Results tagged “apple”

For the past several days, Apple's stock has been rising high enough that the company has flitted between being the first and second most valuable company in the world. Regardless of the final value of the stock on any given day, it is without a doubt the greatest comeback or turnaround story in the history of American business: A single company has gone from being just 90 days away from shutting down to becoming the unequivocal leader in innovation, design, branding and now valuation, and the transformation happened in less than a decade and a half.

Most interestingly, there's a unanimous consensus, from fans and detractors alike, both within and outside the company, that a single man bears the lion's share of the credit for the vision, leadership and execution that's made this achievement possible.

So, who is this man? He's the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He's a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than "3", and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.

Every single person who'd attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They're unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.

It's a choice whether you, or anyone else, wants to accept the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale. Indeed, it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to "save" us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America's most successful company possible. I side with the makers, the creators, and the inventors, and it's about time that the pack of clamoring would-be politicians be put on the defensive for attacking the values of those of us on this side.

I've been waiting a year for someone to write about this, but my laziness has not yet paid off, so here are a few things that we all know about everybody's favorite Cupertino fruit company:

• Apple has client app software on hundreds of millions of devices in the form of iTunes on PCs and Macs and, well, all of the bundled software on iOS devices.
• Apple has an extremely large-scale realtime messaging service, in the form of Apple Push Notifications, which has scaled with high reliability to what must be an extremely large number of messages, certainly on the order of hundreds of millions a day.
• Apple has account info for every person receiving those notifications, usually including credit card information.
• Apple has lots of experience making client applications for short-length interpersonal messaging.
• Apple has a proven ability to get the attention and interest of artists and tastemakers who influence culture and inspire a following.

And here are a few things which Apple doesn't have:

• Any success or demonstrated ability in making compelling clients for social networking, whether in the form of Game Center or Ping.
• A usable API for developers to build on this realtime networking infrastructure in a lightweight way in web apps, or in languages other than Objective C.

To some degree, third parties like Boxcar address some of the need for a generic push notifications client; Services like Urban Airship solve a good bit of the API problem as well.

But in short, the hardest, most expensive technical part of building a web-scale Twitter competitor already exists in Apple's infrastructure. What's missing, in an odd reversal of Apple's usual pattern, is a well-designed, simple user experience that makes people want to participate.

Could a small team of developers and designers within Apple make a credible realtime messaging service with first-rate native clients on every important platform? Could they graft on a simple, REST-based web-style APIs to the complicated, old-fashioned API that enables push notifications right now? It'd be a lot like building a usable, delightful user interface on top of well-established, but complicated, technological underpinnings, wouldn't it? I wonder if Apple has those skills.

Related:

• Delivery as a Service
• The Pushbutton Web

About a year and a half ago, I was disappointed with one of the key choices Apple had made, given that they're often described as one of the most admired companies in the world. I wrote a piece called "Secrecy Does Not Scale", to try to describe the issue:

[T]he element of secrecy that's been required to maintain Apple's mystique has incurred an increasingly costly price. Apple must transform itself and leave its history of secrecy behind, not just to continue being innovative and to protect the fundamentals of its business, but because the cost of keeping these secrets has become morally and ethically untenable.

Well, if it's worth calling out companies when they do something wrong, then it's just as important to highlight when they do something right. Apple is to be commended for having addressed many of the key issues that were enabled by its lack of transparency, from answering questions about the working conditions of its suppliers in China to becoming far more open about the workings of the markets it controls through its dominant iTunes and iOS platforms.

• Apple has published an industry-leading supplier responsibility document, offering insights into the environment at Foxconn and expressing a commitment to ensuring humane and healthy conditions. And this document was clearly in progress before the publication of Joel Johnson's excellent Wired cover story about the topic (though admittedly, after significant coverage from outlets such as the New York Times), so it seems the company has been proactive about the issue even before receiving its most pointed media criticism.
• Apple's nearly-metonymic leader Steve Jobs personally became much more transparent in his communications before his recent medical leave, answering so many emails that multiple blogs like Emails From Steve Jobs have popped up to document them. That's amplified by unprecedented communications like Apple SVP Phil Schiller's on-the-record email to John Gruber about app store rejections, just a week after my critical post had gone up. (To be clear, I'm ascribing zero credit to my post for this change, but wanted to make clear the timeline because it seems Apple noticed the how untenable its position was at about the same time many of the rest of us did.)
• Just as important to their developer community, Apple offered clear, publicly-accessible published guidelines by which applications are evaluated for inclusion in the App Store. You can debate them, disagree with them, or be frustrated by them, but you can't say you don't know what they are.

That's not to say that Apple still isn't fantastically secretive about many things they do. The company still works frantically to try to shroud their product launches in as many layers of secrecy as always. Apple will certainly never be a company that puts out press releases about internal reorganizations or promotions, thank goodness. But in just 18 months, there has been a fundamental shift in the way the company communicates about the issues which have the greatest social impact on the world.

It's a positive evolution, and one that is worth calling out. Frankly, I still think they could loosen up about the secrecy around product launches, too. But I don't care about that as long as it's not having a cost in either the quality of life of the people who make their products, or in the ability for those who support the Apple ecosystem to make a living on their own terms.

And there's still a tremendous opportunity for a company to combine Apple's culture of design and user experience with a truly open and communicative style of doing business. In fact, I suspect it may be exactly that combination that would be required for the company to face a serious challenge in any of the many markets that it dominates.

Lots of nice writing out there that either replies to or references some recent posts here. Highlights:

• Dictatorship Versus Democracy in app store politics at Fast Company, by the always-genius Gina Trapani. A clear contrast between Mozilla and Apple's approaches, and the many other app stores that use similar models as well.
• Slashdot (remember that site?) picked up the conversation about an open app store with a few insightful comments on the thread. It was more striking to me that I wrote a post that got Slashdotted, and didn't notice. Valleywag predictably went a little darker on this topic, as Gawker's Ryan Tate offered up "Beware the Garden of Steven".
• After I posted a small catalog of app stores here, ReadWriteWeb took the idea and ran with it, asking developers, "Can You Take Your Mobile App Somewhere Else?" Good question!

Did I miss any other good responses? Nothing's more satisfying than seeing people use ideas here as raw materials for their own work elsewhere.

Apple took the not-very-surprising step of announcing an App Store for Mac OS X, an idea I was ruminating about earlier today in looking at all the app stores available today. So, now that we know that it exists, how do people who are concerned about the openness of the Mac OS X ecosystem for third-party developers make sure that Apple doesn't get a total stranglehold on app distribution on the desktop?

It's actually quite doable, if two unheralded but influential independent projects coordinate their efforts, or even merge. Their quiet ubiquity among third-party applications could create an emergent app store, turning a broad base of already-distributed and successful independent apps into a force with a lot more marketing and bargaining power in their discussions with Apple. So, who has the ability to change the balance of power here?

• Sparkle: Andy Matuschak has made a library called Sparkle, which allows any independent app to automatically announce and install app updates. If you're a serious Mac user, it's already on your system — from Transmission to Stuffit to Adium to TextMate to NetNewsWire to Evernote and on and on, many of the most popular apps on the Mac desktop all use the same tech for the critical app store functions of updating and alerting users to new versions.

