MSFT and the decline of the PC hardware ecosystem
In the late 80s, IBM attempted to reassert control over the PC hardware platform with the introduction of the PS/2 and its proprietary MicroChannel architecture. The cloners fought back, customers voted with their feet, the PS/2 initiative failed, and the era of open PC hardware continued and flourished. This was hugely beneficial for MSFT as a thousand PC OEMs bloomed, PC-based innovation surged and costs dropped, and MSFT software rode the wave of market expansion.
And it was great for end users. Not only because it drove system costs down, but it also created a rich market of add-on products — everyone could mix and match hardware to create their optimal system, whether they cared about cost or performance or maintainability or upgradability or whatever. Corporations could spec out and build standard low cost machines, enthusiasts could build super-tweaked machines, verticals could build out specialty machines, all on the same open hardware platform.
In the last 15 years, though, the market has shifted dramatically towards the laptop form factor. This shift has been a relative disaster for MSFT. The industry has moved away from an open hardware chassis with mix-and-match components, to closed tightly-engineered all-in-one machines. This shift has played to Apple’s strengths in design and integration and has negated many of the benefits of the PC ecosystem. The PC industry is still struggling to figure out how to regain design and profit momentum — Intel’s Ultrabook effort being the latest scheme. But the Ultrabook is just a direct response to the MacBook, it does nothing to recapture the open hardware experience of the 90s.
The open hardware community still exists in various forms, but is no longer focused on the PC platform and is not much of an asset for MSFT. Enthusiasts still build PCs, mostly for gaming — Maximum PC for instance has a good guide to components, Newegg is the place to buy. But this isn’t mainstream any more. The “maker” community is vibrant but is focused on other platforms largely — Arduino, the Kickstarter community, etc. The vibe and energy around open hardware is great, but it is no longer tied to the PC experience and is no longer an asset for MSFT.
MSFT has always been great at chasing taillights and is hard at work supporting the Ultrabook, competing with the Apple stores at retail, pushing Windows Phone, etc. But chasing Apple’s taillights results in products that are more and more like Apple’s — fully integrated hardware/software/services, a captive retail experience. MSFT has to do all this, the mainstream of the market is here, but there is nothing distinctive about the resultant products and experience. The Ultrabook/Windows/Microsoft Store products may equal the Apple experience, and may offer users a few more choices of hardware brands (does anyone care?), but the experience won’t stand out. Necessary work but not sufficient to recapture thought leadership in the market — at the end of the day, MSFT will be able to claim parity but no more than that.
If I was in a leadership role at MSFT, I’d invest in strategies to recreate the open hardware platform dynamic around the Windows platform. It is not obvious how to do so with the laptop and tablet as the mainstream platform, but I would spend $100s of millions trying. MSFT clearly has the cash to spend on new frontiers and new adventures, a couple hundred million on an effort to change the basis of competition in the PC market seems like a wise bet, even if it fails.
How about putting a “maker’s corner” in every retail store with modified cases and modified machines, maybe even workshops? Get the energy of the PC gaming community into the store, let people see this energy. How can the laptop design be modified to support add on hardware — super high speed optical expansion busses, wireless high speed expansion busses, novel expansion chassis ideas? Sifteo cubes are kind of cool, can this idea be used to provide hardware extensions to laptops? Are there other ways to “snap on” hardware to extend the laptop or tablet, using bluetooth or induction or other mechanisms? Can MSFT seed the maker community with funds or tools? Can MSFT embrace Arduino somehow, or Kickstarter? Could the PC be the hub for thousands of Arduino-based sensors and actuators and gadgets? These ideas are all admittedly poorly thought out, and I am not sure any one idea is right, or if any will work.
But I would spend a lot of money chasing after any idea that would move away from closed all-in-one hardware designs, and I would experiment with many ways to reinject open hardware dynamics back into the PC/tablet market. Ultrabook is not this — it is a fine and adequate taillight chaser, but it won’t shift competitive balance back in MSFT’s favor.
This is not the only reason for MSFT’s stagnation in the last decade, there are many other aspects to consider, but the dwindling of the open hardware ecosystem has been a loss of MSFT. For another take on Apple’s success against MSFT in the last decade, check out Rich’s analysis – the observations about vertical vs horizontal integration ring true.
Enterprise 4.0: IT’s ongoing re-platforming
As we look back at the history of computing, it’s clear that each wave ushered in new rounds of groundbreaking technology that birthed new companies, increased productivity, gave rise to IT, empowered businesses and changed the world. In this blog post, I’ll take a look at early technology waves, reflect on how they changed IT and look at the most recent trends and the opportunities they usher in for innovation.
