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Bundled writing

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times has an op-ed piece by Daniel Akst, Apple's tablet and the future of literature, which I highly recommend.  He asks a question which I think I can answer:

it's not clear how anyone will get paid for writing, or what will take the place of the existing commercial system, which produces ample dreck but a lot of great stuff as well, often written and edited by experienced professionals with families to support and bills to pay. It may get our egalitarian juices flowing to think that the digital revolution will open up this world, but a literary culture in which everyone is a writer and no one is an editor is likely to leave all of us poorer.

I agree about editors; almost every writer benefits from having an editor.  In the past the printing presses were controlled by the publishers, whose editors hired the writers and fixed up their output.  Now the writers have their own printing presses on the Internet, plus their work is unique in a way that editors' isn't.  So now the tables should be turned: writers should hire editors.

Which they will do if they make their living from writing.  Paying for editing services is then a justifiable expense to ensure that they have good products to sell.

Making a living from writing has never been easy, and nobody should expect that to change.  But great writers have long managed to do it by various means.  They generate unique content that people want access to, so they have something to sell.  It might be ad space next to the writing; it might be sponsorships that even members of the public can engage in (I once sponsored the publication of a printed book and my name was printed in the Acknowledgements); it might simply be that you have to buy a copy.  The public Internet hasn't been around very long and it can take a while for these things to be explored and winning formulas to be identified.

One thing is however clear to me:  there isn't much of a future for newspapers as we know them.  It's not just that they deliver stale "news"; most of their content is from wire services and is available on the Web at no charge (often from other newspapers).  Magazines are very different: all their content is unique.  I think they're the ones who should be putting up paywalls, more than newspapers, but while Google Search finds 5220 results for the phrase "newspaper paywall" it only finds 15 for the phrase "magazine paywall".  I'd pay to read articles from such magazines as The Atlantic and The Economist; I don't only because I don't need to (The Atlantic's content is open) or they won't let me (The Economist has no single-purchase option, not for a single issue let alone a single article).  But there's no way I'll subscribe to those magazines, i.e. pay for every article in every issue for a year or whatever, because I don't read that many of the articles.  I will however occasionally buy a single newsstand copy because according to its cover that particular issue contains something of great interest.  And then I don't even want most of the issue, just the one article.

That article I'm willing to pay for was written by a writer.  I'd like to find out about the existence of that article (through such means as Twitter recommendations and, in the case of technology articles, a website like Techmeme), and then read it, paying with money or ad-watching as required.  I don't want to have to get a bundle that was assembled by some newspaper or magazine editor.  I might however be interested in a volume discount, e.g. if the Globe and Mail's columnists collectively resigned and started their own website where one must pay to read each article, I might be tempted to pay one price that's good for a bunch of articles from any of those columnists and with no expiration date.  Unique content has realizable value.

We've been down this road already with music.  Album sales are way down but single tracks sell nicely through the iTunes Music Store (which I don't use myself, but I bought a couple of tracks today on Beatport).

Curated collections won't be going away.  But it's time for more of the individual creators to connect directly with their audiences.

Is Apple about to introduce a "no OS" computer?

 

From 2001: A Space Odyssey

For some time now the tech bloggers have been going nuts over the prospect of a tablet computer from Apple.  They've been focussing on hardware issues, in particular the "tablet" form factor.  But one of the major themes of this blog, the disappearance of the personal computer as we know it, is highly applicable as well.  Apple has a long and strong track record of streamlining user interfaces beyond their major competition (e.g. Apple ][, Macintosh, iPhone), and I expect them to do it again by introducing a "real computer" on which the visible operating system has been eliminated.  There will still be an operating system, but largely hidden from the user, as on the iPhone (and similarly just a version of OS X).

As for the form factor, a tablet would be better for frequent use than a laptop (which has to be opened up), and more in keeping with a device that's more about "output" than "input".  Most people don't type large amounts of text (tech bloggers are atypical but they usually forget that as they pontificate), and books and magazines and newspapers are gradually moving online (with the exception of those where high-quality printing is important).  The screen could use protection, but it's really not that difficult with a good colourless-plastic screen protector (like those often used to protect smartphone screens) or a flip-up cover (like my old Palm IIIxe had), and particularly nervous people can use a full sleeve.  As for typing, I imagine Apple would stick with an onscreen keyboard.

