Curated hypocrisy: How Google camouflages its attacks on Apple
Mon, May 17, 10
Last week, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps published Curated Computing: Designing For The Post-iPad Era where she observed:
“What’s revolutionary about the iPad is the experience that it delivers: The iPad is a new kind of PC that ushers in an era of Curated Computing.“
Not unexpectedly, this drew the attention of the anti-Apple echosystem that regards the Cupertino company as the evil incarnate who’s hellbent on destroying the “open web” by curating its users’ experience on Apple devices.
Taking the baton of anti-Apple venom from Adobe’s Lee (Go screw yourself Apple) Brimelow, Google’s newest evangelist Tim (I hate, hate Apple) Bray responded to Forrester’s “Curated Computing” notion with élan:
I shudder to the core.
In a series of tweets on Twitter, Bray piled on Apple with escalating snarkiness. Let’s review his misdirections away from Google’s own sins:
Curated computing: Who needs complexity?
Exactly, who needs complexity? Who does need complexity other than those who profit from mediating its ill effects on consumers? Who, for example, needs Byzantine complexity purposely injected into our legal, tax or health care systems? Who profits from the shameful complexity of our IT universe? Who benefits from the anti-virus industry? Who profits from the complexity of Facebook’s privacy settings, Oracle’s pricing structure or Microsoft’s SharePoint hairball? Who needs the complexity of users being forced to navigate through six different Android OS versions against a permutation of dozens and dozens of carriers, handset manufacturers and devices? Google would like you to believe users are craving for this complexity, just as Microsoft tried to convince you for the last two decades.
[John @gruber answers @timbray: I think this one actually nails it: "Curated computing: Who needs complexity?" Many use cases where we *don't* need complexity. Tim Bray responds:]
Agreed, many indeed, but freedom is too high a price.
Freedom? Whose freedom? The freedom of those who directly profit from the artificial complexity to continue as they please or the freedom of users who are being taxed by these parasites? Let’s ignore the absurdity of equating Apple’s banning of proprietary Flash with the abrogation of, say, the First Amendment, a real freedom.
Curated computing: Don’t bother your pretty little head, we’ll take care of what you see.
Just like Google telling the rest of the world: “If someone forced us to [disclose how our search advertising business works], it would destroy our product.” This from a company that’s currently being investigated by the European Commission for antitrust ramifications of its opaque search ranking algorithms and the resulting 90% monopolistic share of the European search market. Google knows best.
Curated computing: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Let’s open that curtain a bit. Here’s what Bray’s bosses and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page said in their The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine a few years ago:
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
It could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
It’s not as if, a decade later, the rest of the world can see what’s behind Google’s perfectly opaque and proprietary search and advertising curtain, is it? Can you say “link farms”and SEO? Do you really know what exactly Google does with your click-stream history? Did you know Google has been snooping on European WiFi transmissions until a few days ago even though the company denied it previously? Do you really know what the man behind the curtain is doing?
Curated computing: Admire the beautiful murals on the garden walls.
Or you can go “out there” to admire the graffiti on the…ground? In Google’s walled garden of advertising, for example, “cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and sugar babies are in.” Google “will take care of” your sexual proclivities.
Curated computing: Freedom is over-rated.
So are utopias.
I, for one, welcome our new curatorial overlords.
Of course, no mention of our current overloads: complexity merchants.
Curated computing: What they have right now in China.
And what they also had in China just a few years ago when Bray’s employer Google went in three-monkey style to conduct commerce, despite all manner of people pleading the overlord of search/ad business not to.
Curated computing: Just fine if you’re the curator.
Google should know, its share of the search market hovers around 65-70% and its U.S. search advertising share is over 75%. If you’re the sole “curator” of AdSense/AdWords things should be just fine.
Curated computing: Your gated-exurban-community home on the Internet.
Perhaps the most pernicious proposition of the “everything must be open” crusade is the notion that curation is bad and anti-freedom. Soldiers of this crusade confuse freedom with competition. Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. The goal should be for curators to compete, not for curation to be declared illegal and unholy by the “open” zealots.
Who’s behind the curtain?
Just as Adobe is desperately trying to yell at the world, “Don’t buy into Apple’s walled garden, get locked into our own proprietary Flash,” so is Google trying to misdirect consumers’ attention from its own monopolistic sins to Apple’s mobile platform where 100 million users voted with their own money to enjoy 200,000 apps. The evil man behind the curtain in this scenario is not Apple’s curation, it’s the frightening prospect of Google getting cut off from search and ad revenue derived from its naked domination of the search box on top of your web browser. That, unfortunately, doesn’t sound like an appealing public cry, hence the “Curated Computing” misdirection whining.
