Fishpool

The business interest

Apple today is a $43 billion annual revenue, $240 billion market cap giant, give or take. Out of that value, 40% or so is riding on the iPhone, and Steve is clearly taking the company to a direction where devices running the iPhoneOS will replace the Macs, so that share is only increasing. Right now, they have more resources to do this than anyone else in the world, and least legacy to worry about, given that despite the rising market share and the title of leading laptop vendor, computers running Mac OS X are still a minority market compared to all the Windows powered devices from a legion of other makers.

The company's DNA, and Steve's personal experience over the past 25 years has taught them that an integrated, tightly controlled platform is something they are very good at, but that earlier mistakes of not controlling the app distribution as well left them weak. They're not going to repeat that mistake. And certainly they'll try to ensure that not only do the iPhone and iPad have the best applications, but that those applications are only available on Apple devices.

Adobe, despite their history of dominating many design and content production software niches and a market cap of $18 billion, is tiny in comparison. Furthermore, the Flash platform is a visible but financially less relevant part of Adobe's product portfolio (though exact share of Flash is buried inside their Creative Solutions business segment). Even disregarding that Apple can, as the platform owner, dictate whatever rules they want for the iPhoneOS, Adobe símply can not win a battle of resources against Apple.

But this fight is not about Flash on the iPhone - it's about Apple's control of the platform in general. Whether or not it's true, Apple believes tight control is a matter of survival for them.

The technical argument

Apple wants to make it seem like they're doing this because Flash is bad technology. As I wrote above, and so many others have described better than I have, that's a red herring. It's always convenient to dress business decisions behind seemingly accurate technical arguments ("Your honor, of course we'd do that, but the tech just doesn't work!"). Anyway, let's look at that technical side a bit.

First, lets get the simple bit out of the way. Flash is today most often used to display video on web sites. However, this is not about video, and video has never been Flash's primary point. It just happened to have a good install base and decent codecs at a time in 2005 when delivering lots of video bits started to make sense and YouTube came along to popularize the genre. In fact, it was completely superior for the job compared to the alternatives at the time, such as Real Player. The real feature, however, was that Flash was programmable, which allowed these sites to create their own embedded video players without having to worry about the video codecs.

By that time, Flash had already gained somewhat of a bad reputation for being the tool with which some seriously horrible advertising content had been made, so the typical way to make the web fast was to disable Flash content - rendering most ads invisible. I'm pretty sure for many YouTube was the first time there really was an incentive to have Flash in their browsers at all. That is, unless you liked to play the casual games that already then were also often created with Flash.

But that's all history, what about the future? Adobe certainly needs to take quite a lot of the blame for the accusations leveled against Flash - in particular, the way Flash content slows a computer down even when nothing is visible (as in, the 10 Flash-based adverts running in a browser tab you haven't even looked at in the last half an hour), or that yes, it does crash rather frequently. Quite a few of those problems are being addressed by Flash Player 10.1, currently in beta testing and to be released some time in the next months. Too little, too late, says Apple, and many agree.

I would, too, except for the fact that despite the issues, Flash is still the leading and best platform for rich web applications. It took that position from Java because it was (and is) lighter and easier to install, and keeps that position now against the much-talked-about HTML5 because the latter simply isn't ready yet, and once it is, will still take years to be consistently available for applications (that is, until everyone has upgraded their browsers). Furthermore, it's quite a bit easier to create something that works by depending on Flash 10 than to work around all the differences of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and so on.

But that's exactly what Steve is saying, isn't it? That these cross-platform Flash applications simply can't provide the same level of sophistication and grace as a native application on the iPad. Well, maybe that's true today. Maybe it's even true after Adobe finally releases 10.1's mobile editions on the Android. And given the differences in the scale of resources Apple and Adobe can throw at a problem, maybe it's true even with Flash Player 10.2 somewhere down the road.

