jad

Companies can iterate on their products much faster if they're not required to publish all of their functionality as public APIs. Once the APIs have been published, it's much harder for them to be changed.

Doing this also puts them at the mercy of whether or not client applications are willing to support their new functionality. Maybe YouTube wants clients to adopt some feature, but a powerful client application doesn't like that feature and so won't support it.

The protocol/platform lock-in is a problem, but preserving companies' ability to iterate quickly on features is also very important.

I think there are a few concrete things going on:

* There are many more integration points between their products now. Shipping only the Mac or only the Mac and an iPod or even a first gen iPhone that can only get data into system apps via a USB cable is very simple compared to what they're making today. For Apple's best-cast customer, who owns a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch, and who uses iCloud, how many integration points are involved now? Integration points are like the exponent on software complexity. It's where software goes to die.

* They are still essentially a fat client company that's trying to build more cloud-oriented applications. This leads to additional complexity in the product that other companies just don't have to deal with. An obvious example that jumps to mind is iTunes vs. Spotify. If iTunes was just Apple's version of Spotify, how much better would it be?

* Brain drain. Apple's stock made a lot of people a lot of money, and if you work there, you can't participate in the mobile revolution they started. Steve Jobs's passing could also be a natural book end for people in their careers to try something new, or find a job where they're not working 80 hours regularly, or to just take some time off.

I guess the last one isn't really "concrete", and is more just me speculating, but I threw it out there because of a decent amount of anecdotal evidence I've seen. Here are some other things that are also just speculative but interesting to consider:

* Apple is a product company that succeeds or fails on innovation. As capable of an executive as Tim Cook clearly is, he's not a product person. How does this trickle down into the product development process?

* Product development was micromanaged by Steve Jobs basically until he died. That leaves a HUGE vacuum in an organization and executive team he built to amplify his personal strengths and weaknesses. Who is filling that vacuum now? Is it Jony Ive? Does his new role of "Chief Design Officer" mean he's kind of the new Steve Jobs, in charge of product design, retail stores, office space, etc.?

* If Jony Ive has the final say of all software still (not clear to me in this new role), how good is he at software? How interested is he in it personally? He clearly loves the physical design of things. Steve clearly loved software. If Jony is in charge, does he have that love as well? Does he devote the time and attention into the software as he does with the hardware? Or, to take the iTunes example again, is Eddy Cue basically in charge of that product?

* How good are the people there at software design without Steve? There's a great story about Steve Jobs coming into an iDVD design meeting where he ignored what the team came up with and drew a window on a whiteboard with one area to drag files and one button that says "burn".[1] Is that just one story? How important was that to the day-to-day of the products they shipped? Who does that now?

The key point to me is that, according to Steve himself, Apple is a software company.[2] They make hardware so they can make really great software. Software is what's most important, and I hope stories like this are a bit of a wake up call to re-center their focus on what's truly important.

[1] http://dandemeyere.com/blog/5-most-inspiring-steve-jobs-stor...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this

Says everyone who disagrees with any decision Apple makes. "Steve would have had the same opinion about this I do!" Statements like this are just you projecting your own opinion onto him.

How's that? To search the web, I'd go to DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever. Other companies also provide web mail, maps, office document solutions, etc. Google's definitely better at those things, but using a worse version of those products would not cause the world to "screech to a halt."

Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use Windows or desktop Linux.

I think there's almost no chance that the percentage of iOS users blocking ads is enough to meaningfully impact Wired's overall revenue from that story. Even given that ad blocking apps have been top sellers, it's still only available on iOS 9, which has been out less than a week. So surely revenue from all web users (without an ad blocker) outweigh the (presumably) tiny amount of ad revenue Wired will earn from Apple News. And even if all that were false, why would Wired alone give in so readily to what's basically bullying? It's just not a credible theory.

Way more likely is that Apple is paying them a nice chunk of cash for the exclusivity to help market their News app. Same thing they did with HBO Now for the Apple TV, and with various albums for the iTunes Store and Apple Music.

Probably when the NSA stops illegally spying...

Who said what they're doing is illegal? The whole problem is that the entire surveillance regime is completely secret and completely legal.

Grabbing a company that's making some of the best living room hardware makes a lot of sense.

