February 14, 2012
Fidelity is Fungible

Apropos Apple’s rumored iTV…

“TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration.”

- Chris Moseley, Samsung AV Product Manager

source (Pocket-lint)

I predict that this statement will come to haunt Samsung.  Products are rarely ultimately about any one thing.  It’s the overall experience that matters.  And, while the picture quality of flat-screen TVs has gotten very, very good, the overall experience—from buying them, to configuring them, to connecting them to other devices, to connecting them to the Internet—is simply terrible.

Consumers are very willing to trade off media quality for other features.  In fact, over the past several decades, there has been an across-the-board trend to worse fidelity.    

In telephony, cordless phones introduced static and interference that wasn’t present with POTS.  Voice quality and call reliability were further compromised by cellular.  The overall experience, however, was better: phones became portable, mobile, and integrated with digital address books.  Having Google Voice forward to a cell phone (which I do), further compromises voice quality, in exchange for rough, automatic transcription, voice mail to email, free texting, and what used to be called “bridged-call appearance” (one number rings multiple phones).

Recorded music has followed a similar trajectory.  Although CDs provided a more reliable and superior experience on low-end equipment, audiophiles complained that, at the high-end, CDs could not match the fidelity of analog vinyl.  The compressed digital audio of MP3s undisputedly degraded fidelity further, in exchange for making it practical to download digital music and store it on portable players.

Finally, as movie consumption has moved from theaters, to televisions, to laptops, tablets, and iPods, fidelity has suffered.  Although fidelity improved as we transitioned from VHS to DVD to Blue-Ray, with the rise of streaming video-on-demand, fidelity is again on the retreat.

I would not be at all surprised to see Apple release an iTV with very good video quality specs, but even if this mythical product were to have mediocre video quality or even sub-par video quality, it would likely have Apple-level attention to UX.  Making a TV that was easy and fun to set up and use, that didn’t make users feel dumb, could be a huge win that could do major damage to incumbents like Samsung.  

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October 14, 2011
My Tribute to Steve: Two Days Not Building an MVP

Like many techie types, I’ve been reflecting on Steve Jobs and how he moved me and influenced me at various times in my life. I started writing down these thoughts in a blog post: the fierce competition at my junior high school (yes, that’s what it was called back then) for the two Apple ][s we had; sneaking into my dad’s closet in the Fall of 1983 to read the manuals and technical documentation for the original Macintosh (he was involved in one of the early university deals with Apple and had received them under strict NDA); the day my three year-old became an iPhone user. But then I thought, writing this is not a good use of my time.

Instead, I thought I’d pay Steve homage by sacrificing two days to stop iterating on my MVP, to work on the aesthetics, usability, and insane greatness of my web service.  I don’t know whether this effort will help me acquire users and it certainly won’t help me discover the right market niche, but the product is just so darn beautiful tonight, that I go to bed feeling happy and proud.

Tomorrow, back to the funnel.

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October 4, 2011
Siri is Awesome, But Not for Apple

Update Oct 5th, 2011 (evening)

RIP Steve Jobs, aesthete extraordinaire. You made the world a more beautiful place.

Update Oct 5th, 2011 (morning)

Having received some stiff but fair criticism on Hacker News for this post, I’d like to clarify and summarize a few points:

  1. Apple is not a fashion company.  Yet the value of their brand is clearly not just about utility.  Apple’s products have been so good, so sexy, so “magical” (thank you Apple marketing), that they inspire feelings of religious ecstasy and fetishistic adoration in their users.  This has real value for Apple and they should be highly protective of this phenomenal good will.  But, now we are supposed to believe that the tactile titillation we get from fondling EVE in our palms, is to be replaced by the experience of shouting at an IVR?  Forgive my skepticism.
  2. By “Siri is awesome”, I meant that what we saw yesterday from Apple was awesome.  But, it feels like Apple is over-promising.  I have used the old Siri off and on for the last year on my iPhone.  It’s cute, but is far from “magical”.  To match the speed, reliability, and ease-of-use of the other features on the iPhone (and to avoid tarnishing the brand), Apple would have had to improve dramatically upon the previous Siri.
  3. There are certain visionary product ideas that have been around for decades and have been repeatedly tried, and yet somehow are never quite good enough for mass adoption.  Videoconferencing is one (despite several attempts by Apple).  A voice-controlled AI-backed personal assistant is another. 
  4. If Siri fails (which I think is likely), Apple retreats and moves on.  If it is wildly successful, it is disruptive.  Mobile devices start to disappear and fade into an invisible ubiquitous computing environment that we talk to.  Very cool.  But can Apple sustain an advantage in this world?  AI, IVRs, natural language processing, search—these are not areas where Apple has a lot of experience, talent, or any kind of lead.