But that doesn't matter. What matters is what developers do with the tools given to them, because the tools themselves do nothing. There's plenty of horrible crap in the ranks of App Store's 200,000 applications, and there's plenty of brilliant things done with Flash and AIR. Among the best of the best, which platform has the greatest applications? That's a subjective call that I will let someone else try to answer.

I will say this: all technology is fated to be replaced by something better later. At least ActionScript3 and Flash's virtual machine provide a managed language that lets application developers worry about something else than memory allocation. Sure, it wasn't all that hot until version 10, and still loses to Java, but it sure is better than Objective-C. If we're now witnessing the battle for platform dominance for the end of this decade, I sure would like to see something else than late 80s technology at the podium.

The consumer position

Apple wants to provide the consumer a polished, integrated experience where all pieces fit together, and most of them are made by Apple. The future of that experience includes control of your data as well. Put your picture albums in Apple's photo service, your music library in iTunes, your home video on iMovie Cloud, and access it all with beatiful Apple devices. Oh, you don't want to be all-Apple? Too bad. That's what you get.

Or, you can choose something where you'll have choice. If you believe Steve Jobs, that choice is between dirt, smut and porn, but his interest is to scare you back to Apple, so take that with a grain of salt. Me, I've never liked being dictated to, so I'll be choosing the path where I can pick what I want, when I want it. Sure, it'll mean I'll miss some of the polish (iPhone is by far the nicest smart phone today, and the iPad sure feels sweet), but nevertheless, I respect my freedom to choose more. Today, it means I'll choose Android, and am looking forward to playing Flash games and using AIR applications on tablets powered by it.

Having for years used Nokia phones, lately S60 phones of various generations, with a fair amount of experience of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and lately having used both the Nokia N900 (Maemo OS) and the Google Nexus One (Android) devices as well, I can't avoid comparing these together. As a developer, I'm not really that interested in what they look like today, because today's devices are not what a developer needs to target for applications - rather, what can one determine of the platforms' future from looking at their past?

I can't make any comparisons to the Palm Pre (WebOS), Windows Mobile or Blackberry devices, since I have no first-hand experience of any of them. However, of the four platforms I know to some degree, not only is iPhone still clearly in the lead, but it looks to have the most predictable future as well. iPhone OS 3.1 no longer misses any significant functionality and has gained all the important bits without giving in on the level of platform polish, and the application market is humongous. Its only real weakness is the draconian control Apple enforces, and the crazy restrictions that results in. Those issues are well documented by a recent EFF post outlining the contents of the iPhone developer program contract.

The imminent launch of iPad is the first time the platform starts to experience any kind of real fragmentation in terms of a application development target. At this point that fragmentation looks like to be minimal - with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad all sharing the same OS, same UI, practically same inputs and outputs and differing only by what networks are available for communication and what size the screen is, developers are not going to have a hard time at all in developing for all three devices.

That is quite unlike the situation on the other three platforms (Symbian, Android, Maemo). The fragmentation of the Symbian market is a matter of some notoriety. Basically, the same app will not work on phone models launched 9 months apart, or sometimes even on simultaneously launched devices, due to differences in the OS, let alone differences in the form factor, screen size, input mechanisms, and so on. With already two major revisions announced, this trend is only going to continue, and the base OS is already nearing 15 years old, if traced back to the first 32 bit EPOC it evolved from, though I believe the first S60 UI version came out in 2002.

Android is beginning to suffer from the same disease. Not only are the devices on the market each a running different base OS version with different features available to applications, but nearly all of them are also customized by their manufacturers or network carriers with little regard to compatibility (nor in fact could they have any regard for it, since none of them have any previous experience maintaining a platform). And of course each one has a different form factor. However, the most surprising feature of the platform (as a recent Nexus One user) is that even though Android is barely two years old, it already carries with itself a legacy of inconsistent UI controls. What exactly does one do with an indirect-control pointing device (a trackball) on a device capable of direct control via both a touchscreen and motion sensors? Why are the built-in applications (never mind those available on the Android Market) full of menus, "select an object and execute a function on it via a separate control" type UIs clearly inheriting baggage from the decade before touch screens, and other clunky hacks, when there's a rich base to copy from in the iPhone UI design library of 150,000 applications?

