iPhone: How Big Will It Be?

Shamelessly cross-posted from the work blog.

We don't deal much in Apple products at ENLLC. But we do deal in cell phones. We are a proud, U. S. Cellular dealer. And we are technology watchers and this blog is dedicated to distributing our technology wisdom to our customers and the rest of the world. So...

The introduction of the iPhone has been the most-hyped product introduction since... well since the Mac really. But does it live up to the hype? Early reports say, mostly yes. Does it have some quirks and shortcomings that all first generation products have? Certainly. The non-user replaceable battery is a biggie. But on the whole reviewers seem to agree that it is just as cool and paradigm-changing as the marketing hype makes it look. And quite frankly, if the thing does 80% of what is looks like it will do in the ads, as easily, it will going to do some major paradigm shifting. It is "a breakthrough," in the words of WSJ tech commentator, Walt Mossberg.

The iPhone's true measure will probably be more greatly felt a few years down the road, when the exclusive deal with AT&T expires and when the second (third?) generation iPhone starts to really move into the masses, when and if the iPhone installed base starts to push into say, the tens of millions.

How major an innovation is the iPhone? Well, let's look at a recent New York Magazine profile of Steve Jobs.

With the iPhone, in particular, he is hurling Apple into foreign waters. His motivations for doing so aren’t difficult to discern. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion cell phones are sold worldwide every year; in terms of scale, ubiquity, and relevance, it’s the mother of all consumer-electronics markets. The chance to upend this sprawling industry, bend it to his will, is one that Jobs, being Jobs, finds irresistible.

Apple’s competitors, by contrast, find the prospect of the iPhone terrifying. “The entire fucking Western world hopes that it’s a case of imperial overstretch,” says the CEO of one of the planet’s largest communications companies. “But everybody is quietly saying, er, what if people want to buy a $500 phone? What if, er, people have been waiting for a device that does all these things? What if this thing works as advertised? I mean, my God, what then?”

Indeed. What then? What if Apple starts moving iPhones in numbers comparable to the iPod, at 16 million a month.

What then is that the mobile computing industry -- and increasingly, that is what cellphones are morphing into; Apple has merely finished the job that was started by the Blackberry and the Treo -- is going to have to get really serious. Serious about innovation, serious about quality, serious about customer service and serious about interface design and function.

One of my favorite business bloggers, Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture, posts the big lessons and hard questions that are going to be asked not only of cellphone companies, but of all of us who run businesses in the wake of this.

1. 1. Committees Suck: The old joke is that a Camel is a Horse designed by a committee. As we have seen all too often, what comes out of large corporations are bland-to-ugly items that (while functional and reliable) do not excite consumers.
   
   When a company decides to break the committee mindset and give a great designer the reins, you get terrific products that sell well. The Chrysler 300 does not looks like it was designed by a corporate committee. Think of Chris Bangle's vision for BMW -- and its huge sales spike -- and you can see what the upside is in having a visionary in charge of design.


Better pick a damned good one, though . . .


2. 2. Present Interfaces Stink: How bad is the present Human Interface of most consumer items? Leaving the improving, but still too hard to use Windows aside for a moment, let's consider the mobile phone market: It was so kludgy and ugly that the entire 100 million unit, multi-billion dollar industry now finds itself at risk of being completely bypassed, all because some geek from California wanted a cooler and easier to use phone.


What other industries may be at risk?


3. 3. Industrial Design Matters: We have entered a period where industrial design is a significant element in consumer items. From the VW Bug to the iPod, good design can take a ho-hum ordinary product and turn it into a sales winner.



4. 4. R&D is Paramount: While most of corporate America is slashing R&D budgets (and buying back stock), the handful of companies who have plowed cash back into R&D are the clear market leaders this cycle: Think Apple, Google (Maps, Search), Toyota (Hybrid), Nintendo (Wii). A well designed, innovative product can create -- or upend -- an entire market. Even Microsoft did it with the X-box;


What other companies have the ability to disrupt an entire market?


5. 5. Disdain for the Consumer can be Fatal: As we have seen with Dell, Home Depot, The Gap, Sears, etc., the consumer experience is more important than most corporate management seem to realize. Ignore the public at your peril.

Young People: "Liberal" or just Reasonable

You might have heard about the NYT/CBS/MTV (?!) poll that declares the young are becoming more left-leaning.

More than half of Americans ages 17 to 29 — 54 percent — say they intend to vote for a Democrat for president in 2008. They share with the public at large a negative view of President Bush, who has a 28 percent approval rating with this group, and of the Republican Party. They hold a markedly more positive view of Democrats than they do of Republicans.

