Only hours after Google announces (ahem) "Google Gulp", Gulp caps are already finding their way on to Ebay!

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Okay, aside from the larger problems of having to have passwords at all, the need for multiple passwords to prevent your global security being lowered to the scruples/security of your weakest content provider, frequency attacks, and all the rest, my biggest peeve is entirely the site owner's fault, and is so easily fixed.

The following scenario happens to me at least twice a month:

1. Go to rarely-visited site requiring registration (eg The Mercury News)
2. Enter email address (I like that more and more places are using email addresses as unique identifiers instead of usernames. This is good.)
3. Enter my most-standard password
4. Find out that the password is incorrect. Try a variation
5. Still incorrect, try another variation
6. Asked again for my email address so they can send me a password-reset link
7. Go to email, follow link to reset page
8. On this reset page, and only on this reset page I'm told what the password requirements are. In this case, at least 6 characters, at least one of which can't be a letter
9. Instantly know what my password was all along, based on these obscure restrictions

   And these steps are just icing on the SJ Merc cake:)

10. 'Change' my password to what the password was all along
11. Get presented with the site's home page, not the story I was originally trying to access
12. Find the original article link I followed in the first place
13. Click that link
14. get presented with the LOGIN SCREEN.
15. Be thankful that I have at least the chimplike IQ to remember the password I just entered
16. Read the story I spent 10 minutes acquiring access to

Leaving aside the dumbfounded wonder of why my newspaper identification account has to be so secure as to necessitate password-acceptability constraints (Oh no! Someone is reading the news while pretending to be me!!), I ask you: how hard would it be to help out the user by reminding them of the idiosyncratic password constraints of your site after they enter the wrong password the first time? ("Your password was incorrect. Remember, SJ Merc passwords are at least 6 characters, one of which may not be a letter.")

For one of the most common design patterns on the web, it's amazing this one is usually so poorly implemented and non-standardized.

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I haven't bought stock in about three years after getting boosted and burned in the dotcom craze, but driving home from the airport with Rachel last Sunday I said "I think I should buy some TiVo stock." It recently took a bit of a dive (40% or so) and while everyone's manning the 'TiVo death watch' it's not the first time, and the first rule of investing is to buy things that are undervalued.

The market was closed Monday and on Tuesday I forgot about it until after the markets closed at 1pm Pacific time. Wednesday morning I wake to find that TiVo is up 25%. Drat.

At first I thought it was just a market correction, things finally adjusting to reality after a hard Tuesday market, but it seems that the 'Apple buys TiVo' rumor again resurfaced. Like two flames brought closer together burning brighter, the Apple buzz around iPods to be released today and the TiVo buzz about being in dire straits -- yet bagging their three millionth subscriber, combined to reignite the Apple-TiVo buyout rumor mill.

A couple mainstream venues reported the rumors and suddenly the stock is in play and, as these things do, it fed upon itself; increased volume and boyancy only giving credibility to the rumor.

I've no idea if the rumor's true or not, though if you've been here for a couple years then you know my take on it. Either way I hope the stock noses down a little bit so I can get in after all. Heck, maybe tomorrow Microsoft will announce that the X-box 360 will have a PVR built in, conjoined to a Blu-ray disc burner.

Anyhow, rah rah Apple, rah rah TiVo.

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The rumors are true: Bloglines is now part of the Big Butler. The grand internet land grab continues...

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A bunch of us on the team had watch lists for 'gmail' on Ebay, and were starting to get disappointed that nobody dared give up their invitation. Now that second-order invitations (invitees are getting invitations of their own) it was inevitable. Yesterday, people started auctioning Gmail invitations on Ebay.

Any guesses on what the first one will go for?

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Everyone's been posting Jim Louderback's premonition of TiVo's death like it's the Gospel, and so I feel compelled to tell you exactly why Jim (a reporter who's been naysaying the TiVo for years) is wrong, and that punchy three-word headlines don't equate to a balanced market analysis.

The simple reason TiVo will live is because TV is intimate. People want ownership of their experience, and they want ownership of the resulting media. This is exactly the opposite of what cable and satellite companies want.

Of course TiVo as a standalone appliance will fade away as Decoder-PVRs become common, but they'll grow into three other markets: The referenced cable/satellite set-top boxes, DVD-R burning hybrids, and as an integrated component of television sets. Two of these hybrids are already on the market (DirecTiVo and two different DVDiVos) and the third, Toshiba and Phillips TVs with integrated free 'tivo lite' will be here by Christmas.

Saying that Cable-PVRs will squash TiVo is like saying that cable squashed the VCR, when in reality it made it much stronger. For all the benefits that a cable PVR has (that it seems cheaper because the cost is built into your monthly charge), there's no content provider in the world who would ship a device that would record to DVD, and no network that would deign to be included in a service that did.

Recording to a DVD isn't as easy as recording to a tape, and this is where an integrated 'export this show to that disc' solution really shines. If you're going to buy a DVD anyhow, the incremental cost of adding PVR functionality is a gimmie. And yes, within the next 4 years it will be an incremental cost.

TiVo is source independent. Cable, satellite, bunny ears or closed-circuit TV, TiVo is your box. As each content provider has their own proprietary system, if you change providers, you have to change systems, a shift as big as switching from Mac to Windows. Oh yeah, and your shows are gone, too. It's content lock-in, and it's one of the big reasons Dish Networks wants you to use their box, so leaving their fold is more painful, even when they suddenly drop CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon because of a contract dispute.

As long as content providers carry copyrighted material on their networds, they'll be hobbled by the demands of organizations like the MPAA and Viacom who will use all the leverage they have to inhibit the end user's ability to export to any portable digital media. Standalone PVRs and in-TV PVRs are farther outside their control, and as that control is flexed, PVR customers will flock to these options.

TiVo-in-TV, which Sony plans to market later this year, is another gimmie. It will provide a free 3-day window to the future, with an inexpensive up-sell to season pass functionality. The TV-TiVo-DVR box is probably about 24 months away.

Jim's main point is that TiVo will fail because the costs of enteing the market and delivering product are dropping rapidly, but this is likely why they'll succeed. TiVo will never be a Yahoo or other conglomorate, but they will become a platform standard with a steady revenue stream. When prices fall uniformly, users flock to the best solution, not the cheapest. Getting PVRs into peoples hands cheaply, on the backs of other products is exactly why the market will succeed, and when the market succeeds, TiVo will likely be at the top of it, based on product quality.

True, you won't have to buy a $299 box for your parents to bring them the light, but when you see the glow in their eyes, talking about the magic recording TV they bought at Best Buy last month, you can bet it'll have a little guy with two antennae and no arms stickered onto the remote.

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A lot of tech blogs are linking to news of Toshiba's new 400GB hard disk drive.

So what?

Maybe living in internet time has jaded me, but back in 1995 I got a 1 gig drive for $700 and frankly I thought it was the shiznit. A few years later drives bloomed so large that I could take the 'the' and 'zni' out of my former opinion, because 1 gig was suddenly very old hat.

