As most of you know, I am a critic of the iPhone. Truth be told, though, if you say that the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market, I won’t entirely disagree. The question, of course, is “best for whom?” For people that want a phone of its type (simple, tightly integrated design, thin, no keyboard, outstanding app selection), it is far and away the best. But that’s sort of giving it a heck of a home field advantage. Tim Lee sums up my thoughts better than I have yet to be able to:

A good way to visualize this is by thinking of a computing platform as a funnel. At the narrow end of the funnel is a human user with an extremely limited capacity for absorbing information. At the fat end of the funnel is “the world”—the collection of websites, devices, people, organizations, or other entities with which the user might wish to exchange information. The job of a computing platform is to connect the two—to filter and organize the vast amounts of information at the fat end of the funnel into a form that is digestible by the user at the skinny end. {…}

This explains why iOS has been losing ground to Android even though most people agree that the iPhone is the best single smartphone on the market. There are tens of millions of people who care most about the narrow end of the funnel. They want the best user interface, and are willing to make compromises on other fronts to get it. Most of these customers will opt for an iPhone. But there are hundreds of millions of customers who care more about some other factor. They want a phone from their favorite carrier, a phone with a physical keyboard or a removable battery, a phone with their choice of app store, a phone they can get for free with a contract, a phone they can get with a pre-paid plan, etc. No single phone (wireless carrier, hardware manufacturer, etc) can satisfy all of these diverse customers. Only a platform designed to support many different phones from many different manufacturers on many different networks can cope with this kind of diversity.

Armed & Dangerous talks about the success that Android has been having:

More interesting, perhaps, is what is not happening in the latest figures. Tragically for the contrarians, it is Apple’s U.S market-share growth rather than Android’s that has stalled. Android share growth continues to bucket along at about 2% a month, while Apple’s shows no increase in the latest figures.

The future is another country, of course, but right now it looks like those of us who thought that multicarrier iPhone was going to be largely unable to fix Apple’s long-term positioning problem were correct. The iPhone’s market isn’t exactly saturated in the normal sense, but sales volumes are only growing as fast as the smartphone userbase as a whole; the multicarrier ‘breakout’ only netted Apple about a 1% competitive gain, and that gain now appears to be over.

Apple is now relying on smartphones for 68% of revenue, so they’d be very vulnerable to an actual drop in marketshare. I’ve taken a lot of flak for saying the company looks like a late-stage sustainer with a principal product line about to experience disruptive collapse, but this is yet another straw in the wind. If next month’s figures show an actual share drop, expect it to be self-reinforcing and get the hell out of Apple stock.

It sounds ominous to talk about how much of Apple’s revenue comes from smartphones. That could just as easily be pointing out the other thing: Apple is actually making money from its smartphones.

There are a lot of questions as to why Google has taken it upon itself to purchase Motorola. Here is Farhad Manjoo’s take:

That’s why I’m betting that this deal will represent a turning point in how Google operates Android. Today, the platform is “open” but chaotic—because phone-makers get the software for free and can do whatever they want with it, Android is available on some good phones as well as lots and lots of cheap, bad ones. In the aftermath of this deal, Google will seek to exert greater influence over hardware companies. Eventually, the deal will help reduce the number of new Android devices that are released every year, and the few that are released will be of generally higher quality—and sell for higher prices—than what we see in the Android device market today.

This won’t happen overnight. Indeed, in a conference call announcing the deal, Google executives argued that the huge purchase won’t change anything about Android. The Motorola division will run as a separate entity within Google. This arrangement is meant to reduce Motorola’s ability to get preferential access to Android over other handset makers that use the OS. This is a signal that at Google, “openness” is still the ideal.

My hope is that Google’s main plan is to create a flagship product. That there are many products and designs that carry different versions of Android is not as much a problem as the fact that there is no real central design that they are all drifting from. If Google can create a serious of flagship products, it would be in the best interest of Samsung and others to fly relatively close to the formation so that the Android apps created for the Flagship will work on their product. Motorola is one of the big makers of Android phones, and with direct ownership over the product, it’s possible that they can be central enough to get the others to “fly right.” That’s my hope anyway.

It also allows them the opportunity to actually make money with their product.

