Best

CC

Now, remember, dedicated apps (like on iPhone/iPad) are one of the ways to deliver info/data without the user resorting to conventional search. Also, it looks like Apple will indeed get into advertising without having to have a search platform.

Now go to the iPhone docs for developers and look under interface. I stopped counting after 100 pages. Apple goes into great detail with hundreds of example images and ideas for interfacing with your new app. Even if you had _no_ idea about UI you could blindly follow a Apple UI recipe for your new app and get it to look great and actually work well for users.

The difference is really striking and shows why many reviewers say iPhone apps are higher quality than similar Android ones. All engineering and no thought to useability

I’m generalising here but the Google boys, Brin and Page are geeks at heart I think. Geeks have little time (as in a short attention span) for social awareness issues and are prone to endless threads of unintended consequences from their under-cooked inventions. Geeks also tend to think they’ve (collectively) ‘got it’, which equates to a naive belief in infallibility and that they don’t need any kind of independent (i.e. non-peer) review for a validation of their ideas. As a result, they often fail, or struggle, to get it in fact. Schmidt aside, there is a ‘geeks rule’ culture at Google that thinks itself cool, correct and and non-accountable. Part of that Koolness Aid is to play life like a game and not worry too much about consequences, quality, or mundane things like UI or UX. But these care-free geeks are being pressured now by market forces to ‘get commercial’; to deliver more; to protect their core franchise by moving in on anyone who seems to have cracked the art of signing us all up as docile ad-reader fodder, and so it goes. But it is all about money after all, especially post-IPO. What’s a poor care-free geek to do? Getting some robust professional discipline is as much of a challenge as finding true religious understanding is for the rest of us. It’s not easy to do ‘humble’ and ‘socially aware’ when you’re so full of cool. Real progress will depend on some culture change.

Print media are risking losing it all because they learned to love advertisers too much and to care less and less about the reader. In an age when information is becoming easier to access, those same readers will discover that they can help themselves, easily, in a more timely manner, in greater detail, at a lesser cost and all without the condescension of publishers treating them as an irritating after-thought. Publishers have done this to themselves and to their readers over such a long time, no one noticed that the true patron was serially demoted to a position of little import. I noticed this in the 80s and stopped buying newspapers. I’m sure many others did the same. You cannot take the punter for granted for long nowadays.

And so Google does expose itself to real competition risks when it acts in ways that might alienate its fans. It is so easy to change to another search engine, even a lesser one, if you feel you or your privacy are being abused. I mean even sheep can be contrary sometimes.

Is it reasonable to draw a kind of parallel here, just to shoot the breeze as it were? Apple was founded by two Steves. One was a geek. Woz was a tech genius of less is more, using a few chips to achieve amazing results etc. He remains a geek but one who ignores his talents today, it seems. The other Steve was geeky but never a true geek. Rather, he was a man obsessed by a vision of user-centric computing and blessed, thankfully, with a manic drive to make it so. Which one has served the company best over the last 30+ years? Apple has changed the world. Seasoned Apple users know how great that journey has been and how much Jobs and Apple have done for them as users and increasingly today, as consumers. It is about perceived intentions. Google may choose to emulate MS and use its patrons. Apple is set on innovation, quality of execution and user-centricity. And as Tim Cook recently said spreading some ‘joy and delight’, customer by customer.

Moving on, you say that Apple does not care for commodity businesses… You said:
‘The only other company that can fill this evolving void is Apple, but Apple is not interested in commodity businesses.’

But hasn’t Apple done a lot to commoditise many markets?

By differentiating itself from every Windows PC maker, in ways they simply cannot emulate, it has rendered its competitors’ offerings into mere commodities. OK that is avoidance of self-commoditisation, I’ll agree.

But Apple has also shown that, while a specific song is not fungible, it can be sold by anyone, like a commodity. In the process it took the major channel of distribution for itself. The same applies, either today or very soon now, to Shows, Movies, News, Books, Magazines and more. They are made by the many, but anyone can sell them, as if they were commodities. You used to be able to swap your media freely in their pre-commodity days; as in ‘I’ll give you my complete collection of Road and Track mags in exchange for your first edition copy of Pride and Prejudice. I digress, but isn’t digital distribution effectively (if not literally) rendering consumable media into freely marketable commodities? Apple’s difference is that they like to be supplier of choice. All of which is to say that does have a growing taste for monopolising the commoditisation of popular media.

If my foregoing reasoning is sound, there is a strong case for Apple to enter Search ASAP. Information is becoming a commodity, especially the news, which is created by circumstances and so, owned by no one. The reportage may be copyrightable, but the event being reported cannot be, surely? People have a growing appetite for information and it’s likely to be an insatiable one, the way things are going.

Apple would be seriously remiss in their strategic thinking to dismiss any interest in Search. This is, very likely, the only enduring killer app. Ultimately hardware and software are merely the means towards getting a result. It is the quality of assistance towards getting that result which matters. That functionality comes from Search alone. Information may be a commodity but the service that gets you to a useful result is wide open to differentiation: by ease of use, by scope and depth of data mining, by quality of filtering, by speed of operation, by quality and relevance of results etc. Many of the qualitative terms I’ve used in that last sentence are a significant part of Apple’s DNA, the part that covers executing well.

Apple have had a decade to look at search. I cannot imagine they failed to appreciate its significance. Professional Search could propel Apple to double or triple its market value.

Best

Chandra Coomaraswamy

Once again, you do not need to test opt-out for security/privacy at the most fundamental level, period.

When I took a tour of Google, I saw a product team of 6 or 7, and was told it was one of the bigger teams there. And everything was fairly compartmentalized: they didn’t even use Chrome, for example. (Not in the “you’re not allowed to look” sense, but in the “we’re so busy working on our own thing we’re not going to seek out other pre-release projects” sense.)

Based on what I’ve seen, from the people I know who work there, I’d figure that a few programmers, a couple graphic designers, several translators, and a few testers saw part or all of it before it was released. Maybe tens of people, if you’re generous.

Do I believe that 10 programmers and designers, whose job it is to push social media, could convince themselves and each other that auto-joining their new social network would be a good idea? Yes, definitely.