Posts Tagged ‘google’

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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@2150/postbot_1

Why is Google dropping H.264 support?

Ditching H.264 serves two strategic purposes for Google. First, it advances a codec that’s de facto controlled by Google at the expense of a codec that is a legitimate open standard controlled by a multi-vendor governance process managed by reputable international standards bodies. (“Open source” isn’t the same thing as an “open standard”.) And second, it will slow the transition to HTML5 and away from Flash by creating more confusion about which codec to use for HTML5 video, which benefits Google by hurting Apple, since Apple doesn’t want to support Flash.

It also, of course, really sucks for consumers.

This move is, in other words, a thoroughly nasty bit of work. It’s not quite as bad as selling consumers down the river to Verizon on ‘net neutrality, but it’s close. And if Google is actually successful in making WebM, not H.264, the standard codec for web video, they’re literally going to render hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes, etc. with H.264 hardware support obsolete.

“But wait!”, the OSS fans are saying. “Isn’t Google really standing up for freedom and justice, because H.264 requires evil patent licensing?”

No. Expert opinion is that WebM infringes on numerous patents in the H.264 pool, and will need a licensing pool of its own to be set up, just like Microsoft’s VC-1 did. So the patents are a wash. This is Google manipulating the market entirely for selfish advantage here, and it’s all the worse because they’re pretending 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_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@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_01_31@0300/postbot_1

Steve Jobs slams Adobe, Google

From a Town Hall meeting for employees, via Wired

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

Apple hasn’t had any really serious rivalries for a while; the Apple vs. Microsoft thing lost its fervor in the ’90s and since then has played out according to well established ground rules that make the whole thing sort of boring.

The next decade sure is going to be interesting.

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2010_01_15@0207/postbot_1

Market Share, Tablets, and the Future of Computing

[Note for incoming readers: this post was written before the actual iPad annoucement, but the predictions were basically solid, so the analysis holds up perfectly well.]

Market share is, of course, the perennial issue in platform wars generally, and has been for a couple of decades now. The new IDC and Gartner reports released in the last couple of days have generated a lot of discussion about this again, but of course the issue never really goes away.

As one might expect after so long, most of the discourse with respect to market share has become formulaic and extremely boring. Windows advocates (those who actually have an argument, rather than just being mindless trolls, anyway) claim that low market share validates their criticism of Apple’s design and business decisions, while Mac advocates reply that quantity is not quality and that they have no reason to personally care.

But it’s worth occasionally giving the issue a serious look. I think it’s particularly worth it now, with the imminent announcement of an Apple tablet likely, for reasons that I’ll get to a bit later.

Desktop Intransigence

Apple, over the last few years, has been making the best products it has ever made and has built itself into one of the most valuable consumer brands in the world. These are not really disputable claims. On top of this, Microsoft’s OS development efforts have gone completely off the rails in the last decade.

Meanwhile, the usual Windows advocate and tech industry pundit explanations for Apple’s failure to gain market share in the computer industry (single-source hardware, no cheap low-end products, limited expansion options, etc.) completely fall apart in light of the fact that Apple does virtually the same things “wrong” in the phone and music player markets, and yet is extremely successful there.

So if all of this is true, why can’t Apple seem to get anywhere in the computer market?

A Brief History of the OS Wars

The only serious reading of the last 20 years of industry history, I think, is that Microsoft, by the mid-90s at the latest, had become completely entrenched in the desktop operating systems market. Windows reached a critical mass in terms of unit sales at precisely the right moment in history. Extremely strong value networks built up around the platform. Windows had the most software and peripheral support. Knowledge, both institutional and personal, started accumulating everywhere about how to use it in many different contexts. Before too long, everyone decided to run Windows because everyone else was running Windows.

Because of natural platform lock-in effects (helped along by Microsoft’s deliberate action, but that probably made little difference in the overall scheme of thing), other platforms have never, despite many attempts, been able to quite situate themselves in such a way as to benefit from those existing value networks. They’ve been on the outside ever since, and will continue to be. Windows is the standard.

There isn’t going to be some huge breakthrough for Apple in the desktop operating systems market. Ever. Regardless of what they do. They could license OS X to Dell and HP. They could make a $400 tower with six PCI-E slots and 8 drive bays. It might get them a few more points of market share, maybe — at a huge cost to revenue and profits.

Apple, of course, realizes this. This realization is the single best explanation for why Apple chooses to offer the specific computer models that it does, why Apple will never license OS X, why Apple just generally seems so much more aggressive with the iPod and the iPhone than with the Mac. Their strategy is designed to provide the most useful (and most profitable) products to a minority of the market, because they know they have no real shot at dislodging Microsoft. That door closed at least 15 years ago.