The big news with Apple is, of course, the departure (and likely imminent death) of Steve Jobs. Not being an Apple guy, I don’t have much to say about it other than that I wish the best for him. Despite my disagreements with the direction he took it, he did make everyone take smartphones seriously. Before him, there was serious resistance on the part of carriers because they couldn’t control a smartphone the way that they could control feature phones where ringtones and apps could be required to come from the company store. Jobs didn’t do me any favors, since I was perfectly willing to seek out a product that not everyone else was using, and preferred the niche devices over the standard that Jobs set. But… he introduced smartphoning to a whole lot of people.

However, even though I am not a Mac user and an iPhone user, there was one thing that he did that I loved. One of his “failed” ventures was a company called NeXT, which worked on OSes. In addition to kind of setting up their own shop, they created a front-end shell for Windows 3.1, which was the first Windows operating system that I ever used. Windows 3.1 relied on Program Manager, which was as user unfriendly as it was inflexible. NeXT made Windows 3.1 really easy to use and set the standard for how I would later customize Windows 95 and beyond.

ebooks: Footnotes & Hyperlinks

Since it was discovered that Amazon is selling more ebooks than actual books, there’s been a new wave of proclamations that print is dead and ebooks are the future. Here’s Megan McArdle:

Printing and distributing books is a large industry with significant economies of scale. If too few people buy print books, the cost of the remaining books will start to rise. Eventually, more and more applications will switch to the winning medium, even if individuals miss being able to flip through books. There will be specialty applications, but they will be very expensive.

The problem I see with this is that it does not seem to me that economies of scale are going to be the death of (or cause of irrelevancy of) the publishing industry. Publishing has become more flexible than ever. Print-on-Demand is a growth industry. The overhead on getting a book ready to print – absent other costs – has gotten so low that John Q Public can do it. The more expensive part, really, is product selection, marketing, and editing. These are things that you have to do whether going digital or print. And once you’ve done all that legwork for the ebook, why not offer a published version as well?

So will printing become more niche? Probably so. The gadgeteer in me loves it, but for the fact that DRM means that it’s not just physical books being tossed by the wayside, but actual ownership of the books. But I don’t think that it will ever reach the point of being actually niche. It still offers a product that eBooks don’t. You don’t have to worry about batteries. You can read during take-off and landing of airplanes. You have total ownership (including the ability to trade back and forth as much as you like). And it’s decoration. The first three strike up a crucial difference between CDs and MP3s, though the last part applies to both.

To me, the promise of eBooks is not as a replacement for printed books. Rather, it’s the creation of an entirely new medium. It doesn’t seem like the publishers have really caught on to it, though. The electronic nature allows eBooks the ability to do something that’s much harder to do in print. Namely, hyperlinks.

Never has this become more apparent than listening to the audiobook for the Game of Thrones series. Here you have an unbelievable number of characters and families sprawling all over the Seven Kingdoms. At the end of every book is an appendix giving a rundown of all of the families. Obviously, with a book you can always flip to the back, but with electronic text, you can simply tap on a name whenever it appears and be reminded. “Jacen Bloke, Duke of Westerland, son of Aron Bloke, twin brother to Jaren Bloke, died on the Battle of the Riverfront” and so on (all descriptions wouldn’t need to be the same – they might just need to contain the relevance of the mention).

My first attempt at writing a novel was a little over fifteen years ago, though it took place last year. Because I was dealing with a 15-year leap in time, there were a lot of various things I referred to that the main character wouldn’t explain in his narrative because everybody knows who President Tsongas was. So I used a lot of footnotes. Two of my four novels have, for different reasons, an obscene number of characters. I have an appendix in back to help keep them straight. Of course, it’s hard to put things in an appendix that don’t give away stuff that happens in the novel. Not a problem with footnotes or hyperlinks. I’m still developing in my mind a detective series in a fictitious state. There’s a good chance I would be using footnotes there the same way I did in the first novel I tried (and failed) to write.

But what can be done with footnotes is simply nothing compared to what you can do with hyperlinks. Books have a more standard beginning, middle and end. It’s much easier for ebooks to be fluid, to be able to go back and forth between the main story and background. Some people don’t give a rats arse about background. You could actually give readers the option to skip it. Or, if they skipped it and they wish they hadn’t, a single place they can go in order to see all of the background stuff.

Right now, ebooks are just books in digital format. Change that, and you change everything. You allow for the telling of different kinds of stories. You allow for something that makes printed books really obsolete, and not just because they don’t have a power button.