Since then, and well before, hard drive sizes have followed Moore's Curve (not Moore's Law, since that has to do with transistors on a microchip, but the curve is the same). Hard drive capacities at a given price point double every 12 months.

It's been true since I got my 5meg (yeah, meg) serial drive for my Mac 128K in 1985, and it was true until over two years ago, when 200 gig drives were mainstream.

Some time in the last two years, however, Moore seems to be slacking off, and what's more, nobody seems to be talking about it. So why the buzz over a 400 gig, 7200rpm drive? There are already plenty of 7200rpm drives out there (heck, there are 10,000rpm drives at Fry's), and 400 megs is just incremental over the 300gig drives on sale all over the place.

<whine>Where's my terabyte drive?</whine>

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Wired has an interesting article on lack of attribution in weblogs, and how many large blogs 'steal' ideas from smaller blogs without giving them attribution.

This certainly happens, and with the rising popularity of RSS feeds, it's easier and easier to read a few hundred blogs a day and pass along the interesting content, without attribution. For many sites, like Metafilter and BoingBoing, this is exactly the point, though Cory (Boingboing) does an exemplary job at citing sources. Since I'm currently working on building out my own 'meta-site' this is a subject of particular interest to me.

The argument's failing, and I freely admit that I need to dive deeper to determine whether it's a weak point of the article or of the underlying research, is that it assumes webloggers predominantly get their content from other weblogs. While that's often true, it's certainly not always the case.

Take for example the 'furry germs' example given in the Wired article: The author claims this is an example of a blog meme with a point blog source and dozens of copycaters blogging it on their own site, without attribution to the original blogger. This is absolutely not the case.

Having blogged about the "plushie microbes" four weeks ago myself, I know exactly where it came from: A monthly advertisement sent out to Think Geek customers. The Wired article's argument is that the specific term "furry germs" is a unique identifier, proving that any two bloggers using the words have the same blog source. In fact, the term "furry germs" is a fabricated example for the article that, at the time of this writing, doesn't exist anywhere on the web except for in the Wired article and in this one (so far as Google can see). More likely the actual example is the term "plush microbes", the term that is used in the marketing email, and on ThinkGeek's site itself.

It's small wonder that bloggers would use the same term when writing about the product, and isn't any evidence of 'blogstealing'. On the contrary, this example raises awareness that we, as bloggers, use the whole world as our source, and that often the same part of the world is shown to many of us at the same time (e.g. through advertisements, the news, terrorist acts).

It's only natural that advertising would raise awareness of a new product, and the far more accurate implication that bloggers don't feel compelled to cite a source when the source is an advertisement that shows up in their inbox is much less insidious than saying we all read each other's weblogs to pilfer content and self-aggrandize.

Just for fun, it might be interesting to have 'attribution week' in the blogosphere, where we carefully document the source of every idea we blog, in as detailed a form as possible.

I propose the week of April 18th, when we're all done with taxes.

[thanks to Amit Asaravala at Wired News, a member of the Terra-Lycos Network]

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Apparently Eminem is suing Apple, Chiat/Day, MTV and Viacom for using one of his songs without his permission in an iPod ad. To quote his publisher, "Eminem has never nationally endorsed any commercial products and ... even if he were interested in endorsing a product, any endorsement deal would require a significant amount of money, possibly in excess of $10 million."

Funny, I'd think a rapper who changed his name in order to ape that of a popular candy has lower standards of commercial endorsement.

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I'm about to make Amazon a whole lot of money.

As much as I like movies and CDs, the single worst part of the user experience of buying a CD or DVD, or being gifted with same, is the initial user experience: the packaging. Today I'll bypass my tirade about how CD jewel cases are the worst storage device since the mousetrap, and use the copy of Pirates of the Caribbean DVD I got from my mom, as an example.

First, the good. Amazon gets it part-way right. Unlike Costco, Target, or any number of dirtworld retailers, Amazon has done the consumer a favor and nixed the exterior cardboard packaging that serves only to make a DVD case the same height as a CD jewel case trapped within its in-store protective theft-deterrent plastic prison. (must resist CD tirade...) I would credit Amazon's customer-oriented approach here, except that clearly this is a deal Amazon hammered out with the manufacturers for their own sake. When you're selling in volume, volume counts, and the dead air and dead weight of the too-tall cardboard boxes weigh heavy on razor-thin margins.

No, my beef is with the stupid sticky plastic labels designed to prevent us from opening the DVD 'keepsake case'. "SECURITY DEVICE ENCLOSED" scream labels on three sides, adhered securely along the three edges of the case to ensure that we not only know that there is, indeed, a security device enclosed, but that we'll have to sit down and have a tete-a-tete with a tooth or nail before we can break in to the case and see it. In truth, RF-tag or no, the labels themselves are security devices because they inhibit would-be five-fingered fraudsters from easily opening cases in the store and making with the discs, sans-case.

Of course, Amazon's DVDs and CDs never see the inside of a store and now, well into paragraph five, we get to the point: Inventory control (err, shoplifting-prevention) is an important part of the K-mart experience, but Amazon? What kind of security are we talking about? Is there a swordbreaker or small shield in the box, to help keep me safe from the movie? What kind of security device does Amazon need to cozy in next to my DVD, so volitile that it has to be sealed inside this sanctum by a snap-case with three security labels (one with a hologram) and a skein of plastic-wrap to ensure the pristine state?

"SECURITY DEVICE ENCLOSED" rings about as false on an e-commerce customer's ears as does 'Provided by the Management for Your Protection' does on a toilet-seat cover dispener. "What Management? Protection from what? Umm. thank you?" I can almost picture a senior VP coming in to the bathroom stall after working hours to replenish the supply, smug in the knowledge of a rectally-protected workforce.

This kind of anal-retentive mindset can be recycled when trying to contemplate exactly how forcing you to remove stickers from a plastic case is actually the consumer doing their part in preventing crime as if to say, "if this sticker is missing, then the terrorists have already won."

Is there a posterior ulterior motive at work? Within the "flagship sticker"'s hologram, is there a microscopic EULA binding my soul to the merchandising and marketing goals of the movie therein and all possible forthcoming sequels?

Jeff, as your company inches toward its first profitable quarter while struggling to differentiate itself from bricks and mortar book warehouses, how 'bout if you wield your mighty influence to change the small things that everyone will thank you for. Get rid of the 'peel here to reveal next protective device' stickers.

Picture next year's gift-giving season when Timmy unwraps the DVD Star Wars 6-pack and in place of eighteen prophylactic devices standing between him and his entertainment, he sees a small sticker that says, 'No security device needed. Thanks for buying from Amazon!'

You're trying to lead the world in a marketplace of fungible products. Grab on to any differentiator you can, especially the ones that make your customers' lives easier.

Oh, and while you're at it, see what you can do about those big red FBI warnings. Really, in today's world aren't there more important ways for the FBI to instill fear in the people?

Thanks,

Kevin Fox
fury.com

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I wonder if anything should be read into the fact that the #6 book on Amazon's purchase circles page for Apple Computer is Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life?