• Growl: Growl is a ubiquitous and enormously popular open source library for announcing system events on Mac desktops. You can browse the list of apps that use Growl for yourself, but again, you've probably already got it on your system. It does a much broader range of notifications than the simple app updates notices of Sparkle, but it also has an even larger installed base. It's not strictly tied to app store functions, but it has the distribution that could be leveraged to give independent developers an extremely broad base of market penetration among Mac OS X users.

The Strategy

So, given these bits of software are useful, have key app store functions built in, and are on an enormous number of Mac users' systems already, what would it take to create an app store to compete on a nearly-level playing ground with Apple, while ensuring that independent developers retain ultimate control of their works and distribution?

Here's a rough outline of the steps that would need to happen:

• Move quickly. A number of prominent app developers would have to commit to supporting an open mac app store, by making their apps available on that store. These announcements would pretty much have to happen this week in order to have enough impact to sway the course of discussion. There's no reason these would have to be exclusive, or say anything negative about Apple's app store, but could just be expressions of these developers pursuing every distribution option available.
• Don't waste time in committee. Being Mac developers, their overwhelming impulse will be to waste time making pretty icons, endlessly debating the name of this new app store, and losing time to all manner of distractions which aren't actually that strategically important. This opportunity will only succeed if devs stay focused, don't waste time Dribbbling on themselves, and aren't trying to write a new galactic constitution. Make a simple wiki page or something, and list your names and apps.
• Make payment infrastructure part of Version 2.0. These developers have succeeded in the market without creating one Grand Unified Shopping cart, and they'll be able to continue to do so if they don't try to solve the payment problem right away. Let that be a great, innovative part of Apple's store for now, so that you can get this thing to market.
• Have the "app store" experience live within each of the apps themselves. To maximize the distribution benefit that each developer provides to the others, don't try to turn Sparkle or Growl into an app store with a dock icon of its own. Instead, make an embeddable store experience that could live within a menu option in the apps themselves, perhaps providing contextual suggestions of "other users who use this app also liked these other apps".
• Don't make it about Apple. One of the biggest temptations will be getting drawn into long, pointless conversations about "the meaning of open" and "the benefits of integration" and other highfalutin' horseshit, or to be stuck attacking or defending Apple. That's great Gruber fodder, but it won't help you in making an app store that actually gives you some leverage with Apple. Don't write long blog posts about The Meaning Of The Lion App Store if you could be just working on something to help you and your fellow developers.
• Ship before Lion does. If you can't do that, shame on you.

So, independent Mac developers: I'm an eager customer of your products. I want to give you my money. I also want you to stay empowered and able to make your own decisions about how your products are distributed. Give these suggestions some thought, point out any omissions or errors I've made, and start announcing your plans to defend your independence. Good luck.

Apple's App Store for iOS dominates people's perceptions whenever you mention the phrase "App Store". But it's actually just one member of a much larger set of "app stores", most of which don't use that description, but all of which are used to distribute applications to specific audiences.This is particularly important to keep in mind as it's likely that new versions of major operating systems like Mac OS and Windows will incorporate desktop app stores for the first time.

But wait — how could there be many, maybe even dozens, of app stores? Because they often take forms that we don't expect, or piggyback on other platform pieces that weren't originally conceived as an app store. To help make the concept clearer, I've outlined a few of the categories of app store that exist today, and collected some initial data about the size of these different app stores. Keep in mind: Many of these app stores serve more than one category, and those lines will only get blurrier in the future. I've deliberately erred on the side of stretching the definition of "app store" because I think it's very likely that new contenders will rise in areas that weren't previously considered competitive in this space.

• Mobile: These are the most familiar model of app stores, catalogs of mobile applications for phones and, more recently, tablets. As the most mature type of modern app store, they include really simple and robust payment services, easy ways for developers to submit apps, and widespread use amongst end users who have appropriate devices. iTunes leads the way here, of course, with Android being the other major player.
• Consoles: Gaming consoles and video set-top boxes have pretty mature app stores as well. Whether it's Xbox Live, Nintendo's virtual console, the coming Google TV and presumable Apple TV stores, or even the mini-applets that show up on Tivos, Rokus, Boxees, and some smart TVs, these are a relatively familiar form of app store for tech consumers as well.
• Desktop: The most obvious, and most glaringly under-developed category of app store. Interestingly, Microsoft launched a catalog of "Designed for Windows" applications as long as a decade ago when Windows XP came out, but today that's largely farmed out to CNET's Download.com and can't be considered a true app store. Windows 8 is pretty clearly going to integrate something more formal along these lines, and I'd be surprised if Mac OS X doesn't as well, perhaps as soon as in version 10.7. Meanwhile, Steam is extremely successful in being an app store for games on the desktop, and Linux users have long taken for granted a seamless app store experience from their preferred distribution's package manager tools. Some new platforms like Mozilla's open web apps will likely run across the desktop and mobile platforms like tablets.
• Servers: On the server, it's a strikingly different story than the desktop. While there are certainly popular package managers as on Linux desktops, it's increasingly common that server applications are delivered as complete virtual machines, or appliances. Amazon EC2 AMIs, Google App Engine apps, JumpBox images, and of course VMWare appliances are all extremely popular methods of deployment. The payment infrastructure for these app stores is also robust, not surprising given the significant amounts of money spent on server applications and the attractiveness of enterprises as customers. Some server app store deployments don't follow this appliance model, as in the common CPanel tools on shared web hosts, or Microsoft's excellent, but under-recognized, /web tools.
• Libraries: This is the geekiest category, mostly the domain of developers. From Pear for PHP or CPAN for Perl, from code distribution systems like Freshmeat or Macports, or even including old standbys like RPM or synaptic, tools that have long been thought of as mere developer infrastructure for installing library dependencies in the open source world seem poised to mature into relatively full-featured app stores, perhaps at the behest of commercial firms interested in introducing a business model and a more polished experience in front of these workhorses of the Internet. It's easy to picture a Sourceforge or Github creating a simple experience for the subset of the projects they host that can actually be used by end-users. One could argue that plugin installations systems such as the WordPress plugin directory are starting to become this sort of app store already.

Who's Winning

So, let's grant that all of these previously-disparate categories of software distribution are becoming simpler for end users, providing a more seamless and integrated experience on all their target platforms, and are introducing more accessible ways to pay for the products they contain. This lets us start to form a picture of the "app store" space as a whole, and a good starting point for creating a strategy to target across all of these app stores is to count the number of apps they claim to contain.

Note: These numbers are rough estimates, and admittedly inaccurate, due to much of the source data being self-reported by the owners of the various app stores. I wanted to post this data here as a starting point for a conversation, so that anyone with more reliable data, or any suggestions for additional app stores to be included, could submit them here in the comments.

That being said, here's a quick overview of what some big app stores list in terms of individuals apps they make available.

Sincere thanks to Morris Laniado on our team at Activate for compiling much of the research in the spreadsheet above, as a great starting point for adding more data to come.

I'm not a Democrat; I don't much care about the scorekeeping of who has more seats in any given chamber of Congress. But I do think there are things that need fixing in this country, and one of the most important is acknowledging when things are going the right way. More to the point, we need to find a way to use our collective powers of amplification for something that helps us, instead of as a reward for distracting us.

Tonight will be the President's State of the Union address. I'm very interested in what he covers, not least because the address will be the start of a two-way dialogue, as I outlined on the Expert Labs site. I think that's a pretty big improvement over simply addressing our elected officials.

