Executive Email 2

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both issued public statements last week.

• Jobs: Thoughts on Music
• Gates: Enabling Security Anywhere

But here's the curious thing. According to del.icio.us, the Jobs letter has been saved by over 1300 people, while the Gates email has been saved by 6 people.

In searching for an explanation for this difference, we need to consider a combination of content and context. Jobs is making a dramatic intervention into a controversial topic. Whereas Gates doesn't seem to be saying anything particularly remarkable.

But why is that? Has Gates lost the power to startle the industry? What is really going on?

Competition 2

Should Steve Ballmer be more positive about the i-Phone, or is it okay to diss the competition?

I posted something here a while back about badmouthing the competition. Ballmer didn't say anything exceptionally bad about Apple, but there was a contemptuous laugh that conveyed disrespect.

In the past, executives were careful with their words, but would often convey additional or contrary messages through non-verbal clues. Thanks to YouTube, this kind of non-verbal behaviour can now be widely disseminated and discussed.

In a post entitled love thy competitor, Garr Reynolds sees this kind of laughter as poor presentation style.

"Frankly, Ballmer reacted pretty much like I expected him to. ... I would have been flat-out blown away and quite impressed indeed if he had been complimentary of Apple. ... But it is the reaction to Ballmer's comments that I find so fascinating. It is the big response to Steve Ballmer's little comments got me thinking: Should you say "nice things" about competitors?"

Tom Peters made a similar point recently - Love Thine "Enemy"! It's Good Business!

Perhaps the real question for the IT industry is whether competition is a zero-sum game. And that depends where we are in the product lifecycle. For a new or emerging class of product, it makes sense for a vendor to collaborate with its competitors to encourage adoption and grow the market. For a mature product, on the other hand, the incentives for collaboration are smaller, and the vendor's strategy may be to gain the maximum market share or the most profitable niche, at the expense of its competitors.

But this is where it gets difficult for the relationship between two major vendors, such as Apple and Microsoft. There are many different product areas in which they compete - from operating systems (OS-X versus Windows) to MP3 players (iPod versus Zune) - as well as some in which they cooperate - and these are at different points in the product life cycle.

If Ballmer were a devious hypocrite, he would have spoken neutrally or even positively about the iPhone and then paid other people privately to dish the dirt. Perhaps we should be thankful that he doesn't try to conceal his true feelings about his competitors.

i-Phone or wii-Phone?

There are apparently two reasons someone might want a mobile phone, which can be summed up by the contrast between the Apple prefix (i-) (pronounced I) and the Nintendo prefix (wii-) (pronounced we).

The Apple prefix suggests private consumption. The iPhone appears to be an elegant cross between a top-of-the-range iPod and a Blackberry, designed for people that want to look cool while cutting themselves off from normal social interaction. Ever since the launch of the Sony Walkman, those tiny headphones signal "don't talk to me, I'm listening to something". And many people seem to use their mobile devices as a way of disengaging from their immediate surroundings.

The iPhone has been extensively reviewed, and I don't want to do a detailed review here. I just want to point to a few comments that suggest the iPhone isn't radical enough:

• "Call me crazy, but I think Apple have overdone the technology innovation, and undercooked the business model innovation." (Martin Geddes)

• "What it doesn't do is actually re-invent the very thing that makes cellphones magical: how you connect with other people." (Seth Godin)

• "But something is missing, something important drowned in this flood of f(x)." (Rikard Linde via Seth Godin on Web4)

The wii-prefix, on the other hand, suggests a shared experience. In a post Disappearing Telephony from January 2006, Martin Geddes made an excellent point about conversation and presence ("humans are sophisticated social animals, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise if our conversation tools need to act intelligently too"), which I followed up in my post on Coffee Shop ("Forget LinkedIn, let's have EspressedIn"). It now seems Seth Godin and Rikard Linde are thinking along similar lines.

As far as I know, Nintendo has no plans to launch a mobile phone. But there are some good precedents for social interaction in the latest games consoles, and it would be interesting to see a communication device based on the wii- prefix rather than the i-prefix.

Update January 2007

I have found some rumour pages from last year about a possible wii-phone, plus a German cartoon.

• Wii-mote to be Wii-mic and Wii-phone? (May 2006, Seth Bland)
• Wii-phone blog (Sept 2006)
• Cartoon (January 2007) via Andreas Schaefer

Update June 2019

Many years ago, I wrote a critique for New Society about the way enterpreneurs like Sir Clive Sinclair were being idolized by the Thatcher Government. As an aside, I noted the attenuation of social consumption.