I read and liked Po's earlier book, The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, a fictional account of silicon valley culture, along the lines of Microserfs, though not quite as compelling (20Mil has a wider lens, while MS focused more on the person inside).

Certainly, it's a weird time for the silicon valley. Now that things have started settling down after the bubble and the burst, I think a lot of people are wondering what's next. There are companies that, while not gone, have lost their luster, and the idealism of their surviving employees might have been rubbed away at the same time.

Google's moving campuses down the block. A bunch of us moved in a couple weeks ago. We've moved in to one of the buildings in SGI's corporate headquarters, as they slowly move into smaller, less expensive digs. Right now we share the space. We share the lunchroom, the parking lot, but we're walking in different worlds. The attaboy slogans of idealism in the cafe, plastered with the SGI logo, ring hollow; a cautionary tale of how little the distance is between mission statements and jingoism. On the wall of the cafe, an LED sign blithely reminds SGIers that nominations for a certain internal achievement award are 'due by 4/17'. No year is specified.

In the meantime, Google is fantastic. Our company party was last Friday and it was a lot of fun. Coincidentally, the party was at the Computer History Museum which, furthering irony, also happens to have been SGI's headquarters, before they moved in to the building I'm in right now.

It's nearly 9pm and Rachel'll be coming home from her show soon. I probably oughta finish up and get home. Tomorow morning I need to go to the DMV first-thing before heading in to the office. Turns out my drivers license extension expires tomorrow and I'll probably need a valid license to pick up my new car which, incidentally, will also hopefully happen tomorrow.

Hope y'all had a great weekend!

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After getting such positive feedback last year, and a reminder email today from a reader (as well as from my mom, one of the singers) I'm happy to remind folks that the Verdugo Hills Showtime Chorus will be delivering live telephone singing holiday cards this holiday season.

The deal is that for just $5-9 (local, long distance, or international), you can have a group of professional-quality chorus singers call whomever you wish and sing them holiday wishes. These are live (and very nice) people, who enjoy giving holiday wishes as much as your friends and family will enjoy getting them.

All of the holidaygrams will be sung on Saturday, December 13th, and they're happy to sing on the answering machine if your recipient isn't home. Actually, some recipients prefer that so they can listen again and again.

Happy Holidays!

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[from the 'it-never-hurts-to-ask' department]

For two months HP has been selling 17" flat panel displays for $199, a little over half off their usual price.

Now they want them back.

It's one thing to not honor an order when they catch it before shipping, another when they've already charged your credit card, but when the item's already shipped and paid for, and the customer's been using it for a month, I'd say it's too late for the company to cry foul. Nevertheless, the voicemail is a nice example of killing with kindness.

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I loved working at Yahoo, but I've got to say that Google has the right idea when it comes to caring for the consumer. While Yahoo is spearheading a drive for premium services, Google is all about the people.

Case in point: Blogger Pro features are now free. And what about those folks who already have a paid annual Blogger Pro subscription? They can get a pro-rated refund (even though the user is still getting everything they paid for!) or a Blogger hoodie sweatshirt, their choice, even if the refund would only be a few pennies.

Heck, even Apple isn't that good to their customers.

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Today Casady & Greene closed its doors forever.

Ten years ago, when I started programming for the Apple Newton PDA (can you believe that it was introduced ten years ago?) I looked for a publisher to partner with and, after several months, I found Casady & Greene. They published 'Reflex', my Newton productivity toolkit, and would have published 'Nexus', an amazing addition to the NewtonOS, if Apple hadn't closed the Newton down.

The folks at C&G are an amazing bunch. I'm really sorry to see that they've fallen on hard times. Still, hopefully the individuals that made the company what it was will go on to their own new adventures and find new joys.

Thank you, Casady & Greene!

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The damned spammers have a new trick up their sleeve that's been foiling my mail client's smart spam filtering. They insert comment tags <!-- like this --> throughout their email, between words every few letters, so neither my email client's Bayesian logic nor my own explicit filter for 'viagra' will flag it as spam. I've literally been getting about 40 of these emails sidestepping my email program every day for the last couple weeks. Here's an example.

The two simplest solutions seem to be Apple's updating of mail to filter out comment tags in the html portions of email before running its spam filtering, or switching to an email client like Mailsmith that will let me write my own complex rules using regular expressions and perl, so I could make filters like "If the email has more than 4 comment tags" or "If, when all comment tags are removed, one of these keywords exists."

Option three is just filter out every piece of email that has a comment tag in the first place, only a lot of legitimate email has these tags (for no reason but to help the lazy programmer who didn't bother taking it out, even though no reader should ever see it).

Apple? Are you working on this problem?

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After 20 years, the has expired. Now freeware image manipulation tools can once again encode in teh GIF format without infringing on copyright and opening themselves up to lawsuits!

If this matters to you, you're a geek.

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Yesterday Steve Jobs gave a presentation to 150 representatives from independent music labels, offering distribution through the Apple Music Store. CD Baby! has posted their notes from the event.

It sounds very cool, and very well thought out. It even opens the door for small indie labels to become clearinghouses for 'ultra-indie' musicians, lowering the barrier to entry even further than it is now.

The thing I was most impressed by is Apple's claim that they will always refuse money for preferential placement. Those big banners touting the 'band of the moment' are created by Apple, solely by what the Apple music specialists think is good and worthy, not by big promotions contracts. One of the label reps was dubious, asking how they can be sure it will always be that way, and an Apple exec responded that Apple's been in the OS business for 20 years, and they've never sold an icon on the desktop like other companies have. (Is this actually true? Did no money change hands for System 7 or 8, when IE was on the desktop, or when the 'Connect to the Internet' icon drove you to an Earthlink sign-up page?)

Since the 'bestselling songs' are calculated on a rolling 24-hour basis, even a small relatively unknown band can get on the chart by organizing its fans to get friends to buy music on the same day, pumping it up in to the list, where it will either fall the next day, or stay high by virtue of the music.

Indie stuff should start appearing on the site within 90 to 120 days. I can't wait.

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So I've been thinking (always a dangerous sign). With Apple's new Music Store, they enforce digital rights management (DRM) by apparently encrypting the songs they download to you with a key to ensure that only a computer registered to you can listen to the music. Other bloggers have verified that the actual content portion of the song is changed, not just some identifying header, having purchased the same song under two IDs and otherwise identical conditions, and finding no similarity to the data within the song files, though they play identically.

Under Apple's digital rights management scheme (which, by the way, for all the evils of DRM, is the least evil I've seen), an Apple Music Store customer can play their purchased music on a Mac that has been linked to their account, and at any time up to three macs can be so linked. At the same time, any song from the Apple Music Store can be played on any iPod, which brings me to my thought: How does the iPod get around the DRM?

What I mean to say is, if the song file is protected, presumably through some sort of encryption, so that only computers in possession of a decryption key linked to the user's account can decrypt a song, how are the iPods exempt?