But the world I inhabit, at the intersection of tech and media, is far more obsessed with what Apple's going to announce about its tablet. People who write about gadgets for a living gotta pay the bills, and I love cool stuff as much as the next guy. What leaves me at a loss, though, is how many otherwise sane and sensible people give their time and energy freely to help support a company like Apple that, despite its elegant designs and generally excellent products (I use many of them), certainly doesn't need free PR from some of the most talented people on the web.

Though Apple is a reasonably progressive company, they explicitly don't give a shit about poor people. (Let's pretend I found a nicer way to say that.)

Who does need your help? I'd say the current administration does. Because the biggest difference between now and 18 months ago is not that President Obama has gotten elected; It's that those who support his agenda have gotten lazy about helping in the effort. Remember "We're the ones we've been waiting for?" Well, it seems like a lot of people got tired and gave up on themselves. What if all the energy that went into free promotion for the Apple tablet went into free promotion for what's been achieved so far, in the hopes of encouraging more achievements in the future?

The Feature List

I know, I know. the conventional wisdom is "Obama ain't done nothin'!" But that's clearly bullshit. Obviously, political opponents are going to parrot that idea, but I'm surprised that even supporters are lazy enough to believe it without fact-checking. Perhaps everybody's attention spans have been a little too shortened by chasing the next Apple rumor, because the facts are obvious. In one year, here's what I caught (you might have your own list):

• The last U.S. Marines are leaving Iraq.
• Credit card companies can no longer charge interest on fees, and can't retroactively raise your interest rate on existing balances.
• We know who visits the White House, and who they're affiliated with.
• There's a quarter billion dollars more funding for National Parks, and $50 million more for the National Endowment for the Arts.
• We responded, imperfectly but with heart and sincere effort, to the disaster in Haiti. Just as we wish we had after Katrina. Leadership matters most in emergencies.
• Our current President readily admits when he's made mistakes, respects the validity of arguments that he disagrees with, and has members of the opposing party in his cabinet.
• The Department of Homeland Security now allocates its security spending according to threats, not by spending the same amount of money on Montana as it does on New York.
• My 401k is up 30% since the current President took office.
• Our President asked both corporations and individuals to reduce their electricity consumption. He asked politely.
• Trains. There's a plan to build more rails and more trains for transporting actual humans around the country.
• The Matthew Shepard hate crime bill was passed.

Now, that's just my list. These matter to me. Maybe you have your own list. Or maybe there's only have a wishlist of features for an Apple tablet. The difference is this: Our current President is listening to what your requests are, and wants to hear them. Steve Jobs doesn't give a fuck about you. I promise. I'm typing this on an Apple keyboard hooked up to a MacBook, and I don't use Windows anymore, but I guarantee you that Steve Jobs is not going to get those last Marines out of Iraq.

And I know, I know, people will piss and moan about the stuff this administration hasn't gotten done yet. So my question is this: What did you do to help? Did you do 1/10 as much as you did to get these folks elected? Did you do as much, today, as you did to help Apple sell billions of dollars of products that you get no stake in, that don't help make life better for you and your friends and neighbors? What are you waiting for, somebody to ask nicely? I'm asking nicely: Please find a cause you care about, and beat the drum to stir up public sentiment to support it. Make it your wallpaper on your new tablet.

I'm not scolding you; I'm scolding me.

I had to ask myself these questions. Sure, I've got a bunch of tweets about Apple features that I want to request, and of course I'll watch the Stevenote as rapt as when I watch the State of the Union. But we all have a choice to make about how we invest our time, attention, and passion. And I'll bet in eight years, today's tablet is gonna look an awful lot like a first-generation iPod looks today. Some efforts age better than others.

My goal here isn't to browbeat anybody, or to lecture. I'm in the same boat as everybody else who loves technology. But my personal reckoning has just shown me that a bunch of libertarian-leaning geeks in Silicon Valley who refuse to engage with government and civic society at all are never going to make an impact on most of the things that actually make a difference in our lives. Everybody in Silicon Valley will tell you they have a gay friend, but they couldn't stop Prop 8 or get the hate crimes bill passed. Probably everybody at Apple thinks "We should do more to support the arts!" but they weren't funding the NEA. There will be no iTrain.

Right now there are a lot of hopeful, and possibly deluded, people in the old-line media businesses who hope that an Apple tablet will prop up their failing magazine, newspaper or television businesses. Those of us who are digitally savvy are probably having a chuckle at their expense, snickering at their wishful thinking. But Apple will invest a lot more in saving any given book publisher than they ever will in saving civic society, in protecting individuals' rights, or in engaging in diplomacy to neutralize the threat of violent extremists.

I'm gonna try to spend at least as much time advocating for issues I care about as I do for the purchase of new gadgets. I hope that even those who disagree with me on those issues do the same. Maybe there'll be an app for that.

Update: Gawker reposted this piece, kicking off an interesting conversation. William Saletan in Slate writes about politics vs. technology, choosing the "or" option when I think he could have focused on "and". Finally, Alex Balk has a little darker take with Barack Obama Is Your New iPad over on the Awl, which is definitely worth a look too.

Note: This article is also available in Belarusian for those interested.

Phew! Seems like there are a ton of people talking about the topics we've all been discussing here lately. Here's some highlights:

Startup.gov

After I posited that the U.S. executive branch is the most interesting startup of 2009, there have been some amazing responses. Craig Newmark (you love his list!) very kindly gave a nod towards my post, adding "In some results, it's run like a really good Silicon Valley startup", and spreading the word on The Huffington Post as well. Mike Masnick at Techdirt chiimed in as well:

For plenty of reasons that you can guess, I'm pretty jaded by people in government, and it's rare to come across people who seem to be doing things for anything other than "political" purposes. But I have to admit that the amazing thing that came through in both [Federal CTO Aneesh] Chopra's talks was that they were both entirely about actually getting stuff done, with a focus on openness and data sharing. Chopra talked, repeatedly, about figuring out what could be done both short- and long-term, and never once struck me as someone looking to hoard power or focus on a partisan or political reason for doing things. It was never about positioning things to figure out how to increase his budget. In fact, many of the ideas he was discussing was looking at ways to just get stuff done now without any need for extra budget. Needless to say, this is not the sort of thing you hear regularly from folks involved in the government.

Towards the end of my essay, I'd pointed out one particular challenge that faces this new startup-minded government effort: "Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn't have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience." Amazingly, the latest perfect example of the type of talent that are heading to D.C. these days just popped up, with Christopher Soghoian's announcement that he is joining the FTC. I only know Christopher's work by reputation at Harvard's Berkman Center, but I think the fact that the government is looking for talented people in academia (a talent pool that typical tech startups often overlook) is a great sign.

Of course, there are skeptics. Gautham Nagesh covers the government for Nextgov and Atlantic Media, and he thinks I'm believing the hype". Of course, I think Gautham and I just disagree about government's role in general, and that I'll take small signs of progress as successes, even if there is a lot of work left to do yet.

In fact, I'll be talking about this a bit later today on Federal News Radio's Daily Debrief show. If you're in D.C., tune in to 1500 AM at 4:05 EDT and one idea I'll be discussing is how the recent web achievements by the executive branch are a lot like Microsoft's recent success with Bing; It doesn't mean that the whole giant organization is on the right track, it just means that it's still possible for these behemoths to do the right thing.

