Ged Carroll

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  • iCloud thoughts

    On June 6, Apple announced a number of products at a keynote speech to kick off its worldwide developer conference. Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 were widely anticipated; but the one that got the most attention was a service called iCloud.

    This service has received a fair bit of coverage and its worthwhile reflecting upon, some of this reflection has to do with all the things that we don’t currently know. I am not  going to focus on the iTunes Connect product that gives you a selection of your music across devices as other people have done that much better than I could.

    First of all a bit of a history lesson

    Apple has actually selling online services since about 1985, so Apple’s history with online services is almost as old as The WELL. AppleLink was an online service set up originally to connect Apple employees and dealers, it had a client software application for both Mac and the later models of the Apple II. It provided assess to remote server folders (kind of like FTP, iDisk, Box.net or Dropbox), bulletin boards for discussion and system-wide email (though interoperability with other email systems came in later).

    This system was a way that Apple distributed systems updates and drivers to dealers (you have to remember that at that time operating systems and the associated software that went along with them took up much less memory than they do today). This was all hosted on time-shared mainframes and connected by a global data network by GE Information Services. GE charged too much for the service and didn’t reflect the technological changes coming down the pipe that made these services cheaper to operate. So Apple eventually worked with Quantum Computer Services (now known as Aol) to develop a version of AppleLink suitable for consumers.

    The first email from space was sent on an Apple Portable via an AppleLink account from the Atlantis space shuttle to the Johnson Space Center in 1991. Back in 1988, AppleLink was also the host for a multi-channel story that played out with weekly episodes and included user identities woven into its plot. The storytelling used chat rooms and email was well as a more traditional narrative format echoing Matt Beaumont’s novel e by about 12 years.

    After a while, Apple, had a falling out with GE Information Services and consolidated their own service renamed eWorld and had it run by AOL.
    eWorld main screen
    Eventually eWorld was closed down as Apple realised that it couldn’t compete with AOL and they had bigger things to worry about as Apple was on the downward trajectory that would result in the return of Steve Jobs. By 1997 both AppleLink and eWorld had been closed down. The content eventually ended up on the Apple website under sub-domains like developer.apple.com and support.apple.com.

    In 2000, Apple came back with iTools which included the .mac email accounts, simple web publishing and iDisk. The email account allowed you to have IMAP4 which was rare at the time and iDisk was based on WebDAV standard to syncing. There were other services including web publishing and iCards: an electronic greeting cards service (prior to Facebook were a low impact way to exchange greetings, with a HTML card sent via email. One of the most prominent providers bluemountain.com was bought in a deal apparently worth 780 million dollars by then internet giant Excite@Home).  By 2002, Apple started charging for these services and briefly threw in a subscription to Virex.

    The service got a rebrand as MobileMe to take account of Apple’s expanded computing portfolio to take in the iOS-powered series of devices. Newcomers got a .me.com email address rather than the .mac.com email address. I myself have been signed up to these services through their evolutions for the past ten years or so, so still have a .mac.com ID.

    iCloud is a development repackaging of these offerings; an evolution rather than an innovation, it also means that Apple’s claim in the sub header of its press release that the service: Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date – are economical with the truth. There is also a question in my mind, for reasons I’ll outline below, about whether this next evolution is positive for end users.

    Device philosophy

    One of the things that stuck out to me when I was listening to Steve Jobs introduce iCloud, he described the Mac as ‘just another device’. On one level it makes sense; as the Mac is one of three sets of computing devices that Apple now sells: the Mac, the iPad and the iPod Touch / iPhone.

    • The second thing that marks it out, is a trust that as Sun Microsystems used to say ‘the network is the computer’.
    • Finally there is the question of primacy. Which device is the ultimate arbiter of the correct data?

    The flawed ‘net

    iCloud is based on the assumption that good quality data connectivity is ubiquitous, this is complete fiction for many people. I live in central London, apparently a world city, a hive of connectivity. Wi-fi that I can access safely is only available in certain coffee shops, and the mobile networks are full of holes like Swiss cheese. I am with Vodafone that seems to be better than most, but the only way to have a near-continuous reception is to roam on a foreign SIM; which is outrageously expensive. This situation isn’t . In the UK, the broadband infrastructure simply isn’t available to support existing streaming video services. I live in Central London within the proverbial stones throw from Silicon Roundabout and get barely 3MBs download and 400KBs upload from my ADSL connection. I live 500 metres from my local exchange.

    Data integrity

    One area I am not convinced that Apple will get right with the iCloud is keeping the integrity of address and calendar data intact. If one device doesn’t have primacy there is no control mechanism. It is easy to accidentally alter a record on an iPhone and that could then ripple through the iCloud to all associated devices based on it being the most recent edit. There is no information on how it will handle duplicate entries and failed syncs. Lots of unanswered yet critical questions.

    Household enterprise systems

    My set-up on MobileMe is relatively simple, I have one iTunes account, one address book, one calendar, one set of bookmarks and system preferences. These are synced across two devices (the MacBook Pro that I am writing this post on, and my iPhone). But increasingly, Apple’s eco-system is found at the centre of family’s IT systems. The analogy of the household CEO is often used to describe the housewife as homemaker.

