[Note: these are my thoughts and not those of my former employer. I had zero visibility into a potential Palm acquisition and was as surprised as everyone else on Wednesday when I read the news]
As the case with most of the large tech companies, there is a lot of Apple jealousy inside the halls of the product side of the HP house. I used to play a game of reverse Buzzword Bingo, collecting one point for every meeting during a given week when Apple wasn't mentioned in some capacity ("we need to be as elegant/integrated/creative as the iPhone... we want this to be the iPhone of X"). Most weeks my score was 0— 1 on the weeks when I had meetings with the facility manager.
From that perspective, buying Palm makes a ton of sense for the world's largest tech supermarket: it gets the chance to bring a line of products to market that are fully integrated, it controls the software experience, and from what I've been told (because I've never owned a webOS device myself), it gets a very good copy of the iPhone OS which can be ported with little effort up and down the product line.
This is why it makes sense that the company would cancel the slate rumor that was rushed to announcement in January and I suspect that it will also be just a matter of time before all of the released Android products— and worse still— any of the on-deck Android products— get canceled or replaced by ones with webOS in their plan of record.
In fact, the fate of Android inside of HP is likely the greatest casualty of this whole deal, and given the recent pressure exerted on HTC by Apple's lawyers, it doesn't come at a good time. While it it hardly the case that HP was single handedly moving Android forward with its engagement with the OS, I think as one of 3 "tier one" players who had begun to embrace it (albeit apprehensively) with partners and the supply chain, the signaling power of the company's retreat will be felt.
It was never easy for HP to get its head around Android— between the open development model and Google's inconsistent messaging around Android versus Chrome and the different classes of devices (which seemed at times poorly thought out and at times just downright flakey), it was a bumpy takeoff every step of the way. HP is a company used to dealing with "vendors" who meet RFPs and charge license/support costs to deliver predictable help, not a community guided by a single company whose core business wasn't serving HP's needs.
In the end, I'm not sure whether HP can make webOS a commercial success (it may be too late), but I applaud their boldness in trying it. There is a lot a stake here if the world continues to go the route of app stores and platform dictators and I'd hate to play without full control of the stack (not to mention the glee at HP legal on the patent trove they're about to own).
What I do think is true is that we consumers ought to fast forward and think through whether we'll be better served with Apple, Google, RIM, and now HP all running this same playbook, or with the seemingly fading promise of a post-PC world that is as open as the desktop/browser one has been for the last decade.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 3 weeks ago (April 4, 2010)
Too many bytes being wasted on iPad reviews/impressions/complaints, so I am going to be brief and specific to people who care about the industries I've worked in. Just three simple initial observations:
First, it is a beautiful piece of hardware with amazing software, but my first impression upon holding it (and one which has just gotten more acute after a day of using it) was: man, this thing is heavy!
This almost doesn't bear mentioning, but it is nice to see that even Apple can not escape the laws of the physical world. If I had to guess, I'd say 40% of the weight is the battery, and an additional 30% is glass, which gives you an idea of what can come out of it in future versions (and what won't). And the weight is going to affect it negatively in two key ways: it won't be a device people can hold up over their heads lying down easily at all, and more importantly, it won't be a particularly rugged device, especially when dropped face down.
(Right now there is a very happy team at my former employer who couldn't for the life of them figure out how Apple might escape physics but were taken in enough by the Reality Distortion Field to believe they might have).
Second, I had written about how much I wanted the web browser to be first class, and it most certainly is. For some web pages it is as fast as anything on the desktop (which speaks to the fact that we're just about as there as we can be without more fiber when it comes to webpages and speed). But more importantly, the pinch and zoom is an absolute delight. And best of all, just about everything that doesn't rely on Flash or complex onDrag event handlers works. Yay open web!
Finally, and this will only be relevant to people in the photo space: photo sharing is about to change forever.
When I say photo sharing, I don't mean an online photo repository like Facebook's that just a feature of a bigger social app; I mean the full ecosystem in which the traditional photo sharing folks have existed. And what is key about this ecosystem is that output has proven to be the only scalable business model, be it the 4x6 prints of yesteryear or the photo books of today.
All of that revenue died today. Not in the going away immediately kind of dead, but in the Lotus Notes kind of way. There will be a generation of folks who will print photos and books for a little while longer, but for the bulk of people that have seen the power of a live slideshow on a bright IPS LED display of the iPad's size— one that can be passed around a living room or left rotating on a particular event— will never go back to keeping anything with ink and paper.
If I were still in that space, I'd be looking hard at the few players who have figured out how to make money with virtual-only products (which is really hard), because that is the only place where there is likely to be any significant growth.
Another way to put it: RIP photo book. You were awesome while you lasted and I'm sorry you never became truly mass market (only about 11% of the US population had made one last I checked), but there are just better ways to tell stories with pictures in a portable and human-scale way out there now.
More later after I work up the muscles to hold up the iPad better.
My iPad ship notification came early this morning, and I along with about a quarter million other overgrown little boys and girls started anticipating the early (late?) Christmas Day coming this Saturday.