The potential is also hinted at in Brady Forrest's post about EveryBlock's acquisition over on O'Reilly Radar. I'm ecstatic to see Adrian and his team at EveryBlock get even more resources for their work, but just as pleased to see the government's work being discussed as a peer to even the most cutting-edge startups in the private sector.

Google's Wave Moment

After my recent posts about The Wave Way and Google's Microsoft Moment, I was very graciously invited to join Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis on their awesome podcast about Google and cloud computing, This Week in Google. If you have an hour or so to spare for listening to a podcast, I am very proud of how it came out, and especially that I got to participate with such pros on a show like this. TWiG is available on iTunes and Boxee and all of those usual services as well.

The idea that Google is facing a reckoning as it grows in size and influence seems to have caught on, and comparing the company to Microsoft has gone from seeming a bit radical at the time I posted to becoming much more popular when Wired covered the idea to finally having become something approaching conventional wisdom in just a few weeks. Take, for example, New Google is the old Microsoft, by Galen Ward, which lists the ways that Google ties its nascent (or even unsuccessful) efforts to the results of its dominant search engine.

Apple Blinks on Secrecy?

Less than three weeks ago, I was arguing that Apple's culture of secrecy can't scale. Fortunately, we may never know if I'm right. Astoundingly, Apple has opened up to some degree, most notably via VP Phil Schiller reaching out personally to bloggers John Gruber and Steven Frank. Of course, that's not a complete course change for Apple, but it is still significantly more human, personal and open than any recent communications they've made about their efforts.

Meanwhile, the idea that Apple's traditional secrecy is untenable has gotten an even larger audience with The Times' lengthy look at Steve Jobs and Apple:

[A]long with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple’s signature products. A cult of corporate omerta — the mafia code of silence — is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered. “The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political,” says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, “and often is an impediment to actually getting one’s work done.”

But employees are one thing; shareholders are another. Should Jobs (who, as far as the world is concerned, is Apple) have been allowed to conceal the seriousness of his illness? Warren Buffett, the greatest investor alive, doesn’t think so. “Whether [Steve Jobs] is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact.”

Some say another sign that Apple omerta has gone too far was the death of Sun Danyong, a 25-year-old employee of Foxconn, a Chinese manufacturer of Apple machines. He was given 16 prototypes of new iPhones. One disappeared. Facts beyond that get hazy, but it is clear that Sun committed suicide by jumping from a 12th-storey apartment. Internet babble says he killed himself because of the vanished prototype and, therefore, because of Apple’s obsessive secrecy.

Pushing the Right Buttons

Finally, the idea of the Pushbutton Web seems to be gaining steam. I am delighted to point out Om Malik's The Evolution of Blogging, which Om uses as an example of a longer-form blog post he's enjoyed recently, but which I also hope will be a catalyst for the evolution of blogging that he's calling for in the post overall.

That point is taken even further with Farhad Manjoo's ruminations in Slate, which reference my Pushbutton post:

[A]s technologies like PubSubHubbub proliferate around the Web, with companies like Google, Facebook, and others embracing them, real-time Web updates will become the norm. It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point of failure. Winer envisions these systems coming up alongside Twitter—when you post a status update, it could get sent to both Twitter and whatever decentralized, next-gen Twitter gets created. If these new systems take off, Twitter would be just one of many status-updating hubs—and if it went down, there'd be other servers to take its place.

Seeing so many great conversations pop up recently around the topics I've been obsessing over has been very inspiring; Right after I made offhand mention of one of my Big Think interviews being about the Philology of LOLcats, my original piece on LOLcat language, Cats Can Has Grammar, was indirectly cited in Time's profile of "I Can Has Cheeseburger", through a reference to "kitty pidgin". It might seem like a minor mention, but the idea that a random dude like me can write a post that results in a phrase showing up in Time or The New York Times is still very exciting to me, after all of these years.

Best of all, there have been a spate of amazing comments on all of these posts lately, both on this site and in some of the responses I've linked to above. I'm having more fun than ever in watching the conversation across the blogosphere.

In the meantime, two to consider:

• Slow Web: "There's a web that well-considered and worth savoring. We'll show you where."
• Every Friday, Rain or Shine: "When you see an interesting idea expressed in 140 chars that you think could use elaboration, ask them to do a longer-form post to explain. Especially on Fridays."

I've really been enjoying the response to my recent blog posts — here are some more thoughtful replies.

Rafe Colburn, one of my favorite bloggers for a decade now, followed up my Apple and secrecy post with "Apple vs. my preconceived notions":

In one scenario, this is a bubble of sorts. Apple may be doing OK now, but they’re headed for a big crash when people get sick of their behavior. In another scenario — one that I think is, sadly, more likely, Apple continues as they are, adjusting when it must to address reality, but only in the most minimal way.

I've also really been enjoying watching Dave Winer's work recently. In the past we were both too young and stubborn to realize we're amused by a lot of the same things (There's my refrain of "We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves" again!) but these days it is just plain entertaining to watch Dave go. My amusement is amply covered in "Anil's belly laugh", which mentions my response to Dave's latest bit of hacking. As I mentioned on my Twitter account, I also recorded an episode of the Bad Hair Day podcast with Dave and Marshall Kirkpatrick last week.

Speaking of podcasts, This Week in Google is a new one featuring Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and Internet Hero Gina Trapani. This week, they had a very nice look at The Pushbutton Web towards the end of the show. I'm delighted how many people have told me they found that post valuable or useful in talking about this whole area of innovation. Since I'm a lousy coder, writing blog posts like that is the most helpful thing I can do.

Finally, as it's come up in several contexts lately, it's probably worth repeating the key point of a post I wrote two years ago, which attracted some attention then but is probably even more relevant today. The core concept is about "The Watery Web":

It's not true to say that Facebook is the new AOL, and it's oversimplification to say that Facebook's API is the new [MSN] Blackbird, or the new [AOL] Rainman. But Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.

Thanks, as always to people who've responded to what I've written, and especially to all of those who've taken these posts as starting points and expanded the ideas into some truly inspiring creations.

Apple is justifiably revered in the worlds of technology and culture for creating one of the most powerful brands in the world based on the combination of some key elements: Great user experience and design, and an extraordinary secrecy punctuated by surprising reveals. But the element of secrecy that's been required to maintain Apple's mystique has incurred an increasingly costly price. Apple must transform itself and leave its history of secrecy behind, not just to continue being innovative and to protect the fundamentals of its business, but because the cost of keeping these secrets has become morally and ethically untenable.

Some recent history:

• Sun Danyong, a young man in Dongguan, China, who worked for Foxconn, one of Apple's most important iPhone suppliers, killed himself after misplacing a prototype iPhone device.
• Apple prohibited the Google Voice application from being distributed on its iTunes application store with no public explanation of why, a refusal to offer any suggestions that could permit the application to be distributed, and no process for appealing the decision.
• Apple removed third-party Google Voice-compatible applications by explaining that they violate a policy against applications that duplicate native iPhone functionality, despite this rule being wildly inconsistent in its enforcement. Again, Apple refused to offer any suggestions for how developers could comply with the guidelines, and offered no process for appealing the decision.

The circumstances of Danyong's suicide are murky -- it's possible that he was involved in supplying the iPhone prototype to copycat manufacturers which would create knockoff devices, but the theory has also been advanced that he was merely unable to cope with the stress of the extreme secrecy required for his work. Regardless of the reason for Danyong's death, copycat manufacturers are a fact of doing business in China; It is only the extraordinary veil drawn around the product that makes such disclosures so particularly fraught.