There's been some speculation that the device's software will be heavily oriented to reading material (e-ink based readers such as the Amazon Kindle won't appeal to all that many people; they can't even display colour, let alone video).  I don't know of anyone who's designed a proper screen reading experience yet, e.g. Google Fast Flip doesn't even fit a page onto my 1280x800 screen.  Apple would likely do it properly.  For a fascinating look at what a good tablet reader might be like, see this and be sure to watch the video there (which is apparently 8 minutes long but for me the time flew by).

And Apple's tablet (assuming that it does come along) will be followed by devices based on Google's Chrome OS, which takes a different approach but has the same idea of eliminating the visible operating system.  2010 will be an important year in the disappearance of the personal computer as we now know it.

Hardware vendors get elbowed aside

Hardware and software people have different areas of expertise.  Obvious, right?  Not at hardware companies, which as long as I can remember have tended to hire electrical engineers to write their software.  Electrical engineers tend to hire other electrical engineers even when that's not the best fit, and the dismal results are everywhere.

Things are finally changing.  But not because of any reform at the traditional hardware companies.

One of the reasons that Apple has been so successful is that it's good at both hardware and software, one of the relatively few such companies.  By controlling both they can assure a good user experience.  But they no longer build the devices themselves; that's long been done by contract manufacturers who have the facilities and expertise to crank out quality hardware at a low price, built to the specifications of their customers.

Contract manufacturers have gradually become better and better at not just the manufacturing but the design, and many have become original design manufacturers (ODMs) who design and manufacture their own products and merely have them branded and sold by companies with a brand presence.  For instance, the T-Mobile MDA Vario and O2 Xda Mini Pro phones, which were sold by carriers T-Mobile and O2 respectively, were both the same phone, one designed and built by Taiwan's HTC Corporation.  While more recently HTC has also been selling products under its own name, the ODM phenomenon continues.

So now anyone with enough budget can become a hardware company.  Just tell an ODM what the machine needs to do, and they'll design and build it for you to sell under your own brand.

Rumour has it that Google will be selling its own phones and netbooks, getting ODMs to design and build the devices to Google's requirements.

Why would Google feel the need to do this?

Because the existing phone and netbook vendors are not up to the task.  They're hardware companies.  Google is a software and services company.

Hardware companies, even when they have an operating system supplied to them by software people, rarely put out decent products from the user's standpoint.  I won't use a laptop that isn't a ThinkPad or a MacBook (both created by companies that are longstanding hardware and software companies).  And the iPod pushed aside the MP3 players that were already on the market from hardware companies.

Where laptops have less than adequate usability, they have more than adequate power.  Laptops are still being sold on the basis of "more power" that hardly anyone needs.  Netbooks are one response.  The traditional PC vendors, and their high-cost suppliers Intel and Microsoft, have been mocking netbooks to try to stop people from buying them.

Google makes more money when more people are using the Internet, so anything that interferes with Internet use is something it wants to fix.  If Google does sell a phone, it will be because it's not satisfied with the software side of all the Android-based phones currently hitting the market.  And if Google does sell a netbook, it will be because the traditional hardware vendors are unwilling and/or unable to sell computers that are simple and cheap, with "simple" requiring that there be no user-visible operating system via something like Android or Google Chrome OS.

I expect to see more software and services vendors creating their own hardware products.  I want even my television set to come from a software company.

140 characters to groupthink

I’m on Twitter a fair bit these days, but lately I’ve been getting quite frustrated by the number of occasions on which I don’t connect properly with one or more other people:  there are misunderstandings and miscommunications and crossed signals.  It seems to me that the common element among these occasions is some level of disagreement. UPDATE: Or attempts at humour.

In the various “echo chambers”, where people retweet each other, send each other links supporting their common beliefs, and support each other against common enemies, 140 characters is enough.  In contrast, delving into differences of fact or interpretation or opinion generally requires more space than that.  So Twitter sucks for any kind of meaningful discussion.

Furthermore, Twitter makes it easy to stick with members of your own tribe and nobody else.  Groupthink forms easily when nobody outside the group is present, and then any form of negativity or skepticism or disagreement is frowned on.  Meanwhile, existing beliefs common to the group get plenty of reinforcement.