It might be more accurate to say that the attitudes of young people are therefore, identical to other age groups. The Times, CBS and MTV paid good money for this poll, so is suppose they had to have something good to lead with in the paper. Kids' Attitudes the Same as Rest of Country" doesn't exactly jump off the page at you; doesn't really sell newspapers. So, one has to take some minor differences and blow them way up.

Forty-four percent said they believed that same-sex couples should be permitted to get married, compared with 28 percent of the public at large. They are more likely than their elders to support the legalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana.

The findings on gay marriage were reminiscent of an exit poll on Election Day 2004: 41 percent of 18-to-29-year-old voters said gay couples should be permitted to legally marry, according to the exit poll.

In the current poll, 62 percent said they would support a universal, government-sponsored national health care insurance program; 47 percent of the general public holds that view. And 30 percent said that “Americans should always welcome new immigrants,” while 24 percent of the general public holds that view.

Their views on abortion mirror those of the public at large: 24 percent said it should not be permitted at all, while 38 percent said it should be made available but with greater restrictions. Thirty-seven percent said it should be generally available.

It isn't so much the approval of national health care and the general sympathy for the democrats at this point in time, that is striking. In those regards the 18-29 year-olds are just echoing the fatigue of the rest of the country. No, what strikes me more and more as I talk with young people is the reasonableness and ability to make distinctions. Andrew Sullivan summed it up yesterday.

What strikes me most about the latest poll of the next generation is the distinctions they make. Instead of seeing "drugs" as an amorphous category, they distinguish between largely harmless marijuana and an addictive upper like cocaine. Instead of conflating all the moral issues, they have no problem with gay dignity and equality, but retain many of the moral conflicts of their parents with respect to the far more troubling issue of abortion. This doesn't strike me less as a sign of their liberalism than of their intelligence and experience. You simply cannot persuade most sane people who have smoked pot, or know people who do, that it is even a minor threat to social order or civilization. And you cannot tell people who know and have grown up around gay people that we are the threat to the family that the Christianists claim. All of which should make us more optimistic about the future, because it suggests that, in the long run, reason and experience actually do work to make the world a marginally less stupid and cruel place.

That pretty much sums up my child rearing goals right there. Survey: Young Wise Beyond Their Years, now, there is a lede.

Tough Love

Let's say that you live in a small, prosperous Midwestern town, a real old-fashioned place right out of Leave It To Beaver or Mayberry, RFD. You have two teen-aged boys. The first, let's call him Bill, is whip-smart, ambitious but a bit reckless, prone to run-ins with the law and goes through cheerleaders like most boys go through a pack of M&M's. The second, his name is George, is not too bright, a "C" student but he's a real straight arrow, dates a frumpy National Merit Scholar and always comes home by curfew.

So, let's say and why not, that one night the cops pull Bill over in his '68 Camaro SS -- after a high speed chase -- only to find the kid reclined in the front seat swilling Coors Light while getting a hummer from the Prom Queen.

Chaos ensues. It is a major community crisis. Your family, model citizens in the town is publicly shamed. After several tormented months, an unconscionable amount of money spent on expensive lawyers to maneuver Bill out of a felony charge things finally settle back down. Bill is bundled off to Harvard, his scholarships still in place. The family takes a deep breath of relief.

Then a year later in George's junior year over the course of a few months it begins to become apparent that George isn't at all what he seems. Teetotaling, not too bright, good-egg George, has been running a protection racket around town. He and his buddy, Dick are at the center of a very tightly organized and quite sordid little tale of beatings, rapes, numbers and extortion. No, one can pin anything on them definitively but the circumstantial evidence is so extensive it is impossible to ignore it any longer. Both the family and the local Sheriff are exhausted after the last family episode and are reluctant to open up what could be a can of worms several orders of magnitude larger.

What do you do? The nice boy two doors down the street -- geeky Chess Club memeber, liked George's girlfriend, maybe too much -- flat-out disappeared a couple of weeks ago. His parents are beside themselves. You get dirty looks down at the grocery store and at the auto dealership. The family has a pew to itself at the normally packed Sunday services. Even the guys at the Country Club and down at the bank where you work are becoming a bit standoffish. Your last neighborhood barbeque only attracted your Pastor, the family of the bank's loan officer -- your immediate subordinate -- and the Sheriff.

Do you do what is right for your family, your community and your neighbors? Do you straighten your tie and go down to the Sheriff and give him your full backing to put your son and that asshole Dick away for a long, long time? Or do you say to yourself, "We've been through enough. He'll be off to college in two years. It will be all over then, and we'll all get back to normal. It will be just like it was."