It seems to me that there are four possible solutions:

1. The files are encrypted by the user's personal key and that key is actually included inside the song file, so that iPods can decrypt any song. Mind you, any other application that knows about the key could decrypt any song, too, unless the key itself is encrypted by another key that is stored somewhere in the flash rom of every iPod so that iPods, and only iPods, can decrypt the key in the song, then use that key to decrypt the song. I believe this is similar to how DVD encryption works, though I could be wrong.
2. Similar to #1, perhaps when a mac uploads a song to an iPod, it tacks on the user's personal decryption key along with the song so the iPod can decode it. A way to test if this is the case is to take a protected song to someone else's mac (that can't play the song because it doesn't have the key), then try and upload it to an iPod and see if the song plays. If it doesn't play, then it means that songs have to be loaded on to iPods from 'permitted' computers.
3. When uploading to the iPod, the mac might completely decrypt the song and then upload it, obviating the need for any kind of decryption on the iPod side. In this case, as in #2, only a 'permitted' computer could successfully upload a song to an iPod. The difference here is that if two people purchased the same song, then uploaded them to iPods, then copied the song back from the iPod, using command-line copying or another third-party iPod tool, then the two files should be decrypted, and identical to each other. Incidentally, these files would likely be playable on any AAC player, effectively removing the DRM without sacrificing quality.
4. Maybe the files aren't actually encrypted at all, and are just made to look different by inserting a small amount of random noise, or a digital signature, to the original waveform prior to encoding, so that the files can be tracked, and playability on different computers is solely regulated by a weak honor-based system within iTunes.

With a little time and two Apple Music Store accounts, it should be easy to tell which of these systems is being used (unless it's something other than the possibilities above). I might do it if I have the time in the next week or so, but I'm really just more curious than anything else. I don't feel the need to go around trying to break Apple's DRM and be a new EFF poster child fighting the DMCA.

For now my main hope is that TiVo sends out an update for its Home Media Option so that it can play my Apple-bought music, especially since Apple's courting independent labels today, and many more cool bands could be in the store in the next couple months.

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Rachel's selling her talking bobblehead. I'm selling my Desktop Powermac G4. I bought a copy of one of my favorite books, and I'm trying to get a (presumably pirate) Buffy OMWF DVD.

I used to think that the Apple Music Store was addictive, but eBay is crack. Damn you, federal tax refund! I find myself in front of the computer thinking "what would I want to buy if I could ever find it? Oh! there it is!"

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The recent launch of Apple's Music Store is clear evidence of their continuing focus on media acquisition and management. The iApps (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD) and iPod all focus on integrating media into Apple owners' daily lifestyle. Could Apple do for TV portability what it's done for music portability?

Business 2.0 thinks maybe. I feel the same way.

Apple and TiVo have been working together heavily on streaming media over the last six months, TiVo's Home Media Option is the first 'entertainment appliance' to take advantage of Rendezvous, Apple's implementation of a simplified network discovery and sharing protocol. TiVo 'gets it' as far as Apple technology goes. To use media sharing of music and photos from a Windows box to a TiVo requires a 16 megabyte application specifically for organizing music into playlists and photos into albums that can be shared over the network to the TiVo. The Mac download is a 288k control panel that just creates a bridge from the TiVo to the user's iTunes and iPhoto library, whether iTunes or iPhoto are running or not.

The Apple/TiVo relationship has brought Apple content onto the TiVo, and an Apple acquisition of TiVo could push data the other way as well. A couple weeks ago Apple unveiled new iPods in 10, 15, and 30 gigabytes. 30 gigabytes is enough storage for 20 days of uninterrupted, unrepeated music. Perhaps a bit excessive. On the other hand, 30 gigs is enough to store 120 hours of high-quality video compressed for an iPod-sized screen (320x240) using a realtime compressing codec (it could be smaller in MPEG-4, but it wouldn't be able to compress video on-the-fly). An iPod with an on-board MPEG2 decoder could synch small-screen versions of TiVo shows on to your iPod for watching anywhere. Perhaps full-screen files could also be saved for display on a regular TV via an S-Video port (after all, the line-out sound port is already there).

Would it make sense for TiVo to be bought by Apple? It probably makes more sense than the Apple/Universal Music rumors, since technology is what Apple's all about, not the creation of content or the managing of artists, and TiVo follows that line completely. Personally, I don't know whether the buyout would happen, and what that could mean for TiVo's existing partners, Sony, Phillips, and Toshiba, but the current ties between the companies give me hope for a Video iPod.

It makes a certain sense: Video is the next logical step in the iPod's evolution, and nobody has nailed the scheduling, acquisition, and presentation of video broadcasts like TiVo has. A strategic partnership here could really go a long way.

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I keep hearing the same numbers all over the net about the Apple Music Store. 99 cents a track, $10 an album, 200,000 songs in their library, and 275,000 songs were purchased in the first 16 hours of operation.

I thought of a couple more interesting numbers...

First, about the new iPods. 10, 15, and 30 gigabytes. That's a lot of space. With the 30 gig iPod, that's 21 days of solid music with no repeats.

7,500 songs in your pocket they say. $499. Pricey for a music player, but not out of this world.

Nobody ever mentions that at $1 a track, it would cost you $7,500 to fill up your 30 gig iPod. If you opt for the economy $299 10 gig iPod, it'll only cost a paltry $2,500 to fill it.

Of course it costs more if you actually bought CDs at $15 each and are ripping them to MP3.

On the other side of the equation, the massive 200,000 song library, ostensibly representing the crown jewels of the big five record labels, fits nicely on one third of a single Xserve RAID box.

So, looked at with a hand on the cynical stick, you can put 7,500 songs in your pocket... for the cost of half a Honda, or you could fit the whole collection in to 1U (3 inches) of rack space for half the cost of a typical San Francisco house (or a couple beautiful homes in Pittsburgh).

It reminds me of the pre-CD era Adobe Font Folio that service bureaus could buy for $30,000 and they'd throw the hard drive in for free! I wonder if they'll have a deal where where when you buy more than $3,000 at the Apple Music Store you get a free iPod to put the music in?

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I've been pretty free about spreading my email address around, deciding that since my email address is already on spammers lists, hiding it now would be like trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. When I see people list email addresses as 'hello at fury dot com' and such, I wonder how well that kind of obfuscation thwarts email harvesting spiders.

The Center for Democracy & Technology knows where spam comes from. This article is the most insightful look into how the online world works that I've seen this year. It's truly fascinating reading.

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Digital rights management (DRM), when applied to music, makes no logical sense for at least the next decade.

When dealing with the medium of audio (music), where it is assured that new releases will continue to be made available on compact discs for at least the next decade due to the embedded market of CD players, embedding DRM protections into digitally downloaded songs will do absolutely nothing to decrease unauthorized copying and playing of those songs.

The reasoning goes like this: A new song or album is released both online in DRM form, and on compact disc. Even if 80% of the purchases are of the online DRM file (thinking to how the world might be in 15 years, but not as it is today, where online downloads reflect about 0.05% of an album's sales), even if 8 of 10 buyers have 'inert' versions of the song that can't be played anywhere but on devices they own, the other 20% can still rip an mp3 (or aac, or ogg) of the song, and inject it into the sea of P2P file sharing spheres.

