window is closing for RIM to make any big gains. The enormous deployed base of Blackberries never translated into a general platform for mobile net-based computing.

At the moment, all of the top 10 -- and 18 of the top 20 -- paid App Store apps (over the last 24 hours) are Game/Entertainment apps. So right now, when the frenzy is at a peak, with mass media coverage of sold-out stores and consumers showing acquaintances their hot new gadget, the eyeballs are on the Super Monkey Balls.

To a lot of people, who have never seen a 3rd-party app on a phone, and who don't totally get what this is all about, the demonstration is going to look more like a Nintendo DS than a handheld computer.

Which raises a possibility: perhaps Apple was wise to restrict iPhone 1.0 to Safari-based apps, thus forcing consumers to view the device as a mini-web-tablet, rather than as a portable entertainment device.

Does LLVM Mean An Alternative to Objective-C is in the Works?

The LLVM project has popped up on the radar a bunch of times lately. There's a variety of speculation about why the sudden interest.

I'll throw my hat in and suggest that Apple is thinking seriously about a full-service alternative to Objective-C for programming against the native OS X (Cocoa) API.

Objective-C hasn't spread as a general use language on other platforms, and Apple is showing a higher level of interest in expanding its ISV/developer base.

While other language bindings have been promised or offered over the years, none have been developed or maintained to the point that they are a realistic equivalent/alternative to ObjC. For example, according to an Apple insider I spoke with, it turned out that, under the hood -- at the level of linking, marshaling, etc. -- the cost of the incompatibilities with Java just got to be too great to try and keep it as a first-class environment next to ObjC.

It would seem that LLVM could open up a lot of doors here.

If, as reported, the Xcode environment hooks in with LLVM/GCC, then there is a natural integration point introduced at the intermediate representation (IR) level.

It may not be trivial -- LLVM is designed to be lower-level than, say Microsoft's CLR. The CLR, together with the CTS (common type system) and various other infrastructure and requirements, created a level of guaranteed interoperability between any two .Net languages ... somewhat different from the purpose of LLVM, which appears to be more about the ability to rigorously transform and optimize code in a hardware independent manner.

In this sense it may be about helping with Apple's parallelization work as well as cross-compilation for GPUs or PowerPC. Still, at the end of the day, there are libraries to be called into and data to be passed. And having a big multi-language abstraction in the middle would seem to make it a lot easier to massage the call patterns of other languages so that they play nice with ObjC system libraries.

Oh, and check this out: it's fun and interactive: you can try it in your browser and see the IR right now!

Please, Tell Me Another Cool Story About Your AAPL Stock

A comment I read today claimed that Research in Motion (maker of the Blackberry mobiles) stock (RIMM) has outperformed Apple's over any conceivable period you might want to look at. (Yes, I checked it out, it's true, and I have some numbers for you later if you don't want to go try it yourself.)

Here's what I find really interesting: Apple doesn't just have product fanboys, it has stock fanboys too. I've personally met dozens of people who -- entirely unprompted -- insisted on telling me about their AAPL stock adventures, successes, questions about timing and the future ... I haven't met a single RIMM investor who has spontaneously felt the need to chat me up about the stock.

Now there's no mystery about RIMM: Anyone who understands fundamentals could analyze RIMM as easily as AAPL. Or if they want to really get into it, RIMM's products, plans, sales channels, and management are arguably more transparent, simpler, and easier to crack than AAPL's. (Most investors love leaks and hate surprises.) So it's not like these AAPL investors stuck with the company they could understand and analyze.

Instead, I'd venture the opposite: I bet they know little to nothing about either company under the hood, but they love the drama and the theater of an Apple product announcement, whether it's really good or bad for the stock. They think that press coverage somehow equals investing success.

As for the numbers, I checked Google Finance and observed that ... yes ... in all the time that these two companies have been public, RIMM has outperformed AAPL over all reasonable intervals. In fact, even if you had, say, sold your AAPL to buy RIMM at the worst conceivable moment, when RIMM peaked relative to AAPL, within a few years your RIMM holdings would already be worth much more than the AAPL shares.