So, what about Maemo? I bought a few years ago the very first Maemo device, the N770 Internet Tablet. I've seen and played with every device since. All of them up to the N900 carried the same "windows and menus" baggage Android is suffering from, but the refreshed UI in N900 got rid of most of that. Not entirely so, but enough that I can state with confidence that the N900 UI is more modern, more designed for the touch screen than Android is. However, Maemo's weakness is that of a platform - there's none. Every version of the OS thus far (five iterations on the market) has broken compatibility with the previous. Now, that's to be expected and somewhat forgivable as long as it's in developers-only mode, essentially being beta tested. It's hard to call N900 a beta test any longer. What's worse, is that Nokia has publicly stated that the next device, whatever it's name, and regardless of whether its OS is called Maemo 6 or MeeGo whatever, is also going to be incompatible with the current one, and applications will require a re-write. This is no way to build a developer base.

So, what do we have to look towards to as application developers, trying to figure out what platform to target when working on our next mobile applications?

iPhone, a consistent, easy to use platform with a stable technical roadmap and little legacy baggage, but saddled with an unpredictable owner who's just as likely to deny you from doing business at all than to support you in it?

Symbian, full of legacy, and with a refreshed, incompatible platform to launch maybe next year?

Android, fast-growing, but already full of clunky hacks, and fragmenting faster than than anyone's seen before?

Or Maemo, approaching a state of polish but unable to maintain direction for the length of one device cycle?

I think we're all going to miss the days of Java mobile games development before this is over.

Last week I posted a brief review of 2009 here, but didn't go much into predictions for 2010. I won't try to predict anything detailed now either, but here's a few things I think will be interesting to monitor over the year. And no, tablet computing isn't on the list. For fairly obvious reasons, this is focused on areas impacting social games. As a further assist, I've underlined the parts most resembling conclusions or predictions.

Social networks and virtual worlds interoperability

As more and more business transforms to use Internet as a core function, the customers of these businesses are faced with a proliferation of proprietary identification mechanisms that has already gotten out of hand. It is not uncommon today to have to manage 20-30 different userid/password pairs that are in regular use, from banks to e-commerce to social networks. At the same time, identity theft is a growing problem, no doubt in large part because of the minimum-security methods of identification.

Social networks today are a significant contributor to this problem. Each collects and presents information about its users that contribute to the rise of identity theft while having their own authorization mechanisms in a silo of low-trustworthy identification methods. The users, on the other hand, perceive little incentive to manage their passwords in a secure fashion. Account hijacking and impersonation is a major problem area to each vendor. The low trust level of individual account data also leads to a low relative value of owning a large user database.

A technology solution, OpenID is emerging and taking hold in a form of an industry-accepted standard for exchanging identity data between an ID provider and a vendor in need of a verified id for their customer. A few of current backers of the standard in the picture on the right. However, changing the practices of the largest businesses has barely begun and no consumer shift can yet be seen – as is typical for such “undercurrent” trends.

OpenID will allow consumers to use fewer, higher-security ids over the universe of their preferred services, which in turn will allow these services a new level of transparent interoperability in combining data from each other in near-automatic, personalized mash-ups via the APIs each vendor can expose to trusted users with less fear of opening holes for account hijacking.

Browsers vs desktops: what's the target for entertainment software?