We are experiencing a number of shifts and a true evolution in enterprise IT. It seems like every day there is a new term being coined and new trends “up and coming.” During these past several decades, a few major waves come to mind and can be identified as ongoing trends:
1. Mainframe / mini era (1959)
2. Networked desktops and client server (1986ish)
3. Browser based and app server (1997)
4. Mobile and “cloud” (2008)
Each of these major trends caused transitions that led to a new way of interacting with technology. I like to call this shift, “re-platforming.” It’s bigger than merely a transformation since it affects the way things are “stood-up” in an enterprise. As this re-platforming is a catalyst for IT, which constantly needs to reposition/rebrand itself to meet current times and the needs of its users.
Mainframe/mini era
I don’t have first-hand experience working with mainframes and mini computers, but I did see them fade to the background with the proliferation of microprocessor-based systems in the 1980s. What makes this interesting is with the arrival of the microprocessor-based PC those in the mainframe/mini industry belittled it for not being a “real” computer. Yet, use of the PC grew and soon it took over jobs previously only done on its bigger cousins, such as data entry and text editing – use cases which opened the door for disruption and innovation, arrived by way of Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Word. The PC no longer needed a reason to be, and it ushered in a completely new definition of a computer.
Networked desktops and client servers
As technology advanced, the PC became more powerful and technologists began looking for ways to improve on their performance by connecting computers together, leading to the development of Ethernet in 1980. Ethernet allowed PCs to be connected together, and soon the notion of networking the PC (client) to a host (server) was born. The idea encouraged openness and commoditized hardware and software and gave rise to the idea that your client could be anywhere; it no longer had to be in the same building or even the same state.
Browser based and application servers
In the mid 1990s, the Internet began to take hold and IT experimented with the idea of using a central server to house an application and using the Internet as the access point to the application. Since networking and server disciplines need to exist as a prerequisite, the build out of client-servers laid the groundwork for the application servers – if your hardware (client) could be anywhere, why couldn’t the application be anywhere? This brings us to the browser and application server era. The growth of programmable web servers and browsers shepherded in application platforms like BEA and .NET, and the broad deployment of software such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer resource management (CRM) empowered businesses to garner more value from their data.
Cloud and Mobile
More recently, IT has begun to ride the cloud and mobile wave. Everyday I see new companies and innovative technologies that are emerging to leverage this trend. While we’re still at an early point of adoption with cloud, it is clear that it is and will continue to be a huge game changer for IT.
Cloud computing encompasses many things and I want to look at both public and private (hybrid) clouds and emerging technologies, which include the development of “as a service” platforms, mainly:
· Software as a Service (SaaS) – the new way software is delivered
· Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – think of it as the new server, network and storage
· Platform as a Service (PaaS) – the new developer tool stack
These emerging technologies are having a huge impact on IT and are put to work differently based on the specifics of each enterprise’s requirements. On-premise, or private, cloud computing (IaaS and PaaS) is important for enterprises looking to maintain the privacy aspect but still receive the same self-service semantics as public cloud. Public, or hosted, cloud computing enables central IT managers to have the flexibility to broker various services to their business users, saving dramatically on costs and time.
In mobile, as always, history repeats itself. For just as the mainframe computing world belittled the PC, so the PC world belittled the mobile handheld device. Think back to 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced. The cool mobile phone was the small sleek Motorola Razr – and its champions poked fun of the iPhone and called it a brick. And yet, what happened at the end of this year’s Super Bowl? The TV cameras charged into the field as the Lombardi Trophy was about to be awarded. What did viewers see? A sea of iPhones in the hands of NY Giants players as they rushed to capture the winning moment. Yes, the iPhone and the other smartphones it ushered in have won. They are first-class computing citizens with capabilities that laptops lack including location-based services and truly continuous connectivity. Mobile devices as enterprise IT endpoints are no longer the exception but rather the rule.
Users are enamored with their smartphones with always-on connectivity and easy access, visually exciting applications that find their favorite restaurant, or keeping them connected to family and friends. These very same users want these attributes in their business applications too. They want to point (or touch) and shoot, and within seconds have their application up and running. They don’t want to have to enter a URL in a browser – it’s the last resort now. So on the surface one may say “so what” the phone is a micro computer with a little OS and some APIs, just hire a developer to create little applications for that small screen. If only it were that simple. The phone is outside the corporate network completely and the apps need to deal with network latency that would give inside the house app timeouts left and right. The phone doesn’t readily give an end user the opportunity to authenticate with Active Directory and needs its own functionality and development framework, which turns out gave birth to mobile PaaS. The establishment never sees the disruption in its true glory.