I have a problem with the belt holsters I put my cell phone in. Namely, if they’re the “right size”, they’re actually too small. By which I mean that they fit too snugly. This is a problem because I take the phone in and out of the holster and all sorts of unintented screen-presses happen. The best ones are a little too large for my phone. I found one the right size on eBay a while back. I wanted a spare, but when I went back to get a backup, it was gone. So I ordered a few different kinds, but none were right. Finally, I saw something very similar to the first on eBay. And I ordered it. And it wasn’t the same one as in the picture. The ad warned me that it might not be, but I had hoped.

Since the seller seemed to sell all kinds of cell phone belt holsters, I wrote the seller this question about the:

“Hello, I ordered this product a while back, but it was too small for my HTC Touch Pro 2. I would like something just a little bit larger. Do you have something for a phone that’s a little bit larger? In fact, the one in the picture is exactly like one I have that fits my phone. What model is that for?”

To which they responded:

“Hello. Yes. This product will fit your HTC Touch Pro 2 perfectly.”

Me: “I know it should, but I find it too tight a fit. I am looking for one the next size up. Do you have any that hold a phone that’s maybe just a little bit larger?”

Them: “This is the one that you need for your HTC Touch Pro 2. It is made for the Touch Pro 2.”

Me: “Which model is the one in the picture for.”

Them: “I don’t know. What kind of phone do you have?”

Me: “I have a Touch Pro 2, but I am looking for one that’s slightly larger. I think the one in the picture is what I want.”

Them: “This item will fit your Touch Pro 2.”

Domino’s Pizza is bragging on their new website where you can track your pizza order. They also have a little feedback/comment section.

It seems like it’s popular among companies to ask for feedback. A lot of places will even offer a reward (or more common, a chance at a reward) for feedback.

I actually like Domino’s new method. Instead of ten questions that you don’t know how to answer because you don’t know how they will be received (some places will penalize for anything lower than a “perfect” score, so if you think you think you are doing them a favor by giving a 9/10, you are actually giving them a demerit. Anyhow, Domino’s appears to be a more informal process. Simply leave a note (“too much garlic”) and that’s that. The messages get posted, and pride does the rest.

I don’t expect that I will be ordering any pizza from Dominos in the near future, but I have to give them credit for the simplicity of the concept.

In the airport, they had some plush toys. Including some airplanes that were marked NorthWest Airlines. NWA was, of course, swallowed up by Delta a couple of years ago. This lead me to wonder, did the plus toys have NWA’s logo and all despite the fact that it no longer exists, or because it no longer exists?

I don’t know what the merchandising rights on such things are. Do the airlines pay to have the toys made, or do the doys pay the airlines for use of their logo and so on. Is it advertising, or is it merchandise?

If it’s merchandise, then I would think that it would probably cost less to use the NWA logo than Delta’s logo, since NWA is defunct and therefore demand is low. But if it’s merchandise, why pay anybody? Why not just make something up? A three year old kid wouldn’t care.

Which makes me think its advertising, and that in Delta pay in fact be paying to put their logo there. If one of the main goals in advertising is to keep a brand in our consciousness, toys aren’t a bad way of doing that. On the other hand, it’s been two years since NWA went away. Why is that there?

Tangentially, the distinction between advertising and merchanising was one of the main factors in Alan Moore’s big break from DC comics many years ago. He was supposed to get a cut of any Watchmen merchandising, but DC simply classified just about everything it sold with Watchmen on it (except the comic book, of course) as “advertising.”

Every now and again you hear about police of health inspectors shutting down lemonaid stands. Conservatives like to point to this as a case of regulation gone amuck. The former libertarian in me agrees wholeheartedly, enthusiastic for bottom-up business in general, whether a taco truck or shrimp sold out of the back of a GMC Jimmy. On the other hand, people like to know where their food is coming from, that it has been safely handled, and so on. And I get that, too.

But what I really think of when I read stories like this is: lemonaid stands suck. I mean, the whole point of it is to give kids a chance at learning about business and making a little bit of money and all that. But seriously, lemonaid stands suck. You typically end up making less than minimum wage. And in the south, you’re burning up while doing so (probably anywhere else, since you typically sell lemonaid in hot weather). So the lesson you learn is that hard work is for chumps. Which of course, may be a valuable lesson in itself, I suppose. But it’s not the lesson that the parents are trying to teach.

