(Credit:
Billpapa.org)
Reading the business section of yesterday's New York Times, you couldn't help but notice the juxtaposition of two seemingly different companies, which, at second glance, have more in common that you might think. One is Bloomberg, the financial data juggernaut that has enough cash to aspire to become “the world’s most influential news organization.” The company has placed its bets on the acquisition of the venerable BusinessWeek, trusting that it will broaden its reach into a mainstream business audience. A few pages later, Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross reveals Apple’s pending patent application for a new advertising pop-up technology that forces users of devices and web sites to acknowledge the reception of the commercial message.
What Apple calls “enforcement routine” is basically a radical ad-based model that offers consumers to use Apple’s products and services for free or at a discount if they “watch ads they may not want to watch.” Stross writes: “Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad--it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.” As Stross points out, other brands went down this path before and utterly failed, and he is stunned that Apple, if it is serious about this technology, seems to be willing to risk its reputation of consumer-friendly “cool.”
One story can be read in the context of the other: Bloomberg and Apple not only share a zealously rigid culture and a “walled garden” business model based on selling high-grade packages at a premium price; they are also both media companies. Both have strong communities driven by the Three C’s of Communities--connectivity, content, and context--and both are wondering which of these parameters they can exploit more aggressively without jeopardizing the integrity of the community that is the foundation of their business. Both Apple and Blooomberg create value by heavily relying on network effects within an ecosystem that they tightly control. Both are distributing content to raise demand for their products. And both have a strong brand to extend – and to lose.
With the acquisition of BusinessWeek, Bloomberg’s strategic trajectory is clear: Owning a proprietary technology platform (it sold 300,000 terminals to date), the company is looking for ways to reach more potential buyers (and sell premium services). Apple’s “terminals,” on the other hand, are its iTunes store and its user interfaces, and the recent patent application indicates that the company might explore the exploitation of attention generated through these properties. Bloomberg is buying attention to open up new sources of revenue, Apple might be selling it.
The two brands have one last trait in common: They are not really embracing social media, to put it mildly. Apple, as a company, does not engage, and Bloomberg even discourages its employees to engage. Apple and Bloomberg, in some ways, are the antidotes to a marketplace that – propelled by the forces of the Social Web – is becoming increasingly atomized, hyper-distributed, open, and transparent. Secrecy, compliance, top-down hierarchies, rigid communication policies, and walled gardens are characteristics that may be somewhat outdated in this era, and yet they seem to be the very cornerstones of Apple’s and Bloomberg’s success as the two firms thrive as the surprise champions of their respective categories. Both came to save ailing industries, ripe for innovation: Apple reinvented the music industry and the Smart Phone market. Bloomberg is determined to reinvent the news business. But in the long term, can Apple sustain its community of loyal users without becoming a more transparent organization? And can Bloomberg really emerge as “the world’s most influential news organization” without going social?
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are facing some dilemmas about what to do with their OSes when it comes to Netbooks.
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Jossey-Bass)
A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process -- from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace -- in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers. With a unique perspective, rich stories, and a global mindset, Hartmut Esslinger explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.
Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, in his foreword, said it all: "Hartmut's book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut."
You can find the table of contents, sample chapters, testimonials, and videos on http://www.afinelinebook.com
And here are some excerpts from a video interview with Hartmut:
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SeekXL)
I’m no patent expert, but it’s clear after a little research that patent laws were put into place for two reasons: 1) they want to encourage secretive inventors to stop stashing their cool ideas under a mattress somewhere and make them public and 2) they want to rock the boat.
Apple has never been accused of keeping new ideas under wraps, but by securing their new patent for “multifunction” touch technology like pinch, rotation, and swipe, they have certainly rocked the boat.
We won’t know how or if the boat will be righted until a few million dollars are spent on lawsuits, but those in the mobile and consumer electronics industry seem to be either ignoring the issue (using the lawsuit reasoning stated above) or they have the knee jerk reaction that Apple is ruining it for everyone – that the company is reverting to Pre-Open-Source, Big-Meany Corporate status.
And yet, isn’t Apple doing us a favor by rocking the boat? The reason behind the existence of patents is sound – to spur innovation and excite competition, the argument being that if there was no payoff for new products, services, or technologies there would be less incentive to push for change and improvement. Instead of ignoring the issue or getting angry about it, companies ought to be putting their energy and resources into coming up with something new. If Apple owns “touch,” what’s next?