Similarly, every carrier (and nearly every mobile application platform) has some arduous or even capricious limitations on the applications that can be created by developers. But for better or worse, those limitations are spelled out clearly, in a way that developers can anticipate, and decisions to prohibit particular applications are explicit even when they are annoying or offensive to those of us who believe in open platforms.

This means that those of us who support Apple with our dollars and attention are supporting a company that chooses to operate with an extreme and excessive layer of secrecy, even when making reasonable business decisions. This squelching of communication about Apple's products results in customers being unhappy or uncertain of the future value of their purchases, developers being too afraid to bet their livelihoods on a platform whose fundamental opportunities could be destroyed at any time, and suppliers being forced to inflict unreasonable or even inhumane restrictions on their employees. And that's in addition to the incredible stress that Apple employees themselves have had to endure, from missing Christmas to get products ready for MacWorld without even being able to tell family members why they must do so, to public-facing communications staff having to endure the misery of telling developers that their products or businesses are being terminated by fiat, without so much as an explanation.

I'm certain the web's usual contingent of soulless Randists will believe this level of suffering is somehow acceptable despite its moral cost, because The Market has made Apple a success. But there's even a financial argument: Apple spends an enormous amount of money on protecting and obfuscating normal business operations that any other company can do in the open. It's hard to estimate just how much the overhead of this extreme secrecy costs the company, but it's obviously many millions of dollars extra per year. And it will only get more expensive as large-scale realtime communications get more and more commoditized.

The Case for Secrecy

Now, if being ultra-private about announcements has such a terrible cost, then why does Apple go to all the trouble? Apologists would say that Apple gets three significant benefits from its incredible secrecy:

• An extremely disproportionate amount of extraordinarily favorable press from its "surprise" product launches
• A significant lead time on the rest of the market being able to copy Apple innovations
• An intangible benefit to the brand being so tightly controlled by the company
  These benefits are real to some extent today, but in each case, the benefit is almost certainly not viable over the long term. Let's look at why:

"But they get so much free press from the element of surprise in their announcements!" This isn't true -- for almost every major announcement of the past several years, we've known the major points days, or even weeks, in advance. In fact, they earn the majority of their press from the extraordinary appeal of their products in design and user experience, as well as the pure showmanship they put into their signature launch events, which are unequalled thus far in the industry.

"But if they don't keep stuff a secret, other companies will be able to copy them!" Other companies already do copy Apple, and always have. And — dirty little secret — Apple has always copied other companies as well. This is a normal part of the business cycle (indeed, before its current bastardization, the patent system was designed to encourage this behavior), and no amount of secrecy will stop it. More to the point, if the only reason people are buying your product is because it has no viable competitors, then your standing in the marketplace is too tenuous to be defended anyway.

"But people love Apple's brand because it's so micromanaged!" This is the most insidious and inaccurate of all the justifications. In fact, since Apple's brand began to recover in the late 90s, two of the greatest and most influential global brands in the world have emerged: Google and Barack Obama. In both cases, they've embraced openness, transparency, and letting their communities define their brand. Despite my belief in my recent pointed criticisms of Google, it's worth noting that a number of high-profile Googlers responded personally, both privately and publicly, to the issues that I raised, all indicating that they took the discussion to heart. And President Obama has taken his penchant for talking things through to such an extreme that it's nearly become a let's-have-some-beers parody of itself.

In contrast, Apple's employees will be too cowed to publicly respond to this post, though I know they'll see it. Partners are tired of being bullied or facing petulant sanctions for accidental disclosures of relatively innocuous bits of information. And eventually, anyone talented and independent-minded enough to participate in the kind of innovation practiced at Apple is going to chafe at being constrained in how they can express themselves.

Real Artistry

Self expression matters because Apple has always explicitly tied itself to the world of the arts and expression. One of my favorite (possibly apocryphal) Steve Jobs quotes is "Real artists ship", a testament to the fact that an invention that never sees the light of day can't affect anyone. But if we're talking about real artists, then let's consider all of their traits.

Real artists also expose themselves, making themselves vulnerable through honest expression so that their audience can see their humanity, and thus form a connection to something universal in all of us. Apple is still holding on to the centralized, Pravda-style public relations that artists used in 1984 when the Mac was introduced. Back then, giant record labels and a few powerful media outlets could tightly control the flow of information around a tiny cluster of superstars. The superstars of 1984 -- Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna -- subscribed to the doctrine of doing no interviews or press, and having their only communication with the public happen through tightly-managed events where they had total control.

Today's biggest and most influential artists, from Kanye West to Trent Reznor to Radiohead, are very nearly competing to see who can be most transparent. The immediacy and intimacy with which they communicate and create their works is dramatic, and they encourage their communities to get involved in a ritual that Apple used to encourage: Rip, Mix, Burn.

The sad truth is that Apple is still stuck in an anachronistic, 1984 mode of communicating with the world. If Apple doesn't evolve, it'll become a pathetic-looking giant, constantly playing whack-a-mole with information leaks, diminishing its relevance by antagonizing the very creators it has so long sought to identify with. Worse, while the fashions of 1984 might be back in style, the ability to tightly control a message is never going to come in vogue again, and the one thing Apple's brand can't withstand is suddenly becoming uncool. (I'm pretty sure Apple's also had a word or two to say about why today's world shouldn't be like 1984.)

Look Around And Learn

Every company, when facing a serious problem, suddenly starts blogging. From the giant auto manufacturers to troubled banks, it's been astounding to see how frequently companies figure out that embracing transparency yields an enormous improvement in how much their customers and community trust them. When Amazon screwed up by abusing their DRM powers over Kindle owners, they were a little slow to respond, but absolutely flawless in their message when they had Jeff Bezos himself post a simple, straightforward apology to Kindle owners in their own community, complete with open comments for people to respond. And it was an easy leap for Amazon to make -- they have extensive experience not just with consumer-facing blogs, but in talking directly to developers or business partners as well. While much was made of Amazon recalling George Orwell's titles, it's Apple's behavior that is most Orwellian overall.

This lesson isn't entirely lost on Apple; Once in a great while a missive will arrive from on high arrives in the form of a one-page letter from Steve Jobs on a significant issue. And when the debacle of MobileMe's bumbling launch got bad enough, Apple even launched a short-lived blog to address the issue. So it's not impossible that Apple can start to communicate in at least a semi-human, responsive way. Even better, Apple clearly has some parts of its corporate culture that want to do the right thing, as evidenced by its unusual willingness to offer refunds to a variety of disgruntled classes of customers over the years.

But the reason for Apple to embrace some open communications channels isn't merely because of the practical necessity of talking to customers, developers and partners. It's because this is the right thing to do. Apple has long been able to pride itself on being innovative even when the market wasn't demanding bold moves of them. Nothing could be more courageous than for Apple to take a decisive step to redefine a core part of their brand's history to be more in keeping with contemporary communication. Moving from the classic Mac OS to OS X or from PowerPC to Intel would be nothing compared to a transition from ultra-secretive to collaborative and expressive. It would show that Apple has the self-awareness to evolve into a better, more humane organization than they've been in the past.

The reckoning Apple has reached, whether it's admitted or not, is that its secrecy is compromising its humanity. Some of the smartest and most innovative developers on any platform are leaving and taking their creativity with them. The trade press who had embarrassed themselves with their effusive cheering for Apple in the past are rushing to cover absurdities like entire sites being dedicated to Kremlinology about Apple's platform decisions. If losing your cool doesn't move you, Apple, then what about people losing their lives to this domineering, outdated mindset?