Of course, our kids are being taught salesmanship in any event, if they belong to the scouts, a sports team, a band, or pretty much any organization that needs fundraisers. As Bill Engvall says, we’re raising a generation of Amway salesmen. Except Amway products have more value than what you’re charged to sell, and you’re allowed to develop your own markets (more on this later). It started off with candy bars, which was ingenious because we would want to eat them all. And spoiled parents would let their kids do just that (mine wouldn’t). I suspect that the problem here came to be that the candy bars would melt, parents wouldn’t want to pay for them, and the company didn’t want them back. So they shifted to beef jerky, which was actually kind of cool. I loved (and love!) beef jerky and I would use my lunch or paper-route money to buy them. You can imagine my irritation one year when, after I was done, Dad bought the rest of them for me. “Now you’re going to be generous? The year I already bought half of them?” I wonder if he just had a spurt of generosity, or if he was impressed at my salesmanship (not knowing who my primary customer was). The primary problem with the beef jerky was that you didn’t have your own market. Suddenly everybody on the little league team was selling beef jerky at once. So the people that don’t want to buy it just say that tbey bought it from somebody else, and those that do want it have to choose who they’re going to buy it from. It becomes a popularity contest. Which, come to think of it, may be a valuable lesson in itself.

The last few years they moved on to something really, really worthless. Mail-order meals. Because everybody wants nachos sent to them by some company in Des Moines. It saves us from the hazard of having to handle this food. But how do you sell nachos with 6-8 weeks of delivery time? You don’t. And you begin to hate the sales process. And capitalism. Which, come to think of it, may be…

The young lady at the local supply store lets me have my frou-frou coffee for free, more often than not. About 60% of the time, since I have started keeping track. Not one to accept a glass 60% full, I’ve been trying to figure out what her schedule is and under what conditions I get it for free and under what conditions I have to pay for it. Is if it some supervisor is around? Some coworker? When I buy something else? When I don’t buy anything else? (I’ve determined it’s not the last two). Most likely, she’s just being randomly generous. And I should appreciate the free coffee I get.

But still, more free coffee is better than less free coffee.

In writing about the the whole incident a while back regarding Apple’s factory workers in China, Dave Pinson makes the following point:

I can see how it might be tough for a company like Dell to manufacture low-margin laptops in the U.S., but doesn’t Apple have high enough profit margins that in can afford to manufacture some of its gadgets here? If New Balance can make some of its high-end sneakers here, why can’t Apple make some iPads and iPhones here? It can’t be for a lack of workers — Apple’s home state of California has a 12.9%. unemployment rate. Maybe it would mean lower profit margins — or maybe Apple could pass on the higher labor costs to its cult-like customers — but it still seems worth trying.

I’d actually be really curious to know what the markup would be if they made in in California. Or, for that matter, South Carolina. You would think that if anyone could afford to absorb some of the costs, it would be Apple. They remain an American company, though, and presumably do the vast majority of their design and R&D work here. My phone is an HTC, which is full-on Taiwanese, though they also do work in the US and are hiring from Washington to North Carolina. HTC actually used to be an English acronym High Tech Computers.

Incidentally, I got a couple new watches over the last couple of months. One I wrote about here. The other is a brown watch from the US Polo Association (though as near as I can tell, the watch doesn’t have anything to do with polo, and is not exactly the fine watch one might expect from our polo-playing elite, nor is it a sportsish watch). It has a little American flag on it. Want to guess where it wasn’t made? The watch was really cheap, so I wouldn’t expect them to make it here. But it was made in… Japan. That I don’t get. It can’t be that much cheaper to make them in Japan than to make them here, can it? I understand that with Made in China or Made in Thailand, there are tradeoffs. Maybe good tradeoffs, maybe bad ones. But it saves them money and so presumably it saves you at least a little bit. But… Japan?

I’ve gotten a couple of new watches over the last couple months. One of them is kinetically powered, meaning that you wind it and it is supposed to power as you move your arms. Apparently, I don’t move around enough in my sleep because every morning the watch is stopped or running very slowly. That I don’t move around a whole lot in my sleep would be news to my brothers. Clancy reminded me that I jerk my legs a lot in my sleep, so maybe I should put it on my ankle at night. Perhaps not coincidentally, the same site that sold me the watch was selling a watch-shaker a couple weeks later, to keep kinetic watches powered (which kind of defeats the purpose of having a self-powering watch). Coincidence?