What about getting apps on to the device and managing them? Is this an IT function? What traditional PC and app lifecycle management tools are built for this? Ah, the web app. IT moved away from heavy weight apps a while ago and now we’re back to doing that again for mobile. So the net of it is all the challenges equal opportunity where desire is high at the point of attack.
The next big shift
With each new trend disruption followed and brought along opportunity. Opportunity for the next brilliant mind to create a technology that saw the solution to the obstacle. Each trend was accompanied by the creation of new companies and technologies. What disruption will arise from the mobile and cloud trend?
I’m betting on technology born in and enabling the success of big consumer facing properties like Facebook, Zynga and Google as the next shapers of enterprise IT. Examples include NoSQL, Hadoop and social mechanics. Unstructured data is growing faster than structured data and is being mined for business intelligence and productivity. Organizations are attempting to leverage social networks, fascinated by the interaction people have with each other and their ability to rally a protest or crowdsource the facts of a news story. It’s only a matter of time before our yearbook photos and status updates are part of the company directory.
We’re at the start of a wave and new companies are being created on a daily basis to lead the way to innovation. Each previous wave resulted in the creation of great enterprise software companies and we are sure to see this continue. Disruption creates opportunity and the desire to grab the opportunity yields outstanding innovation. At Ignition Partners, we are investing in this latest wave now and will continue to invest in technologies that are addressing the needs of future waves. As operators during the previous waves, and now as investors, we’re excited to be part of it.
Ignition news roundup — Symplified, Whiptail
First off, we are surving the 2012 Snowpocalypse. Office traffic is light but folks are here.
On the business front, it was announced that we led a round in Symplified. Great company building some pretty essential tools to manage employee identity and engagement across the web, can’t imagine how companies manage their voice and presence without this.
We also joined the investor group behind Whiptail, who build high-scale SSD arrays to replace spinning disks. Spinning disks — seems like we will look back at these in 100 years and laugh, or at least class them as a steampunk kind of gadget.
Excited to work with both companies.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t note Bluestacks CES award and Splunk filing today
Also of note today is Bluestacks’ winning the CES best software award, and Splunk’s filing. Congrats to both teams on their progress.Korrio’s work on sports and head injuries is a good step
One of the companies in our portfolio, Korrio, is bringing out tools to allow parents to monitor the brain health of their child athletes. This is a great step, I wish this had been around when we had young student athletes in the family. You don’t have to dig around very much to see the frightful effects of head impacts in sports, and anything that raises awareness of the issue and provides tools to manage is a very good thing. There is a lot more to do, I’d love to see impact monitors in helmets that track instantaneous and cumulative impact forces, but this is a great first step, awesome to see this work happening.
No time to blog, so here’s a link roundup
- Cutting the Cord on Cable. Wish I could get there but live HD sports still keeps me stuck to cable/satellite provider. I’ve tried the streaming options and they are weak — poor selection of games/sources (I need ESPN/ABC channels + BTN + Fox Sports channels + upcoming Pac12 network), lots of stutter, not HD content. I will probably be one of the last cable subscribers in the country.
- Do programming puzzles in interviews work?. I don’t think I’ve ever asked these kinds of questions, or at least not in 20 years.
- Gamification sucks. Respect your users.
- The Verge and The Wirecutter — good tech sites.
- If you are busy, you are doing something wrong.
- 10 new-ish programming languages. WOuld like to learn more about Chapel, haXe, X10, OPA.
- DSLRs are a dying breed. Not another “camera phones are going to win” article, but a smarter take on the mirrorless trend.
Feels like the Seattle economy is on the cusp of an expansion
I had a great week last week that left me feeling incredibly optimistic about the Seattle economy.
First, Techstars Seattle Demo Day. What a super event, lots of coverage of it. Great young companies, enthusiasm, great pitches, good progress in fundraising. Big audience with great energy. Super job by @andysack and everyone involved, a model for everyone else in the Seattle community who wants to nurture startups. We need more of these events, not just in cloud/web. I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurship events at UW and they are constrained by mentoring, hiring, seed financing — exactly what the techstars guys are providing. One of the companies, Romotive, has also done a great job leveraging Kickstarter and have generated a lot of early revenue — the rise of crowd-sourced pre-sales/funding is a fascinating and positive evolution.
Everyone was hiring at the event. As an indicator of how desperate people are to hire, I had two guys try to hire me. If you think I am the answer to your problem, you are pretty desperate.