Adobe legal entanglements
Wed, May 5, 10
As a background to recent unconfirmed reports of Adobe asking the U.S. government to investigate Apple (presumably for excluding Flash from the App Store), here are a few of the legal cases by and against Adobe over the years:
- In the late 1980s, British high-end digital effects powerhouse Quantel sued Adobe for $138 million over patented aspects of its Paintbox it claimed Photoshop violated, but lost the case in 1997 due to prior art from Alvy Ray Smith, computer graphics pioneer and co-founder of Pixar.
- In 1998, the German printing systems giant Heidelberger sued Adobe for violating its photo retouching patents. The two companies settled out of court two years later.
- In 1998, Adobe settled its font software copyright and typeface designs case against The Learning Company Inc. for $2 million in damages.
- In 2000, Adobe sued Macromedia for having violated its “reconfigurable tabbed palette” patent to stop the launch of Macromedia’s Flash 5.0. The then Adobe president Bruce Chizen: “Adobe will not be the research and development department for its competitors.” Two years later, Adobe won damages of $2.8 million.
- Two weeks after that verdict, another jury this time found Adobe violated several Macromedia patents and awarded Macromedia $4.9 million. The then chairman and CEO of Macromedia Rob Burgess: “The score is now Adobe one, Macromedia one, customers zero.”
- In 2005, Adobe bought Macromedia in a $3.4 billion stock deal.
- In 2010, after Apple blocked Flash from the App store and Steve Jobs shared his “Thoughts on Flash” publicly, an Adobe platform evangelist blogged “Go screw yourself Apple” and Adobe is said to have asked for governmental intervention.
Google’s burden of Flash
Thu, Apr 22, 10
Vic Gundotra spent over 15 years at Microsoft, becoming General Manager of Platform Evangelism to lock developers into that company’s proprietary APIs. In 2007 he joined Google and is now Vice President of Developer Products.
At Google his job is to get developers to support Google’s search and advertising businesses — which are anything but open or transparent — by promoting “open” technologies that lock into Google properties in somewhat opaque but forceful ways. A layer of misdirection has to be carefully laid out and Google has to be seen on the side of angels so that developers and consumers alike must not spend too much time thinking about just how un-open Google’s search and ad cashcows really are.
Things that interfere with this business model must be dealt with decisively, even if it costs billions. For example, on Microsoft driven mobile devices Bing is the likely search engine or on iPhone OS driven devices native apps are the direct conduit to information, both denying Google the ability to monetize search. Not good.
The holy fight
So Gundotra spent much of 2009 promoting the general proposition that the days of desktop software, proprietary technologies, native mobile apps and any number of development and deployment strategies that can have potentially adverse impact on Google cashcows were unholy [emp. mine]:
• Classic Gundotra evangelism from Google’s I/O 2009 developer conference:
Bet on the web…Its rate of innovation has dramatically accelerated over the past 12 months, giving rise to an open web platform that’s fundamentally more capable and more sophisticated than even a year ago. The combination of HTML 5, a vibrant developer community, and the pervasiveness of modern web browsers is delivering a programming model and an end-user experience that will surprise and delight people.
• Pitching HTML5 to Tim O’Reilly at Web 2.0 in 2009 (midway in the video) by showing how Google turned an iPhone native app via HTML5 to an Android web app:
• Gundotra’s Google I/O 2009 keynote clearly had an effect on O’Reilly:
“Never underestimate the web,” says Gundotra…he goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. “We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. There was this small company called Keyhole, which made this most fantastic geo-visualization software for Windows. This was the kind of software we always used to prove to ourselves that there were things that could never be done on the web.” A few months later, Google acquired Keyhole, and shortly thereafter released Google Maps with satellite view.
“We knew then that the web had won,” he said. “What was once thought impossible is now commonplace.”Google doesn’t want to repeat that mistake, and as a result, he said, “we’re betting big on HTML 5.“
• During a panel at Mobilebeat 2009, Gundotra was unambiguous about Google’s long(er) term open vs. closed strategy:
“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”
Stuff happens
That was then, this is now.
Google’s platform Android is now competing against Apple’s iPhone OS platform, currently as an underdog. It appears that Google needs a checklist of items that Apple devices don’t or won’t do to differentiate itself and solicit developers’ attention. Flash to the rescue!