"The trend is towards individual consumption, and all of Sir Clive's inventions contribute to this trend. He has produced a car that takes only one passenger, a television too small for communal viewing, computers that are mainly used by children playing private games on their own, thus avoiding the stress of direct competition with other children. Many people working with computers have spoken with enthusiasm of a future society in which all basic transactions (including schooling, shopping, banking and all office work) will be carried out from home, using computer technology. We have already substituted the personal hifi for the concert , the rented video for the evening out, the televised press conference for the public meeting. Now the trend is to reduce social contact even further." Cry God for Maggie, England and St Clive (New Society, 9 May 1985)

Obviously some of this argument looks a bit dated now. What about multi-player games, as I noted in 2007? What about "social media"? But I think the main thrust of the argument still applies. Let me give the final word to @rachelcoldicutt

I mean, the tldr for “why are we so individualised now?” is that it’s probably not because phones or civic design or spirituality or libraries or compassion fatigue, but because of capitalism, so happy Friday everyone!

— Rachel Coldicutt (@rachelcoldicutt) June 14, 2019

Updated 14 June 2019

Apple Keynote

Whatever his other strengths and weaknesses may be, Steve Jobs is widely acknowledged as a brilliant speaker. But what happens when Jobs has to share the stage with someone else? Does he shine at someone else's expense, or does he make them look good too?

Seth Godin criticizes Stan Sigman, the CEO and President of Cingular, for his poor showing at the Apple keynote. One blogger (Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz) didn't even bother to report Sigman's name. Come on Fake Steve Jobs, give us the real explanation!

Jerry Yang (Yahoo) and Eric Schmidt (Google) are there as well to praise Apple - and of course Jobs.

• "Congratulations, Steve. What an incredible job!" (Schmidt)
• "It's really, really cool. It's a real honor to be partnering with Apple today." (Sigman)

Browser Wars

Firefox is on the rise. The latest figures on global usage from OneStat show that Mozilla Firefox has 12.93% (up 1.14%), while Microsoft IE has 83.05% (down 2.12%). The fall in IE is greater than the rise in Firefox, indicating that other browsers (Opera? Safari?? Netscape???) are also gaining slightly.

Statistics for selected countries are published, so we can see which of these countries are most (UK, France, Netherlands) and least (Germany, Australia) loyal to Microsoft.

JP (Confused of Calcutta) sees these statistics as a leading indicator of a culture’s willingness and capacity to adopt opensource. For my part, I don't think that Firefox's being opensource is the most significant differentiator between IE and Firefox. I think the likely explanation for the rise of Firefox involves a number of other factors, including the widespread perception of Microsoft as a software monoculture, concerns about security holes in IE (including strong warnings from US CERT), some cool features of Firefox, and the current popularity of Apple (partly due to iTunes). Given these factors, perhaps it is not the rise of Firefox that needs to be explained, but the continued dominance of IE. We'd need some detailed statistics to untangle these factors, not just a few headline percentages.

In Episode 1 of the Browser Wars, as we all know, Microsoft beat Netscape. If Firefox is ever to overtake IE in Episode 2 of the Browser Wars, Firefox will need some strong alliances - not just Linux, not just opensource.

In any case, as JP implies, the browser wars are not going to be won or lost in Germany and the UK, but in the growing economies: China, India, Russia and Brazil.

Wikipedia: Browser Wars
Technorati Tags: browser Firefox Microsoft open-source

Mix06 Keynote

A fascinating keynote speech by Bill Gates at Mix06, without any slides. (He's obviously been reading the blogs about his use of PowerPoint). Some great presentations by mySpace and the BBC, followed by a conversation with Tim O'Reilly.

Tim tried to push Bill into supporting Web 2.0. Can we find some examples of collaborative, bottom-up emergence in the Microsoft/Windows experience? Bill's answers all seemed to be about Microsoft controlling things better, putting in better security features and so on, based on install volume (what economists call "learning by doing") and user feedback. I don't think this was really what Tim was pushing for.

Tim also asked about competition from companies with different business models - Google, Apple - and Microsoft competing with telcos. Bill evaded these questions, and talked instead about Microsoft moving away from a device-centric model of computing towards a user-centric model of software. Your user preferences are available (though services) to any device you happen to pick up - including (if you are authenticated to use it) your friend's phone. This looks like a very important development, which is related to the context-based services I've been talking about on my SOAPbox blog.

This is relevant to the competition with Apple, because the Apple solution remains proprietary and tightly controlled - especially in terms of DRM - and this gives some credibility to Microsoft's attempt to position itself as more open and interoperable. As a representative of a major content provider, the BBC speaker was positive about Microsoft's DRM position.

The keynote lasted longer than I had expected, so I had to leave before the end. I'll try to catch the rest on the Internet later.