There was an interesting email exchange bouncing around the frog design studio in Austin the other day that seemed to entertain a world beyond touch – or at least an admission that touch was in some ways limiting. “My emotional connection to a device is through its content,” not its touch screen, wrote one emailer. As the thinking developed, there was talk of combining capacitive strips with touch UI or taking the gestural technology behind the Wii Remote as an example of “indirect touch,” albeit an imperfect one. “Its gestures are rough approximations and I hate using it to enter text,” was the response.
Touch and the possibilities of the touch interface still seem so new to most that it takes courage to think beyond the now and the wow. Purposefully directing your focus away from the popular culture is risky in a business sense because the MO of business is to capitalize on what everyone wants now. It also verges on the anti-social. When your friends and colleagues are just now getting iPhones and you’re already geeking out about its limits at a cocktail party, it’s hard not to come off as a bore. Ah, the price of early adoption….
If trying to figure out how to trump touch technology is anti-social, one guy who probably never leaves his laboratory is Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. After a read through the book, one wonders what the difference is between touch screens and stone tablets. They both seem archaic up against the notion of haptic interfaces (how what you feel can be enacted virtually and vice versa), the possibilities surrounding RFID tags, and, yes, voice recognition. These aren’t new technologies but could they be developed further? Could these be integrated into everyday life so that they “dissolve into behavior,” as Greenfield puts it? Imagine never having to use a keyboard again, or for that matter, ever having to pull out a “phone” or walk over to a computer monitor. Information and content comes and goes through “interfaces” that have disappeared into how we act and move within our surroundings – wall paint, video tattoos, motion sensors, and chip implants.
The technology is available, or nearly so. I remember in the late 90s when people were experimenting with surgically implanted RFID chips that would communicate with home technologies. Walk into your house and your favorite music would start to play, the oven would start to preheat for dinner, and the television would switch to a pre-programmed news channel. Now there’s talk of RFID implants to prevent credit card identity theft. I don’t know about you, but that gives me the chills. Being indebted to a credit card company already feels like they have their hooks in me. I don’t need a physical reminder.
And of course, herein lies the designer's dilemma. How do you move beyond human habits so drastically without alienating people and the technology along with it? Most would say you do it gradually. Don’t let the technology get too far ahead of human aptitude. Then again, today’s phones look and act nothing at all like they did 10 years ago, so gradual is relative. What are the possibilities in the next 10 years? Thanks to Apple, they may not have anything to do with touch.
An article in the New York Times says customers are being more attracted to "simple" products:
And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.
But the article conflates two different definitions of "simple"
- Doing a focused function or small number of functions (i.e. it's "simple in what it does")
- Being easy and intuitive to use (i.e. it "simple to use")
The article cites a number of examples including the Wii, the iPhone, the Flip camcorder, and the Sonos multi-room music system. These products represent a spectrum of the different meanings of simple, but the article conflates them all together as though they were equivalent. If you're making decisions about how to approach a new product design, this is a very dangerous thing to do.
The Flip camcorder is very simple in what it does. It has removed all but the most essential functions of being a video camera, which has a knock-on effect that it is easy to use just because there is very little to learn about.
The iPhone is far simpler to use than any other smartphone out there, but it is very complex in what it does. With the App Store, that complexity grows every day. Indeed, if Apple had come out with a greatly de-featured smartphone, it would not have been a smartphone at all.
The Wii is not significantly easier to to set up or less complex than the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, but they have put their emphasis on a different kind of game play than the "technical" type of games with steep learning curves that tend to dominate on the other platforms. This makes it easier to get started with playing the games themselves.
Which brings us to an important point: at the same time these devices are removing things, they are adding others. In the case of Flip it faciliates spontaneous use in a way that traditional large and expensive and complicated camcorders do not, and it can be customized with a very cool website to make it more of a fashion accessory. The iPhone added a new interface paradigm with its multi-touch, gesture-based touchscreen, and was able to push back the layered complexity that the wireless carriers tend to impose. The Wii brought joy back to video games with control accessories that use physical movement beyond one's thumbs, and which encourage more personal collaboration and competition than one gets from a first-person-shooter.