You're kidding yourself, Jack. It will never be what it was. George and Dick have poisoned the well. There are a couple of dozen underclassmen running around town kicking dogs, rolling the town drunk and putting the squeeze on the Grocery Store Manager. Your town is sliding down into the abyss but you are too weak to do what needs to be done, to put yourself through another agonizing...

Impeachment?

Hang In There

I'll be putting up a flurry of econ and energy stuff in the next couple of days. Light on analysis, but lots of links.

I Got A Crush On Obama

So, I get back from a grueling if successful two-day network install in Northern Illinois to find Obama Girl all over the Internets.



It is very easy to laugh the whole thing off. But, I think that pop-culture stuff like this gives important insights into the overall public zeitgeist. That people want to believe in a politician who is exciting and inspirational and that they are longing for a new direction for America. Barack Obama just happens to fit nicely into that quite-nearly-empty niche.

More Home Improvement

Redoing the upstairs sun-room/bedroom before the Polish contingent arrives next week. More soon.

Democrats: Stop Playing At Being "Good Christians"

Like any true-blue American, I don't really concern myself with religion much -- literally, but that's another post -- until it starts insinuating itself into politics and public policy. That's when I start to get downright obstinate and feisty. One thing I have observed over the years: being a Christianist zealot politician is like having jazz chops. You either have it or you don't. Someone needs to tell Nancy Pelosi that she don't got it.

“Science is a gift of God to all of us and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, arguing for the bill’s passage. “And that is the embryonic stem cell research.”

Personally, I'd rather see my Democratic leaders putting forward this theme:



But seriously, when Pelosi and other democrats try to ape the religious right in order to "triangulate" with the vast middle, they just make themselves look like insincere whores. And besides, I think that -- as ususal -- most of the strategists who are urging their candidates to do this vastly underestimate the level of the backlash going on against the Christianist right, even among non-secularists. Everyone is tired of these hand-clapping, if-you-beleive-hard-enough-it-will-be-true idiots. Message to strategists: Doing what makes the other side successful is NOT automatically the right thing. Sometimes you have to do the OPPOSITE really well.

The 08 Election as Evidence of Social Breakdown

From the always impressive James Howard Kunstler, comes and eloquent synopsis of the misgivings many people have about the presidential election campaign. No Confidence?

CNN is frantically advertising a set of "live" debates between the presidential candidates this week -- Democrats Sunday and Republicans Tuesday, with loads of "color commentary" before and after. This big media show is being staged in New Hampshire, whose once-significant early primary election has been reduced -- like so much else in our national life -- to merely symbolic status now that fifteen other states have crammed theirs into the super-duper primary day of February 5, 2008. Since I believe that a collective unconscious operates among groups at all levels of the social hierarchy, including the national level, this extraordinarily early staged contest says a lot about how insecure we must be about our leadership, about our place in the world, and about where we are headed.

US election campaign periods have never been regulated in terms of a set number of weeks or months, the way some other nations do. But the 2008 US election is the first in my lifetime that ramped up to such an intense and formal level of activity so far in advance. If nothing else, the amount of money that the candidates need to raise -- and burn through in airplane charters, staff salaries, and staged events -- puts them all in jeopardy of corrupting themselves to the various donors desperate to preserve their prerogatives under the status quo.

What everybody seems to sense semi-consciously is that the status quo is dragging the US into an abyss.

I'm not sure I share fully Mr. Kunstler's level of pessimism with regard to the process that seems to have unfolded and produced a rather strange new elections process. But I do share his sense that is is quite wrong. This rush by states to shove themselves to the front of the primary process is based upon deeply flawed thinking. Individually they are using the rationale that they don't want their states influence to be diminished and thus want to move to the "important" early stages. Collectively, once everyone is "early" then everyone's influence is diminished.

This the the classic Prisoner's Dilemma.

Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both stay silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a two-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act?

The dilemma arises when one assumes that both prisoners only care about minimizing their own jail terms. Each prisoner has two options: to cooperate with his accomplice and stay quiet, or to defect from their implied pact and betray his accomplice in return for a lighter sentence. The outcome of each choice depends on the choice of the accomplice, but each prisoner must choose without knowing what his accomplice has chosen to do.

In deciding what to do in strategic situations, it is normally important to predict what others will do. This is not the case here. If you knew the other prisoner would stay silent, your best move is to betray as you then walk free instead of receiving the minor sentence. If you knew the other prisoner would betray, your best move is still to betray, as you receive a lesser sentence than by silence. Betraying is a dominant strategy.

