Benjamin Bloom - thoughts and analysis of digital strategy, cloud based marketing solutions, and consumer experiences.
Apple's identity (account and Touch ID) stategy comes into focus here in this Chart via BusinessInsider.
The meta-battle is now:
# of exclusive SKUs, Total SKUs, and ease of purchase. Apple might have the digital content piece (apps, movies etc) but Amazon and Paypal have the physical (and second-hand) universe on lockdown.
TouchID certainly is going to help with ease of purchase, and the rest of the battle is: how can we get consumers to buy ____ with Apple.
I hadn't really spent time checking out Wedpics. I know that when I heard about it, I thought it would be a hit. When I was planning my own wedding, I thought that the obvious place we were going as a country was that instead of a wedding web site, we would have wedding apps.
The wedding app would manage RSVPs, tell guests where to be and when, make last minute announcements and adjustments and customize all this info down to the guest level. Obviously this would take a lot of the drab paper and social hand-wringing out of it.
Enter Wedpics. Check out their take on wedding photography, which couples can spend thousands of dollars to pay a professional, when most of the enjoyment is the Facebook album you create of the pics you get right away. I think this is the future of event photography - beyond weddings - where the most meaningful photos are captured, viewed and showcased in real time.
Much of this post was orginally a comment on "Snubbing the Media — Strategy or Revenge?" at Bulldog reporter. I'm working on a larger post about what a universe run by Apple would look like.
The manufacture of the gadgets that have become part of our lives, and made Apple a hugely profitable company in the meantime, has transformed Apple's operations into a lightning rod for outrage over worker conditions. Listeners to This American Life were let in on the sad story even before the Times article was released.
What was damning about the NYT story was that it went further in context and further in exploring corruption. In context, it was better able to show the matrix of conditions costs and imperatives that are involved with being an apple supplier and a worker at such a supplier. But in corruption, the NYT was able to get former Apple employees to discuss the company's internal perspective on the problem, without being official mouthpieces. Culpability seemed to be at the heart of these admissions. What are we to say about that? Apple ruthlessly prevents outside access to its inner deliberations, and in some ways this culture of secrecy is good business practice, but in others, it allows sensational news items to define the company's story.
So now Apple is using its main currency, (thirst for details about the company), to attempt to control the story and diver the narrative away from the labor issue. It's an authoritarian move, and we shouldn't expect Apple to change that approach overnight any more than it can change Foxconn's practices overnight; in many ways that approach might continue to work.
Apple isn't just freezing out the NYT: it is freezing the citizens of the world and the community of its users from being stakeholders in Apple's governance.
As the goods we purchase transition to digital rather than physical, the tangible devices and experiences we do purchase become increasingly important expressions of their lose their tangibly, the opportunity we have to participate in the industrial decisions surrounding their production is real and a true test of the world's appetite for respecting craftsmanship, effort, sacrifice, and pride. Will it become harder to exploit citizens of other low-wage countries, or easier? That much is up to us.
Nice wrap up on SAI, from a Quora post about how apple uses its massive cash resources:
When new component technologies (touchscreens, chips, LED displays) first come out, they are very expensive to produce, and building a factory that can produce them in mass quantities is even more expensive. Oftentimes, the upfront capital expenditure can be so huge and the margins are small enough (and shrink over time as the component is rapidly commoditized) that the companies who would build these factories cannot raise sufficient investment capital to cover the costs.
...
Apple is not just crushing its rivals through superiority in design, Steve Jobs's deep experience in hardware mass production (early Apple, NeXT) has been brought to bear in creating an unrivaled exclusive supply chain of advanced technology literally years ahead of anyone else on the planet. If it feels like new Apple products appear futuristic, it is because Apple really is sending back technology from the future.
Reminds me of the Clarke's Third Law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -[Wikipedia]
Reading The dirty little secret about Google Android, I've been enjoying the insightful analysis of how Apple's decision to free the device from the restrictions of the carrier were key to the identity of the device, and seem more in keeping with what Google originally promised with the Nexus One.
Unfortunately, the Nexus One flopped. The non-Apple customers buy their wireless devices and service very differently. Mass-market phones, even smart phones, need marketing spend behind them, and those campaigns are linked to carrier restrictions and modifications which compromise the "open" vision. The upshot, according to the article:
the consequence of not putting any walls around your product is that both the good guys and the bad guys can do anything they want with it. And for Android, that means that it’s being manipulated, modified, and maimed by companies that care more about preserving their old business models than empowering people with the next great wave of computing devices.
I think this rolls back into the S-Curve of technology adoption.
[credit: Wikipedia]
As the market matures and a it becomes a mass market product, smart phones and apps become both more standardized and more understandable for the average community. We see and hear idiotic advertisements exhorting us to be "twin texting turbos" with the Droid 2. And this is great for Verizon's bottom line, for marketers and developers launching Android apps, and for mobile web content growth. But it basically sucks for the innovators who want to be able to get a great device and move from carrier to carrier in the US market.
Other perspectives: Nic Brisbourne of DFJEsprit writes
[T]he longevity of the app paradigm versus open web standards will depend in large measure on who wins the hardware battle. Open standards at the software level probably will probably only prevail if hardware manufacturers with a PC mindset prevail over those with a preference for closed ecosystems...
Unfortunately, the principles of openness have been interpreted to mean an open app ecosystem, and haven't changed the economics of the closed carrier/device model in the US. Google wants a big market for Android apps and as many users as possible, and that motivation is at cross-purposes with the open-ness that geeks want.
At about 1:20 in the iPhone4 video Scott Forstall imagines a Facetime call with his (future) college-age kids. Really?
Really? It was cool when i could email my parents from my dorm room, and ok, I can see the appeal for being able to call them from the lawn where I'm studying. But havging them video-call me? Whenever they wanted?
If there are iPhones in 2017, I'm guessing that most calls to college students after 10pm on weekends go straight to voicemail.