I'm excited, but not because I have a portable TV to look forward to. I'm also not excited for the price inflation that app vendors (who have barely scraped by at $0.99 and $1.99) are going to try to foist upon us with the new form factor. In fact, I'm not excited to buy any apps at all.
What I'm most excited about is seeing how well an A4 optimized Mobile Safari can behave as a full featured application host— for the only type of apps that will actually matter long-term on the iPad outside of the mail client: fully native cloud apps.
Unlike the iPhone, we don't have to worry about the poor DOM support for things like the camera and the accelerometer, or the coarse and kludgey location support that the browser provides. Those things make a ton of sense for a device which is always with you and frequently needs to be used from hostile environments (at weird angles when you are not sure where you are). In the iPad's case what will matter is the ability to get near native speed and stability from the browser for the following things:
1. Multitouch. Mobile Safari for the iPhone has supported multitouch for a long time, albeit a bit too slowly especially when compared to the speed of the native app gestures. I sincerely hope that the A4 chip and the larger screen area (thus larger digitizer) closes this gap.
2. CSS3 transforms. Productivity style work doesn't need to be cinematic, but there is a certain amount of eye candy that can make a big difference. Dynamic highlights, accordion effects, etc.
3. Clientside storage. This is good enough on the iPhone. All they need to do is not break it (and maybe move the default upper limit on SQLite above 5MB)
4. Offline support. App-cache works on the iPhone, but it is a little squirrely sometimes. In order for the iPad to replace a laptop it needs to be rock solid on planes, trains, and automobiles (in tunnels) which means this needs to work more reliably.
5. Websockets for true bidirectional communication with a server for all of those emerging realtime apps. Ok, this one is a total pipedream and the truth is long polling works pretty well on the iPhone, but one can hope.
There are rumors floating around the Internet that Apple is looking to break all of this stuff in Mobile Safari (in order to encourage developers through their tollgate), but I doubt it. More likely the worst case scenario is that like any big company, Apple is a multi-headed beast— albeit one that is often tamed by Jobs— and as such, there will be a pocket of cluefulls that will do the right open web thing and let Safari make the iPad the first truly novel cloud access device.
We can hope.
In the meanwhile, if you're going to hold an iPad hack party in the coming days, consider targeting the partial HTML5 implementation on its Mobile Safari instead of falling victim to the sirensong of Interface Builder and its jazzy drag-and-drop goodness. You'll be doing yourself a huge favor when the other large OEMs start pouring tens of millions of cheaper Linux and Windows-based tablets into the market over the coming years.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 1 week ago (Nov. 21, 2009)
I've not downloaded or attempted the early release of Chrome OS yet, but having read through the docs, I can't help but feel that Google attempting to launch two post-PC operating systems at the same time is only going to confuse partners, consumers, and even developers.
Unless Google gets into the hardware business, it's going to have to depend on large OEMs to ship Chrome OS preinstalled. These are the same folks that took their limited software resources (because even though you might ship billions of dollars of hardware, the razor thin margins mean that you just don't have that much money for software R&D) and bet "big" on Android for everything from phones to slates to netbooks. Now two years later along comes Google saying "Whoops, we didn't really mean that we were excited about you using Android, instead check out this shiny happy new toy!" That one is gonna sting.
Also, no matter how many cute videos Google puts out, consumers are going to be really confused by Chrome OS. Will it have an AppStore? Will it run iTunes? Can it see the shared printer? Share files with the other machines on the network? The smartphone doesn't have any of these affordances (it is, after all, the grandchild of the telephone) so it doesn't disappoint in the same way. And what of the connection to Chrome the browser? The first time someone sees a netbook that runs both Chrome the browser (a fantastic product) and iTunes and then makes the mistake of buying the "webtop only" Chrome OS version, I suspect the Google brand will suffer. Repeat a million times and Google may have to start worrying about its unassailable brand in search.
Finally, developers. The story here is simpler, but not obvious by any means. Chrome OS runs Chrome the browser which means that we're talking about HTML5 applications. But what if we want access to the camera on the bezel (and not through the flash plug-in)? Will the DOM API be extended? Supposedly this is how developers will get access to really important things like the power meter. So now we've got to test for a series of DOM elements that may or may not be present across Chrome runtimes? When you're talking about tens of millions of Chrome the browser instances, do we really want to do this? And the alternative, which is changing Chrome the browser to behave like Chrome the OS from an API perspective seems like a mistake in a world where Firefox, Safari, and IE are still relevant.
So I don't get it. To me it seems like a great example of the netbook distortion effect (NDE): netbooks are so cool looking to fans of Star Trek, Batman, and 24, that they completely obscure their essence as cheap laptops for those that can't afford better and paperweight toys for the rest of us. Meanwhile some IDC clown put out numbers saying that a gazillion netbooks will be sold and boom! You've got folks at Google scheming to kill Windows on this new dark horse.
