There is an old metaphor that claims when a frog is placed in comfortable water which is gradually heated to the point of boiling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog) , the frog will be unaware of his impending doom and remain in the water until death. While this is simply proverbial, it is an applicable warning for which Apple should heed. Steve Jobs’ history has affected his decision making that has bided well for him up until now.
Apple has enjoyed a fairly pleasant popular reputation, or ‘smiley face history’, pretty much since they outgrew the majority of their adolescence throughout the late 80’s and introduced the yummy looking iMac in 1998. Even I, an ardent PC advocate, wanted to get one simply for how it would look on my desk. And to be honest, I was already aware of the superior graphic capabilities that Apple earned with their products. However, the cost was not enough to justify my emotional desire for one and the virtually unlimited software titles I could utilize with Windows kept me in the PC market. Nonetheless, I digress.
I mentioned the adolescent history of apple for a reason. It seems, or actually has been established, that Steve Jobs has a lofty, perhaps arrogant personality with at least those who are not in his close circles. His history with Apple would make this almost forgivable. The infighting that occurred between he and other Apple board members in the early days about the directions toward which to take the company which eventually led to his removal from the Apple project and then his ultimate departure, created within him a drive to prove them wrong. He felt he was right. And in my opinion, he was right. Tech history strongly supports he knew better how to manage a product line, and he was vindicated by being asked to return to Apple. The rebirth of Apple by the turn of the century was Jobs’ doing, and he had a right to not only be proud of it, but even viscerally vindictive. After all, one can only imagine the early days where he felt his now obviously good ideas were being ignored or put aside for illogical, irrational, and jejune reasons. We’ve all been there, and it’s hard to forget that kind of dismissing frustration.
It seems Jobs has not forgotten either. Now, it very well may not be the case that this righteous indignation for those who pushed him around before has carried over into his business model. But it certainly looks as though it has.
By the time iTunes was released, we already were aware of Apple’s controlling ways. In the beginning of iTunes release, you could not move your music files to anything other than specific Apple approved products, and there was a limit to how often you could do such a file transfer, despite the fact that you bought the music and legally owned it, and no laws imposed such limits so long as you did not then make copies available to others. There were several other examples, most recently being the imposed Requirement of iPhone “owners” to accept the absurd assumption that the phone for which they paid hundreds of dollars is something Apple still must control, that they would parentally decide which apps and what kinds of apps you shall be granted to install on “your” phone.
But you know what? This was ingenious. While most power-using geeks out there like me would not tolerate this insanity, and found it darn near offensive, Jobs knew from past experience that the majority of people out there didn’t care. He knew they liked simplistic rounded, sometimes colorful case designs of their Apple products, and as long as it did some neat wiz-bang stuff, they’d buy these Apple products by the millions. End of analysis, really. Once you know what will sell, and it does, it simply makes good business sense to give the majority what they want.
So it seems he has simply developed to become, rather than ceremoniously deemed, “King Jobs” in his eye-candy techno-castle. I don’t argue this. He has clearly demonstrated that he can dictate profoundly audacious and demonstrably arbitrary edicts about what apps you are allowed to use on “your” device, and his followers still clamor to pay hundreds of dollars for that device. His end users have no idea why this is unacceptable from a customer service point of view, and since this is a free country with free enterprise, the buyer must beware. In this case, the buyer is unaware or devil-may-care… by the millions. They are happy with what the iPhone does have. And they buy into, and perhaps are served by, the Apple rational that allowing such user control opens the device up to various instability issues.
Allow me to briefly explain why most power-users have disdain for this business model, despite that it is apparently superior for driving sales than any ‘open source’ or ‘open development’ phone or desktop OS (albeit Nokia has recently opened their Symbian OS source code up to all, but this was after they had already thoroughly dominated the cell phone manufacturer market). My nearly outdated HTC handset which runs Windows Mobile 6.1 was able to do a LOT of things several years ago. In fact, it could do almost anything any other phone could do, and still does. Then the iPhone came out and I was at first perplexed to see so many people ooo’ing and ahh’ing at the applications they could use on their new phones. I was wondering what was so special about a GPS map, a program that listened to and identifies music, email client, YouTube viewer, etc, etc that made them so ooo-able. After all, I had these same features on my WinMo device for years. Once I was able to get my hands on an iPhone, I quickly realized that there in fact was nothing special about these apps. My phone could so these things years before and with much more features because multiple developers were vying for you to use their app over one from another developer. In addition, I had many other apps on my phone that wasn’t even available to the iPhone at that time. The iPhone had “pinch and zoom”, but this was not important to me. I will say, however, that I envied then and now the vastly superior touch-screen technology the iPhone possesses.