Samsung doesn't need help building hardware. They need help building software. I suspect that's why they bought Boxee.

Elop needs to go now. What an ass clown. It's been a while since we've seen someone with such bad ideas making such horrible decisions, one after another. He reaped what he sowed, and the board can thank him for decimating a once fantastic phone company.

Shipping phones running Android is far from a guarantee of success. Indeed, only Samsung is doing well with Android right now, and even then only in the last year or so. Every single other Android handset maker is struggling. Android turns your hardware into a commodity, just as Windows turned PC hardware into a commodity. It's very hard to overcome this simple fact, even if you do make great hardware (see the HTC One). Don't take my word for it, ask HTC, ask LG, ask Motorola/Google, and so on.

Elop surely doesn't deserve to be dismissed as an "ass clown" for adopting what almost every critic agrees is a first rate phone OS. If Windows Phone had just a tiny bit of momentum, partnering with Microsoft would be a great strategy for establishing differentiation from Apple and the various Android phones.

Steve Jobs had such a way with words.

More importantly, his way with words was indicative of a remarkable clarity of thought.

> They "did not" stock 8GB models, or SSD models. Not "were out of", but did not.

This is a Retina MacBook Pro, not the "traditional" MacBook Pros with the optical drive. All Retina MacBook Pros have SSDs, so I'm not sure what models you were looking at. In any event, Apple does carry the fully maxed out Retina MacBook Pro in the stores. I know because I bought one myself.

I had the same problem with a rMBP. Apple replaced mine at the Apple Store even though I couldn't show them the problem while I was there. They even gave me the extra charging brick that came in the new machine's box.

I have a friend with a base model rMBP who took it into the Apple Store, and they replaced his with the maxed out model because that's the only configuration they had left in stock.

> What to say? The fact that such a public letter had to be issued means that there's a lot of push-back. Apple just doesn't do that. In fact, I don't remember any software company doing this. I could be wrong. This feels unprecedented.

Steve Jobs held a press conference for "Antennagate": http://www.apple.com/apple-events/july-2010/

The concluding paragraph:

"It’s also worth noting that despite a slight decrease in satisfaction vs. iOS 5, generally, satisfaction is still very high overall, and Apple still seems to have a significant lead on Android devices, according to a recent study by J.D. Power. In other words, while iOS 6 may have some disappointing features, judging by these results it looks unlikely to have a material effect on iOS device sales going forward."

> Jobs would have clearly done things differently.

What's almost as tiresome as the now persistent refrain of "this wouldn't have happened if Steve was still alive" are claims to know what Steve would have actually done if he were still alive. Your second option is ridiculous on its face.

> The negative PR and reduction in the quality of the core experience might cause a reduction in sales or consumer opinion of Apple.

Could be. Remember though that they also added at least one notable feature (turn-by-turn), so it's more like 1 step forward and 2 steps back rather than just 2 steps back.

Also remember that Apple took a pounding for the whole antennagate thing, to the point where Steve Jobs had to hold a news conference to get everyone to calm down. That was an issue that "regular people" knew about. (I was asked by people at a bar if the iPhone 4 I had at the time had reception issues, for example.) And yet, Apple sold a ton of iPhone 4s, and no long-term damage was done to the Apple or iPhone brand.

So I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that this will cause long-term problems. However, it is important for Apple to improve their maps data quickly.

> It seems like the quality level maintained by Steve Jobs is quickly deteriorating in favour of business moves designed to wrest more control off Google.

This stuff gets so tiresome. Apple has been buying maps companies for years. Steve Jobs personally ran acquisitions at Apple. He decided which mapping companies to buy and when he did he probably had a good idea of how they would fit into the platform. Development of the new Maps app was surely underway when Jobs was still alive. What do you think happened? Jobs died and the executive team was like, "Alright everyone, we've got 6 months until the iOS 6 beta is out. Let's cancel our contract with Google and get this shit maps app in there pronto!"

The reality is that Apple has been dependent upon their biggest competitor for a strategically important smartphone feature. The Wall Street Journal reported[1] months ago that Google initially balked at letting Apple have access to Street View, and didn't allow Apple access to turn-by-turn data. If the issue was only quality, Apple could have turned to Bing or Yahoo. They didn't because owning this technology is a strategic necessity in the smartphone market as it stands today. Having features dictated by competitors is not an option.