It's incumbent upon Apple to do the moral thing here. Treat your employees, customers, suppliers and partner companies better, by letting them participate in the thing most of your products are designed for: Human self-expression. If the ethical argument is unpersuasive, then focus on the long-term viability of your marketing and branding efforts, and realize that a technology company that is determined to prevent information from being spread is an organization at war with itself. Civil wars are expensive, have no winners, and incur lots of casualties.

There is a path out of the current quagmire. Apple can start to see its customers as collaborators, and start to encourage them to use the very Apple products they've purchased as a conduit for sharing messages about the company and its products. Apple's fans have already shown a willingness to create fictitious print, television, and online advertising that exceeds other company's actual efforts in quality while still being slavishly faithful to Apple's brand guidelines. And being an open company doesn't mean that there can't be the occasional big surprise — in fact companies like Google often find it easier to have things "hide in plain site" because so much of what they do is open that the curious often don't dig past the surface to find out what else is going on.

Finally, there is the opportunity for Apple's employees themselves to act as ambassadors for the brand. Frankly, those Geniuses in the Apple stores aren't the most flattering face for the company. But instead of prohibiting all the other thousands of Apple employees from engaging in conversations about their professional lives on the web and in social media, perhaps they could be empowered to express the company's ideas in their own words. That would be an enormous resource that would be unleashed by Apple's evolution into a communicative company.

So Apple: Do the right thing. End your addiction to secrecy.

When launching the new version of Amazon's book device the Kindle, Jeff Bezos offered up the vision that the company has for the device: "Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds." It's a message that Amazon has been consistently advocating since the device's initial rollout, and meshes nicely with the early Amazon vision of being the world's biggest bookstore.

Others have noted the audacity of the Kindle's vision. That kind of vision obviously evokes Google's early mission statement of striving to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". In truth, Google doesn't talk much about that mission these days, which might explain why a lot of their recent efforts do pretty well with the organizing the world's information part, but can be downright abysmal at making it useful. Virginia Heffernan articulated this quite well in the New York Times recently in regard to Google's image archive of old Life photos:

Google has failed to recognize that it can’t publish content under its imprint without also creating content of some kind: smart, reported captions; new and good-looking slide-show software; interstitial material that connects disparate photos; robust thematic and topical organization. All this stuff is content, and it requires writers, reporters, designers and curators. Instead, the company’s curatorial imperative, as usual, is merely “make it available.”

But at least Google's trying. That does count for something. And articulating that vision in cultural terms, phrased in language that explains the benefit to society, not just to stockholders, is important. Now, I think Google has a gap between their intention and their reality because the organization lacks theory of mind, but perhaps that's a problem that can be fixed.

And hell, I still even have a soft spot for Microsoft's old vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home", not just because in retrospect it seems so modest. It's also because it was a more ambitious vision that, if realized, would mean benefits even for people who never gave a single dollar to Microsoft. (As turned out to be the case.)

And these statements of vision are particularly resonant to me because we seldom hear any sort of similar vision from Apple. When the iTunes store was launched, the vision wasn't to "make every song in the world easily available". Instead, the clear goal was purely commercial, to make people buy music from Apple instead of Walmart.

And the truth is, Amazon, Google and Apple all make billions of dollars — that doesn't happen by accident. They should have clear goals about how to make money as part of their efforts. But since all of these companies also traffic in commerce derived from the artistic and expressive works that shape our culture, it makes sense for us to evaluate their efforts based on how well they articulate a desire to give back to our culture. They should make something meaningful for the world while making their money, at least as a happy byproduct if not as an intentional output. It's a lot easier for me to believe that employees at Amazon are doing something that's meaningful to the world at large than to feel that way about Apple's similar efforts.

I point this out not to be harshly critical of any of these companies; Indeed, I regularly give my time and money to all of them. But we often rush to describe Steve Jobs as a "visionary" for being the best showman in an industry where most people have the stage presence of a bowl of oatmeal.

The truth is, Apple has a chance to redefine what it considers vision while Steve Jobs is on leave. He could return and say that every copy of Garage Band will have the ability to instantly upload a user's songs to iTunes, unleashing an immense market of independent music to the world, and using their enormous market presence to let individuals help create culture, not just consume it. Or Apple could use its leverage with the record labels to impress upon them the importance of getting all of their back catalog of recordings online and available for people to consume — most of the music that's ever been released on any record label isn't available for purchase today, at any price, by anyone.

And just as importantly, we can use this criteria of vision, of responsibility for culture, as a way of analyzing announcements and releases in the technology world. So, last night, Amazon released their Kindle software for Apple's iPhone. Most of the reviews understandably focused on the readability of the text, or how well the synchronization features work. But I'm hoping that at least one or two lines of future reviews will spare a moment to think "is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off?" My sense is that we're more likely to get positive answers to that question if the teams that are making these products are led by an appropriately ambitious vision.

Please (re-)visit Dan Cook's seminal Nintendo's Genre Innovation Strategy essay from 2005. It's chock-full of his signature revelatory insights, in this case inspired by the excitement and skepticism surrounding the announcement of the controller for the Nintendo Wii (then known as the Revolution).

Among many other inspired moments, Dan offers up, early in the piece, two key points.

• The increasingly hardcore nature of the game industry is causing a contraction of the industry.
• New intuitive controller options will result in innovative game play that will bring new gamers into the fold.

He goes on to describe the evolution of individual genres within the gaming industry, reaching a conclusion that was surprising to me, but that intuitively felt correct upon re-reading:

As the less hardcore players burn out on the game mechanics of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.

What is left is a very peculiar group of highly purified hardcore players. They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players.

This made me think of the recent innovations around the iPhone and, particularly, the games that have been created for the iPhone app store. Prior to the iPhone's release, high-end mobile phones had, essentially, become a really specific gaming genre, catering to hardcore "players", consisting of tech reviewers and industry analysts whose tastes had evolved as all genres must. "They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players."

The iPhone was about Nintendo-style innovation, applying the same rules that Nintendo has, and achieving a quite Nintendo-like result of producing a device that is fun, satisfying, and very inexpensive to develop innovative games for. As Dan says about Nintendo's history of innovating in controllers:

One of the easiest ways of creating a new genre is to invent a new series of verbs (or risk mechanics as I called them in my Genre Life Cycle articles). One of the easiest ways of inventing new verbs is to create new input opportunities. Nintendo controls their hardware and they leverage this control to suit their particular business model.

And this is exactly what Nintendo has done historically. The original Dpad, the analog stick, the shoulder buttons, the C-stick, the DS touch pad, link capabilities, the tilt controller, the bongo drums … the list goes on and on.

The touchscreen and tilt sensor in the iPhone are just another in the series of controller innovations, and they've yielded the results that these inventions always do. Only, instead of Mario being the brand that benefits from this new set of verbs, Apple is the brand that benefits.

And all of this confirms my suspicion that the iPod and iPhone are not only designed to be subscription hardware that you repurchase constantly, but that Apple is deliberately creating their devices so that the only way you can level up in this game is by buying a new iPod or iPhone.

It's worth concluding with one of Dan's final points:

Nintendo’s strategy of pursuing innovation benefits the entire industry. It brings in new audiences and creates new genres that provide innovative and exciting experiences. The radical new controller is a great example of this strategy in action.

