It's the Software, Stupid.

Apple made its name in music on the success of iTunes, not iPod.

I’ve worked in the technology industry for quite a few years.  And I’ve come to a pretty basic conclusion:  most hardware companies just don’t get software, and worse, they don’t GET that they don’t get software.  This posting gives just one example.

It is conventional (but somewhat flawed) wisdom in the computing industry that Apple gained its current momentum in Mac’s on the back of iPod’s success.  The often-told story goes like this:  Apple introduced the iPod into a relatively lazy mp3 market, and the iPod had such a gorgeous design and such great features that it eventually cornered the mp3 market, which served to reintroduce people to Apple products overall.  Hence, Mac’s share growth.

There are a bunch of problems with the above assertion.  But the main one is that the iPod’s design and features are what caused its share growth.  Not in my opinion.   

The simple truth is that iTunes is what caused the dominance of iPods, and iTunes was also one of the top-3 contributors to the share growth of Mac’s (what are the other top Mac growth factors, you ask?  That’s for another post…).  It was iTunes, not iPod.

The fact is, there were several cool-ish mp3’s on the market during the early days of iPod.  I owned one by Creative, and it was quite a good player.  Most of the mp3 offerings at that time (2003-ish) made it pretty simple to select songs by artist, album, song name, etc.  Most had fairly easy-to-understand hardware controls.  Some (but not most) even had decent industrial design.  But none of them had iTunes, which offered an elegant integration of hardware and software, and respected a few basic consumer insights.  (screenshot of iTunes 4 from freedownloadsplace.com).

Sometime around late October 2003 or early November 2003, in the first week after it was introduced to Windows, I downloaded iTunes onto my Windows PC.  Overnight, my music world was transformed.   Previously, I had been alternating between Windows Media Player, Napster, and other applications, and using them with various players.  Suddenly, I had a simpler solution for overall management of my music, an easier way to add to my library (iTunes store), and a great application for music synching and playback. 

Early versions of iTunes got a few really critical consumer insights right.  Making playlists very easy to compile, and then later find and play, was one of the big ones.  Afterall, playlists were one of the early “killer apps” of the digital music era.  Suddenly, I could mix-up my music in new ways.  Playlists were highly prominent in the user interface (see above photo of iTunes 4, the version in place during iTunes/iPod's rise to dominance).  Other applications supported playlists, of course.  Windows Media player has playlists, but in the early days, they just didn’t make playlists as easy, or as prominent in the UI.  Ripping CD’s was more intuitive with iTunes too.  And so was synching the portable device.  Before iTunes, I experienced a variety of synch fails, and had learned to overcome them by geeking my way through.  The iTunes software had a simple elegance that made buying, organizing, and playing music fun and interesting.  That’s the main reason Apple wound up on top in music, in my opinion.

New job, same interests. And check out my new ThinkPad.

I've been away from this blog for a while, busy selling my company Switchbox Labs to Lenovo and starting a new global job at Lenovo, where I'm serving as SVP and CMO.

So far, it has just been a couple of weeks since I joined the company full-time, along with my Switchbox co-founders Bob Dickinson and Blake Ramsdell.  I have been incredibly impressed with both the people and the products.  I have so much to learn, and so many people yet to meet.  

I can't make too many promises, but I hope to continue this blog, and mix my consumer technology observations with some commentary on what's going on in the technology industry itself, from the perspective of someone working at one of the big companies in it.

Yes, they are paying me a salary.  But right now, I think I'd work just for this sweet little number in my lap (I'm talking about the computer, just to be clear).  I'm typing this on my new Thinkpad x301, which is just about the best notebook I have ever laid my hands on.  I can't believe CNET gave this thing an 8.3, which is pretty-much robbery.

It is incredibly thin, and light, has the best keyboard of any small computer I've ever touched (don't let anyone fool you, keyboards REALLY MATTER and they aren't all equal).  Maybe most exciting, I'm gettting (seriously) nearly six hours of active usage out of it, partly because my model is all SSD-based (good-bye, hard drives), and I took out the DVD player and put in the optional extra battery in that slot (in case you weren't aware, dvd drives in computers are pretty much obsolete).

