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The Ten Year Anniversary of the Apple TV

Ben Thompson:

Ten years on, it’s worth remembering that even Steve Jobs hedged his bets; the truly transformational can scarcely be imagined, much less established by fiat.

For the annual live incarnation of his podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber is joined by Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing, Phil Schiller. (The Schiller segment starts at about 12 minutes in)

Marco Arment on both the unusualness and the unique appeal of this interview:

Apple doesn’t do this. Apple executives rarely speak publicly outside of Apple events, especially for live interviews. One of the highest-ranking executives of the world’s highest-profile company being subjected to questions, unprepared and unedited, in front of a live audience full of recording devices, is rarely worth the PR risk: the potential downside is much larger than the likely upside. Do well, and a bunch of existing fans will like you a bit more; do poorly, and it’s front-page news worldwide.

[…]

John asked real questions on challenging subjects, including gender diversity, my alleged software-quality decline, discoveryd problems, thinness trade-offs with battery life, the new MacBook, continuing to sell 16 GB iOS devices, and whether the Apple Watch should have shipped without WatchKit 1.0 apps since the native SDK was so imminent.

The Rise of “User-First”

Ben Thompson:

What is interesting, though, is the impact on platforms and ecosystems of a user-first approach. iOS has maintained a platform lead, just as Windows did, but unlike Windows said lead is not based on owning the ecosystem (and thus distribution); rather, iOS owns the best customers, i.e. the customers who are most willing to pay. This is hardly a revelation, but I think there is a larger lesson to be drawn: success no longer depends on platforms or ecosystems; rather, platforms and ecosystems themselves depend on access to desirable customers. By extension, the companies who own that access — who own the funnel, to use a marketing term — are the ones who gain outsized influence and, in the long run, outsized profits.

The bigger picture #5: Jony Ive, Evan Spiegel, Mobile First

A somewhat weekly selection of interesting articles, thoughts, talks, statistics and more. (Mostly about, but not limited to, media and technology.)

  • Conway’s Law | Wikipedia: 'organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations’
  • The Death of Cash | Peter Coy: 'There’s a surge of creativity around ways to drive interest rates deeper into negative territory, possibly by abolishing cash or making it depreciable. And there’s a countersurge around how to prevent rates from going more deeply negative, by making cash even more central and useful than it is now.’


The bigger picture #4: Silicon-as-a-service, AWS, Mobile first

A somewhat weekly selection of interesting articles, thoughts, talks, statistics and more. (Mostly about, but not limited to, media and technology.)

  • The AWS IPO | Ben Thompson: 'The long-run question for Amazon: if ‘Media’ is in secular decline, how will they fuel eternal investment into their business, much less the fabled returns that at least theoretically underpin their sky-high stock price?’
  • BuzzFeed’s first pitch deck to investors in 2008 | Quartz: 'Media companies are good at making compelling content. Advertising companies are good at optimization, targeting, and paid promotion. BuzzFeed will use the same platform to combine the best of both worlds. Competition will come as content and advertising converges’


The bigger picture #3

A somewhat weekly selection of interesting articles, thoughts, talks, statistics and more. (Mostly about, but not limited to, media and technology.)

Ways to think about market size

Benedict Evans:

Anyone with a sense of history ought to have been able to look at a phone the size of a brick and say ‘well, this could come down to the size of a pack of cards and cost $100, given time”, just as anyone should have been able to look at the Krieger electric landaulet above and see that it would get much better and much cheaper, just as trains and steamships had done. If you understood technology, that much was pretty easy. But if automobiles had only replaced existing horse-drawn carriages and carts then the market would have been much smaller. The hard part was to forecast Wal-Mart, and Los Angeles. 

Replacing Middle Management with APIs

Peter Reinhardt:

There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99designs Tasks in the visual design industry, Homejoy in the cleaning industry, and so on. These new software services employ armies of human workers, optimizing their output, productivity and quality while driving price down.

Crowdfunded Marketing

Pebble announced their new smartwatch Pebble Time on Kickstarter yesterday. They blew past their 500.000$ goal after only 17 minutes and raised 1 million in funding after half an hour, the fastest Kickstarter project to reach that number to date.

Properly speaking, it's not a project you can fund though, it’s a product you can preorder. From Pebble’s perspective, this makes sense for multiple reasons: 

  1. Using Kickstarter as a marketing tool: A crowdfunding campaign always makes for a better story than a product launch - especially for Pebble, as leveraging their history with Kickstarter allows them to jump start a substantial PR machinery. 
  2. Using Kickstarter as a distribution channel: Pebble getting to market with their new product before Apple Watch launches might prevent them from being overrun completely. If Pebble Time was introduced after Apple Watch went on sale, it might have looked like a cheap me-too-product. In fact, it might still look like that in a couple of weeks - but enough people will have already decided for Pebble with their wallet by then for Pebble to sustain their business. They just bought themselves some time. 
  3. The gamification of buying: I don’t know if this is attributable to gamification, but when you’re preordering something on Kickstarter, it feels less like buying a product and more like supporting a good cause. Moreover, multiple pricing tiers and limiting the number of available units are a great way of signalizing scarcity and generating FOMO.

It’ll be interesting to see more incumbents trying to dip their toes into crowdfunding platforms to harness some of these perks.

Outing A.I.- Beyond the Turing Test

Benjamin H. Bratton:

The little boy robot in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” wants to be a real boy with all his little metal heart, while Skynet in the “Terminator” movies is obsessed with the genocide of humans. We automatically presume that the Monoliths in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” want to talk to the human protagonist Dave, and not to his spaceship’s A.I., HAL 9000.
I argue that we should abandon the conceit that a “true” Artificial Intelligence must care deeply about humanity — us specifically — as its focus and motivation. Perhaps what we really fear, even more than a Big Machine that wants to kill us, is one that sees us as irrelevant. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all.

Great think piece by Benjamin Bratton, debunking the use of the Turing test as the quasi-standard benchmark for A.I. as an anthropocentric fallacy.