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Is Steve Jobs Repeating His Past Mistakes?

One of my very favorite writers, Robert Wright, had an interesting Opinionator post at the NY Times site this week, which revolved around the question of Steve Jobs' alleged lust for power and why he was making the same mistakes with the iPhone that led to the Mac losing out to Microsoft in the late 1980s. I quote at some length:

The Microsoft approach harnessed positive feedback. The more models of Windows computers, competitively priced, the more people would buy Windows computers. And the more Windows computers people bought, the more programmers would write their software for Windows, not Apple. And the more Windows software there was, the more attractive Windows computers would be. And so on. That’s how Windows wound up with around 90 percent of the desktop operating system market.

With the iPhone, Jobs is again forgoing this positive feedback. He’s not licensing the operating system to other handset makers. There’s only one kind of iPhone — love it or leave it.

Meanwhile, Google is following a variant of the Microsoft strategy…. Why is Jobs choosing the same path that, last time around, kept him from conquering the world? I had puzzled over this for months until I had a conversation with tech-watcher Harry McCracken, who suggested a theory that seemed outlandish at first but is making more and more sense to me: Steve Jobs just isn’t bent on world domination.

I think there is some truth to what Wright is saying here—everything that Jobs has ever done in his career has suggested that he loves great products more than market share. (Though I'm sure he's happier with both.) But I think there is another factor here worth considering.

I'm not so sure that Jobs thinks his Macintosh strategy failed. I think the way Jobs looks at it is this: he built a beautiful, revolutionary machine in the Macintosh, attracted incredible hype for it and passionate early adopters.

And then he got fired.

I'm sure somewhere in Jobs' head he thinks that if he had been running Apple instead of John Sculley, the Mac could have out-innovated and out-marketed Microsoft through the late eighties and early nineties, and kept Windows from dominating the planet. In other words, it wasn't that Apple erred in following the closed platform strategy. They erred in that they had the wrong guy running the company. That may well be delusional, but the fact that AAPL now has a larger market cap than MSFT, twelve years after Jobs' return to Apple, has to give one pause. So in Jobs' mind, I suspect it's not that he's making the same mistake all over again. Instead, he's proving that his original decision wasn't a mistake in the first place.

The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

The following is a transcript of the Hearst New Media lecture I gave last night at Columbia University, subtitled "Two Paths For The Future of Text." Thanks to everyone who came out, and to the Journalism school for the invitation.

I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

The philosopher John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here’s an excerpt from his “instructions for use”:

When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.

Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations. In a certain sense, this is a search algorithm, a defined series of steps that allows the user to index the text in a way that makes it easier to query. Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled: “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” Put another way, Bell created a commonplace book by commonplacing someone else’s technique for maintaining a commonplace book. The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

Thoughts On The New Kindle

I got my first I got my first Kindle last week, and have been toying around with it a little ever since. It is a very provocative little device, one of those technologies that--for all its imperfections--makes you realize that a whole new set of possibilities are just around the corner. I jotted down a few loosely connected thoughts and observations:

1. The iPhone interface has become so second-nature that a handheld device without a touch UI seems simply broken. It just seems inane to use the little joystick to drive the cursor up and down the screen to select a word or a paragraph.

2. I'm not crazy about the e-ink screen. I love the zero-power idea, but it's just a little too gray-on-gray for my tastes. The blacks aren't black enough and the whites aren't white enough. (Something about it reminds me of the output from my old ImageWriter, back in the days before laser printers.) But I may be an outlier here, because my eyes don't really get strained looking at LCD screens, and I gather one of the key selling points of the Kindle is the reduced eyestrain.

3. Because of my research methods, I am obsessed with an easy mechanism for grabbing a paragraph or two from a book and getting onto my computer so that I can archive it in Devonthink. The Kindle has a very simple mechanism for this that works great, though selecting the text would be much easier with a touchscreen.

4. Buying a book through the store is absolutely magical. One-click, wait thirty seconds, and you're reading. I bought and downloaded a book on the F train, during the three minutes it goes above ground over the Gowanus Canal. Wicked cool. (Incidentally, the device comes pre-loaded with all your Amazon account information -- there is zero setup in terms of entering user names, etc. At first I was startled by this, but then it all made sense: by definition, I'm buying the Kindle with my Amazon account -- why shouldn't that info be loaded onto the device automatically?)

5. I bought a Times subscription -- even though I already pay for the print edition -- because the convenience of having the Times permanently loaded on my Kindle seemed well worth an extra fifteen bucks. Haven't started paying for blogs yet, but I can imagine with one-click simplicity that I'll do that as well. If micropayments for content ever takes off -- the whole iTunes for News model -- I suspect it'll come in through the back door of the Kindle.

6. No pages numbers! They have "location" numbers instead, because pages don't really exist in the Kindle, given that you can resize the type with two quick taps on the keyboard. There's a small question here about how you cite a passage from a Kindle e-book, but I think it begs a larger, and more interesting question about standardizing page references in all e-books -- including Google Books for instance. (I'm going to write a longer piece on this...)