I'm not bringing this up to recommend one stock over the other. They have actually trended together, and if this sector is your thing (I count them together today, because of the iPod/iPhone contribution to Apple's success), then you might want to invest in both of them ... and some of their other competitors too ... to diversify, at the expense of trying to make the most money on a single horse.

But what cracks me up is how people so often want to believe a story they know over a story they don't know; a simple story over a complex story; and a story (narrative construct in general) over the tricky realities that motivate and underlie all of our constructs.

And if you're one of those people so in love with a romanticized Apple story that you don't mind having half the returns (in the last 5 years), 40% of the returns (last 2 years), or even just 30% of the returns (1 year) of a RIMM investor ... I'm not saying sell Apple, but diversify, diversify, diversify!

Microsoft Should Trumpet, not Downplay, iPhone's Real Accomplishment (Hint: It's not about Sales Volume)

In this article, Philip Elmer-DeWitt deconstructs a Microsoft partner mass email to discuss how a heap of chest thumping is presumably hiding real insecurities about how the Windows Mobile ecosystem stacks up to that of the iPhone.

Coming before the new iPhone launch, I agree this is not a coincidence. And although I've penned defenses of Microsoft in this blog, this post isn't one them. Instead of chest thumping, Microsoft should be talking to its partners about what Apple has accomplished with the iPhone that Microsoft has not in the 6-odd years since the first Windows Mobile phone shipped... and how that accomplishment has created new opportunities and liberated new value for the entire wireless space including the WinMo world.

In a nutshell, one of the enduring problems with wireless is that no matter how good the phones got (first WAP, then Java apps -- with networking, then color and multimedia and .Net and push data and QWERTY keyboards etc.), U.S. customers just never seemed to get that this was a real computing device, that would powerfully complement their PC(s) and could be just as general in use.

No matter how much analysis showed that the phones people already had could save weeks out of their lives through increased convenience and productivity (with the right software), almost no one used productivity apps, or mobile websites, on their phone. Some conceptual chasm just stopped people in the U.S.

So Apple comes along with the iPhone. And feature-for-feature, the original iPhone OS (not the OSX core, but as it was exposed developers/users) couldn't hope to keep up with Windows Mobile 2003, let alone '07 (WinMo 6.0).

But Apple was hunting different game. By combining a beautiful interface, ridiculously fast processor (to the point that battery life suffered), and an all-in-one experience featuring massive "On Ramp" signage to apps and the web, Apple got people to understand the phone was a computer that normally, natively runs apps and accesses the network, something no one else had accomplished on a mass scale in America.

I've written before about stuff Apple does poorly. This iPhone-as-computer play isn't one of those things. It was a big gamble, but arguably Apple has pulled off another early-Macintosh-type accomplishment in terms of changing how the public understands what a device can/should do.

And, as with the Macintosh, there is no reason that this "enlightenment" should only put dollars on Apple's bottom line. It boosts Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, Palm ... by focusing free mindshare on the phone as computer.

Now the other players need to follow through. Microsoft and RIM have the lead in the U.S. -- the first thing they ought to do is stop everything and get a browser on their phones that doesn't totally stink (that's the sanitized version of how both those guys' browsers deal with the modern web).

I won't detail requirements; I think Safari on the iPhone is a clear enough target. And while the wide variety of OEM hardware that runs Windows Mobile won't all have the CPU muscle for a Safari, Microsoft should make a credible effort to replace notepad, er, I mean Pocket IE. Meanwhile, why not send out a partner mass email confessing that PIE alone is costing everyone in the WinMo value chain bigtime.