Apple does many things well, but above all, hardware and graphic interfaces.  Their products are like sculptures from the 23rd century; gorgeous to behold, almost erotic to touch.  Their software interfaces have a similar visual and tactile appeal.  

It has long been noted that cell phones are jewelry.  When I watch circles of Apple fans boys endlessly fondling their phones, comparing their apps, and discussing ad nauseum the differences between models and iOS versions, it’s clear that the iPhone is not just a piece of jewelry, it’s a gold pocket watch or maybe a diamond encrusted Swiss army knife.

 Now, if you make the most coveted gold pocket watches in the world, why would you add features that cover them with tarnish and encourage people to leave them in their pockets?!  Yet that’s just what Apple did today with Siri.

 Siri is a personal digital assistant for iOS that is based on some very sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) research done at SRI and, before that, as part of the Darpa-funded CALO project.  It’s impressive stuff.  Watch the video here.

 As impressive as Siri is, it’s bad for Apple for three reasons.  First, it makes the all the gorgeousness of the phones less visible. With Siri’s voice UI, the phones will stay in the pocket or in the car’s phone cradle or on the desk a few feet away while we shout at them.

Secondly, interactive voice response systems (IVRs) have been done so poorly for so long and have for so long been associated with poor service, that the technology itself has bad karma.  As cool as Siri is, I can’t experience it without painful memories of hours wasted trying to communicate with major airlines and government bureaucracies through their IVRs.

Thirdly, it’s not obvious that Apple has a defensible competitive edge with Siri. It’s new technology that they acquired only 18 months ago. It’s safe to say that they don’t have a lot of experience with it or a deep bench of talent in this area. Siri’s speech recognition is powered by Nuance. And, others (most notably Google) have done lots of work on natural language processing and information retrieval that could be brought to bear on building competitors.

[Postscript: After writing this, I read Stephen Wunker’s piece in Forbes which also notes the tension between Siri and making the world’s most beautiful handsets. Stephen speculates that Apple may even be headed down the road to being handset agnostic, which could make sense if Siri turns out to be highly profitable on its own.]

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September 25, 2011
Dear Netflix, Catalog Churn Sucks

Dear Netflix,
Yes, I understand that you are getting squeezed by the content companies.  I can live with a smaller catalogue—although the availability of long-tail content was the original reason I fell in love with Netflix.  I can also live with your rates going up.  It’s the churn that’s killing me.  

I watch several episodes of the Atheism Tapes.  It’s awesome.  I want to show one to a friend, but no.  The Atheism Tapes have vanished from the “Watch Instantly” catalogue.

A few days later, I’m minding my five-year old daughter for a few hours and need to be on a call for work at 1pm.  I promise her that, while daddy’s on the phone, she can watch Word World (an educational show she enjoys).  5 minutes before the call, she settles onto the couch while daddy struggles with the A/V gear.  But, again, no.  World World is gone.  Daddy quickly scrambles to find some mutually acceptable substitute.

I can understand why the catalog churn is there—it’s cheaper not to license everything all the time—but the churn is causing real user pain.  You might seriously think about negotiating longer term licensing contracts for episodic content.

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May 1, 2009
Are free markets greener?  On the one hand, government regulation can protect the environment from negative externalities (e.g. pollution, destruction of crucial habitats, etc).  On the other hand, governments tend to be terribly inefficient.  So, where there is more control of the economy, there is more inefficiency and waste, which can easily lead to greater environmental degradation  Curious about this, I took the Yale Environmental Performance Index and plotted it against the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. The result is this plot of economic freedom vs environmental performance for 147 countries. I did not calculate any hard correlation coefficients for these data, but they do seem to be positively correlated.