When this form-factor was first introduced with the x300 last year, a little video made its way to the web, which tells the story of this product's innovation pretty well.  Enjoy!

Slingplayer for iPhone coming soon, but when?

Last week at MacWorld, Sling Media finally demonstrated the SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone and it looks very good. They have a good demo running on their website now, but little to say about when it will be released. The site says they will submit for certification with Apple in 1Q.

I suspect this media push is a strategy to get Apple motivated to approve the player. I spoke with Blake Krikorian, the recently departed founder of Sling, last fall. He told me back then that the app was nearly complete, but that they were facing resistance and foot-dragging from Apple. We sometimes forget that the iPhone isn't an open platform. If for some reason Apple doesn't like your app, even if that reason is that they feel threatened by it, they can refuse to release it. So we'll all have to see what happens, and how quickly.

Meantime, I continue to use Orb, which provides me with a pretty good mobile TV solution, as I described in a previous posting. I have experienced intermittent problems with it since my last posting, but I have it working fairly reliably. I stand by my comment that while cool, Orb isn't yet mass-consumer ready.

My son uses the AT&T Mobile TV service on his Samsung Eternity. This is a surprisingly good live TV service. The feature I like best is almost instant channel-changing. The quality is good, and the interface is surprisingly good. I wish there was a broader channel line-up, and I wish it didn't cost $15/month. Bring on the Sling!

We all know the Internet has changed everything. Next, its going to change your TV habits, big-time. But how?

I love reading stories that claim to know what is ahead. I always wonder how they make their predictions. Like this one from ABI research, reported on Engadget: Internet Media viewing on TVs set to surge by 2013. I, for one, don't know yet how Internet-on-TV will unfold. But I agree it will be a big phenomenon, and fairly soon.

Last week on NPR, there was a great 7+ minute story on the topic, during prime drive-time. This phenomenon is certainly starting to move from tech circles to consumer circles. I can't make a ton of predictions, but what I do know is the following:

• There has been an explosion of TV-related Internet content over the last 18 months. Suddenly, Internet stuff actually belongs on your TV. Building on YouTube's start 3+ years ago, the entrants over the last year or so have been mainly commercial sites, and they are good. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Joost, Veoh, ABC.com, Comedycentral.com are just a few that I watch. Even YouTube now has full-length commercial content, and a lot of it. Of the bunch, Hulu has gotten a lot of play in the press, and according to Neilsen, they broke into the top-10 website providers of streaming videos mid-last-year. I am a loyal user.

• Netflix and Amazon.com have booth been very aggressive at winning deals to get their services built into boxes-near-your-TV, and built right into new TV's. XBox, TiVo, and Roku are among the boxes to announce services to bring Netflix or Amazon content to your TV.

• TV's are still selling, even in the recession. According to DisplaySearch, total global sales were up in 2008, to an astonishing 205 Million units. And they are predicted to be about flat in 2009. Which means, the transformation to digital, flat-panel TV's continues to be the biggest phenomenon in consumer electronics, by far. Those millions of mostly high-def TV's can render high-res Internet experiences very well. And consumers, having just invested in them, will be anxious to put them to good use. According to Nielsen, TV is still where Americans spend their time. TV use actually grew to 127 hours per month last year. Make no mistake, the TV is still King.

• At this year's CES, Internet-on-your-TV was one of the big topics. I saw Internet-enabled TV's from LG, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Sharp. LG, in particular, seems fairly committed to the concept (meaning, they were actually demoing it in the booth rather than just showing it). Some of these solutions were plain aweful. My partners and I laughed out loud in the Sharp booth, in a not-good you-gotta-see-this way. There's a brief round-up of Internet TV solutions at this year's CES here.