These additions have allowed the products to open up new market opportunities and reach customers that have stayed away from less convention gadgets in each category. But it's not just the removal of things to make the devices simple that's achieves this, at least as important is the judicious addition of evocative capabilities.
Sonos is in some ways is a counter-example: It's well designed and much simpler to use than the usual cobbled-together solutions for get multi-room audio using a PC as a music source. If simple was all it took to appeal, then they should have done much better. In fact it took additional complexity -- creating an iPhone app that allowed the iPhone to replace Sonos' custom-built remote (which also contains a scroll wheel and a color LCD, not unlike an iPod -- to goose sales, according to the article.
The common denominator throughout all of these is ease of use, and a new twist on the experience of using the product. But don't make the mistake of thinking that "simple" just means removing functionality. Sometimes that's appropriate, but other times it's exactly the wrong thing to do.
Rumors are buzzing that Apple has been working on a revolutionary manufacturing process involving lasers and waterjets and solid blocks of aluminum for the upcoming MacBooks. The contention is that the rumored "Brick" product actually refers not to a product itself, but the manufacturing method for the MacBooks.
Site 9to5mac, who originated the rumor, state:
It is the beginning of the new Apple manufacturing process to make MacBooks. It is totally revolutionary, a game changer. One of the biggest Apple innovations in a decade.The MacBook manufacturing process up to this point has been outsourced to Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturers like Foxconn. Now Apple is in charge. The company has spent the last few years building an entirely new manufacturing process that uses lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of a brick of aluminum.
They go on to cite the following advantages:
- Carving out of aluminum eliminates the need to bend the metal and create weak spots or microfolds and rifts.
- There are no seams in the final product, so it is smooth.
- Screws aren't needed to tie the products together.
- The shell is one piece of metal so it is super light, super strong and super cheap.
- You can be a whole lot more creative with the design if you don't have to machine it.
In reality, Apple has been using laser and waterjet methods for quite sometime, for example the glowing LED that appears behind a "solid" front face of the MacBooks is apparently achieved with laser-cutting to thin out and partially perforate the wall in that one area.
So there is nothing particularly novel about user laser and waterjets as they are used frequently in smaller size production runs of the tens of thousands. The difference is scaling them up to the hundreds of thousands that Apple produces in.
(I should note here that although Apple and frog design, where I work, worked together in the 1980's and pioneered injection molding techniques with plastic that are now commonplace on computer products, I don't have any insider knowledge whatsoever on this rumor.)
For example, if you look at the iPod Shuffle you can tell it is hogged out aluminum. On such a small product this is do-able. On a large product like a laptop this would typically result in a massive amount of waste (so kiss your green credentials goodbye). And the notion that this is somehow cheaper than stamping thin sheets or molding plastic is completely wrong - it's much more expensive.
However, starting from a solid piece of aluminum allows tighter tolerances and mechanical features that can't easily be achieved with molding, stamping or extruding. If you look carefully at these pictures of a MacBook Air that Gizmodo took apart, you can see some bosses and undercuts that would be difficult to do with typical molding techniques. But there are some more exotic methods like hydroforming and near-net casting that are more common in aerospace and military contexts could probably achieve the same result. Another example of a company investing in manufacturing IP to give it a competitive edge is Shimano, who has built up expertise in super-thin wall, super high tolerance hollow forging for its bike components.
But given the complexity of the components that need to get tightly mounted inside a laptop casing, and the number of ports and so on that need to be exposed to the outside, it's unlikely that it will literally be a hollowed out block of aluminum. And even if it was, it would not particularly help much with weight (it's still aluminum) compared to the stamped case of the current Aluminum MacBook Pros.
(And though 9to5mac makes a big deal out of "aircraft grade aluminum", there's nothing particularly exotic about that these days either, it's quite a commonly used material).
What's remarkable is how Apple is scaling up techniques normally used for limited production runs - limited because they are more expensive on a per-part basis. But clearly Apple has been figuring out how to get the economies of scaling, and picking off certain techniques one by one to try them out on successive product introductions. A new MacBook makes sense to bring several of them to culmination as a flagship product.
Having said that, and not discounting Apple's ability to go beyond the bounds of what others pull off, going by the 9to5mac article there isn't necessarily anything very revolutionary being described.
iTunes 8, announced Tuesday, introduces a couple of things that point toward a future in which Apple branches out beyond its pay-as-you-go buying model for media. Are these a harbinger of new buying options that will appear in iTunes 9?