Here's a rough sketch of competing technology streams in terms of two primary factors – ease of access versus the rich experience of high-performance software. “Browser wars” are starting again, and with the improved engines behind Safari 4, Firefox 4, IE 8 and Google Chrome, a lot of the kind of functionalitywe're used to thinking belongs to native software or at best browser plugins like Flash, Java or Silverlight will be available straight in the browser. This for sure includes high-performance application code, rich 2D vector and pixel graphics, video streams and access to new information like location-sensing. The plugins will most likely be stronger at 3D graphics and synchronized audio and at advanced input mechanisms like using webcams for gesture-based control. Invariably, especially the new input capabilities will also bring with them new security and privacy concerns which will not be fully resolved within the next 2-3 years.

While 3D as a technology will be available to browser-based applications, this doesn't mean the web will turn to represent everything as a virtual copy of the physical world. Instead, it's best use will be as a tool for accelerating and enhancing other UI and presentation concepts – think iTunes CoverFlow. For social interaction experiences, a 3-degrees-freedom pure 3D representation will remain a confusing solution, and other presentations such as axonometric “camera in the corner” concepts will remain more accessible. Naturally, they can (but don't necessarily need to) be rendered using 3D tech.

Increased computing capabilities will change economies of scale

The history of the “computer revolution” has been about automation changing economies of scale to enable entirely new types of business. Lately we've seen this eg by Google AdWords enabling small businesses to advertise and/or publish ads without marketing departments or involvement of agencies.

The same trend is continuing in the form of computing capacity becoming a utility in Cloud Computing, extreme amounts of storage becoming available in costs which allow terabytes of storage to organizations of almost any size and budget, and most importantly, developing data mining, search and discovery algorithms that enable organizations to utilize data which used to be impossible to analyze as automated business practices. Unfortunately, the same capabilities are available for criminals as well.

Areas in which this is happening as we speak:

• further types and spread of self-service advertising, better targeting, availability of media
• automated heuristics-based detection of risky customers, automated moderation
• computer-vision based user interfaces which require nothing more than a webcam
• ever increasing size of botnets, and the use of them for game exploits, money laundering, identity theft and surveillance

The escalation of large-scale threats have raised the need for industry-wide groups for exchanging information and best practices between organizations regarding the security relevant information such as new threats, customer risk rating, identification of targeted and organized crime.

Software development, efficiencies, bottlenecks, resources

Commercial software development tools and methods experience a significant shift roughly once every decade. The last such shift was the mainstreaming of RAD/IDE-based, virtual-machine oriented tools and the rise of Web and open source in the 90s, and now those two rising themes are increasingly mainstream while “convergent”, cross-platform applications which depend on the availability of always-on Internet are emerging. As before, it's not driven by technological possibility, but by the richness and availability of high-quality development tools with which more than just the “rocket-scientist” superstars can create new applications.

The skills which are going to be in short supply are those for designing applications which can smoothly interface to the rest of the cloud of applications in this emerging category. Web-accessible APIs, the security design of those APIs, efficient utilization of services from non-associated, even competing companies, and friction-free interfaces for end users of these web-native applications is the challenge.

In this world, the traditional IT outsourcing houses won't be able to serve as a safety valve for resources as they're necessarily still focused on serving the last and current mainstream. In their place, we must consider the availability of open source solutions not just as a method for reducing licensing cost, but as the “extra developer” used to reduce time-to-market. And as with any such relationship, it must be nurtured. In the case of open source, that requires participation and contribution back to the further development of that enabling infrastructure as the cost of outsourcing the majority of the work to the community.

Mobile internet

With the launch of iPhone, the use of Web content and 3rd party applications on mobile devices has multiplied compared to previous smart phone generations. This is due to two factors: the familiarity and productivity of Apple's developer tools for the iPhone, and the straightforward App Store for the end-users. Moreover, the wide base of the applications is primarily because of the former, as proven by the wide availability of unauthorized applications already before the launch of iPhone 2.0 and the App Store. Nokia's failure to create such an applications market despite the functionality available on S60 phones for years before the iPhone launch proves this – it was not the features of the device, but the development tools and application distribution platform were the primary factor.