Then I spent the better part of a day in a meeting with the UW College of Engineering Visiting Committee. Some great data on the College of Engineering — most programs are massively oversubscribed, turning away students in bunches, doing a great job placing students. Great evolution in programs, great facilities, great staffing. The College could probably push out many more engineers and is constrained by state economic policies; with tweaks to tuition and governance, it seems like the pipeline could open much more broadly. And we also had a chance to listen to President Young speak who seems to have a very open attitude about IP licensing, he seems to recognize that getting IP out of the university and to work is important.
I left the two days feeling like a lot of piece parts are coming together fast. Seed funding. Crowd sourcing. Mentoring. Training/Education. And with iteration and tweaking, we could see an explosion of economic growth in the Seattle area. Exciting times.
Hadoop World is here and we invest in Cloudera
With the second annual Hadoop World this week, taking place November 8 and 9, it got me thinking about a few things I’d like to share. I attended Hadoop World last year and there were around 1,000 attendees; this year’s event is sold out.
It seems that an overarching theme for conferences this year is the move from definition to implementation. For example, at VMworld last year I noticed the majority of the conference was dedicated to defining the cloud while this year’s conference in Las Vegas featured sessions that illustrated “how-to’s” and cloud use cases.
In my experience, this transition always is a key metric of a specific type of technology gaining velocity. Makes sense right? Conferences begin to reflect what the majority of people are talking about. Imagine, in 2009, there were hardly any cloud computing conferences and now it seems as if they are sprouting up daily; some better than others obviously.
Based on all of the real customer interest and accelerating deployment of Hadoop, we decided this year to join the momentum as an investor. We are proud to now be part of the Cloudera investment team. We made this decision based on the company’s desire to produce a true platform for data. Our partnership has deep expertise on platform building including DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer and Windows NT/2K, and Xen at the API and hardware level. A platform by definition is something upon which other things stand. A data platform is what Cloudera is all about. Great applications will be built on that platform. The Cloudera team is going in the right direction and we’re excited to help accelerate that. See the press release here. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cloudera-nets-40-million-in-series-d-funding-round-led-by-ignition-partners-2011-11-07
So for the conference last year I noticed that the sessions were responsible for educating the audience. This year’s agenda has an overwhelming number of sessions defining the specific types of problems Hadoop is solving and features new and innovative ways in which people are using the technology. It seems that increasingly we are seeing organizations, including startup Tresata, introduce new capabilities that would not have been possible without Hadoop. Its elastic processing capability is so adept and I’m sure there will be many discussions around it.
This year’s event is sure not to disappoint and I’m really looking forward to the keynote from Cloudera’s CEO, Michael Olson, and to hear about the future of the project. And again we’re excited to be part of it!
The web interface for my house is woefully inadequate.
So Nest is the newest shiny toy for the tech industry and media to get all excited about, a ton of coverage this week — for a thermostat. Obviously some of the ardor will fade — how long can anyone stay excited about a thermostat? But I do think there is a theme here which has some enduring value.
I’m not really that excited about the UI and learning features of the Nest thermostat. I am able to navigate my smart thermostat today, and I just don’t need to futz with it very often. In our new house it took me a couple days to get things where I wanted them but I’ve moved on and haven’t had to look back.
But I am totally excited about the remote access for the Nest thermostat, the web interface. Our houses are the biggest asset we own, and the cloud presence of our house is either missing or spewed all around the web in random places. There are so many things I should be able to do:
- Remote utility management. Remote thermostat is a nice start. I want remote utility management in general — what’s the temp right now, what’s my water usage, change my temp, change my water heater temp, turn on/off my sprinklers, check my power usage, turn on/off appliances/circuits, check my usage and billing history, etc. I can get pieces of this but it is hard hard hard to get it all and to integrate it all into a single cloud interface.
- Remote security. Webcam monitoring, alarm monitoring, history of access to house, remote door lock management. Again you can get piece parts of this but cobbling together is a significant pain.
- Remote doorbell. When someone rings my doorbell, I want an instant notification on my smartphone, I want to see the video feed from my door, and I want to be able to talk thru the intercom. The person at the door should have no idea if I’m in my kitchen or on a business trip. This is part of the security topic but is more compelling than most of the security features.
- Bills. Utility bills, consumption history, how I compare to others, bill payment.
- Financial info. Mortgage status — balance, rate, is it time to refi. The estimated sale value of my house. Mortgage document storage. Tracking of improvements to the house — costs, documentation — so I can correctly calculate cost basis at sale time.
- Service. All the warranty terms and docs for all the appliances and other features of my house. A place to track service records, to record preferred vendors, to get vendor recommendations. A service advisor — what maintenance should I expect to do in the next year based on what is known about my house — time for roof inspection, approaching lifetime of water heaters, time to repaint, what is my likely cost in the next year for all this.
