The Maps letter Tim should’ve written

Team,

The launch of MobileMe Maps was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe Maps was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe Maps as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing just Maps with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications other features one by one – Mail points of interest search first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail search) by Calendar turn-by-turn directions, then 30 days later by Contacts flyover.

– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe Maps at the same time as iPhone 3G 5, iPhone 2.0 iOS 6 software and the App Store an all new iPod lineup. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe Maps could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe Maps into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe Maps team will now report to Eddy Cue Scott Forstall, who will lead all of our internet iOS6 services – iTunes the OS itself, the App Store its applications and, starting today, MobileMe Maps. Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now Scott will continue to report directly to me.

The MobileMe Maps launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services mapping and search. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe Maps is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve Tim

Original letter: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2008/08/steve-jobs-on-mobileme-the-full-e-mail/

The iPod Lineup - Just Doesn’t Make Sense


The quick run down

Two too many products and completely wrong price points. The iPod Shuffle and the 3.5” iPod Touch should be dropped. The iPod Nano should have stayed the same form factor as its predecessor and the 4” iPod Touch should be $199 and $249 respectively.



Reasoning

First the iPod Shuffle is too low of an entry point for an Apple device at just $49. The margins just can’t make sense for this product to exist. Many runners use this device because of the clip but the nano with a similar form factor makes a perfectly fine replacement at a much higher price point and greater margins. Speaking of a nano with a similar form factor - why did Apple create this new nano with a 2.5” screen? It is a complete waste of a 2.5” screen considering you can’t run any apps. You can only watch movies if you have preloaded them and same with pictures. We are in a real-time world so if my screen can’t show the latest stuff without me physically syncing it over a cable - it’s no longer a feature. Therefore, this extra screen real estate is a complete waste. Not only is the 2.5” screen a waste of space but for $50 more I can get a 30% bigger screen and have the ability to run apps on the iPod Touch. Apple should have kept the same form factor and added Bluetooth 4.0 so that notifications can be sent from your iPhone to your iPod nano. This would feed the crazy wearable tech and digital watch market that has emerged on Kickstarter over the past ten months. This new iPod nano device is just idiotic.

Secondly, the price point of the new 4” iPod Touch is way too high. If Apple launches an iPad Mini, I would consider it a failure if the baseline price is higher than $299. Yet the 4” iPod Touch starts at this price point. This means that the new iPad Mini must start at $399. The wrong move if Apple is trying to compete with Amazon.

Apple should have simplified and given direction to their iPod lineup but instead they added a product and completely redesigned another. They should have stuck to their last generation nano design and added a notifications feature giving the product clear direction as Apple’s answer to wearable tech. While the new iPod Touch 4” should be the company’s clear answer to gaming and portable music. Instead their lineup doesn’t have any direction and just doesn’t make sense.

A Few Notes on Television

The television industry has a long, documented road of innovation over the past ninety years. Now this might seem counterintuitive given our current state, but television and more importantly - its distribution methodologies - have been disrupted time and time again. ‘Long-distance television’ was impossible in the fifties without paying the outrageous fees of AT&T’s network in the fifties - hence why there were only a handful of stations. Ted Turner changed this in the ’70s by creating a network of satellites to distribute the content to the local stations that delivered it to the consumer, thereby avoiding AT&T’s network entirely, and opening up the opportunity for smaller channels to emerge. Finally, cable television and satellite came around in the ’90s that allowed distribution direct to the consumer and no longer would the number of channels be smaller than the monthly bill.

Television is distribution.

So what does the next generation of television distribution look like? Simple, I call it CoIP - Cable Over IP. The next cable provider will take advantage of a pipe that everyone already has delivered to their house - the internet. This ‘cable provider’ will broker deals with all the channels you can already get on Dish or through Comcast and make them available to you anywhere - well anywhere you get internet. They would make apps for all the major platforms - iOS, Android, xBox, Windows Phone and the Web - all accesible via a single login. They could bundle practically all the channels that exist for $99 / month because there are virtually no costs beyond the content itself. There are no satellites to maintain or fiber optic cables to install. And speaking of installing - there wouldn’t even be installers! There would be no boxes or dishes that must be subsidized. Customer service would consist of helping users recover their login credentials via the web and not call centers in India. And for the first time, you would be able to watch truly live tv on any device you own.

