Archive for April, 2010

2010_04_13@2330/postbot_1

Google’s release of VP8 codec changes little

I’ve previously discussed the dustup over Ogg Theora vs. H.264. Today Google announced it is releasing the VP8 codec as open source. VP8 is an ostensibly patent-free codec which, unlike Theora, is said to be as good, technically, as H.264. But it won’t change much.

Most of the case against Theora didn’t come down to its technical quality, but the fact that H.264 is a standard that extends far beyond just web video on desktop platforms, and there was no way Theora plausibly had a chance in that larger world. The same logic applies to VP8.

The Mozilla Foundation and Google can implement VP8 in Firefox or Chrome or whatever. But let’s look at, say, Netflix. Right now, they can serve the same H.264 streams up to desktop platforms via Silverlight, to iPads (soon iPhones and iPod Touches), to the PS3, to the Nintendo Wii (as of this month), to Roku boxes, to the Xbox, to various Blu-ray players….

Most of those devices implement H.264 decoding in hardware, and their vendors couldn’t add VP8 decoding to them if they wanted to. And they mostly don’t want to, because H.264 licensing is pretty cheap, and they don’t care about the ideological arguments against it. It uses the same kind of licensing regime used by MPEG-2 (DVD), Audio CD, ATSC digital broadcast… the industry is very comfortable with this model.

So, what is a company like Netflix supposed to do? Keep two copies of its entire library, one in VP8, for Firefox, and one in H.264, for every other client platform in the world? Because the Mozilla Foundation has some ideological objections to software patents, and so refuses to implement H.264?

Right. Good luck with all that.

Had VP8 been around (and open source) five or six years ago, things might have been very different. But H.264 has already achieved critical mass. It simply won’t be displaced by another current-generation codec. If people want a patent-free codec to eventually emerge on top, they should start thinking about how to build a patent-free next generation codec, and get it ready for prime time before H.264′s inevitable MPEG-LA-licensed successor is ready.

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2010_04_13@2321/postbot_1

Adobe’s JooJoo reaction validates Apple’s flash stance

Engadget’s review of the JooJoo Linux tablet:

But what about Flash? This is supposed to be the big differentiator, right? The iPad killer! In an interesting move, Fusion Garage coupled the Atom processor with NVIDIA’s Ion graphics to aid in playing full screen Flash video (or for doing… something). Unfortunately, the software just isn’t there yet. Currently the device is running Flash 10.1 beta 1, and won’t have hardware-accelerated Flash video for a good while now (the timing is partly reliant on Adobe support, and is labelled as a “work in progress” by JooJoo). That means some regular-sized YouTube and Hulu works, as decoded by the CPU, but full screen Hulu is jittery, and a 720p YouTube clip is like watching a slideshow. In one of the biggest moves of irony, JooJoo has actually implemented a hack for YouTube where you can view a video in Flash or in “JooJoo” mode which is a straight playback of the MPEG video file every YouTube video harbors. What does this remind us of? HTML 5, albeit with a less elegant implementation. This of course only works on YouTube right now, though JooJoo says it plans on supporting other sites in the future.

They’ll probably eventually get hardware acceleration working and get this straightened out, but there’s a larger point here. Platform vendors shouldn’t have to rely on the good graces of an outside company to make key elements of their user experience not suck. Even if this gets fixed on Linux/Atom tablets, it will only crop up again with some other new platform in the future.

The notion of a key piece of web infrastructure being proprietary software controlled by a single vendor was only sustainable within the homogeneity of the traditional desktop world. Now that computing is seriously moving beyond the desktop — now that the industry is actually interesting again — it’s all falling apart for Flash. Apple is just hurrying things along a bit.

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2010_04_11@0121/postbot_1

A conversation that will occur this summer

Normal Person: [switching instantly back and forth between Evernote and Safari while listening to a Pandora stream, with Loopt updating their location continuously in the background]

Geek: “Hey, you know your iPhone doesn’t support ‘real’ multitasking.”

Normal Person: “Huh?”