Surprisingly, this also benefits Microsoft and it benefits Sony. As the years pass, the hard core publishers that serve mature genres will adopt previously innovative genres and commoditize them. Their profits will be less, but they’ll keep a lot of genre addicts very happy. Everybody wins when a game company successfully innovates.

I see both of these strategies as a necessary and expected part of a vibrant and growing industry. Industries need balance and Nintendo is a major force of much needed innovation that prevents industry erosion and decline.

According to Amazon's account of holiday bestsellers, "Nintendo Wii dominated the top sellers in video games and hardware including the Wii console, the Wii remote controller and the Wii nunchuk controller." Worldwide sales of the Wii are nearly equal to sales of the Microsoft XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 combined.

One of the most satisfying and fun things I've ever seen in my job was the sight of my friend and coworker Michael Sippey onstage with Steve Jobs and the Apple crew, showing off TypePad for iPhone. In our line of business, Apple keynotes are just about the biggest shows in town, and Sippey killed it on the toughest stage around.

As Michael graciously mentions in his own post, the demo wouldn't have been possible without our great developer (and demo god in his own right) Ray Marshall, along with Stephane Delbecque on our team who helped pull the entire effort together. You can watch the whole keynote on Apple's site, or just see a short clip of the TypePad demo for yourself:

But while I'm happy for Michael and the team on such a great demo, it also made me happy to see Michael onstage showing that his knowledge of blogging is second to none. Michael was, along with Peter, one of the people who really inspired me to start blogging, and he's probably under-recognized as a pioneer.

The list of ways he's influenced blogging and our industry are countless: Even the biggest gadget blogs today still make a huge deal out of featuring big-name tech CEOs when they get an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, but Michael interviewed Jeff Bezos for his seminal blog Stating the Obvious twelve years ago. I interviewed Michael for our series on the 10th anniversary of blogging last year, in which Michael talks about creating what was arguably the first link blog, Filtered for Purity, ten years ago. And of course, Mena mentioned Michael's joining Six Apart back in 2004 as our VP of Products. It's a role he's held ever since.

Add in his influence in efforts like advising the original Pyra team, which created Blogger, and it calls to mind the old chestnut about the Velvet Underground: Not everybody has read Michael Sippey's blog, but everyone who did, started a blog. (And at some point in recent history, it's possible that everyone who did started a blogging company.) Congrats to my friend Michael on putting that experience on display on the biggest stage around.

(And oh yeah, if you're the best in the world at what you do, you can work at Six Apart, too.)

An application that appears cluttered or illogical is harder to understand and use.

Aesthetic integrity is not a measure of how beautifully your application is decorated. It's a measure of how well the appearance of your application integrates with its function. For example, a productivity application should keep decorative elements subtle and in the background, while giving prominence to the task by providing standard controls and behaviors.

An immersive application is at the other end of the spectrum, and users expect a beautiful appearance that promises fun and discovery. Although an immersive application tends to be focused on providing diversion, however, its appearance still needs to integrate with the task. Be sure you design the user interface elements of such an application carefully, so that they provide an internally consistent experience.

From Apple's iPhone Human Interface Guidelines.

In an excellent post about Meg Whitman's retirement, David Galbraith succinctly summarizes the most important thing about eBay's potential:

Ebay is all about Green, the biggest angle any company can have, currently, and yet it has ignored this. As the largest marketplace for second hand goods, it is the worlds largest recycler.

Similarly, despite my frustrations as an iPod Touch owner that Apple is charging $20 for an update to the device, I am heartened that their revenue model may be evolving, even if just in a tiny way, from planned obsolescence. They claim their devices are more green because of reduced PCBs in the circuit boards, but the best thing they could do is to make their revenue model rely on throwing away software, instead of throwing away hardware. It's been said there are hundreds of millions of cell phones that live in drawers, and I suspect that the 100 million iPods that have been sold were sold to perhaps 30 million households. That's a lot of costly devices sitting in disuse. Software subscriptions are a much less planet-clogging option than hardware subscriptions for companies which offer both.

Although I've been accused sometimes of reflexive contrariness, the truth is I'm just pretty consistent in my assessments of technology, with little regard for the perceptions of the companies or people who provide those technologies.

The best case in point I can use to illustrate this is an example of the worst thing about Apple. There is simply nothing less attractive than a person who is both flawed and smug, and apparently one of the few plausible justifications for treating corporations as legal persons is the fact that this holds true for companies as well. And Apple is a smug company.

The new version 10.5 of Mac OS X ^[1] rather famously features the following display when you're browsing machines that appear to be running Microsoft Windows:

Now, I'm all for a little sense of humor in the world of technology. But the image here deliberately uses an aged-looking monitor and a crashed computer as the illustration of your other computers. The disdain here isn't for the unfortunate unwashed who have to suffer through Windows because they're so clueless -- it's a snide shot at the other computers you own, or of your family's other machines around the house, or of the computers of the peers you work with. In short, the derision is likely aimed at people who care a hell of a lot more about you and your boundless Mac-enhanced creativity than, say, the OS X team does.

And all that is assuming the image is even accurate. Plenty of Linux and other Unix machines show up as Samba file shares, meaning they'll be presented as unstable blue-screening machines, despite the fact that they're likely more stable than OS X. That's the heart of the issue -- it's not like the Mac is completely stable; It's got its share of crashes just like every other operating system.

Arrogance is ugly. If you claim to care about aesthetics and design, it's in your interest to keep from being completely tacky and lacking in taste.

To be honest, there's really only room for mocking everybody else if you're absolutely flawless. And even then, it's pretty bad taste. I've seen exactly what it looks like firsthand to see people take cheap shots and make snide comments about their nominal competitors, and it invariably makes the complainer look worse than the ostensible target. When the company you're taking a shot at is Microsoft, that's saying a lot.

Perhaps most disturbingly, it's not at all implausible that this little easter egg was, at least implicitly, approved by Steve Jobs himself. It's a whole 'nother post to explain why that level of meddling megalomania is kind of pathological for a multi-billion-dollar global corporation, but let's not digress too much. Suffice to say, the presence of this image means that there's permission to be this passive-aggressive and, well, lame at all levels of Apple's organization.

So, to Apple: Your company's value, as measured by market capitalization, is way up. You're dominating the markets you care about. The quality of your products is generally very good -- my main laptop runs OS X and we've got the requisite geek household pile of various-generation iPods around. Apple's got my money, to the tune of thousands of dollars. But this level of sneering arrogance, at a time when a little humble appreciation of success is well in order, would go a long way. You're succeeding. Act like it.

(Thanks to Joerg for the image.)

[1] Referring to versions of OS X by cat names, when those names appear nowhere in the operating system itself, seems astoundingly user-hostile. I have no idea what the cat name is for the operating system I'm running, and yet when I try to evaluate shareware, the authors are often asking me if I'm a panther or a tiger or something. Hasn't anybody noticed how stupid that is over at Apple?

One of the things I love most about my job is that sense of discovery you get from working with people that are chock-full of good ideas. One great example is Brad Choate's 100+ iPhone Feature suggestions. I don't have an iPhone, but I love the sense that he could have just kept reeling off desired improvements infinitely, especially since he's the kind of guy who can actually make some of these requests happen, even if Apple doesn't indulge.