You can get a ton of this info today but it is spewed all over the web. To access all the info about your house, you would have to access the Nest site, any smart metering site, a remote security site (or several for webcam, door locks, monitoring service), each of the utility websites, your bill payment web site, your mortgage provider website, zillow, redfin, etc.
I’d love to have a portal that integrates all this via user configurable widgets into a single interface — my home at a glance. And gives me great mobile access to all the info and features. And just gets better as I add nicely designed devices into the house — a Nest thermostat, a great doorbell/webcam, internet-controllable door locks, etc.
I’m sure the Nest guys are thinking broadly about the entire space, with a general name like Nest they must have ambitions beyond thermostats. I’m excited to watch their evolution. I’d love to have better command of the largest asset I own.
I’ve never used a QR code in my life and can’t imagine why I would.
Daring Fireball points to a pretty thorough takedown of QR codes as used in print ads. The original design goal — Toyota invented these to track parts — makes sense, but jamming these into consumer media is just strange.
- Users can already type in your URL or a sentence, or speak into Siri, or do an image search with their phone. Is taking a snap of this code thing really so much better?
- There’s a history of companies trying to stuff proprietary ID systems in between users and product/service providers. These visual codes are one such thing. AOL Keywords, RealNames are text-based equivalents. They all try to get advertisers to stuff these in ads, but I don’t see how this really serves users or advertisers, it mostly just serves the companies with the proprietary ID system.
- Ultimately, if your product/ad/message is so forgettable that you think jamming a QR code or text string in will help, well, there is a deeper problem.
Android on Windows? Really?
About a year ago Simon Crosby (then Citrix CTO) and I talked to the folks at Blue Stacks about the concept of virtual-izing Android apps on Windows . At first mention of it, more than a few people look at you kind of funny. But five minutes into the conversation the light bulbs start going off about the possibilities. What hit me was the fact that the cool Android apps are real apps that, for the most part, take advantage of the local processing platform including graphics acceleration and object storage. The counterparts to many of these apps on a Windows PC are usually web apps that are also accessible from any device. The web apps have great reach and in general enable fuller access to certain parts of applications. The Android app design center (and mobile app generically) is much more focused on the heavily used portion of the app. This is largely due to screen real estate and the touch versus keyboard and mouse input. Navigation to what you need or want to do is heavily streamlined resulting in a simply cleaner day to day experience.
Ok so why bother with this on a Windows laptop or tablet? An observation I had about two years or so ago around the activity of enterprise developers was the first thing that got to me. I’m referring here to the millions of people that work for businesses of all sizes and develop in house applications. The best endpoint developers at the largest companies were spending the bulk of their time getting their mobile app chops together. The tooling was kind of shaky for large team development but the best code jockeys were starting to write apps first for mobile deployment while keeping a web app hanging around for non-native platforms. What I found curious was the large number of developers targeting Android versus IOS. I expected a landslide in favor of IOS but it wasn’t happening that way. The enterprise shops were doing one of two things:
· Do native Android and IOS and then web apps for everything else (I’m overloading .NET front ends as web apps here and ASP.NET is very common)
· Do native Android and web apps for everything else
One can argue and speculate for the reasons about IOS not having the landslide but from personal experience (as an executive working at Citrix) I can tell you that Apple in general doesn’t care about enterprise developers. They won’t make their money there so why bother and enterprise developer support is expensive and certainly not sexy. Well OK is that enough to make the developers swing to Google. Google might care about enterprises since they want to sell and office suite to them but again in general it is not in their DNA through the marrow. If developers made that choice based on the vendor caring about them they would be on WP7 or Blackberry. The enterprise guys and gals like deployment platform diversity. Iphone has lots of options right? You can get the blue one or the white one plus a couple of other cosmetics here and there. Suppose you want a bigger screen ? a brighter screen? a smaller screen? Foldout key board? Something with superior battery life ? waterproof ? better speakerphone ? some security widget? A cheaper device ? Well then you go elsewhere and the elsewhere is largely an Android device. Finally, the enterprise guys say the browser for iPhone and iPad is darn good. In fact its good enough to handle whatever they would write for the PC and Mac.
Alright so the browser on Android has to get good enough at some point (hey HTML5 will fix everything) so why write native apps? Well native apps are cool and learning to leverage a platform is cool and developers like to be the coolest developers. It happened with PC. I was one of hotshots sent to code PC assembler while my co-workers slaved away on mainframe and minicomputer COBOL. We were the cool guys who stayed up all night cranked out thousands of lines of code a day. What we did was harder. We got the pay raises. We spoke in a different language. We moved to C and C++ and built the first PC client server apps right on OS metal with nothing but a network transport to help us out. How does this translate today? The best developers will want to get the most out of the platform and will go as native as necessary to do so. History has shown this and will repeat itself. Reach is equally important but it lacks the emotion and passion of watching your code making the platform dance.
