Caveat Creator

On Discipline

Techmeme was a bonaza of stories today. I wanted to read them all: from Groupon's IPO to auto-follow "tricks" used by Kevin Rose's new app Oink. Two particular stories stood out in how they revolved around Apple and the discipline, applied in two very different ways.  BusinessWeek laid out how Tim Cook's laser focus on supply chain efficiency has turned Apple into an operational machine that wields its advantage like a hammer to beat back competition and inflate margins. It buys up all available supply. It pays up front. It enforces unyielding rules on its suppliers. It is merciless. It is disciplined.

And the only way to compete with Apple as a supplier is to be equally disciplined to protect long-term needs. In this piece  on GigaOm, Ryan Lawler reveals how CBS honcho Les Moonves rejected Apple's offer to join its proposed (subscription?) video effort. CBS knows what is has in its content treasure chest and didn't want to give it away solely on the promise of future revenue shares. CBS knows Apple has over $80 billion in its own treasure chest and is probably holding out for a deal with rich upfronts, minimums and on-going syndication payments. By doing so... by having the discipline 'no thank you'... it set the stage to win those revenues from Netflix, Amazon and perhaps, in the future, Apple.

Can I Come In?

Image via Lemmingstone

It’s not an uncommon sight these days, to see someone tap tap tapping away while strutting the sidewalk. Busy busy businessmen fire off emails, head-down and feet churning. Tweens fling fowl without glancing up. And high-heeled gals simultaneously manage to look fab in thigh-highs while taking a conference call and getting directions to the hot new cafe, to boot. We’re all Totally Connected.

But to what and to whom?

Not to the crowds around us, not to that guy trying to catch our eye on the train, not to those bus ads, or to those newspaper stacks, and certainly not to that great big billboard Way. Up. There. Can’t look up. Just one more Tweet. Just last night I managed to miss a friend walking right past me (who I was waiting for) because my eyes were down, scrolling the world through a screen rather than up, taking it all in.

Today, more than ever, we live in our own superdupersmartphone-induced bubbles. We insulate ourselves from the greater world with who & what we already know. Our phones let us carry our friends, a thousand years of music, all the news that flips and its associated advertising with us at all times. We’re becoming a heads-down culture with noses in screens and buds in ears even while out & about, exploring our cities and towns. But at the same time we rely on our smartphones to insulate us, we also ask them to point the way to the new, the cool, and the hot. It’s gotten to the point where we need apps to break out of the app-induced bubble.

Mobile is a semi-porous membrane after all, allowing some things to enter while blocking all else. This has significant ramifications on so many aspects of our lives. It helps fosters the balkanization of the media by ensuring we never have to read a dissenting view. It changes how we interact with our peers by keeping us constantly, loosely connected.  And it certainly changes how brands and businesses reach consumers. Mobile is the new local. It’s the new outdoor. It's the new everything. Plan accordingly.

Why Instapaper is no longer Free

Last fall, I conducted an experiment: I quietly removed Instapaper Free from the App Store for three days, leaving only the full, $4.99 Instapaper app. Not only did sales increase incrementally, but nobody seemed to notice.

                via www.marco.org

Marco Arment, the man behind the incredibly useful Instapaper application and previously of Tumblr, writes an extremely cogent rationale of his decision to remove the free version of Instapaper from the Apple iOS App Store. He wisely experimented with both price and availability and found that, "Ah ha! The people will pay." Freemium has become the business model du jour, but it's always worth considering if it's the right path. And it's certainly worth experimenting.

Evernote's CEO, Phil Libin, is famous (well, famous to me) for saying

The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using.

Apprently, Marco disagrees or at the very least he believes that the cost, distraction and pain of supporting those billion users simply isn't worth the risk.

Each application and web service is different, of course. Each has a different cost basis and underlying value to the consumer, but if you were developing an app today (or have one in an app store right now) would you go the Evernote path or the Instapaper path?

No Nitro for you!

There was a big kerfuffle yesterday when the the Register reported that Apple was crippling home screen apps, apparently in an attempt to bias the platform towards native apps available in via the App Store. John Gruber at Daring Fireball and others have refuted the claim and present the case that this is the case of Safari getting faster, rather than home screen apps getting slower. He writes:

The clear insinuation is that web apps running outside Mobile Safari have been made to run slower, but that’s not true. What happened with iOS 4.3 is that web apps (and JavaScript in general) running inside Mobile Safari have been made significantly faster.

The Nitro JavaScript engine is only available within Mobile Safari. Outside Mobile Safari — whether in App Store apps using the UIWebView control, or in true web apps that have been saved to the home screen — apps get iOS’s older JavaScript engine.

Put another way: nothing is slower regarding web apps or web page rendering in iOS 4.3 compared to 4.2 or earlier. If anything, everything is at least a little bit faster. But: the most significant performance improvements in iOS 4.3, particularly for JavaScript, are exclusive to Mobile Safari.

                via daringfireball.net

He's probably right. It's probably not a conspiracy to slow down home screen apps. Apple probably isn't playing the role of the Nitro Nazi ("No Nitro for you!"). Home apps will probably eventually get the speed bump. But the mere fact that it was a considered credible possibililty says everything you need to know. Caveat Creator.