Hal O'Brien

"At Apple, we reward excellence -- as long as you're excellently white, and excellently one of the guys."


More at my journal. But let's just say this has been a longstanding problem at Apple.

When it has something to do with Apple.

The New York Times has a blog piece on the iPad's arrival in Japan, and the stir it's allegedly causing. They use this as a peg for a larger analysis about the Japanese feeling like they've lost their competitive edge, not only to Apple, but to South Korea's Samsung, Taiwan's Acer, etc.

Along the way, they drop an eyebrow raising stat:

"Shipments of the iPhone more than doubled, to 1.69 million units, in the year ended in March, giving Apple a 72 percent share of the country’s smartphone market, according to the MM Research Institute."

Eyebrow raising enough that I went looking at it. There are a few problems.

The most obvious: Note the 72% figure is of "smartphone" sales. The thing is, smartphones don't sell well in Japan (or anywhere else). The iPhone's actual market share in Japan among all cell phones is 4.9%, according to the very same report from MM Research Institute Ltd. quoted for the 72% figure.

Now, mind you, that is slightly better than the iPhone's global market share among cell phones -- which is 3 percent in Q1 2010. (Smartphones sold 54.7 mil units; they're 18.8% of global sales; that yields global sales among total devices of 290.96 mil units; of which Apple sold 8.8 mil.)

Around the world, 97% of the market looks at the iPhone -- and buys something else. In Japan, "only" 95% of all customers buy something else, but it still ain't great.

The iPhone has a smaller market share than Linux. And Steve Jobs has yet to trade in his "reality distortion field" for a "reality clarification field."

After giving me a window of 3-5 days to get Minimax back, the Southcenter Apple Store called last night and said it was ready. I've picked it up, and everything appears to be doing well. 1 day turnaround is pretty good.

In an interesting way of setting what the marketing jargon calls a "reference price," they printed up a receipt to let me know this Main Logic Board replacement would have cost $617.81 had the machine not been under warranty. That's about as much as it cost new. No, nobody's trying to sell an Applecare extension, why do you ask?

Now comes the most difficult part of trying to fix an intermittent problem like this: Waiting to see if it goes wrong again, while realizing early success may only be a Black Swan.

Oddest side effect found so far: My serial number isn't in System Profiler any more. It only says,

"Serial Number (system): System Serial#"

Having kept all my receipts, though, I think that'll be OK.

Obligatory cutesy name for my new Mac: Minimax. Because it was the least worst option...

So they appear to have given an iPhone to one of the hosts of the Today Show to use on the air.

Problem: She couldn't figure out how to answer a call.

So much for "ease of use."

(Or, actually, I'm reminded of one of the claims from NeXT: "The easiest to use UNIX ever." Not really "easy," mind you. Just, easiest to use to that date. No matter how hard he tries, sometimes a sliver of truth sneaks up on Mr. Jobs.)

Mike Kozlowski has a pair of posts wherein he takes Apple to task for... thinking people can create media, rather than just consume it. Sample quote:

"Note the words “organize” and “consume” there. They’re key words, because they’re what regular people do with digital media, and software that helps people organize and consume their media is software that will get heavily used. Apple apparently missed that nuance, though, because they proceeded to enhance their newly-dubbed iLife suite with things like iMovie (a consumer-level film-editing program), iDVD (a consumer-level DVD-mastering tool), and now GarageBand (a consumer-level multi-track mixer and MIDI sequencer, apparently).

Which is all well and cool, if real people were as hip and creative and cool as the people in Apple commercials (or even if they could reach the low bar of creativity and coolth set by their on-stage demo guy, John Mayer), but they’re not. Real people never create anything; they take advantage of specialization of labor to let the really good creators — the Peter Jacksons, the Steven Spielbergs, the Beatleses, the Vanilla Ices — make all the movies and music necessary, which they then purchase/steal and need help organizing and using.

I’ve never edited a movie in my life, never mastered a video DVD, and never even considered making a multi-track music recording. Neither have you, if I might be permitted to play the odds here. By aiming its media tools at creators instead of consumers, Apple is either confusing Jobs’ Pixar coworkers and celebrity friends for normal people, or deciding that its long-time 5% market-share is too big."

*^*^*

Here's what I said in reply:


"But I stand firm by my baseless, unsupported assertion that digital media creation is inevitably going to be a much, much smaller market than digital media consumption."

Smaller, perhaps.

"Much, much smaller"? I don't think so.

One of the strangest things about the 20th Century, the century of anti-art that we are departing, is the division between creators and consumers of art. All the arts -- painting, music, crafts, fabrics, music, etc.

You can make the case that very few people are very good at creating art. But to say that hardly anyone wants to strikes me as so unobservant about humanity as to be borderline Asperger's. I would say that a great deal of the ennui about modern life is precisely because many of the outlets people once had to entertain themselves -- lengthy detailed letters, playing musical instruments, craftsmanship in all kinds of sculptural media -- have been taken away and replaced by a mandarinate of "content creators", where the masses are assumed to just be the pliable "consumers" you imagine.

Here's a quick reality check: Have you looked at the Bush In 30 Seconds website? Take a look at the now thousands of videos that have been submitted there. Many of them produced with Macs.

I think Jobs and Apple are taking a bit of a leap here... But it's not one they can't afford. And the possibility is that they'll find millions who want the barrier to creation lowered with easier tools.

In fact, it may well be that they're going for the easier path. Think about the way PIMs have died as a category. It isn't just because Outlook/Entourage got included with so many systems -- that program is largely an e-mail client with an address book. No, I'm talking about the deeper, attempt-to-organize-everything-in-your-life kind of PIM like Agenda, or Zoot, or AskSam. That category has largely shriveled, not so much because it isn't needed, as because everyone organizes their information differently. There's no common ground to make a category-creating app around -- you'll never find enough purchasers who think the same way the designer/programmers did.

So to say that Apple is passing up some giant opportunity in the field of household media organization is not unlike saying that Esperanto's potential for world peace has never been appreciated. It's accurate, but trivial.

But given just how many people do spend time in garage bands -- and go to art classes, and pottery classes, and take pictures, and go to craft stores, and go to fabric stores, and... This is a giant, giant market that you're refusing to see. It may well be a mostly female market, and that too may be coloring your view somewhat, I don't know. (And why creativity tends to be so gender-segregated is a real stumper. I don't know what most guys are afraid of, but hey.)

And I'm speaking as a longtime Windows advocate who believes the Mac mostly exists because Jobs wanted to piss off Mike Markkula (the great unwritten story of computing, I think, is their decades-long feud).

But I think Jobs is spot on regarding this issue.

You might also want to look at Doc Searls' post on this, and Dan Gillmor's.