7. When he was on John Stewart, Jeff Bezos mentioned that the Kindle was great for one-handed reading, which got a salacious chuckle from the audience (and Stewart), but I think it's best for no-handed reading: i.e., when you're reading while eating a meal, one of life's great pleasures. It's almost impossible to read a paperback while eating, and you really have to snap the spine of a hardcover to get it to lie flat, but the Kindle just sits there on the table helpfully while you cut up your teriyaki.

8. There's an Kindle for iPhone app as of yesterday. I've spent about five minutes playing with it, but it's pretty sweet, and the integration between the devices is very clever. More to say on that when I've had a bit more time to explore.

From CNN.com/DowJones: Apple's IPhone Must Avoid The Razr Trap.

The iPhone is, by all accounts, a truly innovative piece of technology. Yet the most innovative parts - its user interface, its touchscreen capabilities and its appearance - remain what Apple brought out with the original device. The iPhone's latest additions, such as the ability to tap faster wireless networks and its location services, have been available in smartphones for years.

  "Where's the innovation?" Global Equities Securities analyst Trip Chowdhry said in describing his initial impression of the new iPhone.

Unbelievable to write a whole piece like this and never once mention the SDK and the App Store. Did any of these people see the keynote? At least a third of it was devoted to all the innovation happening through third-party applications. Yes, technically it's true that those innovations won't be specific to the 3G iPhone, in that first-gen users will benefit from them as well. But that doesn't mean that the iPhone product won't get massively more appealing to consumers starting mid-July thanks to those innovations.

Think of the games alone: the current iPhone is not a game platform at all, in that none of the applications available for it directly are games. But starting in July, the iPhone will be one of the three most innovative handheld gaming platforms in the world, and certainly the one with the most innovative controller interface. (We saw how that worked out for the Wii.) Yes, the hardware for the iPhone 3G is more of an incremental advance. But everything else happening to the platform is as game-changing as it gets.

The Silent Room Tone

I didn't actually get to see the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg interview yesterday at SXSW, but having read through about six thousand blog posts about it, I feel as though I've seen it. And, naturally, I have some thoughts about what happened, some of which connect to what happened the day before when I was on the same stage talking with Henry Jenkins.

Most accounts of the interview have talked about the role that the Twitter "back channel" played in the event. Clearly it was pivotal, and I think it sheds some interesting light on how face-to-face group events are changing thanks to communication tools like Twitter. 

I probably did more than fifty public appearances last year in front of crowds -- speeches, conversations, interviews, panel discussions, etc. And every time I get up there, the primary thing I'm thinking about -- more than the words themselves, most of which I've said before in roughly the same sequence -- is the room tone. In the words of our commander in chief: is the audience with me or against me? Are they having fun? Are they confused? Am I talking at too technical a level? Am I being condescending and talking down?

This can be very hard to gauge, because the information channels that flow back from an audience to a speaker are very narrow ones. An audience enraptured by a fascinating story is, most of the time, indistinguishable from an audience slumbering at a ponderous lecture. You can't read facial expressions in that environment, so all you have to go on is the sound, and the sound in both those cases is silence.

This is the main reason that I compulsively make jokes when I'm in front of a crowd. Not because I'm a ham (though that's no doubt part of it) and not even because the audience likes to laugh. The big reason to make jokes is because they're the best way to get a quick read on the collective mind of the group you're talking to. The volume of the laugh is important, but so is the lag time. You can tell immediately if they're on your side, and if they're really following what you're saying, by how quickly the crowd responds to your jokes.  And in doing so you open up the channels of information flowing back to you from the audience. If they're slow, you know you have to adjust, wake them up a little. If they're quick, you know you've got their attention.

In our talk on Saturday, Henry took another approach that had the same effect: he had a couple of "rallying cry" lines that set up the audience to murmur or applaud in endorsement. (A bunch were about Obama.) That's a great approach if you can pull it off; you really know you have your crowd if they're clapping mid-conversation.

But most of the time the crowd is quiet and unknowable. The room tone is silent. The one advantage you have as a speaker is that this unknowability extends into the crowd itself. Each individual might be sitting there quietly steaming at the absurdity of your comments, but unless they start openly hissing at you, they have no way of realizing that all of their neighbors are feeling the same hostile sentiments. And because people are more inclined to chuckle, laugh, or clap than they are to boo or hiss, the public signals that flow back to the center stage tend to be positive or indifferent, and not openly negative.

But backchannels like Twitter change all that. When enough audience members connect with each other, a consensus room tone can quickly form, with each member's personal outrage amplified silently by his or her neighbors'. Onstage, of course, you see and hear none of this. All you know is that the crowd is quiet Until something tips, and they start vocalizing as a group, having been empowered by the backchannel consensus.