On Twitter, how often does anyone’s mind get changed about anything?  I suspect that the answer is “not very often”.

My March 2007 blog post about Twitter, Reduced barriers to entry for ... narcissism!, was off the mark (I don’t mind admitting it since so many others were wrong too).  Perhaps the real downside of Twitter is that it contributes not to narcissism but to rigidity.  Mob psychology among people who aren’t even in the same place; just what the world needs.

Google, privacy, evil, and advertising

I haven’t posted anything here for a long time. I did once write a post entitled Blogging infrequently is a feature, not a bug, but by “infrequently” I didn’t mean such a gap!

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, caused a flap this week by responding to a privacy concern with “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I have a few comments.

Essentially all of Google’s revenue comes from targeted advertising. If you use Google’s services, it collects as much as information as it can about you in order to better target the ads that it serves you. If targeted advertising isn’t evil, and if the information collected is used only for that purpose, it isn’t evil either, right?  That’s how Google sees it.

Many people are in fact totally fine with having no privacy, especially those who indulge their exhibitionistic tendencies via Facebook and Twitter and location-sharing services such as Foursquare. That group consists mostly of younger people, and I would guess that some observers expect their attitude to dominate over time, i.e. it’s just a matter of waiting for the old fogies to become outnumbered and perhaps not realize what’s happening in the meantime (i.e. the frog in the slowly heating water).

I don’t believe that’s what lies ahead. According to Socionomics, which greatly influences how I view many things, we’ve been living through a very unusual period in history in which optimism and trust have been running at much higher levels than usual. If that period is in the process of ending, as I believe it is, we can expect a loss of confidence that it is safe to trust other people and companies with information about us that we wouldn’t necessarily want to be public knowledge. Not just the highly sensitive stuff that we generally manage to keep under wraps, but even some information that privacy-oblivious Googlers would think harmless.

Facebook has recently also been hit with privacy concerns, and although they haven’t done the best job of dealing with them to date, they’re continuing to respond and I believe can achieve an acceptable middle ground.

But Facebook and Google are in different revenue situations. Although Facebook too is largely dependent on ad revenue, it’s also going after other revenue that should in time reduce that dependence. Google also has non-ad revenue, in particular the growing Google Apps for Business, but relatively speaking the dependence is quite different. For Facebook, privacy is a pain in the ass but one that can be accommodated sufficiently to mollify users, while for Google, privacy is an enemy to be overcome.

Then there’s the dependence of advertising on the general economy. And then there’s what I believe is a long-term decline in advertising as the nature of customer engagement changes in a more connected world. What if advertising declines slowly over time, plus is hit across the board in a worsening economy, plus even its least-vulnerable spot of highly targeted advertising is hit by privacy concerns?

I understand why Eric Schmidt would like to think that privacy is in the past, because privacy is a major threat to Google. I think that belief is incorrect.

UPDATE added the following day:  I forgot to mention one point I’d intended to make:  advertising is widely seen as slightly on the evil side of the evil-good spectrum – and when the social mood (to use the socionomic term) is down, any perception of evilness gets magnified in the eyes of the public.

"No OS" computer on its way

Further to my post More on the evolution of netbooks, ZDNet’s Andrew Nusca points to a story printed today in the New York Times. The NYT has obtained confidential documents saying that cellular carrier T-Mobile will next year launch in the USA a tablet computer that uses the Android operating system. This would be an example of the device I expect to largely replace today’s personal computers: one without a conventional operating system, and pretty much just a smartphone that has a much larger screen and a full-sized keyboard (which in the case of tablets may be an on-screen keyboard).

Replace, that is, for those of us who feel the need for more than a phone in our pocket. I expect us to be in the minority, with most people satisfied with a smartphone. Today smartphones such as the BlackBerry and iPhone and Treo/Centro are priced much higher than regular cellphones, but as the category becomes more popular, and as all the cellphone manufacturers get into the market, the prices are coming down. Already, new lower-end phones and plans increasingly include browsers and some Internet access, leaving out only smartphones’ larger screen and full keyboard (physical or on-screen). I recently heard a Torontonian who is originally from India tell a story of a recent trip back to India: when he pulled out his laptop, his nieces laughed at him and said “Oh, uncle, you’re so old-fashioned – you and your laptop!” They just use their phones now, and they think that’s better!