So Google brings in another actor to the stage, Andy Rubin, Vice President of Engineering on Android, with a post at Adobe Featured Blogs no less:
Partnerships have been at the very heart of Android, the first truly open and comprehensive mobile platform…Google is working to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform…Google is happy to be partnering with Adobe to bring the full web… [emp. mine]
Which neatly echoes what Adobe’s Mike Chambers was orchestrating the same day:
I think that the closed system that Apple is trying to create is bad for the industry, developers, and ultimately consumers, and that is not something that I want to actively promote…We are at the beginning of a significant change in the industry, and I believe that ultimately open platforms will win out over the type of closed, locked-down platform that Apple is trying to create.
Alice in Wonderland
We’ve come full circle: Google positions itself as the champion of “open web” (because it’s good for its own business), promotes HTML5 (because it’s the vehicle to get there) but comes across a formidable competitor in Apple and finds itself at a disadvantage. What to do? Why, let’s promote the very un-open and proprietary Flash, as a purely cynical competitive bludgeon against Apple. Never mind what our General Manager of Platform Evangelism Gundotra has been telling the world for the past year. Business is business.
This, of course, isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed naked displays of Google’s hypocrisy. Despite all sorts of criticism at the time, Google did go into business in China for commercial expediency, then feigned shock for having discovered there was censorship. Just like when it grafted the intrusive Google Buzz on top of the widely used Gmail without opt-in to quickly build traction even if it knew it would expose millions of users’ privacy, then blamed it first on users’ lack of understanding and subsequently on lack of external testing.
Comes a fork
Indeed, “we are at the beginning of a significant change in the industry” as Adobe’s Chambers says. And Google has a historic opportunity and responsibility (to its own incessant “open web” rhetoric) to let Flash die on its legacy vine. We do not get progress by blindly (and in Google’s case expediently) catering to legacy. That’s precisely why Apple is unique in the industry. It introduces and promotes new technologies by “killing” the old: from floppy disks to physical keyboard and stylus on mobiles…and now Flash.
This isn’t news to Google, however. It recently killed the IE 6 browser. Google knows “full web” is not the same as “open web”. Surely, there are tens of millions Microsoft IE 6 and Silverlight users on the web. A “full web” would require support for those as well as myriad other technologies. How come Google is not promoting Microsoft properties in the name of “full web”? Obviously, Adobe/Flash poses little competition to Google, unlike Apple/iPhones and iPads or Microsoft/Bing and Office.
As the most important web company on the planet, Google has been given a unique chance to display leadership: does it really want an “open web” or is it just interested in promoting a momentary “competitive” advantage against Apple? Does Google believe in what its General Manager of Platform Evangelism has been selling developers? Or are we back to “Don’t be evil, as long as it’s profitable”?
Google’s final embrace of Flash will tell.
Microsoft passes the “choice” bludgeon against Apple to Google
Tue, Mar 16, 10
One day, two unrelated events and a solidifying trend.
Yesterday, Tim Bray (Canadian software developer and entrepreneur, one of the editors of the XML specifications and a long time Sun employee) announced that he joined Google as a “Developer Advocate” working on Android.
The old misdirection
In and of itself, this wasn’t much news, coming from someone who hasn’t done much outside of his duties at Sun over the last half decade to warrant such a triumphalist announcement. But he has a new job as a mouthpiece of the Google machine, the search and advertising monopolist-in-the-making, and he started it in the old-fashioned way by attacking the industry leader, Apple:
The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
He then took his self-designated mission to a loftier perch, assuming guardianship of WWW:
The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor…It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.
The “Web” may not have a vendor, but his mission, Android, is certainly driven by Google. Without Google’s resources and corporate ambitions Android would have been just another languishing Java/Linux based mobile platform by now.
Google has declared itself as the champion of the “open web” while maintaining a moat around its cashcows, search and advertising, which it guards in the most un-open way possible. Google funnels billions from its proprietary and closed businesses into a systematic effort to commoditize myriad industries with free products to lure users into its perfectly commercial sphere of personal-data-for-advertising-dollars exchange. That Google has been able to persuade the technorati to swallow this under the glow of ‘open web’ is all the more remarkable.
Tyranny of choice
The bludgeon Google uses against Apple is a familiar one: choice. And we have seen this movie before. In fact, over and over again in reruns for nearly two decades. It came from another monopolist, Microsoft. Just as it’s now with Android, it was then “One OS, many hardware manufacturers.” That is, you could build and sell anything as long as you acquiesced to be married to Win32 APIs and other proprietary Microsoft technologies.