Jobs’ is notoriously a recluse to the general public. In rare moments of what could be attributed to cases of temporary boredom, he replies to emails sent by the average Joe-Schmoe. This might seem like a good thing, but Jobs’ replies are typically less than comforting. In one email when a customer asked if the iPad would be tether-able to his iPhone, Jobs’ replied “No.”. That’s all. There’s nothing horrible about that short reply, but if Jobs is going to get into the practice of speaking directly to customers if even rarely, he should put a little more effort into showing a ‘thank you’ attitude to those customers who helped make him very rich. The rarity of contact makes it even less forgivable for him not to take a moment to think of a nice way to reply, and instead ‘slip up’ and be somewhat curt in his interactions with customers.
In a slightly more egregious instance, Jobs replied to a person asking for his help. Jobs reply was very short, and not so sweet. In essence, he told the developer to “get over it”. The incident occurred last November of 2009. A very small software company named “The Little App Factory” was making a legal and helpful application for the iPod that assisted in transferring music from one Apple product to another . The admittedly short sighted decision of the company to name their product iPodRip notwithstanding, CEO John Devor sent Jobs a polite and admiring email, albeit somewhat groveling, asking for Jobs’ help in calling off the Apple legal team that was forcing them to stop using the name. In that email, Devor groveled “[you] have been an inspiration for me”. Jobs’ reply?
“Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal. “
Steve
Again, if Jobs is going to interact with the customer base, he should at least pretend to have some gratitude for their patronage. But it’s not a crime, not even ‘unethical’. Just bad customer service that he can get by with at this point in time, which he apparently knows he can do. And that leads me to my main point.
Apple has recently made some moves that the general customer base is likely to notice. This is important, because the aforementioned emails, and others I did not mention, were fodder for geek sites and tech blogs, but didn’t make it to many of his typical ‘babes-in-toyland’ customer base who have no ideas what RSS is. The point here is that if you are making a crap load of money form a crap load of people and the demand is tremendously high for the product your company sells, your CEO’s rare emails to customer service can afford to be less than stellar. Applites, who not to be confused with Apple Fanboys (the former is more like a simple drone, the latter is more like an at least somewhat educated vocal advocate) everywhere will still flock to their apple stores to get the next Apple gadget.
The problem occurs when you behave like Jobs has behaved and then start making more public moves that could draw at attention, or perhaps even ire, of the general Applite customer base.
When Apple clearly demonstrated a demonstrably absurd and arbitrary approval and rejection process for developer’s app requests to be added to the iPhone App store, only developers and the geek segment knew about it with few exceptions. But when Apple recently decided that you are not allowed to have previously approved “Wi-Fi” detecting applications on “your” iPhone, a little slice of that general public noticed. You see, Wi-Fi detecting is simply what your laptop does when it shows you a list of all the Wi-Fi networks in your area. It’s how you find coffee shop wireless signals and connect to their free service.
It is unclear why Apple did this, as they cryptically offered that it was because the apps use “a private framework to access Wi-Fi information”. It has been theorized that this is referring to the iPhones built-in 802.11 radio.
While all other smart/PC phone manufacturers seemingly couldn’t care less, as well they shouldn’t, if you use their OS’s framework to access the built in wireless radio, once again Apple deems it important for you to understand that they shall decide how you use “your” iPhone’s features.
This move of arbitrary parental non-sense has cast a slightly wider net over the iPhone customer database. Unlike other decisions that power-users and geek watchdog sites noticed or even understood, now a significant slice of the shiny-happy-people customer base noticed. One iPhone user who knows almost nothing about technology said, “What the hell? Why can’t I use a Wi-Fi app on my phone?” This user may well have a very simplistic understanding of all the reasoning behind the decision and technology behind the iPhone wireless radio. But that need not detain us from the main point. She noticed, and she wasn’t happy.
In a move that illicits a warranted ‘shaking in the boots’ to cell phone manufacturers everywhere, Apple has announced it is suing HTC for Intellectual Property (IP) infringement. HTC has been kicking out phone after phone with touch screens and haven’t been too shy to implement iPhone like features, such as the way a touch-screen phone owner uses their finger to perform functions on the iPhone. It’s typically a “gray” area in the patent process when ‘ideas’ or patented as such ideas must meet the muster of uniqueness, or “not so obvious to have been utilized before”, before it is awarded a patent. On the flip side, patent infringement is just as gray: I.e., is the alleged infringement, if not an exact duplication, similar to the original patented idea? If so, to what degree?