If I were Ballmer, I'd dig up half a dozen hackers from inside or outside who have worked on the Mozilla codebase. I'd get them porting whatever they could to WinMo, and I'd have an internal team building a new Pocket IE product as well. At the end of Q3 '08, whichever browser works better on the most Windows Mobile devices, becomes part of WinMo, the other guys get a mediocre line for their resume (unshipped product), a vacation, and a reassignment to the next Microsoft Bob.

Real Psystar Story: Mac Users Caught Looking ... or Apple != Hardware

Apple believes that they are a hardware company, even though their fabulous software and consistently broken, mediocre, (tech-and-policy-)crippled, and overpriced hardware make it clear that's not the case.

These folks have enablers, too: fans who think about the hardware like they think about tables at Design Within Reach ... who get a warm fuzzy knowing they have the authentic overpriced article. And other fans who don't think at all, but love a glowy apple logo because it makes them fit in with the crowd they want to imitate, er, um, that came out wrong, the crowd who all want to, uh, think different with. Identically. Or something.

Truth is, aside from the hardcore enablers, all the other Mac users don't give a damn about the hardware (until it breaks). They sit at the their glass desks from Ikea or Target (not DWR), they boot up their who-cares-I-just-like-Mac-OS machines, and they work.

The real Psystar story is not about a vaporware company, or unenforceable EULAs. It's a story about the story. The real Psystar story is this: it's a big deal because most Mac lovers don't love, worship, or want to pay for Apple's charade of being about hardware. So they would consider buying a Mac clone.

Think of it this way:

• PC users who don't want a Mac don't care about Psystar
• PC users who are technophiles and would like to play with Mac stuff without a real Mac don't care much, because they can build their own Hackintosh for very cheap
• Mac users who believe there is critical value in the Apple hardware don't care either, because they (and, they figure, those in the know) would not be interested in a Mac clone to save a couple hundred bucks.

Who's left? Why is everyone so spun up? (Google shows 220,000 results for Psystar right now, and only a few are psystar.com itself)

Because when the mere possibility of a Mac clone gets so many people feverishly looking, writing, and thinking, it puts the lie to the Apple-is-really-a-hardware-company positioning. And that realization ... if it were to take hold ... would have implications for Apple's strategy, product line, and stock price.

At some level, the Macosphere has always known, that the software was 98% of the experience. And a big part of them viscerally responded to the proposition that all they need is a software subscription to really nice OS.

A Workforce That's Never Seen Mac OS 9

I spent some time yesterday with a recent grad who is interviewing for a design position with IndustryNext. For some reason, I got the idea to ask him if he'd ever used a Mac before OS X. "Nope," he said, "I've been OS X all the way."

Damn, man. I'll resist the temptation to get melodramatic about feeling old or to reminisce about walking uphill both ways, hacking Think C and Think Pascal code for the old MacOS, with Inside Macintosh open on my lap 'cause there was no "line" for online docs to be "on."

Actually, the emergence into the workforce of a generation that knows only OS X means that Steve Jobs, for all his quirks, has pulled off something pretty amazing. Namely, making OS X successful enough for long enough that students are graduating who don't know anything about Apple's troubled bad ol' days.

I'm still ambivalent about Apple and Mac OS X, though. Great accomplishments include the design (both software and industrial), the first POSIX compatible BSD OS that your mom wants to use, and the first mass-market OS with a native OO API...

At the same time, Apple is still a high-maintenance partner with serious control issues.

Things have improved since the "authorized repair" racket in the 80s, where Apple required personnel to confiscate hardware if there were signs you had tried to install it yourself or put in something that hadn't been blessed by Cupertino (creating ethical dilemmas aplenty for the geeks with the case crackers and screwdrivers, at least where I lived). But vestiges of the program were still in force for factory repairs, at least up to the point just before OS X was released. And after that, there has been an unending series of minor scandals.

To be fair, selling high-end product in a Wal-Mart world is a tough gig. More power to 'em for trying. And nostalgia aside, if a new generation of designers doesn't know or care about the Mac legacy, good for them. Let's hope that their ignorance of the past opens their minds to new possibilities for the next generation of products.