Path & the Risks of a Startup

There are inevitable risks that a user undertakes when it uses a product developed by a startup. And Path users just experienced one of those risks. The deadlines inside of a startup make it impossible to fully flesh out the security concerns of every feature that is pushed. A quick (and embarrassingly true) story about Posterous further illustrates this:

Several years ago I wrote a thesis on the Sustainability of Apple. After I submitted the first draft, my advisor told me it was a solid B and that I needed to get industry experts as sources if I wanted to get into the A range.

I decided my first industry expert would be Michael Arrington who had just been named the most influential person on the web by Forbes and listed on the Times 100. I thought it’d sound badass to have ‘phone interview’ next to those credentials in my works cited, so that afternoon I went to work… stalking. As I said earlier, embarrassing.

Lucky for me, he uploaded a picture from his hotel to Posterous. I knew it was a brand new startup and crossed my fingers as I downloaded the photo to check out the exif data… and jackpot! Everything was still intact, including the nice gps coordinates the iPhone embeds into every photo. Google Maps pinned it directly atop the Wynn Resort in Vegas. I called up the hotel, asked for Mr. Arrington and twenty seconds later heard, “Hello.”



If you know anything about exif data and photo uploading services, you’d be pissed at Posterous for not stripping the gps data. From a privacy standpoint this could have serious consequences if someone, for instance, can figure out where you live - think Craigslist rapist. But to be honest, it was a simple oversight and several weeks later, Posterous did implement exif data stripping. Sometimes when you just gotta ship, “quick and dirty” becomes the only option.

This brings us back to Path, a startup that not only is trying to iterate at a very fast pace but is also dealing with rampant user growth and engagement rates since its 2.0 launch. The fact that it’s keeping those servers running with no downtime is impressive (just ask Twitter). On top of that, it’s trying to go back and re-do those “quick and dirty” jobs properly. This .plist Address Book upload has ‘quick and dirty’ written all over it. Hashing the emails or only pulling pertinent data or simply having a prompt for opt-in doesn’t take that much more time but clearly the developer working on this functionality didn’t have the time - and hey, if you’ve ever had deadlines, you should be the last person to place the blame. Dave Morin said they already knew about it, meaning it was in the pipeline to go back and code the feature properly (just as Posterous did a few weeks after my exploit).

As startups mature, greater oversight processes are put in place and each commit is more thoroughly reviewed for these type of things. But that also means slower iterations and innovation. If you’re like me and embrace the pace of the valley and its products then understand the underlying risk in adopting early products and don’t go crying wolf when an honest mistake is made.

Update: Dave Morin is a beast. Due to the handling of this crisis, this story won’t be penetrating the walls of the world outside of tech and a majority of potential users will never know it even happened.

Why the MacBook Air is a SUV

Note: This post is from my Wordpress blog and was originally published here on October 21st, 2010 (soon after the release of the 2nd Generation MacBook Air). For a myriad of reasons, I have since migrated my blog here and made available my old posts.

In order to understand where the MacBook Air fits into Apple’s lineup and its overall strategic vision moving forward, it is necessary to understand its CEO - the primary visionary of the company and, as of late, the computer industry. At the D8 Conference, Steve Jobs gave one of the best analogies explaining the future of personal computing. He said that PCs (meaning all personal computers including the Mac) will be like trucks and tablets (such as iPad) will be like cars. Most people will use cars in the future, because it serves all of their needs. Just as the average commuter just needs to get from one place to another - the average computer consumer wants a device that ‘just works’ and enables them to email, browse the web, compose documents (and the occasional spreadsheet) and enjoy their media. The people that use trucks want to do more than just get from point A to point B - they want to bring a boat along or maybe a crate of bricks. Similarly, those people who want to do more than just email and surf the web will need a full-fledged PC while sacrificing mobility and battery life in favor of raw processing power that will enable them to use Photoshop, Final Cut, Parallels and many other high powered applications.

The current Apple lineup mirrors this vision. iPad is one of the best email and browser experiences as well as being a great entertainment device, while being able to easily compose a document with the help of a bluetooth keyboard. On the high-end, the latest Macbook Pro lineup is outfitted with i5 and i7 chips that really crank up the performance of the machines designed for heavy use.

So where does this leave the MacBook Air? In continuing our vehicle analogy, it would be classified as an SUV (a crossover more specifically and not one of those massive Tahoes or Surburbans). It is a sleek version of the truck without all the capabilities but is more versatile than a car. It is a pain to pull a boat or transport a crate of bricks in a SUV and sacrifices must be made, such as taking out seats or getting horrendous gas mileage gunning it up a hill. Just as running Photoshop on a MacBook Air might be a pain, requiring the user to close most or all other open applications. But it both cases, the options are still available - it can be done. But in a car its impossible to bring along a boat or haul a crate of bricks, similar to running Photoshop on iPad - it’s just not possible.