This strategy did work to expand the PC market around the world. So well that today the largest of Microsoft “choice” partners like HP, Dell, HTC and Motorola are falling all over themselves looking for alternatives to the Wintel empire of the last two decades. Yes, using this strategy, Microsoft has become fabulously profitable, but only by commoditizing the business of its “choice” partners into ever thinner margins.
At the start of the iPod/iTunes ascendancy, Microsoft executives and “advocates” bitterly attacked Apple for not “opening up” its digital media ecosystem to competing interests, incredulously insisting that Apple should also offer various proprietary Windows formats! This from a company that shafted its own partners by killing the laughably named PlaysForSure media format to introduce its own non-licensed, proprietary Zune system. Apparently, “open” platforms are wonderful as long as they help fuel the platform originator’s proprietary cashcows. Windows then, Android now. That the latter is open source may be technically interesting but strategically insignificant.
Microsoft takes a fork
For two decades, consumers suffered endless and unnecessary complexity, inelegant and shoddily made hardware, a parade of slowly evolving, convoluted operating systems, untold hours and billions wasted on insecure platforms…ultimately, a colossal loss of positive engagement and aesthetics. Users were forced to be afraid of their own computers.
Microsoft has itself ultimately recognized the failure of this strategy, as we have repeatedly pointed out over the last two years. In the competitive consumer markets, where consumers bought their own computers and devices without the stifling IT filter, the enforced separation of operating system, applications, hardware and services has been shown to produce consumer-hostile results.
So also yesterday Charlie Kindel, head of Microsoft’s Windows Phone developer strategy, has unveiled his company’s Windows Phone 7 Series direction:
Apps that run arbitrarily in the background create an end user experience where battery life and responsiveness of the system becomes … inconsistent.
We focused on getting a set of experiences right where we didn’t have to support [multitasking,] but we will over time.
We are revamping a lot of the marketplace policies, [and] we have a real desire to make sure that for developers, getting started is cheap and easy.
No ‘multitasking’, no user-changeable memory cards, limited VOIP, no background telephony for 3rd parties, one-way control of the Windows Phone Marketplace, and so on. A virtual clone of the “closed” iPhone platform.
A battle refought
Consumers (a market much larger than the enterprise enclave) want devices that are easy to learn, joy to use, consistent, dependable, all without having to be excessively managed. As the Wintel episode illustrates, we have no evidence that this can be achieved through the now-defunct “One OS, many hardware manufacturers” strategy. On the contrary, Apple, RIM, Palm and even Microsoft with Xbox have already demonstrated the benefits of hardware+software+services integration.
With little technology packaging, consumer market understanding or design competency, Google has decided to make a mad dash to old Microsoftdom by raising the ‘choice’ flag against the guardian of integration – most likely because that’s what it all knows. Just like Microsoft. Unfortunately, we have already seen this movie: caveat emptor.
The case against Opera Mini on the iPhone
Thu, Feb 18, 10
In 2002, Apple forked KDE project’s HTML layout engine KHTML and JavaScript engine KJS into WebKit which begot Safari. As usual, everyone thought Apple was either evil or ignorant for not choosing Gecko, everyone’s favorite non-IE rendering engine at the time. Apple rejected Gecko because KHTML/KJS offered less code, cleaner design, excellent standards compliance and faster speed.
Through its sustained commitment for nearly a decade not just to WebKit but also to WHATWG, HTML5 and various complementary aspects of the open web (canvas, H.264, SVG, etc.) Apple gave the open web community an increasingly credible alternative to proprietary platforms like IE, Flash and Silverlight.
Today, in the mobile business, every major platform but Microsoft’s does (or soon will) run WebKit as its primary web browser. The open source WebKit would certainly not be where it is today without Apple.
To Apple, though, WebKit is not merely a web browser. It bet its rich web-media rendering future on WebKit. Every Internet-connected Apple device, and likely Apple TV soon, runs on it. Even for the usual Apple anti-fans, WebKit, specifically its iPhone instantiation, is still considered the best browser on a modern, multi-touch mobile device.
Now comes Opera, mini Me
With amateur-time spectacles in airports that would make Adobe Flash evangelists proud, Opera now is daring Apple to reject its Opera Mini browser which it hasn’t submitted yet to the App Store:
“Opera is not based upon WebKit, no” confirms [Opera co-founder] Tetzchner “but it’s the world’s most popular mobile browser. Why would Apple not want the world’s most popular browser on the iPhone?”
