Occupy Silicon Valley?

Occupy Silicon Valley?: Instead of bundling parcels of mortgages and turning them into derivatives, they bundle up parcels of people and turn them into masses of users, who generate content. Then they sell access to those users for a price, to other businesses. The problem is that as growth levels off, and it’s sure to do that (how many more groups of 800 million can Facebook find, and where will they have to go to find them, and who will they have to sell out to to get there) — they’re going to have to take more from those users. Zuck calls it “sharing.” The rest of us call it “privacy.” [I find it interesting that the vast majority of friends and family have barely any network/social presence at all.]
Source: Scripting News

A new iPhone prediction

A new iPhone prediction:

Out of all the pundits who will explain over the next 24 hours why the iPhone 4S is a huge disappointment, less than 1 in 20 will even attempt a coherent defense of that position.

“All right, the camera meets or exceeds anything else on the market in a phone, as does the CPU. Yes, iMessage beats BBM, and has nothing directly comparable on any other platform. Sure, it’s actually a ‘world’ phone now, and it has HSDPA data speeds. Yeah, iOS 5 addresses complaints with notifications and a lot more. Okay, iCloud isn’t quite like any other syncing solution and it could be a really big deal, and the cloud-based iTunes is—no matter what you may think of iTunes—a killer media manager. And sure, we’ll have to see how Siri works in practice, but up until now voice control has meant sitting in your car repeating ‘Dial Martha’ over and over in slow, mounting frustration—if Siri does what it’s supposed to, it’s operating on a level we haven’t seen before outside of sci-fi movies.

“So all in all, we have to conclude this was quite a disappointment.”

[Heh. I agree. Siri could be, ahem, well siriously amazing. I’ve lived a number of “voice activation” features in my car and phones, and I’ve found them utterly useless. I haven’t participated in the betas for iOS5 for lack of time, but I’m excited to give this a go. It could be great. Even insanely so.]
Source: Coyote Tracks

Can Larry reboot Google?

Can Larry reboot Google?: Bill Gates got to this point with Microsoft, tried to re-whip the intelligence of his early days, failed, and went on to be a philanthropist.

Steve Jobs was fired before Apple could get to this point. He spent years in the wilderness, came back and somehow got Apple to turn the corner. Probably because he had no reason not to fire the losers who accumulate in BigCo’s. There was a huge purge at Apple in 1997 and 1998.

Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg are there now. Neither of them has made it over the hump. Will they be Steve or will they be Bill? Or something else. [Something else… if anything.]
Source: Scripting News

Google’s reaction to Kindle Fire

Google’s reaction to Kindle Fire:

You’re not the licensee Droid is looking for. Google’s reaction to Kindle Fire speaks volumes about its goals for Android. Kindle Fire is based on Android, and will run Android applications. Android has been struggling in the tablet space, so you’d expect that Google would be delighted to have Amazon on the Android bandwagon. But you’d be wrong. Let’s look at the press release Google issued today to welcome Amazon to the Android family. Wait a minute, there is no press release. Okay, so let’s look on the Google blog. Nothing at all. Maybe a tweet from Andy Rubin? Dead silence.

&

Slouching toward Bethlehem. One revolution I’m sure is coming is the remaking of the print publishing industry. As I’ve said before (link), once about 20% of the reading public has electronic devices, an established author can make more money bypassing print and selling direct through e-readers. I think the new Kindle line, and especially the entry-level Kindles at $99 and below, will finally push us past the 20% threshold. It will take a couple of years to play out, but this will force the long-awaited restructuring, or destruction, of the traditional book publishing industry.

[Book publishing is not entirely about the medium, although everyone likes to talk as if it is. It’s really about author services.]

It’s the Content Providers (or not)

It’s the Content Providers:

The Angry Drunk:

While the Netflix changes are certainly annoying, and the
messaging was less than stellar, we need to make sure to remember
where the blame ultimately lies  —  with the content
providers. Until they decide to get with the program content
distributors like Netflix and Apple will always be at their mercy
and customers will continue to suffer.

and

The answers to these ques­tions, and I believe the dri­ving force behind the Netflix changes all involve one group: the con­tent providers. The tech press some­times seems to think that dis­trib­u­tors like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Redbox, Blockbuster, etc. just pull this con­tent mag­i­cally out of their asses. They ignore the fact that there are pow­er­ful movie stu­dios and record labels that are obsessed with main­tain­ing con­trol over their prod­uct dis­tri­b­u­tion and are scared shit­less over dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion. How soon we for­get that a major Netflix con­tent provider, Starz, recently told Netflix to piss up a rope and took their ball home.

[It’s complex and battle between the content providers is always more complex that it seems on the outside. Amazon is getting into publishing, publishers are getting into selling retail. What if Amazon decided to start producing some of the products they sell (besides the Kindle et al)? It is also easy to decide that the content providers are screwing everything up for you and me… it’s never that simple.]
Source: Daring Fireball

The Cloud’s My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem – Alexis Madrigal

The Cloud’s My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem – Alexis Madrigal:

Netflix, Twitter, and Google make unasked-for, unanticipated, and unstoppable change in their products, which also happen to be our work and play spaces.

and

But the freedom of usage that defined personal computing does not extend to the world of parental computing. This isn’t a bug in the way that cloud services work. It is a feature. What we lose in freedom we gain in convenience. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. Or maybe it’s something that just happened to us, which we’ll regret when we realize the privacy, security, and autonomy we’ve given up to sync our documents and correspondence across computers.

[The thing to remember is that we do not have to give up one to have the other. We can have document syncing etc. without living “in our parents house” simply by paying for the services. We can have our privacy and our freedom. But it has a cost.]

IDEO: Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous Ideas

IDEO: Big Innovation Lives Right on the Edge of Ridiculous Ideas:

“Those skeptics are in every walk of life. You can certainly combat it with the experimenter role. Show people it’s possible, don’t just tell them. It’s always been the seemingly improbable, boundary-pushing ideas that have created this world around us and none of that would have been possible if they’d listened to all the people who said it never would have worked. We’d still be living in caves if we relied on the skeptics.”

Also see: From Ridiculous to Brilliant: Why We Play at Work

Cringely Called It

Cringely Called It:

Cringely, back in February:

Then there’s Meg Whitman, who expected at this point to have
resigned from the HP board to spend all her time running
California as governor. But that didn’t happen, so now what is
she to do? You can only get so many pedicures. She’ll eventually
get around to hip-checking Apotheker and taking his job.

Can’t get more accurate with a prediction than that.

[Good one!]
Source: Daring Fireball