Sort of like the guys with the cornseed engine for this new killer car called the Edsel.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 5, 2009)
Boston's airport is run by a bunch of incompetent castoffs from all of the other state agencies that seem to relish applying maximum manpower to minimize anything decent about a modern airport. The other day upon returning to my car from a trip away, I found one of those baggage trolleys trying to eat the rear of my car, sort of like a big English wrench clamped between the undercarriage and the top of the trunk (how a cart like this can wedge in this way probably has something to do with Mayor Menino's third cousin twice removed who gave up a career in carburetor repair to design a better Smart Cart and ended up using the jacks at his garage for inspiration).
After a long wait for one of the 15 roving tow trucks which seem to prize cruising slowly around the parking lot above say, helping motorists, I decided to take my Skeletool to the cart in the hopes of disassembling enough of it to get out. As I got underneath the car I realized that a part of the cart (again designed after garage equipment) seemed to be poking into what I thought was the car's gas tank thus making for a much more fun evening at the airport.
In the end the puncture wasn't really deep enough (and further research has revealed that it was not in fact the gas tank), so off I went. But as I was driving home, I was reminded of how proud I had been that in the case of this particular car everything is "sealed," meaning that from the day I drove it off the lot two years ago, it's been to the dealer once, precisely when the car's computer told me to take it in, a stark contrast to every other car I've had where intimacy with the various parts of the drivetrain or heating system became a necessary survival skill.
The car experience is not unlike those I've had with several other "sealed" devices as of late: my Tivo HD's 2-year service recently expired, and when I realized I couldn't purchase another 2-year contract but had to instead go on a ghastly month-to-month plan that cost more for the EPG than I pay for cable, I decided to let it lapse. Except that now I've got a brick: I can't manually record, and every time I change the channel, I get a popup that tells me to go pay for the month-to-month to use my very own piece of hardware. Ditto for all of the old iPhones in my life— each of them is only mistaken firmware update away from the "Connect to iTunes" bricking that only a painful jailbreak process can fix (and thank God we have that option).
As consumers we love these set-and-forget seamless experiences— be they cars, Tivos, or cellphones. With these type of experiences being every product designer's foremost goal, and companies obsessed with service (or annuity) business models, we're trading something important for all of that convenience— the ability to control our own hardware beyond the life of the original service contract. Or more importantly, the ability to know anything more than the most elemental operating guidelines for the things that surround us, and may in time come to suffocate us.
I'm not looking forward to the increasing amounts of product detritus accumulating throughout my life because of this phenomenon and would prefer more open systems that give these things second lives beyond their initial service period. Sort of like the utopian vision laid out in Makers, where tinkering with old gadgets becomes second hand to the a whole bunch of people tired of this sealed product life.
And I may never again want to know where my car's gas tank is by the way, but I might want someone other than the dealer to be able to patch up the little hickie Boston airport gave it.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 15, 2008)
Ever since Sequoia decided to get ahead on the rest of the Monday morning quarterbacks with their RIP Good Times presentation, every Tom, Dick, and Harry angel investor and me-too venture fund has decided to get in on the advice giving about how startups have to conserve cash and get serious about business models.
Come on people, this is like great platitudes from Captain Obvious and friends. Startups are businesses after all which I think means that they should be worried about this no matter what the times are like!
If you want to see a really funny version of the "eat fruit, save money, and exercise regularly" schpiel, go check out what Whiner Jenkins has to say. I have to admit to laughing out loud over this one:
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 10, 2008)
My brother was recently telling me about grounding my thirteen year-old nephew for 3 weeks. He lost his ability to invite friends over, watch TV, play Xbox, and even putter around on his laptop. Despite this, the kid remained surprisingly smug about his prospects for the next 3 weeks bored. Apparently his dad forgot to take all of his screens away— and with his iPod touch still in hand, he felt that he had beaten the rap's worst consequence: being disconnected.
Having just finished reading Cory Doctorow's wonderfully entertaining tale of teenage Geek culture in his polemic against the Patriot Act and all of our loss of privacy in recent years, I was again reminded of how fast kids can take ownership of new technologies in ways that leaves the grownups scratching their heads and... just generally feeling old.
Doctorow's novel, "Little Brother," has a really rich description of this world being conquered by teenage geeks, one that struck me as both incredibly realistic, and quite telling of how the first post-PC, post-Internet generation expects to be able to own their electronic fates— from media to communications to the interaction between the virtual and the physical worlds, the narrative serves as much better guidepost for what is coming than all of the artificial "teenage panels" that seem to come at the end of every tech conference these days ("what will you kids pay for?" is always my favorite dumb question at these), or even the ethnographic academic studies that always seem to conclude that kids really like to "socialize."
In the book, three teenagers wage war on an out-of-control Homeland Security by employing crypto, open source, hardware hacking, and social engineering, all without seeming like the contrived movie characters who are always a little too glib, a little too knowledgeable. In fact reading the book on the 25th anniversary of War Games is fitting, for not since Broderick's everday geek have I seen such believable kid-hacker characters, and enjoyed so thoroughly the honest portrayal of self-discovery and confidence building that comes from twisting technology to tweak the system.
Update: The real world imitates art with kids hacking the MBTA, "arphids" and all...
I'm a VC at Matrix Partners living in the Boston area. I've started some stuff, worked at some
places, and I love making things.