Perohryz

If you see a person--or a company--doing something that seems completely and inexplicably boneheaded, then it's unwise to assume that the reason must be that everyone but you is a complete idiot who is blind to fairly trivial insights such as "people desire inexpensive and conveniently available movie services, and will resist having those services made more expensive, or less convenient".  While it's certainly true that people do idiotic things, it's also true that a lot of those "idiotic" things turn out to have perfectly reasonable explanations.

And in fact, if management of all these large public companies really were the staggeringly malevolent yet totally hapless lackwits that so many seem to believe, it should be really, really easy to get rich by outwitting them.  Oh, sure, they'd probably get all their rich friends in Congress and Kiwanis to gang up on you, but since, according to the internet, almost all those people are also too dumb to come in out of the rain, you should be able to defeat them with a couple of well-placed banana peels.

If you've found it maybe not quite that easy to make a pile of money by outguessing all these benighted fools, then perhaps you should consider the possibility that they aren't quite as stupid as you are making them sound when you sniffily ask "Why don't they just . . . ?

The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”

During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. After analyzing the records, he recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage!

This seems backward at first, but Wald realized his data came from bombers that survived. That is, the British were only able to analyze the bombers that returned to England; those that were shot down over enemy territory were not part of their sample. These bombers’ wounds showed where they could afford to be hit. Said another way, the undamaged areas on the survivors showed where the lost planes must have been hit because the planes hit in those areas did not return from their missions.

If your attitude toward the lives of others is that of a house burglar confronted by an open window; if you consider it part of your business to fabricate conversations where none exist; and if your boss treats his employees with a derision that they, following suit, extend to the subjects of their inquiries—if those elements are already in place, then the decision to, say, hack into someone’s cell phone is almost no decision at all. It is merely the next step. All that is required is the technology. What ensues may be against the law, but it goes no more against the grain of common decency than any other tool of your trade. This has been confirmed by Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at the News of the World, who started by blowing the whistle on phone-hacking and now appears, for the hell of it, to have switched from a whistle to a trumpet. Questioned on the BBC, on July 5th, he said that, having pondered the matter of Milly Dowler’s messages being hacked, he has come to view it as “not such a big deal.”

As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986."

More details:

At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person's hard drive.

A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.

The companies -- including Google, AOL and AT&T -- maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.

But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government's way.

"Follow us on Twitter" Why? I'm not a stalker. I'm not a lap dog. Do you think my friends will be impressed if I tell them: "I follow lots of stuff on Twitter." Sure. "Join our newsletter." Why? "Watch our videos." Yeah? Oh, I haven't seen a video in days. Can't wait to see yours.

Formats are a really terrible form of navigation. I was talking to someone recently who has a big video section on their homepage. Let's say they're in the business of supporting start up companies. They gave customers tasks like: "Watch our video on how to get start up funding."

Not a single person found the videos. Why? Because they went scanning and searching for funding. They did not think video, they thought funding. When you want to book a flight do you go looking for a tool? Is Google a tool? Is Twitter or YouTube a tool? When you need to convert currency, do you think 'I need a tool to do this'?

Web teams are obsessed with their recently launched Twitter feeds, their tools, their documentation, videos, blogs. Customers are obsessed with their tasks.

Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not "products" in the classic business sense. They have no plan to become their own "economic castles." Rather they are very expensive and very aggressive "moats," funded by the height and magnitude of Google's castle. Google's aim is defensive not offensive. They are not trying to make a profit on Android or Chrome. They want to take any layer that lives between themselves and the consumer and make it free (or even less than free). Because these layers are basically software products with no variable costs, this is a very viable defensive strategy. In essence, they are not just building a moat; Google is also scorching the earth for 250 miles around the outside of the castle to ensure no one can approach it. And best I can tell, they are doing a damn good job of it.

With Android, they are not building a business, they are building a moat.

Google has organized this defensive play with precision. Carriers and handset makers that use Android are given economics to do so. The Android version of the "AppStore" shares the majority of its economics with the carrier and handset makers. Once again, they are not building a business, they are building a moat (sorry for the repetitiveness, it's intentional). Because they are "giving away" money to use their product, this creates a rather substantial conundrum for someone trying to extract economic rent for a competitive product in the same market.

This is the part that amazes me the most. I don't know if a large organized industry has ever faced this fierce a form of competition – someone who is not trying to "win" in the classic sense. They want market share, but they don't need economics. Imagine if Ford were faced with GM paying people to take Chevrolets? How many would they be able to sell? What if you received $0.10 for every free Pepsi you consumed? Would you still pay $1.50 for a Coke?

Home delivery outside of New York
7 Days: $64 a month or $770 a year
Friday-Sunday: $45 a month or $541 a year
Sunday: $33 a month or $390 a year
Weekday: $32 a month or $385 a year

Digital only
Web and smartphone apps: $16 a month or $195 a year
Web and tablet apps: $22 a month or $260 a year
Web, smartphone and tablet apps: $38 a month or $455 a year

So, as a consumer in New Hampshire who values mobile access to news, my absolute cheapest price for access to the Times app on my iPad alone is $260 per year.

But if I want to read the Times on my iPhone too, I may as well get the paper delivered five days a week. That beats the “Web plus mobile apps” package by $70 a year.

That just does not add up. The Times said last week that its pricing plan was the result of extensive consumer feedback. But which consumers said the problem they wanted to solve was how to pay a $70 premium not to receive the print newspaper?