To look at it another way, if there was an extremely virulent disease, (music just wants to propagate, after all) and 50,000 people were infected with it (people buying an even moderately popular album) but DRM acted as a prophylactic, preventing 40,000 of those buyers (or 25 of those buyers, using today's ratio) from spitting into the well, but the other 10,000 (49,975) buyers are still free to do so, anyone who wants to get sick can still drink from the well.

DRM's success is contingent on its universality. If a single unprotected digital source is available to the public, then getting an unprotected mp3 into the P2P world is trivial.

Look to DVDs for a more successful example of DRM. True, they can't prevent you from sharing your DVD with others (yet, though it's been tried (ahem *DivX* (I mean the other DivX))), but it's more convoluted (and less DMCA-friendly) to encode or copy an encrypted DVD.

The point here is that new digital music download services, and I'm specifically talking about Apple's new venture, have no need for DRMs, because they still represent the minority distribution channel.

DRM's useful as a tool of restriction only if its use stops someone from getting the file by other means, but DRM-ing songs sold online won't stem the flow of ripped mp3s. that won't happen until every CD player is replaced by one with DRM technology in it, or at least as many as are needed before the labels see it as more profitable to stop making 'open' CDs, forcing people to buy new players.

That transition hasn't even begun, and if the transition from LP and cassette to compact disc is any guide, it'll take at least 15 years from beginning to end.

Most importantly, until that end is reached, and the last 'open' CD is pressed, applying DRM technology to purchased digital downloads does everything to hamper fair consumer use, while providing no benefit to the music publisher.

With 5 days before Apple's unveiling of 'the next big thing' in music, let's hope they're smart enough to realize this, and even better, smart enough to have convinced the major labels as well.

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"We are small enough to listen to you!"

--MacGPS Pro web site

What a great way to accentuate the positive.

Incidentally, this is probably my biggest concern with the Google/Blogger buyout. Right now Pyra is small enough that if I have a really good idea, I can email Ev and talk about it, and maybe even get things done. As I understand it, that's how most of Blogger's new features and interfaces get started.

Will Bloogle still be small enough to listen to me?

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Irate Scottsman has an interesting entry on inconsistencies in UI controls amongst Apple's own iApplications.

Personally, ever since Apple started with the iApps, I've been questioning the conflict of interest between Apple's setting UI guidelines, and then breaking them in their own applications in order to make those applications feel more appealing than third-party options.

The 'chrome' UI window theme used by iTunes, iPhoto, Safari and others is the clearest example of this. It lends the applications a sense of utility and refinement above that of applications that actually follow Apple's published UI guidelines.

It goes further than that though. Back when we were implementing webcams into the mac version of Yahoo Messenger, and I was creating the interface for the webcam broadcaster, I sought to follow the play/pause/ffw designs that Apple had established. Seeing the similarity in the webcam broadcaster's utility with that of quicktime, it made sense to leverage off the media controls OS X users were already familiar with.

Quicktime Controls

I got in touch with the UI evangelist at Apple and asked where I could get the approved 'bead' graphics for the play/pause/stop buttons, and I was told that not only were those graphics unavailable for third-party use, but that they are specific to Apple, and that other applications with interfaces requiring play, pause and stop buttons should not seek to emulate these controls.

What? Beaded buttons are one of the primary differentiating visual characteristics of OS X, and Apple goes through great pains to make sure they're used pervasively in third-party applications. Yet somehow media buttons fall outside the fold.

My first thought was that Apple's software revenue is tightly focused on digital media applications, but if that were the case, I would think that they'd put more effort in keeping their interface controls consistent across their own cutting-edge apps. Instead, each iApp tweaks the standard, either slightly, by beveling it down into a chrome window (iTunes), swapping the order of the 'rewind' and 'full rewinid' controls (iMovie 2), or eventually abandoning the bead style completely, as iMovie 3 has done:

iTunes Controls

iMovie 2 Controls

iMovie 3 Controls

Sadly, it seems that Apple's UI guidelines are created by waterfall design. They create cool new applications, then update the guidelines to accommodate. Thus, the application designer with the keys to the Apple UI palace can innovate all they want, then declare it the standard upon release. Third-party apps rush to follow suit, but by the time they do they seem outdated and boring, and Apple's taken the next step.

It reminds me of the Microsoft light bulb joke: "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "None: They just adopt darkness as the new standard, then charge customers for the right to unscrew their own light bulbs for compliance."

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Looking back five years from now, this will probably be the single event that will have changed the face of personal communications more than any other event in 2003.

Google has purchased Pyra Labs, providers of Blogger.

Oh, and I'm not sure what my intellectual property dealio is with Yahoo, so please don't ask me why Yahoo didn't buy Pyra a year ago when I was UI designer for GeoCities and Pyra was inches from insolvency. It's a painful memory anyhow...

Okay, to elaborate more, I think Google is the perfect Pyra buyer because their user-driven mentality is right in line with Evan's mentality. Google Labs is full of cool ideas that three-person Google teams come up with, and the ones that get a lot of user attention and use get funded further and get ramped up for mainstream use. It makes perfect sense to me that Google would be attracted to the best extra-googliar example of this mentality: Blogger, the first large-scale hosted blog application.

I can't wait to see where this goes! I just wish I was a part of it.

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...almost as much as I love late-night procrastination.

Why do I love Amazon? This is why.

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No, I'm not talking about my GAP jacket with pouches for my iPod, Elph, and Sidekick, but instead the tech revolution going on an entirely different 'slicker' industry.

I remember when being desensitized was bad, but apparently it's all the rage in the U.K.

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(Executive summary: Internationally renowned women's chorus (and my mom) sings holiday greetings to the persons of your choosing, anywhere in the world, for $7-10)

I probably don't post about my family as much as I ought to, and I keep meaning to write about how proud I am of my sister for becoming a foster parent this year, or the rest of my family for their wide-reaching accomplishments, but today I'm writing to tell you how proud I am of my mom, and to let you know about a really cool gift you can get for your loved ones. Yes, this is a plug, but it's a really worthwhile one. If you think so too, I hope that you'll tell your family and friends, and/or post it on your own weblog. These nice folks deserve all the exposure they can get.

My mom's a member of the Verdugo Hills Showtime Chorus, a member chorus of Sweet Adelines International. Along with about a hundred other accomplished vocalists in her chorus, she regularly performs in large competitions. I had the privilidge of hearing them perform at the Buckeye Invitational competition in Columbus, Ohio last August, where they swept all the award categories. They're really good.

Okay Kevin, cut to the chase:

For the past several years, every holiday season, the girls have done singing holiday cards. You give them the name and phone number of the person you want to serenade, and the best time to call, and on December 14th they'll call that person up, anywhere in the world, home, cellphone, whatever, and they'll sing your choice of one of ten holiday songs (repertoire includes Silent Night, Jingle Bell Rock, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, the Hanukkah song, and others listed on the order page). No recordings, no canned anything. The real deal.