The launch of Google's Android will further accelerate this development. Current Android-based devices lack the polish of iPhone, and the stability gained from years of experience of Nokia devices, yet the availability of development tools will supercharge this market, and the next couple of years will see accelerated development and polish cycle from all parties. At the moment, it's impossible to call the winner on this race, though.

I wanted to link to Andrew Chen's recent article, Does every startup need a Steve Jobs, because it's a useful discussion about the differences between technical feasibility, design-led desirability, and business viability, a triplet productized by IDEO, and one that we also identified a decade ago at Razorfish (wow, it's really a decade ago!). As for the question in the title - no, I don't think that's the only way to create greatness, though clearly if you have Steve at your disposal, you could do worse than have him run everything. :)

Seriously though, at least in this consumer-targeted software business that I'm familiar with, it's crucially important to have those three principles well represented at every level of the business. Sure, it's possible to create a successful business with just two or perhaps even just one of those viewpoints, especially if you can get away with copying someone else but just doing it with better economics. However, to create something new and be successful, it'd be a mistake to ignore business, technology or design. Sadly, of the three, design is the one most commonly ignored. According to this interview of Ken Auletta of his new book, even Google ignores it, Marissa Mayer notwithstanding.

Anyway, what I'm particularly interested about is how can you marry great design with incremental, rapid iterations on the market. I'm pretty sure I've understood how to iterate out in the open with regards to technical work, and relatively comfortable with iteration regarding business aspects. I've yet to come up with a really convincing argument for iteration and design on a very granular basis - well, I can convince myself, but I'm having less success convincing designers. :) If anyone cares to share their secrets, I'd love to hear more.

I've kept away from this debate since last April, but this eternal dragging-on is getting to me. Could we please move on already regarding the Oracle-Sun-MySQL decision? I'm a customer of MySQL, and I don't really savor the idea of becoming a customer of Oracle. Even so, I'd much rather see Oracle own it, than leave it straggling, let alone see this process drag on and on. This is helping no one.

I'm using a product from a company from which I buy commercial support, but I could switch to using a binary-compatible Open Source tool any day I chose. I am not bound to remaining a customer of the company I'm buying support from for any period longer than the current contract. I can definitely live with that obligation. I can live with the OSS-tool (whether we want to call it MySQL Community, Percona, MariaDB or whatever, I don't care) instead of the commercial product - in fact, I'm getting the understanding that the OSS-tool may in fact be better suited to my requirements than the product. So, I have no issue being bound Oracle, should the merger go through, because I am not bound to them. I can see as much interesting related technology being developed outside the discussed commercial unit as inside it, so I'm certainly not worried about the future of the tech.

At this point in time, I could buy support from at least a couple of different organizations to replace and extend that which I've bought from MySQL/Sun. I have absolutely no reason to think that option would go away should the merger be approved, despite what certain founders now claim. If it's not commercially possible to develop and support a database product without being in full control over its copyright, then how come Percona has a business? If it's possible to provide such support for GPL software on a limited basis, but not on a big-business enterprise level, then how come Red Hat is a successful public company?

I use MySQL as an infrastructure component to run a business which could be described as software-as-a-service. I do not redistribute the code base as part of a licensed product. There are companies who do that, but they've always done it with the full understanding that what they're doing is dependent on having to license something from an independent party over which they have no control. If they don't like licensing from Oracle, then they can choose to re-engineer their solution to work on top of some other database engine. It's not like those don't exist, or like technology, licensed or not, hasn't always carried that risk with it.

I can't avoid thinking that some of the parties keeping this thing from reaching completion are dreaming of Skype -- selling the same business twice. Hey, more power to them if that happens, but frankly, that was dependent on Ebay making a stupid deal at the time. I just do not see what that has to do with anti-trust and why the European Commission needs to be involved. THIS is hurting the market, more so that Oracle is likely to.

I have nothing further on the matter. Thank you for your attention.