Are free markets greener?  On the one hand, government regulation can protect the environment from negative externalities (e.g. pollution, destruction of crucial habitats, etc).  On the other hand, governments tend to be terribly inefficient.  So, where there is more control of the economy, there is more inefficiency and waste, which can easily lead to greater environmental degradation 

Curious about this, I took the Yale Environmental Performance Index and plotted it against the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. The result is this plot of economic freedom vs environmental performance for 147 countries.

I did not calculate any hard correlation coefficients for these data, but they do seem to be positively correlated.

12:20am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zjzkay65pLR
March 6, 2009
Does Amazon Want the Canadians to Freeze to Death?

David with Maple LeafStrangely, Amazon.ca sells no clothes.  In fact, they sell little more than books, music, and software.  Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de have rich inventories, comparable to the US Amazon site.

That’s very strange, given Canada’s cultural similarity to the US, proximity to the US, and NAFTA.  I wonder what the back-story is here?


6:29pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zjzkay51OdY
December 19, 2008
Posthumous Email

When I reflect on the growth of the Internet as I have experienced it as a user, a few personal landmarks stand out: my first email, the first time I played a networked game, the first flame war I got sucked into, the first web page I created (a list of links of course!), the first time I surfed the web from a public bathroom, etc.

This morning, for some reason, I recalled the first time I received email from the dead.  This was around 2003.  A colleague at another company passed away.  One of his co-workers logged into his computer and emailed everyone in his address book to share the news.  Although the “From:” line held the name of the deceased, the body clearly identified that theemail was from the co-worker.  Still, it was incredibly weird.

Now there are posthumous email services (some of which offer free trials!).  I have yet to be at the receiving end of one of their emails (or the sending end for that matter).  I imagine it will be very strange, indeed, to receiveposthumous email written in the first person.

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December 5, 2008
Numbers are Powerful Brands

The goal of ISN/Freenum was never to promote numeric brands.  Instead, the goal was (and is) to break free from the contraints of E.164 and ease the transition from 12-digit keypads to alphanumeric voice addresses.  We may, however, never abandon numeric addresses altogether.  From numerology to ZIP codes to significant dates, numbers are powerful brands and, according to a piece in the Wall Street today, growing in brand power:

We think of numbers as quantities. But they can be potent brands as well.

Devised a quarter century ago, the Internet’s domain-name system was meant to spare the general public from numbers. Easy-to-remember words or initializations such as toys.com and cbs.com were allowed to stand in as aliases for 11-digit computer addresses.

Now, numbers could be making a comeback. Industry watchers say Web users should get used to visiting sites whose names are numeric. A group in Australia plans to develop 100.com into a search engine that will deliver the 100 most relevant results. An Aspen, Colo., equity researcher has spent more than $1 million on numeric domains for a project that is yet to be determined. And on Thursday, an auction of dozens of numeric domain names closed, with bids as high as $325,000 for 88.com.
…

Among numeric names’ advantages: There’s no need for translation between countries, and some numbers, such as 360, have global meaning, and are reasonably priced, compared with equally short domains using letters.

Of the 100 priciest Internet domains sold this year, 11 are numeric domains, compared with no more than one in each of the prior three years, according to data tracked by Domain Name Journal. “I do think you will see a movement toward numerically named Web sites,” says Eric Bradlow, professor of marketing at Wharton. “They have this perception of technology and newness.”

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December 2, 2008
Disinformation: “Bittorrent Declares War on VoIP, Gamers”

The Register has published an alarmist piece of disinformation on how BitTorrent’s move to UDP transport is going hurt VoIP and gaming and cause the Internet to collapse.  This is the exact opposite of what we intended for the Plicto transport protocol (now uTorrent’s uTP).  Our intent was to be as gentle as possible to the network, yielding to competing TCPs and non-adaptive, delay-sensitive traffic like VoIP and gaming, but making efficient use of available capacity in the absence of competing traffic.  Bennett comes off sounding like a shill for the ISP’s, who are heavily invested politically and technologically in “traffic management”.

Luckily, saner heads are prevailing in pieces around the blogosphere and in the comments for the Register article itself.  I am hopeful that Stanislav’s work to open and standardize this approach to congestion control encourages a variety of independent implementations and experiments that will help clear up a lot of the disinformation.

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November 14, 2008
Silicon Valley Challot

Silicon Valley Challot

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