The lowdown: Twenty-five singers performing live in four-part harmony (barbershop style): tenor, lead, baritone and base, singing specifically to your recipient. People really love it. It has a very personal touch, and won't be a throwaway gift that'll gather dust in the closet, but a memory that they'll keep with them.

So how much does it cost? Just $7. Less than you'd spend on a doohicky they'd never use. If your recipient is outside of Southern California, it's just $8 (long distance charges included in the price). International is only $10.

Renting a philharmonic orchestra costs $70,000 a day, so having a chorus of highly talented singers spreading holiday cheer for one ten-thousandth of that is quite a deal!

I recommend ordering early. The order deadline is December 11th, as long as they don't fill up before then. If they get enough interest, they may add have a second day, but there's no guarantee.

So that's my plug. They're really great folks, and their specialty is spreading holiday cheer, and they even accept PayPal. I'll be giving singing holiday cards to a slew of my friends this year. Also, they have no advertising budget, so this is all spread word of mouth. If you agree that this is a cool gift, please pass this permalink along to family and friends (weblogs, etc), as my testimonial gives a lot more detail about the service than their order page provides.

Happy Holidays!

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This is interesting... Flexplay has developed a DVD that will 'expire' 8 hours after it comes into contact with air. [sorry for the nyt link. registration required]

At first I thought this was stupid, but then at first I thought it related to music CDs. Stupid because you would have all the more reason to mp3 encode it immediately upon purchase. But for DVDs, well, when a product enters the market, the public decides whether it will succeed, and where DivX failed (buy a disc with the rights to watch for 48 hours, then buy more rights to 'license' it permanently on a single DVD player), these 'self-destruct' discs might just work.

You see, I have problems with DVDs. I'll buy ones I like, and then rarely watch them. Sometimes I'll rent DVDs at Blockbuster, but that requires me to drive to Blockbuster, rent it, after giving Blockbuster all kinds of personal data they can use to bill me or track me, watch it within a day or two, and then go back there to return it, or face messy late fees.

Netflix is a little better, but then I'm paying a flat monthly fee, when some months I'll watch 8 movies, and other months I'll watch none.

What this new tech would probably do to the market is that DVDs would just be a commodity like groceries. If these single-use DVDs were comparable in price to a Blockbuster rental, I could pick up a couple copies of Lord of the Rings for later viewing at $2 or $3 each, and then buy the full Special Edition DVD when it comes out.

More importantly, I could go shopping for DVDs at the video store once every few months, and pick up all those films I know I want to see, without having to pay hundreds of dollars for permenant versions, or keep going back every week (and hope that the movie's in stock) to rent the one I want to watch that night.

Also, if I really like a film and I want all my friends to see it, I can buy a handful of copies and give them as gifts. At a sixth the price of a DVD, it's not such a grand gesture, or dent in the wallet.

Since the discs are cheap to make, this could also be a great viral marketing mechanism. When you buy a 'full' DVD, you might also get one or two 'single use' copies in there. This way, when I buy Amelie, because I love it so, I can get a few discs that I can give to friends, making me an instant Amelie evangelist. Those friends, if they love it as I do, might turn around and buy the full DVD, or at least a couple more single-use DVDs of their own, or for friends.

DVD-of-the-month-club also becomes a much more financially reasonable proposition.

Christmas would be much more fun if I didn't have to hope that my friend would like the DVD I chose for her, or pretend to like the one I got. When you can give someone a library of single-viewing experiences, you're more likely to make them happy, and it's easier to trade an inexpensive item with your friends for one you'd rather have.

Basically, you're buying, selling, giving, and trading movie tickets that you can redeem in your own home, the instant you open the airtight seal.

Especially when you consider how many portable devices use DVDs (computers, protable players, card, etc.), the idea of being able to 'rent' a DVD that you never have to return or pay late fees on, and can wait as long as you want before using, looks like exactly what's needed.

Despite the instant reaction to any sort of digital rights management technology, I actually think this is way cool, and could completely change people's spending habits on DVDs.

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Well, despite paying for overnight shipping, my sidekick's slowboating it here from Texas, and I'm without cell service at all until Thursday, at the earliest. I had to cancel my AT&T service before ordering the new phone because I wasn't sure that I could cancel it without paying the early termination fee, despite the terrible reception I get at home with that phone.

Anyhow, my only phone for the moment is my home phone, and that doesn't even have voicemail. Looks like email's the way to get a hold of me for a while.

Come Thursday though, I'll be a cornucopia of connectivity, with email, real web access, SMS messaging, instant messaging (on AIM :-/ ) and of course cellphone service, all in my pocket.

Technology's so cool, but I just don't have the patience...

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Like the ultimate Jewish dilemma (see above re hammy part), I just got a spam from an artist who's composed his own 'inspired by Lord of the Rings' soundtrack, and it's available on mp3.com. I don't know whether to be happy about the distribution of small, unlabeled artists, or to be annoyed by the spam. I think I'll do both.

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Just got an email from Jeff Bezos (err, from Amazon, anyhow) asking me to test their new clothing metastore, spanning offerings from the Gap, Old Navy, Nordstrom, Lands' End, Target, Eddie Bauer, Foot Locker, 'and many more.'

I get a $30 gift certificate if I spend $50 or more, and it's likely not so much a test as a buzz campaign. It looks like anyone gets the $30 gift certificate. You don't have to be sent the letter (though I bet millions got the letter all the same).

I'm shopping for a winter jacket anyhow, so perhaps I'll check it out. You can too.

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So I made the Amazon purchase today, and four items, including the oversized textbook, are on their way to me. I gotta say, living 50 miles from an amazon distribution point makes for some lighting-fast fulfillment. I've had an order arrive less than 14 hours after I placed it.

And I shared the love. Rather than sift through email addresses and determine who might like what (not that I could break it down by item anyhow), I just decided to send it to all my 'Amazon Friends.' Not that Karen cares about The Computer Music Tutorial, or Ernie wants MacOS X for Unix Geeks, but overall I figured a lot of people might be interested in something on the list.

I just hope that my mom doesn't decide she wants to give Tenacious D a try.

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You know you're in a serious class when Amazon tells you that the textbook is

"inelligible for Super Save Shipping due to its unusual size or weight, and will incur a separate shipping charge of $1.40"

on top of standard shipping fees.

It's also amusing that they also advertize a "Great Buy" when I buy this $65 book along with another $60 book on a related topic, for the combined special price of... $125! Suchadeal! Okay, stopping now...

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My Wells Fargo Visa card expires this month, so it was no surprise to get a new one in the mail yesterday. What was surprising was that I'd been upgraded, and now warrant a Platinum Card.

Amusing to me is that my credit limit hasn't changed a cent, staying at a $3,000 max I haven't reached in the last two years. But now it's Platinum. It's pretty. This is now the card I'm proud to pull ot of my wallet when paying for dinner and trying to impress a date. After all, it's Platinum and it looks Platinum, and that says far more about my ability to be a family provider than if I opted for a translucent green card, which I can only guess is supposed to tacitly inform my dining partner that I'm looking to get married so that I can obtain citizenship.