But we aren't in a prisoner's dilemma situation. Everyone knows what's going on and there is pretty high transparency. Not just about the election but about all the hard issues facing our nation. But, it seems everyone continues to maintain the strategy of Always Betray.

I think this election campaign is going to end badly. No one can hope to emerge from the two-year long slog through the morass of opposition research and media scab-picking with anything resembling the political legitimacy required to lead our fractured and fractious nation in the coming years.

Pond Blogging, Pt 1.

When I haven't been at work -- which is most of the time, busy as we are -- the last couple of weekends have been spent rehabbing our backyard pond.

It came with the house, full of beautiful goldfish. Way too many goldfish. They are illegal to release into the waterways, and attempts to give them away met with no takers. Last winter, with the very long, very cold snap, I was unable to keep a hole open in the pond for gas exchange. When spring arrived, there were 70 little fish corpses floating in the water. Now they fertilize our garden.

Also, over three years of kids playing around it and three years of freeze-thaw cycles, much of the surrounding rocks had ended up in the bottom of the pond. The tall grasses had gone nuts, taking over the entire back end and the lillies, pictured below in 2005 had also become overgrown. So, time to empty it out and start from scratch.



Step one is to pump out the thing and remove all the debris from the bottom. The pond is about 4.5 feet deep in the middle. Emptying the first 3.5 feet was pretty easy with the pump. But then the lilies and the accumulated pine needles got in the way. So, first step was to divide the lilies.

Water lilies are very easy to divide. They are rhizomes or bulbs. So, I simply found the most healthy looking of the six and eight foot lengths of bulb and cut off all the current growth (which was pretty extensive by late May) and laid the bare bulbs with just a few nubs in a wading pool. I discarded everything else. Below, you can see me left in ankle-deep water consisting of mud, grass clippings, pine needles and other organic matter (use your imagination). The discarded lilies and stuff can be seen in the upper pool. You can also see where many rocks have fallen in and how the grasses are overgrown.



I'm trying to hook up the pump to get the rest of the water out. I got out all but about three or four inches. This was mostly mud and gravel and I hauled that out four or five trips with a five gallon bucket.

As I was getting down to the final few inches of muck, I saw movement in the water. At first I thought it was a frog. But what I could see breaking the top of the water was long and white-yellow. Reaching down I saw... a goldfish!! Somehow, this guy had survived the oxygen deprived winter, and lived in the turbulent, gross water for two days. He was immediately deposited into a clean container. We dubbed him Creature From the Black Lagoon. He/she is an Übergoldfish. We will get three or four new goldfish and he/she will sire/spawn a new Master Race of goldfish! Mwahahaha!



Time to scrub the liner down (soap and water) and let it dry. Next I hit the grasses with Roundup, covering the clusters I wanted to keep. I waited about three days for the poison to work its way down to the roots then attacked with the weed whacker, knocking them down to about 1-2 inch stems then hitting again with the Roundup. Eventually, I'll have to go to work with the shovel and dig up as much of the root mass as possible. We will then lay down plastic plant barriers and put some nice paving stones and river rock on top for a Japanese garden feel in the area by the large boulders. Some potted plants will go nicely there too.

I also had to take out all the rocks and spray them down thoroughly to remove old dirt and whatnot. To do it properly, I should have treated them with some sort of masonry cleaner, but I was on a budget.

Next, time to begin repairing the rim and the rock shelves. The stuff to use is polyurethane expanding foam, just like using in home insulation and filling in gaps. Real pond professionals use a version that is black-colored to match the pond liner. However, this stuff costs about $13 a can and is unavailable anywhere locally. Mail order would have cost about $70 for two cans with shipping. So, I ran down to Farm and Fleet and got the beige stuff. It dries to a dark beige color that is very close to the natural sandstone. It is tricky stuff to work with though and I'm not sure I'm totally happy with the aesthetics of the results. Practically speaking though it works like a charm and makes a very solid bond between the rocks and the liner. Below are the early results with the shelves done and the grasses knocked back.



It's been raining on and off pretty hard all the last two weeks, so the pond has filled back up with rainwater. But this morning I also got the waterfall built with nice, flat stones we brought back from the Indiana Dunes and put the newly potted lilies back in the main pool.



So, that's what I've been doing with my precious little spare time. Once the pond is full back up, I'll start working on the upper pool rock rim and waterfall, a cute housing for the filter, and putting back the bridge that existed when we bought the house.