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2010_04_07@1711/postbot_1

Why the iPad is a big deal

In terms of long-term large-scale impact on consumer computing, the iPad is the most significant new computing platform to launch in over 20 years, with the possible exception of the Web, depending on your definitions. Really. Even if the iPad itself ultimately ends up as a minor player in the tablet market, it will likely be the device that takes tablets mainstream, like as the Mac did for the GUI. Why is this a big deal? It’s a big deal because this form factor has been anticipated for over 40 years both in fiction (see, for instance, 2001) and by human/computer interaction designers (see, for instance, the Dynabook), and will likely have a major impact on the shape of computing over the next couple of decades.

In terms of how users interact with computers, the iPad is the most significant thing since the mouse and the modern GUI. You could credit the iPhone for the multitouch revolution, of course, but I think the the phone form factor is just too limited to develop the full vocabulary required for touch-based UI to really come into its own. The iPad is the first platform that will enable that.

And there’s even a bit more to the iPad than that. The iPad isn’t just a new device built along the same model as traditional computers but with a new form factor and primary interaction mechanism. Put together the simple model lineup, the lack of focus on geeky tech specs, the elimination of the file system as a user-level concern, the system-level automatic application installation, removal, and updating… and the iPad is also clearly a major push toward the sort of appliance-like personal computing that many have tried for over the years, but none have previously achieved.

Now, I understand perfectly well that these kinds of predictions are easy to dismiss. That’s sort of the nature of the thing; if this were all obvious, there wouldn’t be much point in writing about it. But large chunks of the web get archived, and we’ll see in five or ten years just who saw what was coming, and who didn’t.

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2010_04_06@0436/postbot_1

Why not a netbook?

If you look at the geek complaints about the iPad, the obvious trend that emerges is that what the geeks really wanted from Apple was a generic $350 Mac netbook. But the more you think this through — the idea that Apple should have shipped a netbook rather than the iPad — the less sense it makes.

Netbooks work on the same paradigm as traditional desktop computers; they’re basically the desktop user experience, but slower, smaller, and cheaper.

If you’re not playing the meaningless “Apple vs. The World” game, and you’re looking at things purely in terms of Apple’s own unit sales (and profits), Apple’s approach is obviously better.

Let’s say instead of the iPad, Apple had introduced a $350 Mac netbook. As a Mac — firmly situated within the established desktop platform ecosystem — it would have been subject to the same forces that have stopped the Mac platform generally from breaking into the mainstream over the last decade. It wouldn’t have really offered unique advantages against Wintel netbooks, unless you were already interested in running OS X. Which also means it would have cannibalized Apple’s higher end Macs to some extent; people would buy it instead of a $999 MacBook. Finally, Apple probably would have had 10-15% profit margins on such a device (typical of the netbook market) instead of the 20-30% profit margins they’re probably running on the iPad (typical of iPod and iPhone).

With the iPad, Apple has a device that appeals to the existing Mac user base but won’t cause much cannibalization, and also has much more appeal outside of the existing Mac user base because it offers unique capabilities other than desktop OS X. So they’re likely to sell several times as many of them, with fewer losses to their higher end laptop sales. Oh, and they probably make 2-3x as much money from every one they sell, vs. a Mac netbook.

Looking past just the bottom line, the critical strategic issue is the whole “breaking into the mainstream” thing. With the iPhone, Apple has had its first real taste of mainstream success with a computing platform in a couple of decades, and they wanted more. And what they’ve realized is that the battle for the traditional desktop OS market has been over for a long time, and Microsoft won. So the way to get more is to launch another platform outside of that market. Except unlike the iPhone, the iPad platform has the capability to grow, over the years, into something that really could replace a traditional computer for many users.

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2010_04_05@1303/postbot_1

Apple to preview iPhone OS 4 at Thursday event

See here.

This seems pretty unusual for Apple. There are only two plausible reasons why they might be doing this, I think. Either it has major new implications for developers, so they have to announce it well in advance of shipping, or it has major new features which they think will help sell iPads, so they want everyone to know it’s coming.

Either way, this event signals iPhone OS 4 is probably going to be a pretty big deal.

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