Heck, my new credit card even has a Platinum Magnetic Stripe on the back, to impress others with my ability to induce ferromagnetism in otherwise nonferrous metals (not to mention making life difficult for people who can't tell where the stripe is, rendering near useless the semiotic drawing at ATMs showing which of the four orientations is the right one for swiping their card).

The funny part is that this is a credit card that was put on hold by Wells Fargo only last week because of suspicious activity. They sent me a nice letter letting me know that there was unusual activity on my card, and they did me the service of putting a hold on the card until I called them to go over the recent charges, item by item, to verify that they were all mine and authorized.

So I gave them a call and found out that the unusual activity was that, after six months of being overlooked in favor of my check card, I actually used it. I suppose to their fancy computers with their bayesian logic trees, that is unusual activity, and therefore suspicious enough to warrant shutting the card off, so that I don't do it again.

But now I have my fancy new Platinum card, lifting my spirits while padding my ass. I just hope all the honeys I try to impress with my ability to incur serious debt don't realize that every Wells Fargo customer is turning Platinum this year.

Shiny.

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Today, France has officially surpassed California as the fifth-largest global economy.

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(I only wonder what kind of googles that title will attract...)

Crystal pointed me to an interesting Amazon photo and review of Harry Potter's Nimbus 2000 broomstick. Check out the last (as of now, anyhow) review.

I'm not sure which is funnier: the visual, or the fact that the reviewer only rated it one out of five stars for educational value!

On a related note, Amazon is getting a little too touchy-feely, as their most recent 'new for you' email to me reveals.

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Okay, so since the ad had taken on a life of its own, sparking conversations all over the place, I feel the need to write just a bit more about what bothers me, and what doesn't, about Apple's recent tactics.

First and foremost, I'm not particularly bothered that Apple has decided to charge for iTools. I'm sad for the necessity, but that's the way the web is going, and though there's still the ambiguity about whether iTools was a feature of 10.1 and 9.0, or if only the hooks into it were features, that's another battle, and a point that Apple should explicitly address in one form or another, especially as they're on the cusp of releasing a new version of the OS, and many users may be asking themselves which of the 150 new features will Apple start charging for next year?

No, the problem I have with Apple is that even though Apple SVP Phil Shiller admits that the average conversion rate to paid services is 10 percent, though they hope to beat that, Apple is shutting out the 90% of Mac users and Apple loyalists who choose not to pay for the premium services.

Let me be explicit here: I'm not saying that this 90% (which, by the way, consists of 1.9 million Mac users; a fair chunk of their 5% market share, and a number significantly greater than the entire user base using OS X) deserves free iTools functionality in perpetuity. I'm not even saying, despite the fact that Yahoo and hotmail have free email offerings, that Apple should have a free, limited level of service. I am saying that there are two levels of consumer standards that Apple should meet: The first is an obligation to existing users, and the second is a more intelligent, palatable product structure.

Apple needs to make money off iTools/.mac. That's their prerogative. By offering a reasonable suite of products at what can be argued as a reasonable price for those products, Apple has created what is to many, a viable subscription package, and perhaps even a good deal. For users who wish to retain the services that they had been getting for free, along with the new services, that's great. For those who choose not to pay for the service and move on to other providers for their needs, Apple has an ethical obligation to do at least a bare minimum to help those Mac users out.

Apple has claimed that they need to make .mac profitable. Fine. They claimed that iTools was not a sustainable model. I believe that too. The problem is that Apple has made a deliberate decision to not allow forwarding addresses or change-of-address bounces on expired mac.com accounts, and that is Apple turning its back on those Mac customers who are loyal enough to use a Mac, but not loyal enough to buy all the bells and whistles Apple has to offer.

This is, quite plainly, dirty pool.

It creates pissed off users who have committed only two sins: believing that a mac.com email address offered as free from Apple would either stay free or close down gracefully, and choosing not to buy a subscription bundle that costs 10 times more than the functionality they desire.

What's the right thing to do? It's simple. Mail forwarding isn't the answer. It doesn't educate the sender about the new address, and requires Apple to expend server resources for an unspecified period of time. Unless the user proactively informs every person who sends them mail via mac.com, Apple will face the same problem months or years down the road.

When Apple shuts off the free mac.com email addresses, anyone sending to such an address will get an 'undeliverable mail' message when the email hits Apple's mail servers. This 'server tax' will happen no matter how Apple treats their expired mac.com accounts. Allowing mac.com users to specify a 'change of address,' and modifying the Apple mail servers to bounce, not an 'undeliverable mail' gobbledygook server error message, but instead a 'This user is no longer at mac.com. You can reach them at . Please update your address book.' requires only one hit to a database to lookup the new address. This flow educates the sender, doesn't require the former mac.com user to know the email address of everyone who might email them, and gives Apple users the freedom to choose the package that's right for them, instead of locking iTools users into Apple's product because of their email equity held hostage.

This is the right thing for Apple to do, and to do otherwise is to admit that Apple is in such dire financial straits that a 10% conversion to .mac is more important than the goodwill of the remaining 90% who, let's not forget, will be deciding whether they want to pay $130 for Jaguar in the next few months.

So, that's the bare minimum. Now let's look at the product offering itself:

In their own breakdown of costs, justifying their claim that $99 a year is a good deal for the bundle's contents, they say that the email access alone is worth '$40+ per year,' citing Yahoo and Hotmail as similarly-prices services.

First off, Yahoo and Hotmail have free email addresses. It's true that it would cost about $40 to match .mac's offering feature for feature, but if you didn't need POP access, or were happy with a 6 megabyte mailbox, you could pay half that or less.

Apple offers additional email addresses 'a la carte' for $10 a year if you're already a .mac subscriber, so clearly Apple's costs for these additional 5 meg accounts is less than $10 a year, yet this option isn't offered to the average user.

The 'value' of getting what Apple purports to be $250 worth of software and services for $100 a year is clouded by the fact that most of the items are products the average user wouldn't otherwise buy, such as virex (when was the last time you saw a virus for OS X?) or the backup tool. Moreover, several of the items listed are software products not subscriptions. Bought separately, a consumer wold only have to pay for them once, not year after year. there's absolutely no guarantee that these products will be revised every year, or even at all. If you stay a .mac subscriber for three years, suddenly the software freebies aren't so cheap.

The point is that Apple is trying to sell users things they don't need or want, simultaneously holding hostage the very few services that users do require, and using the filler services as a justification for the high annual rate. This is the worst kid of manipulation.

Apple has some of the best interaction designers and product marketers in the business, so one has to ask: how did this happen? Well, I'll tell you...

Exactly one month before Apple's most recent quarterly earnings announcement, they lowered their forecast on that quarter's earnings. This is something that companies do when they see that industry analysts are predicting earnings higher than what the company sees as likely internally. It's designed to prevent a huge selloff of stock after a negative surprise earnings release. Apple wasn't going to make the numbers they predicted last quarter, and they wanted to give investors a heads up.