    The family’s IT system needs to look more like the kind of enterprise technology that a CEO would expect. With massive data storage and policy-based systems designed to keep the right data with the right owners. I haven’t seen any evidence that iCloud would do this which is likely to result in lots of poisoned address books and music collections.

    It just works?

    One of Apple’s key selling points since Steve Jobs returned to Apple was that the company’s products just work. This is why the synergy between hardware and software is so important. When you took one of the original iMacs out of the box, you plugged in the keyboard, the modem cable into the telephone socket, the power socket and turned it one; you were ready to start computing.
    Museum of Information
    It promised elegant simple technological choices to early adopters and the late majority alike and is why products like the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone have become commonplace in many developed marketplaces disrupting incumbent players like Creative and Nokia. The complexity and challenges that the iCloud system needs to overcome could undue this unique selling proposition and tear Apple’s market-making leadership position apart.

    Open standards to Apple standards

    One of the things that has helped Apple to do well has been its adherence to open standards: the iMac benefited from being a USB pioneer. Mac laptops became popular with photographers because of FireWire. The Safari web browser and WebKit build upon W3C standards compliance and it is hard to remember now, but the first iPhone used HTML5 web applications for external developers – something that many people lost sight of.

    Apple’s online services were similar. The email service was based on IMAP4 allowing for easy synchronisation and iDisk works on WebDAV. However in the Apple press release announcing iCloud there is no information on what it supports any standards, but it does talk about iCloud storage APIs. And Apple did promise to make thse APIs available to developers. I am concerned that my social graph may be locked into a storage equivalent of the Hotel California; which is especially dangerous when you think at the amount of iterations and service closures that Apple has exhibited in the online space.

    More online related content can be found here.

    More reading

    Apple Introduces iCloud – Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date

    What the iCloud will cause to happen next | FT.com

    Apple details iCloud’s digital storage and syncing, free 5GB of storage

    Fourth time’s a charm? Why Apple has trouble with cloud computing

    Cloud Poll: Does iCloud Actually Have Anything to Do with Cloud Computing? | ReadWriteWeb

  • The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

    The Age of Spiritual Machines was written by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a technological rock star, responsible for great music synthesisers and much of the developments around optical character recognition and speech recognition. This is what makes him a good futurist. The fact that he has had his hands dirty.

    The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a book of two parts. In the first part, Kurzweil outlines how technology has progressed since the dawn of computing with Charles Babbage’ difference engine. Kurzweil uses this trip down computer memory lane to demonstrated that computing power has been increasing exponentially since the dawn of time rather than just the dawn of Intel with Moore’s Law on the doubling of transistors. Even though silicon transistors may top out computing power will keep on trucking (though Kurzweil doesn’t necessarily have the answer of what is the next technology).

    The second part of the book is likely future scenarios; and this is where things get interesting. Kurzweil is setting himself up for a possible fail.

    Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold missed the internet in the first edition of The Road Ahead when it was first published in 1995 and Kurzweil sets himself up for a potentially bigger fall in the scope of his book. Even if Kurzweil has his timing a bit wrong or doesn’t get everything right his book is still a great thought experiment in how intelligent computers would impact humanity.  More book reviews here.

  • The basics

    The current economic climate will help re-define the basics for many people.

    Since I was a child supermarkets and shopping experiences have been richer and presented consumers with progressively more choice. During the last recession of the early 1990s supermarkets created own brand products that offered cheaper alternatives with the exact same quality as own brand products.

    No Frills

    A second own-brand phenomena was own brand products that fulfilled basic needs but did away with superfluous packaging and were best seen as ‘fit for purpose’: the No Frills supermarket own brand pioneered by Kwik Save is a classic example of this category. Sainsbury has their version called Sainsbury Basics. So by the time the economy picked up again choice had been increased even further. These brands moved away from, or redefined the bare essentials, for instance recently in Sainsbury’s I have noticed basics including filter coffee and Jaffa Cakes.

    SuperValu Nice Price Jaffa Cakes

    When I left university in the late 1990s, I got a jump on other candidates that worked for the same temping agency as me by having an alphanumeric pager that allowed me to be more responsive to the agency – getting better roles because it was easier for them to find me. Over the next ten years mobile phones became ubiquitous to the point where even homeless people and crack addicts have one.

    It is pretty much the same story with internet access. I used to go over to a cyber cafe in Liverpool near James Street station to check the email in my Yahoo! account every Saturday. Although I had bought shareware Mac software online via Kagi whilst at university, I made my first modern e-commerce purchases via Boxman during my lunch break in the office when I moved down to London. It is hard to imagine that prior to Freeserve in the UK, even dial-up home internet access was largely the preserve of the middle classes in the UK. In contrast, now fixed and mobile broadband has become ubiquitous with mobile broadband connections costing as little as 5GBP a month at the time of writing.