Like the children in the classroom who sit quietly and wide-eyed, eyes darting back an forth between the teacher and a devient child that keeps playing with his muted Nintendo DSi during quiet-time, and watching to see the teacher’s reaction if any, other cell phone manufactures have held back with their touch-screen software as far as implementing certain usability features, but have kept an eye on HTC and seeing if Apple was going to pounce. Apple did not for quite some time now, and other manufactures have slowly been implanting similar touch-screen usability features (just as other school children might start pulling out their DSi’s to play with during class). Again, they were not certain such features infringed on Apple’s Intellectual Property Patents, but they weren’t willing to test it. They let the bold child, HTC, be the guinea pig, and when HTC wasn’t yanked by the collar and sat in the corner, they began to mimic the behavior.
That may have been the catalyst for Apple to make a move in this area. It is unclear why they didn’t pounce earlier. Nonetheless, this move may also get noticed by their drone-like customer base when the rest of the world starts complaining about why they don’t have phones that can do what the iPhone can do.
Since I began this article about a month ago, Jobs has remained true to form, responding to yet a few more groveling fans with curt replies, and coming right out with his disdain for Flash technology and it’s lack of implementation in the new iPad. And about that disdain for Flash technology, this is going to be noticed. Big time. As the babes-in-toyland proudly play with their new iPads before any other tablets make it onto the market, they will recognize the lack of flash capability. Jobs seems to be unaware that the vast ignorance of his typical customer base are not aware of how much they use Flash on their Mac or PCs. But they will now.
Now, it may be the case that they will see the stand-in icon replacing several boxes where a flash advertisement, game, or video would normally play, but not be too distressed. After all, they can’t see what they are missing anyway. But then there will be some times when they attempt to look at their local news channels’ weather radar and a message will alert than that they need flash installed to view the application. They’ll see this message here and there, but maybe not enough to cause them more than a furrowed brow and dismiss the lack of usability. They will almost certainly ask their tech friend, who if a PC user, will be filled with so much visceral hatred or profound smugness at seeing an iPad user ask why their iPad won’t do something, to give a comprehendible response. But if a Mac user, they’ll hear how Flash makes the device less stable and allows for malicious software to run on the device as well. They may even finish up with a “…most flash is used to look at porn anyways, so it’s not necessary”. The iPad owner will likely nod, but turn back to their iPad and wonder why their computers still have that ability and they’ve never had more heard of such numerous and horrible problems with malicious software from other computer users. But the worst (or best?) is to come.
You see, new Windows 7 tablets will hit the market, namely the HP Slate, where more and more chances of sitting beside someone in the train or bus or at work who is happily surfing the net able to do a lot of things the iPad user cannot do. The following conversation, or reasonable facsimile there of, will go like this:
“Does that have 3G in it?” the iPad user may ask.
“Um, no, I’m using my 4G dongle for speeds 6 to 10 times faster than 3G”.
“Oh…” as they look at the dongle. How do you do that?”
“This has a USB port.. I can plug in any connectivity device into my tablet. And next month when Wimax2 is released here in the city, I’ll start using that for 12-14 times as fast a 3G connection”.
“Oh.” Says the ipad user as they look down at their iPad. They find themselves watching the screen on the Windows 7 tablet, doing lots of things their iPad can’t do.
It won’t matter if the Windows7 tablet is slower, as long as it’s not really slow. It won’t matter that the battery life is “only” 5 hours, given most laptop users are rarely more than 3 hours from being stationary near an electrical outlet long enough to recharge. It won’t matter that the screen is not as responsive, as long as it *is* responsive. The iPad user is going to see that the Windows 7 device is what they want next, not the next iPad.
This, again, is not true for the Apple fanbois. They will still carry the mantra on of how the iPad has a 10 hour battery, Windows 7 is bloated, instable, and insecure, and no one *really* needs flash. But the rest of the demographic, the vast majority of the demographic who aren’t’ so technically savvy, won’t care. They will want that functionality badly, unlike in the past with earlier iProducts, and here is why:
Jobs has been able to enjoy his fortunes because windows mobile power users did not number enough to show the iPhone buyers the devastating comparisons. Android was too new as well. And back in the day, Mac and PC could both do essentially the same things with not so perceptible differences.
But Windows 7 tablets will be ubiquitous. They’ll be in the planes, trains, and cubicles in full display next to the iPads. For the first time in Apple history, their devices will have direct competition standing in full view and arms reach of their not-so-tech-savvy customer base. And the demonization of Windows 7 issues will seem trivial.
And the only way Jobs will be able to compete is to give up his control of his customer’s devices. I’m just not so sure he’ll be able to do it. I see him angrily clutching the iPad 2nd gen to his chest as he defiantly refuses to take the outstretched arms of his faithful team and falls to his proverbial death over the cliff.
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