Genius List
iTunes has had a "Party Shuffle" function for quite a while, with which it dynamically builds a playlist from your music on your hard drive. It was not (so far as I could tell) particularly intelligent about how it picked out what to play, however--Chemical Brothers could be immediately followed by Dave Brubek. It was essentially a glorified shuffle mode.
With iTunes 8, Apple has introduced the Genius List, which communicates with a cloud server about the contents of your music collection, then does fancy some background intelligence so that when you give iTunes a seed song, it is able to build out an automatically running playlist in which the songs have more of a similar character. And what's great is that you can do this on the iPod, independent of iTunes.
While a seemingly small thing, this actually fixes one of my peeves about iTunes--when you want something more tailored than a full shuffle but you don't want to switch to radio, how do you do it? iTunes has always had a fairly black-and-white approach--it's random, or it's exactly what you asked for. There was no in-between. Genius List fills this middle ground without the hassle of creating mood-specific playlists.
This is clearly treading into the same territory on which Pandora has built its reputation, though for the time being, Apple is mum on how the algorithms are doing their magic. Apple is currently restricting the Genius List to the contents of your current library, while Pandora is, of course, a streamed service that introduces you to new music and artists.
This brings us to...
The Genius Sidebar
The Genius Sidebar goes outside your library to introduce you to algorithmically generated recommendations from the iTunes Store. Again, Apple isn't saying much about how this is done, other than explaining that it bases recommendations on looking at your collection, as well as others' (so the more people that take part, the smarter it gets).
At the moment, these recommendations are available only with the usual 30-second preview, but it seems like just a short hop to get to a full streaming, subscription-based approach, living in parallel with the pay-per-song approach Apple has successfully used so far. Rumors have been around for ages that Apple will introduce a subscription service, and the Genius Sidebar seems like a simple way to step into that approach.
Most of the subscription services tried so far have done rather poorly to terribly for various reasons: price point, confusing DRM, confusing interface, lack of content, or just not having a critical mass of users to sustain them. If anyone can make it work, Apple can, and my guess is that iTunes is its step toward a full-blown subscription service in 6 to 12 months.
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Sennheiser)
Rob Walker, the author of the just-released "Buying in," is a marketing connoisseur, an expert in reading the cultural underpinnings of commerce. In his Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine, he examines how technology shapes consumer culture and vice versa. In tomorrow's piece he elaborates on the history of headphones, and how their role evolved in modern society, from the first Bose set to the Sony Walkman to the iPod earbuds.
With the miniaturization of devices, the public exposure of personal space increased. I remember that when I was 14, I came home from school, had lunch, and didn't wait a second to lie down on my bed, put my clunky Sennheiser headphones on, and listen to an album I had just bought. Thomas Dolby's "Aliens Ate My Buick" or Prince's "Sign of the Times." I closed my eyes and forgot the world around me. It was a moment of total immersion and uncompromising intimacy, both with the artist and myself. I wasn't ready to share the music with anyone else until I had fully experienced and vetted every single note through the immediacy of the headphone connection.
Looking back, headphones seem to have anticipated the era of performance-enhancing body extensions that we may be entering soon, but at the same time they now appear like a nostalgic relict of a time when the supply of attention among young consumers was still excessive. Having their social function shifted from providing excessive to expressive intimacy, headphones have become a status symbol for consumers who want to consume in between or parallel to other activities, and who want do that on their own terms -- in public, alone; in a perfect manifestation of what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined "extimacy." The album has dissolved into 99-cent units on iTunes, and the headphone experience has been succeeded by portable soundtracks for permanent distraction.
"I've been thinking recently about my connectivity and mobility and one of the reasons I keep coming back to it is the dissonance I have when looking at the two mobiles I use most often. There's now been many comparisons made between the Nokia N95 and the iPhone. Both best in class so to speak. However, I've struggled to completely understand why the iPhone beats the N95 (for me and I'm also really betting for many others). The N95 ostensible has it all. Better camera, streaming bluetooth, video, decent headphone jack, better speakers and general sound etc. It has messaging and mail etc. I could go on and the comparisons which have been made before.