OK back the title entry: Android on Windows. As a developer if I can spend all my time working on the thing I have passion for and then use another technology to get more reach then I’m all over that. I’m especially all over it if I don’t need to sacrifice the experience I’m targeting as use case #1 in order to get reach. That is, layered frameworks to enable multi-platform deployment can be OK but separate the hotshot developer from the platform . Here lies the allure of Blue Stacks for me. That hotshot can now take her Android code and have it run on the PC laptop or tablet with no changes and delivering the same streamlined experience she built for the mobile platform. Sure she will have to maintain a web app for everything else but now all the PC users can get her latest and greatest whenever she moves the mobile application ahead.
The allure (for me) was for the enterprise developer. However upon release of the pre-alpha it seems like many people just want it for all their Android apps so I was wrong but in a good way! All developers then! So yeah “really” squared. I’m using the Android LinkedIn app on my laptop. I like the single pane without all of the extras I would use to “manage” my LinkedIn. It is like a little news feed with laser sharp access to the important stuff. Blue Stacks went live in pre-Alpha last week. In that week over users downloaded the Android app player and are kicking the tires and then some. I like to be wrong like that! It gets even more interesting with the Windows8 Metro user interface where the Android apps will just take their assigned places on the canvas of the display with all the other apps (I have seen this working since I’m an investor). Now there is a puck for Blue Stacks to skate towards.
We invested in Blue Stacks in March 2011 and are excited to see the software getting out to end users in large numbers. New funding was announced this week including Citrix, AMD, and a player to be named later. I especially welcome the new investors as they will help the company in driving the agenda forward not just via their investment in dollars but in real business initiative.
The company is http://www.bluestacks.com
Follow me @frankartale
Photostream is cute, but what I really want is Aperture/iPhoto in the cloud
So I don’t really get iCloud storage yet, and Photostream doesn’t really accomodate all my DSLR pictures well. So rather than just whine about what I don’t have, what do I really want?
First — I have a 203G (gigabyte) Aperture library today, that is where my primary photo storage is. Digging into this a little:
- 54G is thumbnails, previews, cache of various sorts. 27G of thumbnails alone! Impressive use of disk space, Aperture. Clearly the team has embraced the idea that disk space is cheap and is getting cheaper. There are probably some settings I could tweak to trim the size of all this at the cost of performance, but whatever, disk space IS cheap, 30% overhead is probably not a ridiculous design objective. This is all derived data tho and could be trimmed, dropped, whatever, as I think about cloud storage.
- My masters are 149G. A mix of RAW and JPG depending on which camera/scanner I used and how long ago I took — tending towards more RAW over time.
- 19G from this year
- 34G from 2010
- 25G from 2009
- 71G from earlier years.
Lets assume I continue to take pictures at the last 3 year average rate for some time, that is about 25gig of new photos every year, not accounting for inflation in photo size due to better quality capture chips, light field cameras, etc. OK so you probably have to assume some growth in that 25gig of new storage a year.
Cloud storage of photos — is it important? Hugely so, if my house is burning down, I do not want to be running back in to save a hard disk, photos are emotionally very important. And I do NOT want to have to pick and choose which photos I store in the cloud — too many photos, not enough time, I just want the entire set up in the cloud. I really just want my entire Aperture (and iPhoto) collection replicated to the cloud automagically. And then I need some modest access control features on the folders in the cloud so that I can share selected photo sets with family members, etc.
So I want a cloud storage solution that gives me ~200gig of storage today at a reasonable price, and if I think about the next couple years, a clear path to 300-400gig. And with good web access with some security. What are my choices today?
- iCloud doesn’t begin to work. Aperture doesn’t really talk to it except for Photostream. The max storage I can buy is 55gig. There are no access controls. Doesn’t work along almost every dimension.
- Dropbox. I can get 100G for $240 a year with a nice web interface and some sharing controls. I could even get the team license, store up to 350G, but for $795 a year. If I had this, I could just move my Aperture library into my dropbox folder and voila, it would be in the cloud, on my other machines, etc. However — the Aperture library folder is not really meant to be browsed by humans, the masters are chopped up into some funky balanced tree of directories. Seems like Aperture needs to learn how to work with shared storage. But I could get everything in dropbox, with a very easy UI for me, but at a high price, and probably the ability to share folders with family members would be hard to realize.
- Box.net. Well I get 50G free with their iPad offer, so they pretty much trump iCloud. I could get up to 500G in a business plan for $180/year per user. Similar pros and cons as with Dropbox, but pricing seems better.