What’s particularly frustrating is that I absolutely love the watch. I love watches and clocks in general, and this is one of the coolest looking ones I have ever had. But it’s usefulness is rather limited.

I am thinking I should maybe give it to a sexually frustrated teenager who has to gratify himself constantly. I would guess that’s about the only way to make sure it keeps a charge.

Walter Olson brings back the “Cash For Clunkers is why used cars have become so expensive” argument:

Guess what’s the newest trouble to hit the car business? As news outlets around the country are reporting, the price of used cars has lately soared to a modern-day record, with some cars commanding more used than they sold for when new. News accounts commonly finger the Japanese earthquake and high gas prices as reasons, but there are some problems fitting either reason to the case. While the earthquake affected the supply of new cars, it’s the previously driven kind that has scored the more impressive price jump. And while the rise in gas prices would explain a relative shift in buyer demand from SUVs and trucks toward smaller vehicles — which has indeed happened — the strength of the used-vehicle market lately has been such that even the thirstier vehicles have advanced in price, $4 gas or no.

No doubt there are multiple reasons for the price spike, including the severe general slump in new-auto sales in recent years, which has reduced the volume of newer cars coming onto the resale market. But — as Washington scrambles to take undeserved credit for whatever passes for normalization in the auto business these days — it’s worth remembering that an artificial scarcity of used cars isn’t just bad for the poor as a group: it’s bad in particular for the upwardly mobile poor, since in most of the country landing a job means needing to line up transportation to get to that job. When it suddenly costs $6,000 instead of $3,000 to get wheels, the move from unemployment to a paying job faces a new and discouraging barrier.

At least he points out that there are “multiple reasons,” which is something that a lot of C4C critics have glided over in the past. Even so, he acts like C4C is the driving factor when there is comparatively little reason to believe it’s more than just a contributor. I wrote about C4C here and here. My basic view is that Cash For Clunkers was an idiotic proposal, a poor way to go about reducing emissions and destroying a lot of capital along the way, but that it’s hard to blame all – or most – of the increased cost of used cars on the law. I previously pointed out that some of the cars where the price increase is the highest, late-model used cars for instance, were not the ones taken off the road. While it’s possible that there is a cascading effect (people can’t buy a targeted, fuel-inefficient vehicle and instead buys an ineligible care taking that one off the road) you would still see the biggest impact on the cars that were targeted and more impact on cars from that period and not more recent cars. Instead, it’s the other way around, suggesting that the biggest reduction in used car availability (where increased demand is meeting decreased supply) is a result of people buying late-model used rather than new vehicles and – more likely – holding on to the car that they have.

Olson cites this article, among others:

Bill Visnic, analyst and senior editor at Edmunds.com, said the auto industry went from selling 16.5 million new cars annually before the recession, down to 10.5 million in the depths of the crisis. He said the average age of a used vehicle on the road today is in excess of ten years old, as well, meaning that overall more consumers are keeping their older cars.

“About five million people or so dropped out of the market,” Visnic said. “A vast number of those people would have been trading in a used car when they bought a new one. That’s a big whammy when the replacement rate has been lagging so much.”

Consumers looking to buy used cars will find that prices are up markedly, Visnic said. The Wall Street Journal reports that prices for used cars are up 5% this year at wholesale auto house Manheim. He said the Car Allowance Rebate System, which was introduced in 2009, also set off the price hike in the used market. The government program dubbed “Cash for Clunkers” offers economic incentives to U.S. consumers for turning in their used cars for a newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle. In turn, instead of ending up on the used car lots across the country, those vehicles went to junkyard graves.

So there has been a reduction of 6 million car sales per annum. Cash for Clunkers may be responsible for – at maximum – 1/7th of that. That assumes that everyone who totaled their car in 2009 would have sold it in 2010. Given that a frequent (and valid!) criticism of C4C is that it didn’t even increase the sale of new cars because it merely time-shifted purchasing (they bought in 2009 what they might have waited a couple years to get rid of), it seems likely that a lot of them would still have the car.

Be that as it may, it is likely that it is contributing to the problem to at least some extent. The “lost capital” that I lament is going to have some effect. And it is another reason to dislike this bit of free pudding policymaking. But there are a lot of other factors at work (an economy that went to hell, primarily) that swamp the effects of the policy.