So what’s not to like about Opera Mini? It says “50 million rides” in the ad above, it must be “the world’s most popular mobile browser”? If that’s the case, Apple should reject Opera for not being good at math: there are already more than 50 million iPhones/iPod touches sold, everyone of which actually relies on WebKit as its sole browser. Let’s consider the serious issues:
Proxy. It’s one thing for an app on the iPhone to query the web, talk to its own or others’ servers, but something entirely different for Opera Mini to proxy the entire web through its own proprietary servers. Yes, you read it right. Opera gets in between you and every single URL out there, from your bank to your school to your doctor’s office. You never communicate with any site directly, only through Opera proxy servers that first go to that URL, get a page, recompile it into its own markup language, compress and send it back to the mobile client that alone can understand it.
Security. When visiting encrypted pages, you have to allow Opera to get in the middle to decrypt and re-encrypt (via Opera Software), breaking what’s meant to be an end-to-end security chain. You need to ask yourself if you need another potential opaque layer of insecurity between you and, say, your bank account?
Scalability. In introducing the iPhone’s Exchange facilities, Apple stressed how it was more secure and scalable for a distributed system to deliver email than to rely on a single point of failure, like RIM’s centralized NOC proxies for BlackBerry devices, which have infamously suffered multiple failures over a number of years. Now imagine Opera, a tiny outfit in comparison, having a similar fate, except taking down the entire web for its users.
JavaScript. Opera Mini 5, the version which we assume will be submitted to the App Store, is currently in preview and is not the more capable one that requires Java J2ME runtime which Apple will clearly not approve. Apple gets dinged for not delivering the full Internet by excluding Flash, and yet I bet the very same Apple anti-fans won’t say a word about Opera not even trying.
In addition to recompiling each and every web destination into its own markup language, Opera also deliberately dumbs down its JavaScript support. After Opera gets a page from the real server, its onLoad JavaScript events are fired, but all such scripts are allowed only two seconds, and, for example, all interval and setTimeout functions are disabled. So if the original page was doing something time-related or took more than two seconds, too bad, the original page is compiled, compressed and sent to the mobile device incomplete. Consequences be damned. When on the device, there are only four events allowed to trigger JavaScripts, onUnload, onSubmit, onChange, onClick. Enjoy your full Internet, the Opera way.
Opera Mini may be a huge step forward for dumb WAP phones, but for a company that bet its future on the rich interactive features of HTML5 and JavaScript in WebKit, this Operatic intrusion is clearly a giant step backwards.
Persistence. One of the key capabilities in HTML5 is local storage, which allows web sites/apps to store varying amounts of data on the client side for personalization, preferences, data, syncing and off-line capabilities. Coupled with emasculated JavaScript support, Opera is looking into the WAP past instead of the HTML5 future here.
Interface. Pictures of the proprietary Opera Mini are not being made available, but the company said that the browser does not include such fundamental UI conventions on the iPhone as pinch-zoom. Apple has bet its fortunes on establishing the world’s first pervasive multi-touch UI platform, from Mac trackpads to iPhones to iPads. As we argued here two years ago, it would have been a mistake to allow Flash on the iPhone because it had no concept of multi-touch, regardless of any other issue. Nearly 100 million iPhone/Mac users are now familiar with Apple’s multi-touch gesture library, it’d be a travesty to allow a tiny player with a marginal interest in this platform and no experience in gestural UIs to pollute it now.
Unknowns. There are many of them:
- Will OS-wide copy and paste work as expected in Opera Mini?
- Will it allow multiple text and graphic items to be selected and copied with formatting intact to other apps?
- Will bookmarklets such as Instapaper or ReadItLater work as expected?
- What will happen to Opera when more and more device-specific functionalities (like GPS, accelerometer, background notifications, etc.) are integrated into WebKit?
- Apple’s said to receive $100 million/year for including Google Search in Safari. How does Opera interfere with that revenue?
I could name many more unknowns, but the fundamental problem with Opera Mini is this: other than a few geeks who want everything because that’s what defines them, have you ever met an iPhone user who complained about its browser? Most iPhone users I know bought an iPhone primarily because they loved the browser on it. Sure, who wouldn’t want a faster browser? If the iPhone got 3X faster this summer, will people stop wanting it to be even faster? Of course not.
I have no idea if Apple will reject Opera. But before people start jumping up and down about how evil Apple is, I hope they consider some of the issues posed by Opera, because so far the only advantage they promise, but haven’t yet publicly delivered, is speed. And speed isn’t everything, if the Wintel saga hasn’t taught us anything else.