- Smugmug. This is what I use today. There is an Aperture plugin, I can save from Aperture. The bad part about this is that it is not automagic — I have to intentionally move folders up there, not happy about that. But — unlimited storage, at $40-150 per year for jpg, some extra cost but still cheap if you want RAW. A great interface for sharing, completely customizable, printing integration, etc.
For now …. Smugmug is the way to go, but as storage costs drop, I can see flipping to box.net or dropbox at some point. I’d give up some of smugmug’s great interface for admin control but that is overkill for me anyway. If Apple made this all work natively in Aperture at a competitive cost, that would be fine too. For people with a more modest set of photos, the Box.net 50G free offer for iPad/iPhone users seems like an awesome option.
I’m struggling to understand why I would ever use iCloud storage.
I’m struggling to understand why I would ever use iCloud storage. After a couple days of tinkering, I have two sets of data in iCloud — device backups, and Pages/Keynote docs.
- I really don’t get the value of device backups. My apps are all recoverable from the iTunes store. I use primarily apps like Evernote that already store their data in the cloud so there is minimal non-replicated data on my iPhone and iPad. Music isn’t backed up, I will need iTunes Match for that some day. My photos aren’t backed up in iCloud, that is not something that is offered at all (and besides the photos on my device are a fraction of my photo content, I use smugmug and other paid services to back up all my photos). So what exactly is in these device backups that iCloud stores? and why is this substantially better than backups stored on my Mac — when will I ever use these backups? In sum — I’ve been explicit about choosing apps and configuring apps so that all my valuable data and state info is replicated and in the cloud, so that I don’t care if I lose a device (and can use multiple devices). So why should I care about device backups?
- The other files in my iCloud storage are docs. I have Pages and Keynote docs in iCloud from my iPad. If I was purely a Mac person, and didn’t collaborate at all with people in my office and business partners who use Office, then maybe I could just use Pages/Keynote on the Mac, and the iCloud doc storage might seem pretty simple. But I use a PC sometimes to edit my docs. And so I use Office so that I can work on my Mac or PC. And so that I can, with no fidelity loss, work with my colleagues on docs they have created in Office. I guess I could still move these docs in and out of iCloud storage, but if I am going to go to the trouble of moving docs around, why don’t I just move them into box.net or dropbox? They both have great iPad and iPhone interfaces, they work with Pages/Keynote on the iPad, I get 50G free on box.net, they both offer sharing options, I can create folders in them to organize my docs and control my sharing (Seriously, iCloud, no folders??), they let me store any kind of doc, they have great Mac/PC clients so that I can sync my collection with local folders easily, etc etc. If iCloud didn’t have the Apple brand, we would all be laughing at it.
- iCloud claims to store your music but practically doesn’t. I have 16,000 songs, 88G of music, in my iTunes library (and flac versions of all this but not in iTunes). 99% of it is from ripped CDs or purchased in mp3 format outside of iTunes. None of which iCloud handles, I have to wait for iTunes Match.
- iCloud stores your photostream but I’ve already talked about why this isn’t very useful to me.
- I don’t care about mail/calendar/contact backup as all mine is already stored on my Exchange server or Gmail server.
So iCloud storage is substantially worse than leading competitive alternatives for document storage; its only unique benefit is device backup, which I can’t figure out why I’d use; and it’s other features don’t really solve any problems. I am sure Apple will improve iCloud over time but as a storage solution it is underwhelming. Am I missing something? Does anyone find iCloud storage to be hugely helpful?
Thinking about gameday cell network performance
When I sit in Ohio Stadium for a football game, my fancy smartphone is a useless piece of metal and plastic. Some developers have tried to come up with apps to improve the gameday experience, but these apps miss the point. With 105,000 fans in the stadium, another huge set of ticketless fans milling around outside, all the stadium staff as well as security and service staff outside the stadium — there are probably 200,000 network devices in 30-40 acres all trying to jam onto the system, and all failing. The cell network simply can’t handle the load.
Our cell networks are wonderful things, but in the build out of our networks, the notion of broadcast has been left behind. 98% of the fans want the same exact data — top 25 scores, breaking football news, in-game replays, radio game feed. And yet the cell network and data apps feed this data to each user via dedicated single-user transactions. Cell broadcast exists in the standards but is not really in use in networks or handsets. Qualcomm tried to push Mediaflo for this use but got very little uptake and eventually shut down the service.