Mitch Wagner has a provocative, comprehensive, and entertaining look at the recent conversations about Apple and the enterprise over at InformationWeek entitled "Does Apple Have A Moral Obligation To Serve The Enterprise Market?" Though some part of the conversation is pegged to my recent posts about the topic, I should clarify that, despite my strident tone, I don't think Apple has a moral obligation to create products that meet the requirements of enterprises. I think they have a social obligation to bring their tradition of great user experience to more of the business world if they want to really want to have the biggest possible cultural impact.

Part of my premise here is that Apple, with its focus on aesthetics and user experience, clearly cares about its intangible impacts on culture. I am fortunate enough to get to talk about these sorts of things as part of my day job, and the the people i work with who do all the smart thinking about it spend time designing for both the best experience and the widest adoption. i tried to capture that a bit in my comment on Mitch's post:

There are two parties responsible for much of the failures in enterprise IT. Certainly, there are IT departments that choose their own convenience or the imperative of manageability and homogeneity over the end-user experience of their coworkers they were supposed to be serving. I have worked in IT and understand all too well the temptation to make those awful tradeoffs.

My posts were directed much more at the other responsible parties: Vendors who aren't ambitious or imaginative enough to consider that something can be both enterprise-grade and usable.

I also enjoyed some additional thoughts over at The Mac Observer:

The primary focus was Mr. Dash's argument that his company, Movable Type [sic], achieves the desired goal, and he wrote: "You can meet all the (reasonable) requirements of an Enterprise while still creating a product that delights and inspires the people who make up that organization."

Thus, if corporations force users to use crappy tools and subjugate them, corporate users should revolt and demand more from the IT managers who are supposed to serve them, according to some. In order to assist in that process, the implication is that Apple has a moral obligation to do the same: make great enterprise products that employees love and still checks all the corporate IT boxes.

I'm not sure John Martellaro is completely accurate in his encapsulation of my viewpoint, but I found it remarkable that he managed to make this, too, a Microsoft-versus-Apple story. Hint: It's not. It's about user experience, and I'd point again to the example of Research in Motion and the Blackberry. It's a phone that, from a feature perspective, does even more than the iPhone, albeit less elegantly for any task that doesn't involve entering text. However, RIM has made a product that users are passionate about, even addicted to, while still meeting all the needs of the enterprise and insinuating themselves deep into corporate (and political) culture. Succinctly, they've changed the way people do their jobs, and in doing so, changed the way people live their lives. The iPhone is forced to be "my other phone" for a lot of people whose phones are business tools, and no matter how pretty she is, a sexy mistress is nowhere near as meaningful as a committed marriage.

All of that aside, Martellaro nails one point in his essay: "ultimately the resolution requires a cultural change". That's the part where everyone who wants to make technology for both work and play can have a hand in making things better.

Rule #1 in nerd blogging: jwz said it first. If you enjoyed The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition last week, you'll want to read Jamie Zawinski's essay that was so burned into my subconscious that I forgot it influenced me.

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy....

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

"Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

Any more quoting than that, and it's just wholesale plagiarism. Go read the original, including the definition of "workflow".

The Premise: Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition, and settling for less denies many people the chance to discover tools or technologies that can improve their lives.

I was struck by John Siracusa's 'Stuck on the enterprise', which he wrote a few days ago. His assertion:

Sure, Apple makes periodic overtures in to big business. It even redirects apple.com/enterprise to someplace sensible. But nearly every Apple product or service ostensibly aimed at enterprise customers can also be seen as a natural part of some other, "non-enterprise" market where Apple is strong (e.g., creative professionals).

Unfailingly, Apple markets only to the end user these days. ... What Apple does not do is sell products to corporate IT that are meant for direct use by non-IT employees. That is, desktop PCs, and more recently, cellular phones.

Siracusa then goes on to list a series of enterprise desires for phones that he claims look "quite different than the iPhone", mainly centering around manageability and predictability. This is followed by a contention that these aims are incompatible with usability.

This is, to be blunt, horseshit. It's apologist blathering to cover up a failure of imagination and ambition. And it's saying that people cease to become people when they're at work, and are instead Enterprise Employees. These are the excuses that let the tech industry off the hook for failing to engage as many people as it should be.

This leads to an alarmingly wrongheaded conclusion:

[T]he decision to ignore markets where you must sell to someone other than the end user is pretty high-minded (for a corporation). It's also perhaps the only way to ever create great products, products that customers actually love.

No, this decision is elitist and lazy. Here's the truth: You can meet all the (reasonable) requirements of an Enterprise while still creating a product that delights and inspires the people who make up that organization.

In fact, you have to do so.

The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time. Look at email, instant messaging, hell -- look at the telephone. These staples of business communication are so popular because they meet the "I want this as part of my life" threshold. They can even be so good as to inspire addiction, complete with withdrawal in their absence.

If you create a tool as powerful as instant messaging, for example, you won't be able to stop adoption in the enterprise -- you'll just need to add enterprise features. And to those who proudly point out that the iPhone is "too cool to ever go to work", you can't also claim that enterprise IT will have to deal with it because it's popular. Unless you want to perpetuate the myth that we somehow transform into emotionless robots when we go to work, you have to acknowledge that Apple's going to make more and more improvements to accommodate them, and that's a good thing.

Of course, I have a dog in this fight. I'd advocated for years that blogging should be an enterprise tool, and helped my company ship Movable Type Enterprise, which was the first is the most popular enterprise blogging app around. I wrote a little bit about why in "Why do you care about business blogs so much?"

For the normal people, the ones who kind of maybe have heard of blogs, but certainly haven't tried them out yet themselves, discovering blogging as part of work will lead them to thinking about how blogs can change every part of their life. It's just like the millions of people who first used a web browser as part of their job, or the people who had an email address at work or school before they ever signed up for Hotmail or Gmail.

When I talk to companies about blogging, I ask them how their Knowledge Management or Enterprise Content Management deployments have succeeded. And they almost invariably mumble a bit about "it's sort of underperforming...". This is the dark outcome of people trying to draw a line between who we are at work and who we are at home. You end up with shoddy, compromised products like KM or groupware. And the folks in IT aren't unfeeling, tyrannical monsters; When I tell them "well, we'll give you LDAP integration, but it'll also have a UI that's easy enough that people choose to use these tools in their free time as a hobby", their eyes light up. They want to delight people, too.

That's the truth of it -- if you don't change the way people work, you can't claim to be changing their lives for the better. In the developed world, we spend most of our waking hours at work, and the impact is enormous. The success of PCs in the enterprise helped indirectly subsidize computers getting cheap enough to buy at home. The requirements for reliability and stability of a lot of enterprise software makes for better consumer user experiences. And of course, most of the shopping on eBay or Amazon or most of the ad-clicking on TMZ or Gizmodo happen while people are at work too. If the anti-enterprise advocates had their way, none of us would have web browsers at work, but we'd still be ideologically pure and stickin' it to the man. Yeah!

Except we'd be sticking it to ourselves, for 8 to 10 hours a day. If you believe in a technology, like I believe in blogging, or you believe in a company, like many fans believe in Apple, then expect more. Don't settle for compromises where we're supposed to have crappy tools for the work we do -- any good craftsman takes pride in using the best tools he can.

And above all, stop making excuses for the arrogant and exclusionary voices that want to limit promising new technologies to just those who can afford to pay for them at home, or who have the interest to chase down the latest tech. Everybody deserves to benefit from this stuff.