Core vs. Periphery

Now, about this time all of you Windows advocate types are getting really excited. “Ha!” you’re thinking, “We’ve finally got one of these Mac advocates to admit that Microsoft won!”

Well, not so fast. Microsoft is firmly entrenched in the desktop operating systems market, and will not be dislodged. But at the same time… well, look. Despite controlling more than 90% of the desktop computing market, Microsoft still somehow manages to be irrelevant to the future of computing. Microsoft holds the desktop OS market, which is still the center of the computing universe. But all of the innovation happens at the periphery, and Microsoft is like China has been for much of its history: a powerful empire perennially incapable of projecting power beyond its borders.

The companies defining the future of personal computing today, more than any others, are, in fact, Apple and Google. There are two frontiers here so far: the Web, and mobile devices. Apple is leading, with Google closely following, in the mobile device category. Google and Apple are both making heavy investments in the Web as a platform, Apple by pushing Web standards via WebKit and various other things still mostly below the radar (their massive new datacenter, various things they’re doing around client-side JavaScript libraries), and Google through its own WebKit derived platform, through its cloud apps, and soon through ChromeOS.

And then, of course, there’s the rumored tablet. Now, I’m about to head off into some wild speculation here. And it all might turn out to be wrong. I don’t pretend to have any special knowledge about what Apple is planning to do. And it’s possible the tablet is just going to be a media player and e-book reader, and not really all that interesting.

But I’ve watched Apple pretty closely for the entirety of the Jobs II era, and my gut tells me otherwise.

Signs and Portents

We’ve heard rumors — some of which look a fair bit like controlled leaks — that Apple has been working on an advanced vocabulary of multitouch gestures for the tablet. That they’ve been working on a tablet-based version of iWork. That the tablet pre-dated the iPhone — that all of this touch technology was developed for a tablet, and was co-opted for the iPhone because the tablet platform wasn’t ready yet, which means this device has probably been in development for at least five years.

We’ve also heard that iPhone OS updates have been delayed because of resources being pulled to the tablet project. There are some indications that Snow Leopard itself was delayed because of iPhone/tablet related development. And there’s the curious fact that Snow Leopard’s UI is virtually identical to Leopard’s despite the fact that, among other things, Apple completely rewrote the Finder, an obvious opportunity for a big UI overhaul that was passed up. We’ve also heard that Jobs is almost monomaniacally focused on the tablet project.

I think this is it.

I think this is going to be Apple’s attempt to redefine personal computing the way they did with the introduction of the Macintosh.

Leading Indicators

The key early indicator of this will be whether that iWork rumor is true. If this device is debuted with a multitouch version of iWork, it will be obvious that Apple intends to position it as a general purpose computing platform. If it debuts without iWork, it might be less obvious, but not necessarily something that could be immediately ruled out. In truth, it might actually be even more clever for Apple to use the tablet as a sort of trojan horse — present the thing as a media player, try to build a user base that way, and unfold a strategy to slowly turn it into a general purpose computing device over a period of years. We’ve seen with the iPod that Apple is capable of strategic long-term platform building that nobody really sees coming until it’s a done deal.

Mind you, even if Apple does take the direct approach, they’ll probably deny outright that the device is intended as a potential future replacement for a personal computer.

The Rematch

Either way, by creating a device situated outside of the paradigm of existing desktop operating systems, Apple would be doing an end-run around Microsoft’s desktop hegemony. Note that nobody expects the tablet to be positioned as a kind of Mac. This is key; being, say, the “MacTouch” would subject the tablet to the same sort of market share “cap” that the Mac has been subject to. (Though if the tablet took off as a general-purpose computing platform, one assumes it would inevitably have to merge with the Mac.)

While the risks here would be large and success would by no means be a sure thing, the mere attempt would be the most interesting thing to happen to the industry since, perhaps, the rise of the Internet. If successfully executed, such a ploy, which would be the first serious move against Microsoft since the return of Jobs, would give Apple a chance to re-fight the platform battle lost in the ’90s, probably from a much stronger position.

I guess we’ll find out. Though of course the ever-clueless Windows advocates and tech industry pundits — the same people who dismissed the iPhone by working their way down the spec sheet point by point — will deny that Apple is up to anything significant almost regardless of what gets announced.

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Posted in Computer Industry, Predictions | 2 Comments »

2010_01_14@2334/postbot_1

Ogg Theora Advocates: get over it already

So Google is planning to do a revamp of YouTube, and Slashdot is talking about it. The most-requested feature is, of course, the replacement of Flash with HTML5 video.

Slashdot being a rather popular destination for open source types, the discussion immediately breaks down into the controversy over whether HTML5 video should be delivered via H.264 or via the Ogg Theora codec.

