I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I really, really don’t like software patents. The patent system as it regards software is hopelessly broken. It seems obvious that software patents should be abolished. Check this out for an elegant summation of why.
A co-worker of mine forwarded a link to this absurd little article the other day in the Wall Street Journal by Holman Jenkins. The main point seems to be: Apple’s stratospheric success is primarily due to lock-in to its ecosystem, and for a variety of reasons, that lock-in advantage will disappear, and with it, Apple’s success. Considering this, I actually have to wonder what the credentials are to become a writer for, of all things, The Wall Street Journal. It has to be more than the ability to come up with snarky metaphors like “Apple’s Roach Motel,” right? How much does Jenkins really understand about business in general, and in specific, Apple‘s business?
Check this out, via Brian Ford, from Samsung's AV Product Manager Chris Moseley:
TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are...great, but let's face it that's a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.
He's dismissing potential competition from Apple's rumored iTV television. For his sake, I hope it's just the necessary marketing bluster to keep confidence high in Samsung's stock in the face of potential stiff competition. Because if it's not trash talking, and Samsung truly sees no potential threat, that could be big trouble for them.
Have a look at this comparison of introductory statement from Tim Cook and Kazuo Hirai. In Cook's, there is Apple's company mission front and center
delight our customers.
In Hirai's, we see something straight out of the Maximizing Shareholder Value playbook:
...drive the growth of our core electronics businesses...
...turn around the television business...
...create new business domains.
Perhaps Mr. Hirai truly understands how to change Sony's path. Because here's the comparative paths the two companies have been on in terms of shareholder value for the last three years:
There was a time—and this was many years ago—when Sony made spectacular products. Everything was just a pleasure to use. But then, maybe 15 years ago, the design and overall quality of their products just went off a cliff. My guess is somewhere along the line, Sony's approach to being successful changed from simply making great products to the kinds of priorities described by Mr. Hirai.
If history is a guide, it doesn't bode well for Sony's future.
If you haven't already seen it, first have a look at this babbling, incoherent mess by Thorsten Heins – the man who one would assume has been assigned the task of turning around RIM:
Recently, I came across the following book review in Forbes: The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value. The central thesis of Roger L. Martin's book "Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes and what Capitalism can Learn from the NFL" is that the primary – in fact the "singular" — goal of most publicly traded companies since 1976 has been to maximize shareholder value, and that this is a poor choice of goal for any company. Not only because, as Martin puts it, it is rotting our capitalist system from the inside, but because the widespread adoption of this goal has—arguably —had the effect of reducing shareholder value in the years since it was first proposed.
Today it was just announced that a 13 month old Android tablet and an 18 month old Android phone have just become moribund. It seems the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S will not be upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich. In this case it's because the hardware can't handle the new OS on top of Samsung's TouchWiz UI.
I'm sure, though, everyone's excited that they get to spend more money on a new phone or tablet.
Since I wrote this, I keep returning to it. I've thought about it a great deal, and There was a nub somewhere in it that I actually spent a fair amount of time trying to get to over the next few weeks. The place where I dug around the deepest was around this idea of "Gotcha Capitalism." It's a term coined by Bob Sullivan in the book by the same name. That's not really it, though. Because that's mostly about large corporations (telecoms, hospitality, banks) using hidden fees to extract money from unsuspecting consumers, all strictly legal as codified by the small print in contracts, but scarcely ethical. The reason I though it was relevant (and to a certain extent it is), is that the mindset it requires is one that approaches business from the perspective of: where are the untapped revenue streams in our customer base? And how can we tap those revenue streams.
The android universe is hobbled to a large extent by the carriers, who seem to exclusively have this way of thinking. They have their customer base on contracts that they must pay handsomely to break. And while within that contract, subscribers must, usually, buy phones from the carrier, onto which they can drop crapware which the carriers' "partners" pay them handsomely to include, and which their customers cannot remove from their devices.
It goes beyond the carriers too. The handset makers would rather you buy a new phone than make it easy (or even possible) to upgrade the OS on your device. New handsets = new revenue stream.
But then this article by James Allworth in the Harvard Business Review nailed it. It goes beyond what I had been thinking about. It focuses on the Innovators' Dilemma and the assertion that Steve Jobs solved it with Apple. But, as he mentions in the piece, Jobs and Apple did this by putting satisfying the customer over profit. Rather than happy, satisfied customers as an optional by-product of the pursuit of profit, at Apple, profit is the by-product of the relentless pursuit of making the next insanely great thing. The thing that will its users happy every time they interact with it.
I've been watching the twitterverse this morning for #iOS5. It's amazing just how much eager anticipation there is for Apples latest iOS update.
And it makes me think: this is one of the reasons why Apple has been as successful as they are, and at least part of what the Android universe seems not to get.