As for me, I'll go on record. I don't like stuff built into my TV. A lot of TV's don't even have tuners anymore. I don't even use the speakers built into my main TV. We feed our TV's their content from a finite collection of boxes, such as a cable-box, DVD or BluRay player, and sometimes a game console, and I think it will be a while before that changes. That's because our TV's outlast these other gadgets and we don't want to be stuck with outdated stuff built into the TV. I think Internet content is much more likely to be popularized by one of the existing external boxes, or by an additional box, than as a proprietary feature on your TV. A built-in TV feature, by the way, will work differently on one brand of TV vs. another, and thus never achieve any kind of scale in a fragmented TV market.

Intel and Yahoo have decided to collaborate on a strategy to bring simplified Internet Widgets to your TV, with some consistency across brands. Called Widget Channel, I saw several demonstrations of this at CES. There's a nice story here on CNET that discusses the strategy. I like Widgets, and it is an appealing notion that they could emerge as a standard that developers can count on, to bring Internet experiences to TV in a simple form. We'll just have to watch and see if they take off.

I can't tell if Intel and Yahoo are really behind this thing or not. They had people on the floor demoing it who really didn't understand the technology, and they weren't pushing the platform very persuasively for developers. Maybe it is "early days". Or, maybe Intel and Yahoo are only "somewhat" committed.

While I like the idea of the Widget channel, much is left undone. The best Internet experiences are pretty powerful, and I don't see most TV's having the computer processing power to render 3D web experiences in real time. Little gadgets on the TV will probably ultimately let people down. In my experience, every time people are given the choice between the "real" Internet and "little pieces" of the Internet, people choose the real thing. Widgets are pieces.

If Internet-on-the-TV is going to take-off, there needs to be a new controller strategy. People are accustomed to the full control they get from a mouse and keyboard. There needs to be a way to give them this level of control over Internet experiences on a TV, without introducing a mouse or a keyboard into the living room. Today's solutions use things like on-screen keyboards which are so frustrating to use that I want to throw something at my TV.

In our house, we have a very quiet, very power-efficient PC hooked up to our TV. I handle all of the system maintenance, so the rest of the family gets a very easy-to-use always-on PC experience. If the whole thing was simpler, and never required bootups, backups, patches, updates, wizards, anti-virus programs, and what-not, I'd be much happier. We have a variety of ways to control our TV's PC, and none of them are ideal. My favorite full-sized TV-room keyboard is this one, which sells under a variety of brand-names. I have tried a bunch of them, including the Logitech DiNovo Mini, which is nice-looking but very difficult to use due to a flawed mouse-pad. I'm also using the very clever AirMouse app for iPhone, and I keep waiting for their promised update with such necessary things as an esc key (as in, the key that gets you out of full-screen on Netflix and Hulu), so its not a solution I can recommend yet. I'm told the update is coming any day.


Having the Internet on TV has really changed things for our family. I find myself not recording stuff anymore. Our DVR is rarely used. All the stuff we want to see is just a few clicks away without having to bother with a DVR. We have good family times watching clips together on YouTube and Hulu. Previously, the kids were squirreled away with their laptops in another room. So in a way, having the Internet on our TV has brought our family closer together. If that doesn't spur a phenomenon, I don't know what will.

Staying connected just got easier

I have a number of different wireless devices. When I travel, I usually carry either a laptop or Netbook, and a wireless phone. I take my laptop into other companies' conference rooms and need an Internet connection. The problem is, I don't want to pay for multiple 3G dataplans for my multiple devices.

That's why I am so impressed with MiFi, an ultraportable WiFi hotspot recently announced by Novatel. As you can see in this photo, MiFi is very small. It's the smallest portable WiFi unit I have seen. (Photo credit to Engadget, where you can find a great consumer products column by Ross Rubin). Read the Engadget story about MiFi here.

With MiFi, you'll pay a wireless carrier for a single 3G dataplan, then use it to connect whatever laptop or netbook you happen to be using. This will save me a ton of complexity. I have laptops that support PC card, and others that support Express, which means I can't easily use a single 3G datacard. And, I don't like having to launch the connection application. Simply switching on a WiFi hotspot will be much easier, and give me the added benefit of being able to share the connection.

