Posts Tagged ‘apple’

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2011_01_13@1547/postbot_1

How does interoperable video recover from Chrome dropping H.264?

I don’t know that it does.

It’s essentially inconceivable that the rest of the world — particularly once you move beyond the browser — is going to ever adopt WebM, so any dream of a universally interoperable video format is right out the window. The best possible outcome we can hope for now is that the major browser developers will all support WebM, and we’ll have one video standard for the web, and one for everything else. And that’s not a very good outcome at all, really, compared with the kind of ubiquitous video compatibility we could have achieved.

Even that limited victory seems pretty remote. It would require Apple to support support WebM in Safari and on its mobile devices, despite the fact that Google dropped H.264 in large part just to piss Apple off. And it would require Microsoft to support WebM, despite Google being an arch-rival. It was hard enough to get Microsoft to support H.264, a neutral open standard. What are the odds they’ll ever support WebM?

Google has just thrown away the last, best hope for truly interoperable video, and ruined web video for the foreseeable future. That might sound apocalyptic, but it’s hard to imagine how things could develop otherwise.

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2011_01_11@2141/postbot_1

A recap of Google duplicity on H.264/WebM

Google has announced they’re dropping support for H.264 in Chrome because their own WebM is “more open”. This is, essentially, a lie. Let’s recap.

H.264 was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG), which are standards committees that draw members from industry and academia under the umbrella of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which are (in practice) intergovernmental public/private partnerships. It is governed by a public, multi-party governance process representing many different stakeholders.

This is how a real open standard works.

Does H.264 require patent licensing? Yes. But that’s not because (as some people seem to believe) it was developed by some company that licenses it out to make money. Rather, it requires patent licensing because it turns out that a lot of the techniques you’d want to use in a modern video codec are patented, so the standard that MPEG/VCEG developed (basing their decisions largely on technical considerations) ended up infringing on a bunch of them — about 1000 patents in all, in fact. As is common with such things, a patent licensing pool was set up to make licensing all of those patents cheap and easy for implementors.

It is extremely unlikely that WebM does not infringe on some of those very same patents. It’s a very similar codec to H.264. Moreover, this has happened before. Microsoft’s VC-1 codec was supposed to be a patent-free alternative to H.264, and guess what? It ended up requiring a patent licensing pool as well.

So, with H.264 you get a codec that’s an actual open standard, with a formal multi-party governance process and with easy patent licensing. With WebM, you get a codec that’s not formally standardized, has no formal governance process (and is de facto controlled by Google, because they employ most of the developers), and that has huge ‘submarine’ patent risk.

Google, somehow, has the gall to claim that the latter is “more open”. And a lot of people seem to believe them.

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2010_10_02@2255/postbot_1

Is Android winning?

The real question is, winning what? Take a look at this mobile industry profit share data.

Where on that chart do vendors who have adopted Android start seriously stealing profit share away from Apple? Nowhere.

The key thing to understand about Android is that its market share growth has been driven almost entirely by handset vendors who where never able to field serious mobile operating systems of their own, who are now ditching the systems they previously used in favor of Android. Though it’s often framed very differently, this in-place substitution has very little direct relevance to Apple.

To give a more concrete illustration, imagine that the handset market consists of four companies, A, B, C and D, each with 25% market share, and each selling a single model of phone (call these Phone-A, Phone-B, etc.) that runs an OS developed by the company that makes the phone (call these OS-A, OS-B, etc.). Now, let’s say companies C and D decide “Hey, OS-C and OS-D are actually kind of terrible. Let’s both switch to using OS-E, this new open source mobile OS”.

OS-E will immediately have 50% market share, while OS-A and OS-B still have just 25% each.

What the pundits declaring Android victory right now are doing is stepping in at this point and declaring that OS-E has “won” over OS-A and OS-B because it now has twice as much market share as either one. But you really have to ask the question… has anyone won anything? If so, who? And exactly what have they won?

As far as I can see, the answers to these questions are “no”, “nobody” and “nothing”.

I suspect some pundits are having so much trouble understanding this because if OS-E were a licensed commercial product, there would be a winner, namely the company that owned OS-E. They’re conceptualizing this market as Google = Microsoft, HTC = Dell, Samsung = HP, etc. But this is wrong. There is no equivalent of Microsoft in this market. There is no discrete entity that owns Android (in any useful sense) and aggregates benefits from all Android handsets sold by all vendors.

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2010_08_02@1333/postbot_1

Balmer Talks Tablets

See here.

Microsoft’s behavior here is entirely bizarre. They’ve been pushing desktop versions of Windows on tablets with absolutely no mass-market success for over a decade. Apple releases a tablet with a much more lightweight OS, with UI redesigned from the ground up for a touch device, and has instant mass market success.

And Microsoft’s announces that they’re taking this very seriously… and their response will be to keep pushing desktop versions of Windows on tablets, but… what? Hope that people notice this time because Apple got people paying attention to the tablet market?

Right, good luck with that. The reason people didn’t pay attention to those Windows tablets is because they sucked, and they’ll be perceived even more negatively now that there are better products on the market to compare them with.

Here’s how I see this going: some time in the next 18 months, Microsoft will finally come to terms with the fact that they’re barking up the wrong tree trying to stick a desktop version of Windows onto a tablet. They won’t actually abandon that approach, because internal corporate politics won’t let them and they lack the discipline to actually focus on things that matter. But they will announce an additional project to create a tablet versions of Windows Phone 7, which might even turn out to be a credible technical effort.

Only problem is, by the time that gets market, it’s going to be going up against the iPad, Android tablets, WebOS tablets, and the newly announced Blackberry tablet, some or all of which will be quite well established by then and will be on their second or third generation. And few or none of the value network effects Microsoft benefits from in the Windows market will do anything for them in the tablet market. So, basically, they’re screwed.

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2010_05_30@1401/postbot_1

What Google is up to with WebM/VP8

There are three reasons to introduce an alternative to H.264:

  • It’s technically better.
  • It doesn’t require patent licensing.
  • You want more control over web video than the multivendor H.264 standardization process provides.

VP8 isn’t technically better than H.264, and it will almost certainly have the sort of patent problems that will require a licensing pool to be set up, just as with Microsoft’s VC-1, another attempt at a patent-free H.264 alternative.

That means what Google is after is control.

Google has played the PR game masterfully here. The release of VP8 is being hailed as a victory for openness. Meanwhile, if VP8 were to actually displace H.264, then instead of a codec controlled through an ISO standardization process involving dozens of vendors, you would have a codec controlled almost entirely by Google.

Advocates of open computing need to think really, really hard about what’s going on here. A lot of them seem to have declared for Google (and against Apple) because of a couple of fairly trivial technical points with no long-term strategic relevance (Android runs apps that aren’t from its app store, etc.), and some clever rhetoric on Google’s part. But the paradigm that Google wants for the future of computing — cloud-based apps running on Google’s servers — is no more compatible with openness than Apple’s vision of appliance-like computing devices.

In fact, it’s less compatible. Apple’s devices can at least be jailbroken; the cloud can’t be. And Apple doesn’t seem interested in having access to all of your data, whereas Google’s cloud-based vision for computing would involve them having access to all of your data, and Google’s business model, based around targeted advertising, creates an incentive for them to know as much about you as possible.

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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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