It’s unfortunate that the idea of broadcast has been left behind. It would be hugely useful in these kinds of crowded venues. I wonder if Qualcomm might not have succeeded had they just focused on NFL and NCAA football fans — people who spend stupid amounts of money on tickets and related gameday expenses, and who would probably spend money on dedicated gameday data services. It is not an easy service to provide tho. It requires spectrum, devices using that spectrum, and local content assemblage and editorial. There may be too many moving parts. It might be easier just to truck in lots of picocells to events and say screw it, dynamically expand the cell network as needed.
Lava is an awesome product name, I want one now.
Seriously, who would not want a Lava heater? I am ready to order one today.
Contrast with the “Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch”, Samsung’s latest phone. How stupid a name is this? Do they seriously think this will have lasting impact in the market? What will they call an upgraded version some day? Will they increment the S or the II or the Epic or the 4G or will they just abandon this?
I’m no product naming expert, I used to excuse myself from all naming discussions while at Microsoft since it always felt like a discussion of how many angels on the head of a pin. Ultimately good products can overcome bad names, and bad products aren’t helped by clever names. But I admire cleanliness and simplicity in names, and the Lava name is simple, evocative, and to the point. The Samsung name is ridiculous.
UPDATE: a smart guy informs me that the Samsung name of the phone is the Galaxy S II. A little long but not egregious. It is Sprint that has slapped on the “Epic 4G Touch” modifier and Sprint deserves the blame. Pro tip: if you include “epic” in the name, pretty much guarantees the offering is not epic.
Ifttt.com and platform reminiscing
I’m playing around with ifttt.com and it is intriguing. I remember an earlier effort, yubnub, that I always found compelling. A general script interface to all my Internet data and services so that I can do interesting things across sites seems good.
I remember the evolution of Lotus Notes. A super general collab platform that let you store anything, write nice scripts and forms on top of it. The generalness of the platform was appealing and a certain set of early adopters went for it. But there were many more customers who didn’t want to create their own collaboration apps, but needed some pre-built apps. And so then Lotus made the “nifty fifty” most popular apps available — email, calendaring, candidate tracking, simple CRM, etc etc etc. And that was good, and more customers bought it. But ultimately Notes got washed out of the market by Microsoft Exchange, for many many reasons. But one simple view is that, while Exchange was a collab platform too (although terrible to code against), Exchange really focused on the high volume apps of mail and scheduling and just made those apps work. And that is all most people really needed.
Competitively the ifttt.com guys need to be very cognizant of cherry picking. While it is great they have hundreds or thousands of canned scripts, I don’t need hundreds, I only need a couple. And that is probably true for most users. And if the couple that people need a common across large groups of users, then some competitor can sweep in and just do those couple scenarios really really well and ifttt.com will remain a niche tool. I’d bet that they will have to build a lot more code on top of their platform to make sure that the top scenarios are really slick and easy to use, to avoid losing users to alternatives.
For instance I can already pretty easily use a wordpress plugin to MIRV content over to twitter and then to facebook. Will I flip over to ifttt.com for this or will I keep using the solution that someone has polished and made fit into wordpress? I suspect I’ll use the one that fits really well in wordpress. Now if the ifttt.com guys wrote the code to provide an ifttt.com plugin for wordpress, that would be interesting…
Apple is the new Honda
Nice writeup of Apple’s manufacturing/supply advantage vs the PC OEMs. Reminds me very much of the way Honda and Toyota crushed the American car manufacturers in the 70′s and 80′s — GM in particular had overly complex product lines, cars with a gajillion options. Honda came in with a simple model, no options, and great great quality, and just crushed GM in core markets. Product line complexity comes at a huge cost, Apple is playing this hand well.
New Sony Reader, same old busted strategy
Sony has a new e-reader out and it seems to be very nice hardware, I’d love to buy one. Let me check out their reader store and see what their book inventory looks like these days:
Oh. And this kind of sums up Sony’s strategy. Nicely designed premium hardware, but off in their own software and service planet, which is not well executed. I’ve tried to give Sony the benefit of the doubt — I owned the first Sony Reader back in 2007 — but they have failed to act on the big picture here. A big part of the Kindle’s awesomeness is the great store backend, the seamless download experience with the store, and the availability of Kindle software on every device on the planet so that I can read my purchases on my PC, my Mac, my phone, my Kindle, my iPad, on the web, pretty much anywhere. Sony totally whiffs on this total experience. It is kind of sad because I would love to see a first rate competitor to the Kindle, and Sony has some great assets to bring to bear — retail stores, solid hardware design skills.
In the long run, Amazon wants to sell digital goods, Sony wants to make great devices — I have to wonder why Sony doesn’t abase themselves, drop their own store, let Amazon run the backend for the Sony device, and make the Reader the best Kindle-compatible device in the world. Any other strategy just seems pointless.