By the way, having one of these in your backpack will provide a bonus benefit to iPhone fans. As you know, many iPhone functions are restricted to WiFi only connections. MiFi will give your phone a WiFi connection wherever you may be, using 3G as its backhaul. So you can download iTunes songs, for example, or watch videos on the Television app.

My email service, email client, and smartphone come from three different companies. But I still expect it all to work together perfectly.

As a marketing guy, I have been thinking lately about the merits of “systems” vs. the finer attributes of “best of breed.” What am I referring to? Well, in “systems”, you choose who you want to do business with in advance, and then get everything from them, on the promise that it will all work great together. With “best of breed” you choose different offerings from a variety of providers, getting exactly what you want in each category, but then potentially face the hassle of cobbling it all together.

With cars, I’m a “system” guy. When I make a decision to buy a car, I’m also in effect deciding that their dealership will also be the ones to do all of the service on the car. I only use factory audio in a car, because, well, I just like that it is more integrated. Factory floor mats? Absolutely. I have even gone so far as to have the dealer replace my tires. One throat to choke, as they say. To be clear, I’m not defending that this is a good idea. It may be a very bad idea. But it is what I do, nonetheless, simply because I prefer it. Are there product categories where you prefer to buy into a “system” and then stick with it? I’ll bet there are.

But I’m also willing to bet that for most of us, we prefer to buy the best-of-breed in most categories. When I do this, I feel that I still have a right to get mad when it doesn’t all work seamlessly together. So do you. Companies who rely on you buying everything only from them, just to get an adequate experience, aren’t thinking about you, the consumer, the way they should.

I’m feeling this way about Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) right now. Windows Live Mail doesn’t support IMAP, and they only support email forwarding if you pay them for premium mail, which is darn hard to figure out how to do. I wanted my Windows Live mail to be readable from within my gmail account, for a number of reasons, including gmail’s superior integration with the iPhone. Well, you can’t do that. You can’t use an alternative offline client very easily, either. Basically, your choices to access your mail (and keep it in sync, which rules out POP access) are… 1) the Windows Live Mail client (which, thankfully, I love), and related Microsoft mail clients, 2) the Windows Live web service (which I don’t like as much as gmail), and 3) Windows smart phones. That’s pretty much it. I think their idea must be that if they make it really hard to use any email client other than their own, you be a more loyal customer, and not switch away. That is a crazy amount of absurd and it just makes me mad. I love my Windows Live mail and I also love my iPhone. I expect them to work together more easily than they do.

Sometimes companies who are selling a “system” make it obvious with their advertisements, which try to convince us we're better-off buying everything from them. Sony and Apple are two companies that each spend a significant amount of effort trying to convince consumers to buy their own products across-the-board, under the promise that it all works best together. And generally, it does. But at what cost? Premium prices are an acceptable cost, but to me, being trapped in a closed system by underlying proprietary technology isn’t worth it. I view Mac’s this way. I love some Apple stuff, but I feel that Apple tries to trap Mac users into using only their stuff (shouldn’t they have put in HDMI, and not mini-DisplayPort, into their latest Mac’s? My point.). This is the value of working within the most broadly adopted standards. With enough openness, the really popular products should eventually all work together very well, if their makers have the consumer’s best interests in mind.

In our household, we’re more PC than Mac. I much prefer Windows to OSX, probably because I am so familiar with it. I’m the IT guy in our family, and I look after about 8 PC’s and one Mac. But all of our networking is Apple. I prefer Apple’s configurability and I’m a huge fan of Airport Express for whole-house music distribution. We use mainly iTunes for music and video. I have been impressed with how easily Apple products (iTunes, iPod, Airport, TimeCapsule) integrate into a mostly PC environment. Quite simply, they are writing some of the best PC software out there, which ironically, is one of the reasons I have little interest in switching to Mac’s. In this sense, they are less of a closed “system” purveyor than some would say.