That leaves us questioning what market this device targets. If cars are for consumers and trucks are for professionals, then the Air is for everyone else. It might sound like a cop-out answer or a potentially tiny target audience, but it actually could be a good portion of the market, especially initially. The Air is is for those consumers who feel uncomfortable when they are not carrying around a OS X device. It may take some time for even the average consumer to depart with OS X for mobile applications and purely adopt iOS for being on the go. The Air is also for amateurs, a more long term market, who need more than what iPad has to offer but not quite MacBook Pro power. Apple has even made a fantastic, free, pre-installed on every mac application bundle, iLife, for these amateurs. And those amateurs that want to run the occasional high-powered applications can do so as well.

I hope this sheds some light on the state of the Apple lineup as well as their vision moving forward. It is clear after seeing many comments on TechCrunch and even articles by other publications that believe the MacBook Air is a NetBook killer while iPad is just a fun device. This is obviously not the case (the price of the Air can tell you that much).

Moving forward, don’t be surprised if, during the next refresh of laptops (most likely Summer or late Fall of 2011), the current white plastic MacBook and the 13” Macbook Pro are discontinued and the MacBook Air simply becomes the MacBook. Feel free to drop me a line @chadhuber

Jack Dorsey: The Next Steve Jobs?

Note: This post is from my Wordpress blog and was originally published here on April 18th, 2011. For a myriad of reasons, I have since migrated my blog here and made available my old posts.

Anyone in Silicon Valley can tell the story of Steve Jobs’ exit from Apple and then his legendary return to the company he founded. It’s truly a remarkable story - and it just might be happening again. Over the past few weeks, Jack Dorsey has found himself in a truly unique opportunity to repeat history and be the next comeback king, the next Steve Jobs.

Dorsey, originally ousted by disagreements in senior leadership (not by John Sculley but Ev Williams) has finally returned to Twitter amidst reports that the company is in a downward spiral. But it gets better, as even the Michael Dell’s have come out saying that Twitter should sell to Google or Microsoft as it’s the only way the investors will ever see any money.

Dorsey has returned to set a vision for Twitter and it’s about time. When Jobs gave his first keynote as Interim CEO of Apple in 1997 at the Boston Macworld he had this to say of critics who claimed that Apple couldn’t execute, “Apple is executing wonderfully, on many of the wrong things. They are doing the wrong things because the plan is wrong.” Anybody even remotely following Twitter in the past year has seen that clearly Twitter’s plan is wrong. They screwed over developers, created the Dick Bar and have made absolutely no user improvements to the Twitter experience in the past six months. Dorsey, like Jobs, is back to return his company to its roots of innovation.

But Dorsey has another project to worry about too. He is the CEO of one of the fastest growing startup companies (Square) and has big dreams for its future. In his Golden Gate Bridge speech to the Square Team, Dorsey said that it is his goal for Square to carry every transaction in the world (no easy feat especially when one of the current top carriers of transactions calls your product a fraud magnet). The critics have lined up on this one saying that it is impossible for Dorsey to take on both of these tasks - recover Twitter and build out Square to a size of epic proportions.

But the critics are forgetting this has been done before.

While Steve Jobs was helping Apple recover, he too had a small side project (as the CEO of Pixar) which had just found massive success in the box office two years prior with Toy Story. Pixar’s defining moments were in the late ‘90s - they needed to prove that they were not just a one hit wonder studio and it was up to Jobs that this didn’t happen. A Bugs Life, slated for release in 1998 would be going head to head with Antz and shortly following Pixar would take on the daunting task of releasing its first sequel (Toy Story 2) - which in animation are almost always failures. In strikingly similar fashion, Square’s defining moments are just around the corner - the “make it or break it” point for the company is coming closer. And major questions still surround the company such as how it will survive (or thrive) with new technologies such as NFC.

Dorsey has the demeanor, work ethic, creativity and innovation required to take on these seemingly impossible tasks. He has placed himself in a situation in which he could repeat the iconic history of Steve Jobs. And to those critics who believe that his aspirations are too great must have forgotten that the people who are crazy enough to think think they can change the world are the ones who do.