It's true that the quality of the maps app isn't great. I get looney search results (even when tapping on their search suggestions) and it's extremely frustrating. But there is something to be said for getting it shipped and starting the process of refinement and improvement. It only becomes a strategic problem if the quality doesn't improve noticeably with time.

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FwvSLvr...

> it seems like the product is intentionally kept away from more critical reviewers.

Macworld didn't get one either, and they're not exactly known for their critical reviews of Apple products: https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/248233492650020864

Right. I was saying that in the PC industry, it was the Windows monopoly that commoditized PC hardware. I wasn't saying that every monopoly necessarily leads to commoditization.

> To play devil's advocate, how much innovation is needed for toothpaste?

Having the market structured such that innovation is rewarded might not be important in toothpaste, but it's really important in technology. Commoditization can kill innovation in a technology market, which is exactly what happened with PCs once Windows reached monopoly market share.

> If the app wishes to not show ads or to use twitter for more of an "infrastructure-like" purpose, then there should be some kind of use-fee-based pricing model on the API side.

No need for this complexity. They could just revoke API access for apps that don't show ads per their guidelines. It'd be easy to catch any Twitter client with a significant user base that isn't showing ads properly.

At the end of the day though solutions like this just aren't realistic. If Twitter's going to show ads and other content like cards in their stream, advertisers have to have confidence that the content and presentation will be preserved. The only way to truly do this effectively is to control how your product is presented in all cases.

The problem isn't that Twitter's making these changes. The problem is that Twitter's only getting around to doing this now, years after a vibrant ecosystem of third-party clients has been well established. No one complains that there isn't a rich market for third-party Facebook clients, even though the Facebook app historically has been pretty substandard. Facebook, wisely, never relinquished control over their platform.

Twitter, as ever, is cleaning up for previous incompetence, trying to clean up a mess that never should have existed. How could they not have assigned one or two people to build an iPhone client the minute the iPhone SDK was announced in 2008? How blind do you have to be to not anticipate that mobile will be huge for Twitter, a service originally engineered around being used over SMS?

Watching Twitter bungle issue after issue over the years gives the distinct impression that Twitter is successful in spite of their executive management, not because of it.

> Maybe Tim wants to change Apple's core identity.

The Wall Street Journal has its own article on this[1], and it reports that "Apple Inc. held discussions with Twitter Inc. more than a year ago about taking a strategic investment in the short-messaging service." Steve was still alive more than a year ago.

1: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044334370457755...

  >> - Objective-C Is Tedious
  >
  > Matter of opinion. One person's tedium is another being explicit and reaping the
  > benefits during refactoring, code completion and compilation speed.

Objective-C:

NSDictionary *d = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:[NSNumber numberWithInteger:1], @"foo", [NSNumber numberWithBool:YES], @"bar", nil];

Ruby:

d = {foo: 1, bar: true}

Objective-C's "explicitness" provides no advantage to the programmer here whatsoever.

I write code all day every day in Objective-C. It is an extremely tedious language that requires large amounts of boilerplate to perform even simple tasks. (Yes, I know about the new literal syntax available in Mountain Lion, but that doesn't change the broader point.)

Your programming language is the most powerful tool in your toolbox. Ruby is clearly more powerful than Objective-C in terms of how much code one has to write to accomplish a given task.

Let me paraphrase: "I bemoan the rise of Internet tollbooths and gatekeepers, such as the ones put up by Facebook and Apple. By the way, please build native apps for Android, and please use Google+ to connect with your friends and family."

> The phone market is indeed significantly warped by subsidies from the carriers. If carrier subsidies didn't exist (if people didn't fall for it being subsumed into the cost of plans) the iPhone market would never have taken off.

The point I made about carriers was about Apple owning their sales channel. Most people buy their phones directly from carriers. Carriers have their own agendas. Thus Apple has less control over the phone sales channel than they do for any other product they sell. It matters. We could debate how much, but it matters. For example, if I walk into an AT&T store and ask the salesperson, "I want a smartphone", and he replies, "This Lumia 900 is our latest and greatest" and so I buy that, my opinion is that that has a real impact on the market.

