Month: September 2012

This is an interesting move. Wal-Mart and Target have both decided that Amazon is a big enough retail threat that they do not want to empower them by selling Kindles in their stores. What’s funny is that I think this is the wrong competitive move — I get why they think it is right, but I think they made the wrong call.

Aside from anything Apple sells, I think the Kindle line takes second place on the most desirable gadget list. Both because non-Apple fans want them, and because they better fit a parents budget than Apple gear. Either way, let’s just say holiday demand for Kindles is real, and very large.

If we accept that as fact, then it naturally follows that many will need and want to buy the devices. Where do they go? They can’t go to Wal-Mart, or Target — guess they go to Amazon.com — oh and while they are on Amazon.com, why not conveniently tick-off a few other gifts and save the trip to the store. “What’s this Prime thing? Of free movies and free shipping? That will save me some money this holiday season, purchased.”

You see what will happen? We just made a loyal Amazon customer.

Instead of selling your competitors low-margin devices, and then selling *your* customer some other holiday goodies — you just sent your customer directly to your competitor and showed them how much less crowded online shopping is.

This only works if the Kindles are actually coveted — and I think they are — otherwise people would just buy whatever else Target has. So my best guess is that Wal-Mart and Target think they can get away with this by directing people to equivalent devices — let’s see how that works out for them.

Horace Dediu with an excellent analysis of the competitive threat Amazon poses to Apple:
>The assumption (implicit) in Kindle is that the product is “good enough” as it is and should be used for many years to come. That’s not a way to ensure improvements necessary to disrupt the computing world.

I hadn’t thought about this, but Amazon makes *more* money if they don’t sell you next year’s model Kindle. That is, they introduce new Kindles just to try and gain *new* buyers. Apple introduces new models to get upgrades **and** new buyers because Apple makes more money on the hardware sales themselves.

Also see Dediu’s note about the Apple TV.

Dave Cameron writing about Seattle Mariners Manager Eric Wedge, and his idiotic decisions in last night’s game, concludes:
>We already know Eric Wedge is lousy at evaluating talent. He can’t afford to also be lousy at this kind of stuff too.

To be clear Wedge went through several pinch hitters and had another bunt in a hitters count before finally calling on his best bat (who was on the bench and available) to come in and pinch hit to try and win the game in the 11th. Yes, the Seattle Mariners are a terrible team and have been for years now, but that doesn’t mean the Mariners deserve a shit manager too. *Just saying.*

Christopher Poole, 4chan’s founder:
>I don’t believe in large websites supporting themselves through ongoing donations (a la Wikipedia), both ideologically and practically. I *hate* the thought of asking users to donate money and receive nothing of value other than “the site doesn’t die.”

Poole has shifted to the ad-supported + membership model now for 4chan. I urge you to read the entire post if you are interested in how to support websites at all — because it offers a good look at just how hard it is no matter how popular your site is. I know a lot of people get tired of hearing me harp on why ads are bad on websites, but I think most people are missing the larger point.

Which is that ads are not, by themselves, bad — but in aggregate they are not helping the web as much as people think they may be. The future of the web isn’t with ads plastered everywhere just as the future of cell phones wasn’t a service with ads interjecting into conversations. Likewise the future of the web isn’t with every site requiring you to pay them to read it.

There’s got to be a balance somewhere between free and paid — I’m not sure where it is — but I know that I don’t want to be on the free side of things. Somewhere, somehow, someone has to pay for the content on every webpage — be it the creator, reader, or other party — and I only know two things about that:

1. I don’t want to be the one paying to give away my content;
2. and I don’t like advertising.

That’s all I really know, everything else is a big experiment waiting to see what happens.

Scott Rafer:
>What’s missing from this conversation is that map usage is critical. Regardless of Google’s PR success in the Atlantic’s unintentionally misleading Google Ground Truth infomercial, more than half of Google’s mobile map usage is going away in the next month or two. I love the Atlantic, but they got punkd. Usage makes maps better a lot faster than software does.

Rafer says it way better than [I did](https://brooksreview.net/2012/09/maps-apple/), and the more I think about it, the more I think it was Apple’s play to kick Google Maps out and go “all-in” on mapping. Maps are far too important a part of iOS for Apple to not own and control them.

It sucks that right now Apple Maps aren’t as good as they are from Google, but I think Rafer is off on his 18 month prediction — I’m thinking more like “by Christmas” Apple will have played catch up. Of course, that all depends on how much man power Apple assigns to it.

Matt Drance:
>It’s no coincidence that the “Tech Specs” link atop apple.com/iphone is dead last. Apple’s best marketing has always been about what a product does, not what it has. Forget MHz and GB and mAh — how much faster does it launch apps? Play games? Snap pictures? Load web pages? How many hours of video and talk time? These are things that anyone can not only understand, but appreciate.

The entire post by Drance is a fantastic explanation of why people are upset there is no NFC in the iPhone, but the above quoted section is a spot on analysis of why Apple products are seen as more compelling. Apple doesn’t tell you it has a 3200mAh battery, it tells you that you can talk all day long — and which is more useful information? Certainly there are qualifications to all day long, but the same is true with pure specs. A fast CPU and massive amounts of RAM are great, unless the OS is piss-poor.

People often say that the specs are the actual “facts” of the device, but that’s simply not true. Benchmarks certainly are, same with real world testing, and so it is along that line that I think Apple’s advertising *feels* more true to me.

Harry Marks:
> I also see Street View as a much more practical feature than Flyover because if I’m going somewhere I haven’t been before, I’d like to know what the building looks like before I get there.

Actually, as someone who has been using the iOS 6 betas, I disagree. Flyover isn’t the same as street view, but it is better in some ways than street view. Most importantly it is more fluid. It is true, that you don’t get the standing on the street perspective, but I think the perspective is also very useable for finding where a shop/store is on the map.

The difference is that Street View gives you a very direct and limited perspective, whereas flyover gives your a very indirect and wide view of the area. You don’t see what the store front looks like, but you certainly know which building it is in and where a bouts in the block that building is. It’s hard to state, but once you play with it you will see what I mean.

An additional bonus of Flyover is that you can see all sides of a building, regardless of there being a street — that is, Street View only shows you what can be seen from a car (mostly) and Flyover shows you what can be seen period.

As for 3.2 billion people not getting Flyover or Street View: that’s pretty shitty.