And that's the irony of it: you have a thunderous room tone that is audible to everyone in the room except the people on the stage.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I think the overall system is on the whole better than the traditional lecture information channels. But I also think it has its quirks and points where it fails outright -- and given all that, Sarah Lacy probably had a case when she said she had a hard job up there. But maybe by thinking these issues through we can make it easier next time around.

Games and the iPhone

Two quick thoughts on the iPhone announcement today:

First, an open question: does this mean the only way you can do over-the-air syncing of calendar events and contacts (a feature I really, really want) is by connecting to an Exchange server? That would be pretty intense if Apple limited a crucial feature exclusively to users of a Microsoft product. Shouldn't iCal and Google Calendar users be first in line?

Second, I think by far the most important news today came in the form of those game demos. We knew the SDK was coming; we knew that some kind of enterprise support was coming. But you watched those games -- particularly with the accelerometer support -- and it was suddenly clear that the iPhone platform is potentially a serious competitor to the DS and the PSP. That's a whole new industry that Apple has NEVER seriously tried to be competitive in, but the touch and accelerometer hardware/software built into the iPhone means that they are -- literally overnight -- the Wii of the handheld gaming market: a platform where the controller innovation changes all the rules.

Apple Opens Up

It struck me yesterday reading Steve Jobs' personal note about plans for third-party apps on the iPhone that the most telling thing about the announcement was the opening five-word phrase:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

Let me just say it. What we're starting to see here (and of course in the anti-DRM letter from earlier this year) is a pretty significant shift in Jobs' public relations strategy, in that he seems to have recognized that there are limits to secrecy. Yes, some developments are best kept under wraps for as long as possible -- like the iPhone or the Intel switch -- contrary to all the principles of Web 2.0 openness and transparency. But with other decisions, you're sometimes much better off going public early, and exposing some of your thought process when you do. I had been thinking about posting something over the past week or two about the iPhone SDK issue, arguing that if Apple indeed was planning on opening up the platform sometime in the nearish future, there was absolutely no reason not to announce those plans -- unlike release specs for, say, the iPhone, keeping the SDK plans secret wasn't a competitive advantage in any sense, and it was bringing on a ton of ill will from people who would otherwise be iPhone fanatics.

But as it turns out, I didn't need to write that post, because Jobs decided to go public with Apple's plans, even if they weren't fully-formed. That suggests to me that he's still evolving as a CEO and as a PR wizard, still capable of adapting to new situations -- yet another reason for Apple's competitors to be nervous.

Here's my big question, though: I wonder whether Apple had the SDK as part of its plans all along, and merely changed its mind about whether to go public with it in response to the criticism -- or were they truly debating the merits of opening up the platform, and thus reluctant to say anything until they were 100% sure of their plans?

Clear Evidence That Apple Reads This Blog Religiously

Today on Daring Fireball:

The screenshots that show you how to check your iPhone’s serial number are based on the as-yet-unreleased 1.1.1 version of the OS. (The current release version is 1.0.2; no idea what happened to 1.1.0.) One change is an additional setting under General for “Home Button”; my guess is that it’ll let you select an action for double-clicking. The iPod Touch uses a double-click of the Home button to bring up music player controls.

Me, a few days after the iPhone came out:

So here's my solution: double clicking the home button automatically takes you to the phone favorites screen.

Thanks, Apple.

How To Make The iPhone More Of A Phone

So the one mild criticism I have about the iPhone thus far is that the phone functionality isn't quite as front-and-center as you'd like it to be. Remember Jobs' line about "calling someone is the killer app"? Well, I'm not quite sure they've got it exactly right yet. But I have an idea for an easy improvement that would really make a difference.

Here's the problem. If I was last using a non-Phone application, these are the taps it takes it takes me to call my wife:

1. push the home button to wake the iPhone up
2. "slide to unlock" on the screen
3. push the home button again to get back to the main application screen
4. tap the phone icon
5. tap "favorites"
6. tap my wife's name

On my old Nokia, I could generally get to my wife's number (assuming it was recently dialed) in 3-4 steps, even if I'd left the phone running the Gmail app. My gut is that 6 steps is asking a bit too much for calls you make ten or twenty times a day to your core group.

So here's my solution: double clicking the home button automatically takes you to the phone favorites screen.

If the phone is off, you'll still have to do the "slide to unlock" move, but even then you'll be always be three taps away from your top ten favorites. And if you're working in another application, two taps will do it (counting the double-click as one gesture.)

I'm wondering if there's a reason Apple didn't allow double-clicking of the home button -- the double tap is a pretty key element of the multitouch UI.

Thoughts?

Here's one I wouldn't have predicted in advance: the iPhone makes me want to take a train somewhere. People who have above ground mass transit commutes are going to be psyched. Surfing, checking mail, listening to music, picking up a few calls -- all without lugging out a big laptop, or switching back and forth between the Treo and the iPod.

I'd like to think that the iPhone will lead to widespread adoption of mass transit. But I suspect it'll just lead to a widespread adoption of driving while trying to read Digg on your iPhone.