    I get the sense that we have reached a golden age of what basics means, and that golden age will last an uncertain amount of time as environmental and resource concerns kick in. Resources as diverse as food products, oil, copper and water are all under pressure; together with rise of a huge middle class in the developing world basics are going to be more expensive and some items will come off the list as compromises are made. Globalisation will no longer just be about competition to supply products and services, but also about consumer competition to demand goods.

    What does the basics look like to you? How will it change by economics, increasing awareness of personal carbon footprint and environmental impact? More retailing related content can be found here. 

  • Jamster & consumption

    Jamster

    Jamster the ringtone, logos and java games company most famous for its crazy frog ringtone TV adverts has been all over the media this week with the success in the UK charts of a single based on the ringtone.According to the Financial Times on Saturday the company has sold about 11 million Crazy Frog ringtones across Europe at about 3GBP a time. Lets be generous and allow them a cost of transcation of about 0.15GBP, giving a potential pre-tax profit of about 31.5 million GBP. This doesn’t take into account the cost of making the ads, online advertising, business infrastructure etc.

    Now in the UK according to anonymous sources quoted by media gossip newsletter Holy Moly, they have spent about 30 million GBP on TV advertising. Given the amount of times that I see the adverts when I go to the gym, I suspect that this number is not far off the mark. So, the frog is not as profitable as it would first seem. In addition, the adverts do not drive traffic to the Jamster website where they can cross promote other products, but flash up a short code number that you SMS for your ringtone.

    Where it gets really interesting according to the same sources is that from the a TV advertising point of view is that the ringtone adverts are apparently driving down the cost of TV ads. Understandably advertisers generally don’t want to appear in the slot after a Crazy Frog ad as a large proportion of the audience will have channel surfed off until the programme is back on, this means that the TV channels finding it harder to sell on these slots. The big mystery is why they haven’t told Jamster to get lost yet? More wireless related posts here.

    Class and consumption

    The New York Times has run a very interesting article on class and consumption in the US. When the Jones’ wear jeans talks about how technology, low inflation and consumer credit has levelled the playing field for the consumption of luxury goods and that the rich are more likely to be diffferentiated by the personal services they consume like plastic surgery, a nanny and a personal chef.

    Key take outs:

    • With the demise of the community and the rise of mass media, people are less likely to be bothered about keeping up the Jones’ (ie their local community) and more bothered about getting their fair share of what the rich have
    • Consumption is patchy, people may shop for discount brands but still like Starbucks coffee, iPods and designer jeans
    • About half of Americans now have a cell phone (there is about 176 million cellphones in the US), the cost of a cellphone has fallen to about an eighth of what it was a decade ago
    • Department store prices have fallen by about 10 per cent in the last decade
    • The new hot segment in the car market is ‘sub-luxury’ cars (like the BMW 1 series and the Audi A3)
    • American consumer debt is about 750 billion USD, up about six-fold over the past 20 years
    • I found it interesting that the article made a big play about how marketers are having to move from income and gender (socio demographic) segmentation to lifestyle and interests. (Are US marketers way behind the UK in this respect? I would have thought that the likes of P&G would have led the way rather than followed?)

    Finally a quote from a spokesperson from Godiva – the chocolate firm: “People want to participate in our brand because we are an affordable luxury,” said Gene Dunkin, president of Godiva North America, a unit of the Campbell Soup Company. “For under $1 to $350, with an incredible luxury package, we give the perception of a very expensive product.”

    renaissance chambara says that it goes to show the old maxim that perception is reality.

  • China Inc. – The 800-pound dragon in the room

    The New York Times has a great review of China Inc. by Ted C. Fishman which highlights the growing economic might of China. Some interesting facts and figures featured in the review of the book include:

    • From 1982 through 2002, the United States economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent. China’s economy grew at an annual rate of 9.5 percent,
    • In 2003 China bought 7 percent of the world’s oil, a quarter of its aluminum and steel, almost a third of its iron ore and coal, and 40 percent of its cement.
    • China makes 40 percent of all furniture sold in the United States
    • China has 3,000 Christmas-decoration factories which exported more than $900 million tree trimmings and plastic Santas in the first 10 months of 2003.
    • China still only makes one-twentieth of everything produced in the world
    • China can rely on a vast low-wage army, working for an average of 40 cents an hour, that can turn out consumer goods of every description
    • American and Japanese companies spend $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new car
    • New super-cities like Shenzhen, a fishing town of 70,000 20 years ago that now has 7 million people, making it larger than Los Angeles or Paris, swelled by migrants from the countryside looking for a better life in the city
    • Up to 300 million Chinese have migrated from the country to the city over the past 20 years
    • The Asian Brown Cloud, a wind-borne industrial smog that originates on China’s east coast, can be seen in California as it rides the jet stream
    • China has seven of the world’s ten most polluted cities


    The book also provides some insights into the differences between the rise of China and Japan. Unlike Japan, China Inc. is driven by local enterprises rather than the central analysis and planning carried out by Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) [now known as the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry] to find key markets to conquer. There is a certain irony in the socialist state using the brutal darwinism of the marketplace in a way that Adam Smith would have appreciated.

    Current reading at chez Renaissance Chambara:

     

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