Regarding your point, though, if carrier subsidies didn't exist, presumably they wouldn't exist for anyone, so who knows what the market would look like? It might favor Apple even more. Their supply chain seems to be the best in the industry. Rivals are having trouble making tablets with similar features for competitive prices, and competing PC manufacturers are having trouble selling ultrabooks for similar prices as MacBook Airs. So wouldn't it stand to reason that in a subsidy-free world, Apple could make a phone for $300 or $400 and still make a healthy profit, but Samsung or HTC or Nokia would struggle to do the same?

> They once had it in the bag, and now account for about 1/2 of tablets, heading ever downwards.

Do you have a link for this? I'm sure you're familiar with discussions of market share based on shipped vs. sold. And this is only anecdotal evidence, but just about everywhere I go -- coffee shops, airports -- all I see are iPads. I've seen maybe 2 or 3 Android tablets (including the Kindle Fire) in the wild ever. Again just anecdotal, but it was pretty clear once Android phones started to gain traction and were selling in real numbers. It doesn't seem that way at all with the tablet market.

I'm not sure that the tablet market will really settle down to look like the iPod market. There is too much money to be made and way more competition than there ever was for portable mp3 players. But I do think a lot of the market fundamentals are the same as they were with the iPod, and assuming Apple removes the price umbrella relatively soon, I think it's going to take a _significantly higher quality product_ than what we're seeing today before competitors start gaining real traction.

> I believe it's only a matter of time before tablets become commoditized like the smartphone market is doing right now.

Why wouldn't tablets be more like, say, the iPod than the iPhone? The phone market is significantly warped by carriers. When people's contract are up, they walk into their carrier store and ask the salesperson what phone to buy. Articles about the Lumia 900 launch indicate AT&T is planning to push it as their primary high-end phone[1]. In this regard Apple does not control their sales channel as they do with all of their other products. This is significant, as recent data show that the vast majority of iPhone buyers purchased their device at the carrier's store[2].

The only real vulnerability Apple has in tablets right now is price, but I think the chances they'll leave a price umbrella where people can continue to swoop in at $199 and undercut the iPad is very small. I expect their pricing to play out like the iPod, where eventually there was a model at every price point from $50 to like $400 at $50 increments. They've also done this with the iPhone, where what started out as either a $500 or $600 phone is now sold for $300, $200, $100, or $0.

If the quality of competing tablets does not improve significantly, there is nothing at all inevitable about the tablet market playing out like the phone market.

1: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/att-going-big-with-lumia-90...

2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/apple-only...

> Lastly, never underestimate Microsoft (Tim Cook certainly isn't).

"I don't really think anything Microsoft does puts pressure on Apple."

- Tim Cook as quoted in the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020488040457722...)

The reason is because they view it as a consumer electronics device. How much RAM is in your DVD player?

> I also wonder how many of these startups have been killed. I have to think that keeping things secret means that the execs can halt projects without reporting this to investors.

The advantages Apple's secrecy provides can't really be understated. As you imply, it allows them to experiment with product ideas freely. They can release products only when they're ready, and not to meet some artificial deadline announced months in advance. They can (and apparently have) cut features and made changes at the last minute, again with complete freedom because they haven't told anyone what they're doing.

And, obviously, they get tons of free press from the rumor mill and from their eventual "big unveil" product announcements. Consider the difference if Tim Cook casually said at, say, CES that they're shipping the iPad 3 in a couple months and it's going to have a retina display. How underwhelming would the eventual announcement be? Would it get coverage on broadcast news when it's finally announced, like iPhone and iPad announcements do now? That alone is worth millions of dollars in free marketing.

> you would think they would market that ability more

Maybe Amazon thinks that if it is obvious, no one will pay up front to have ads removed, and getting more money at the time of purchase is more valuable than future ad revenue.

> Which will likely pass.

Pass the House of Representatives. Then a similar bill has to pass in the Senate, which, because of filibuster rules, now effectively requires 60 votes to pass anything significant rather than a simple majority of 51 votes. Once it's passed in both the House and the Senate, the two sides have to reconcile the differences into one bill that both houses then have to pass again. That final bill then has to be signed by the President to become law.

All of this has to happen in an election year, which always makes it harder to pass significant legislation.

There are still lots of places for the bill to die, or at least be weakened significantly, and there's still plenty of time for voters to take action to make their voices heard.