Sorry, guys, but for anyone who isn’t obsessed with software licensing, the answer here is is obvious. Theora’s a substantially inferior codec, with a handful of implementations mostly in non-mainstream open source software. H.264 is an extremely good current-generation codec implemented by… the entire rest of the world, basically. Game consoles, phones (including both the iPhone and Android platforms), iTunes, set-top boxes, cameras, Blu-ray… H.264 is everywhere.

Despite the Mozilla foundation siding with Theora for Firefox, H.264 is the only remotely plausible choice here. Apple probably couldn’t support Theora on the iPhone if they wanted to, because the iPhone’s video decoding is handled by dedicated hardware, and as far as I’m aware there is no such hardware for Theora, and nobody plans to produce any. And Apple is far from being alone here; the same applies to most embedded devices.

H.264 implementations do require license fees to be paid under certain conditions, yes. But this puts it in the same boat as Audio CD, MPEG-2 (the standard codec on DVDs), MP3, AAC, and numerous other media standards. By demanding not only an open standard, but a codec that requires no patent licensing, open source advocates are holding web video to a standard that has essentially never been met, and are, in fact, effectively standing in the way of standards-based web video.

If the Mozilla foundation doesn’t want to license the relevant H.264 and AAC patents, they should at least let Firefox use QuickTime to handle HTML5 video content in those formats. Anything else puts abstract idealism over real-world interoperability.

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2009_11_21@1659/postbot_1

Chrome OS and the future of files

Chrome OS has no real file manager, and it’s not really clear that it has anything resembling a normal file system. If it does, the user doesn’t see it. This is a pretty radical departure from the last few decades of standard industry practice.

One might be tempted to think Chrome OS can only get away with this because it provides very limited functionality. But some reflection will reveal that this is not quite true. It is quite possible to build complex ecosystems of software and data without the existence of files and file management. This is how the cloud works, for the most part. Even in web-based app that provide something that looks a little like a file management interface, like Google Docs, you’re not really manipulating real files, most of the time. You’re probably manipulating database entries; you don’t know and don’t care, because instead of interacting directly with the data store, everything is filtered through context-specific code that implements the necessary functionality.

And the desktop might be headed this way as well.

Consider. A decade ago, when early adopters took photos with their newfangled digital cameras, they generally thought of those photos as files and managed them in a file manager.

Today, they’re far more likely to manage them using an app like iPhoto, which understands a lot more about photos than a generic file manager does, and hides all the details of the actual file storage from the user. And iPhoto specifically does something really interesting here: it provides a system-level API for accessing the contents of your photo library, that other Apple and third-party apps can use. So even when opening a photo in another app, the user still doesn’t have to worry about actual files.

The key distinction is that instead of the user working with “image files” — chunks of data that are largely opaque to the operating system — the user works with “photos”, which the system now understands as a primitive type. That is, a photo is no longer a type of file, it’s just a type of data that the system knows how to work with in addition to files.

This is sort of how the cloud works. For the most part, discrete files don’t exist in the cloud. Look at something like Flickr. It’s very much built along the same lines as OS X’s photo library support — there’s an application roughly equivalent to iPhoto (the main Flickr web site) for accessing and manipulating photos, and there’s an API that provides access to other applications that want to access that same data and functionality: blogs that want to embed Flickr images, desktop apps that want to upload them, web-based image editing software, etc.

There is still a key difference between this and what iPhoto is doing on the desktop, however. The Flickr application and the data it acts as a gateway for are both globally addressable. You can pull up the application with nothing more than a URL and a browser. Most specific data elements have their own unique addresses. Data can therefore be passed around “by reference” rather than just “by value” (that is, with nothing but a URL), and specific functionality of the Flickr web site/app can be invoked remotely.

This is what makes the cloud a cloud, rather than, to abuse the metaphor a bit, a bunch of isolated individual water droplets.

It’s easy to see how cloud/desktop convergence could play out here. Bring global addressability to the desktop. Instead of local applications working with files, they’d work with data that is accessed through standardized high-level type-specific APIs. Code running on your local machine would expose your locally stored photo library (for instance) through an API much like the one Flickr uses to expose access to the photos it stores. This API would be based on open web technologies (XML-RPC, etc.) and would be the standard mechanism through which both local and remote applications accessed that data and any functionality exposed by the process that implemented the API (maybe it can rotate photos, crop them, perform image recognition, whatever).

Instead of having a world of structured API-accessible data in the cloud, and discrete applications and files on the desktop, this brings cloud-style data management onto the desktop, allowing both the elimination of traditional files and file systems (except possibly as internal implementation details) and seamless integration between local and remote data and functionality. Your local machine would be fully integrated into the cloud, rather than merely being a terminal for accessing the cloud.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we’ll end up here, sooner or later.

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