Fast-forward to the eve of the Keynote speech: Apple released their earnings numbers after the bell on Tuesday evening, roughly matching their lowered expectations. The next morning Apple's CEO would be giving a pivotal keynote speech in front of 50,000 people in the financial capital of the world, withing earshot and webcast of the very analysts and investors who, after reading Apple's financial, are waiting to hear what he has to say before making the decision to upgrade or downgrade Apple's stock.

Clearly, the New York keynote was being delivered to the financial community. What better way to cater to that community than to announce new sustainable revenue streams? Recent moves in the subscription realm by competitors such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Real, justified subscriptions for services as a viable tactic, and one that is recognized by Wall Street.

Speaking to a packed auditorium gone suddenly terse and quiet, Jobs was trying to save his company's market capitalization. It must have killed him to have to make that speech to that audience. Still, the groundwork for this decision was laid down weeks if not months earlier.

I've heard from inside Apple that this was a 'Steve-down' decision. having participated in literally a dozen meetings at Yahoo, discussing the premium services offerings, prices, add-ons, etc., for Geocities and Mail packages, I can tell you that (at least at Yahoo) those decisions weren't made lightly, and the balance between profit and customer satisfaction was a delicate one, honed during meeting after meeting, assisted by surveys and market research.

My assumption is that this same kind of thoughtful research went on at Apple too, with carefully planned tiers of service for .mac (which, I'm guessing, was still going to be called 'iTools' before the change). Then one day the need for new apparent revenue streams is realized by Apple's top executives. Despite the fact that by Schiller's own estimates, .mac will generate only $22-44 million a year, equating to 0.4-0.8% of Apple's annual revenues, iTools was targeted as a financial golden goose to be sacrificed on Wall Street's already bloodied altar.

The rest is history.

So, how did the big master plan work out? Conversion to .mac accounts is too slow to gauge, largely in part to Apple's decision to start the annual clock on the day the user pays, incenting users to wait until September 30th before buying in to .mac. As for the stock price: It lost 18% of its value the day after Apple lowered its quarterly forecast. The following morning Merrill Lynch and AG Edwards downgraded Apple stock to Neutral and Hold levels. These downgrades were the likely catalysts for the .mac pricing plan. Apple stock lost another 17% in the two days following the earnings announcement and the keynote speech. On the morning of the 17th, Salomon Smith Barney downgraded Apple stock from Buy to Neutral.

All told, in the last two months, Apple stock has dropped 46%, from its 52-week high to its 52-week low. Since the keynote, Apple stock has dropped 18%.

Clearly .mac wasn't the only Wall Street appetizer at the keynote. The decision to release a Windows iPod was one held in reserve for a case of dire need, and the pricing structure for Jaguar was similarly changed in recent months. If Jaguar had always been intended to be a full-priced upgrade, it would have been labeled 10.5, not 10.2. In fact, the decision to keep the Jaguar codename is built on the necessity of differentiating 10.2 from 10.1. The 'leopard print' X logo followed from the same rationale.

Now, as so many of the 'anti-whiners' have whined, Apple has a mission to make money, and of course that's true. As Apple devotees we all have some bitter pills to swallow in the coming quarters until the economy the tech sector turn around. Nevertheless, if the past couple of week have shown us (and hopefully Apple) anything, it's that Apple needs to create the illusion, if not the reality, that we the loyal Apple customers are in this with Apple together. Heavy-handed pricing and upgrade policies (I won't even get in to the QT 5 Pro -> QT 6 Pro debacle), aren't the way to retain the market share that Apple still has.

The lure of a better product is what made most of us buy our first mac. The allure of a better company is what causes us to evangelize, put Apple logos on our cars, even brand ourselves with mac.com email addresses.

In short: We are the cult of Apple. Please don't make us drink the kool-aid.

Comments? (56)

I've been wrestling with a moral dilemma for the last several days, tying me up in little knots, getting to the core of who I am both personally and professionally.

At last week's Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announce the .mac ('dot-mac') initiative, essentially taking the functionality of iTools, adding a few other features, and packaging it as a $100/yr subscription package.

There's some nice functionality in it, but at the same time they're also discontinuing iTools itself. Hundreds of thousands of Apple users who have been using the service, and using their mac.com email addresses will now lose those addresses unless they agree to pay $100 a year. There is no free version, and there is no announced forwarding policy.

As a user experience designer, this irritates me to no end. An Apple executive has been quoted in a News.com article as saying they anticipate that only 10% of the users will actually migrate to the paid service, meaning that 90% will lose their email addresses. Permanently.

Having worked at Yahoo for the last year, I'm no stranger to the push for subscription-based premium services, but Yahoo and most companies that are still in business have done it right: Charge for enhanced services and new services. when you can't do that, charge for those services which were free but are still ancillary, like POP mail access, but don't take a free service and tell your users 'tough. Fish or cut bait.'

So what did I do? I made a commercial. In the 'switch' style, but using no Apple logos or implied consent, I voiced my own opinion on Apple's new policy, and frankly I'm pretty proud of the result.

And herein lies the problem: Once I finish my HCI masters at Carnegie Mellon next year, Apple is very high on the list of companies where I would like to work. Knowing that a video/protest like this could come back to haunt me, I decided to make a pixelated version, hoping to obscure my identity. Still, I couldn't post it here, as people who know me personally would still recognize me and the cat would be out of the bag.

I showed the video to a lot of friends, and received positive feedback, but still I was torn:

When user experience design is my vocation, not just my job, what do I do when doing the right thing from a user experience perspective (on behalf of Mac users everywhere, my constituency in this case) can endanger my chances of getting a job as an experience and interface designer at the very company whose policies I'm calling into question?

Very frustrating indeed, but after a few days I have finally decided that if Apple wouldn't hire me because I stood up for the users in opposition to an Apple policy while I wasn't in their employ, then it's not a place I would want to work in the first place. As I mentioned to one of my former Yahoo coworkers: Yahoo would have hired me even if I was a vocal opponent of a Yahoo business practice before starting there, and I wouldn't want to work someplace less cool than yahoo. Let's hope that the people within Apple are more circumspect than Apple-the-company's recent business decisions.

So, without further ado, I give you:

Bait and Switch

Props to Robert for coming through with today's Buffy Tidbit: Apparently, for those too impatient to wait three years for Season Six to come out on DVD, you can plug that burning hole in your pocket and bid for a few rare DVD copies of "Once More, With Feeling" on eBay.

It seems that (quite rightly) Joss has chosen this episode as one of the two each series is permitted to send out to TV notables, hoping for Emmy nominations. As a result, hundreds of copies are out there, and naturally some of them have made their way to the common market.

On a parallel tangent, I've been TiVo-ing the late night and early morning reruns of Mad About You. I've got a jonesing to catch "Met Someone," the flashback episode where Paul and Jamie meet for the first time. Checking out the schedule of shows for the next two weeks, I came across another M.A.Y. episode entitled "Once More, With Feeling." Is this a trend, or an homage?

PS: for those non-Buffy fans out there, give it a try. You've probably noticed that your friends who rave about Buffy aren't those who you'd think would go for cheezy stupid TV like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and you're right, they don't. The show's a wonder, and I really truly hope OMWF gets an Emmy because honestly, it so richly deserves it.

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