However, the real reason in my mind that the iPhone wins is its ability to 'stay in social touch.' The email, the SMS, the browsing experience has enabled much of the behavior that social networkers have mastered already on the laptop or desktop. It's not about the technology, it is about how the device helps you socialize.
(...) Devices that keep us more connected and 'loosely connected' without pressuring us to wear a heads up display are going to win over those that just add a better camera. In the end it is about the conversations, the chatter, and the ability to engage wherever you are. I even find the iPhone works well as sort of a second screen...for glances at email updates, entering Twitter updates etc. In that way it is supplementing my desktop."
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Mallorca photo blog)
Just a mirage? Rick Poynor, in a beautifully honest article for ID Magazine ("Down with Innovation"), takes the "design thinkers," the "innovators through design," or the "design-ovators," as he calls them, head on:
"Design thinkers set great store by business targets, by driving the enterprise forward, because it is exactly what their clients want to hear and it gets them work. Seen from outside the cozy bond of service provider and client, this is a severely limited way of viewing design, and the total domination of current design discussion by this kind of commercial rhetoric is a worrying trend."
And furthermore:
"It is hardly surprising that designers try to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the accusation that they are hung up on making things look pretty. Belittling language of this kind suggests that the visual is inherently trivial, easy to do, and beneath consideration, that form is not a powerful medium of expression and carries no meaning for the viewer. Design thinkers like to talk as though we have somehow passed beyond the stage where the way things look needs to be a primary concern, and designers, browbeaten and demoralized, half seem to believe them. They have been too ready to accept the caricature of themselves as airheaded stylists who care about insignificant niceties of no concern to anyone else."
"Yet the rhetorical reduction of design to frivolous prettification reveals a willful blindness to the power of expressive form-making, if not a deep, philistine ignorance of the history of design and visual culture. The scale of the oversight is so colossal, and frankly baffling, one hardly knows where to start. Are the great cathedrals of Europe--Rheims, Lincoln, Chartres--merely pretty? Are the gardens of Kyoto? Is Alvar Alto's Paimio armchair? Was Alexey Brodovitch's Portfolio magazine? How about Leica cameras? The patterns on Moorish ceramic tiles? Or the PowerBook and the iPod? There is surely no need to go on."
In the same article, Michael Bierut of Pentagram supports him: "The business use--the specific goal that motivated the client or sponsor to initially fund the work--often fades away, sometimes quickly," he says. "In some ways, you might argue that aesthetic value--for an enduring design, at least--is the only lasting value, since over time functional needs can change and business moves on to the next goal." Bierut goes so far as to modestly propose that "just making something look nicer" or "replacing something ugly with something not so ugly" is an admirable goal for designers.
That's quite a statement in a climate where proving the business value of design is the profession's Holy Grail (and complex), and "design thinkers" keep demanding designers should become CEOs. Can they? Yes, perhaps, but only if they can get over themselves. Leadership in business is about empowering others. Designers and particularly "design thinkers," however, are still busy yielding power for themselves.
At this point, it may be more aspirational to be humble. Rather than touting design as the ultimate problem solver in all aspects of social, professional, and political life, the (relative) power of design may lie in balancing the possibilities of convergence (media; devices; platforms; disciplines; processes) with the unleashed forces of divergence in a web 2.0 world -- design as the facilitator between software and hardware; mobile, web, and desktop; analysis and creativity; virtual and real; professional and consumer; individual and crowd; business and art; function and beauty.
Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog design, teaches design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The mission statement he has crafted for his students may provide some much needed clarity and guidance in this debate for practitioners:
"The holistic challenge for Design is to create physical and virtual objects which are useful art, and inspire spiritual values by as few atoms and bits as possible. Design is our modern-day continuation of 'technical' functionality converted into human-historic and metaphysical symbolism. When designers create a new and better object, a mechanism, a software application or a more inspiring, human-centric experience, this will become a 'branding symbol' in itself by meaningful innovation, good quality and ethical behaviors. People will recognize the resulting visual symbols as a cultural expression of humanized technology and subconsciously connect it with historically learned visual shapes and patterns that connect. Design cannot be just a fashionable statement, but must advance our industrial culture by providing sustainable innovation, cultural identity and consistency so it can create emotional and social belonging. Designers have a humanistic responsibility that connects and coordinates human needs and dreams with new opportunities and inspirations in science, technology and business in order to make the results and their usage culturally relevant, economically productive, politically beneficial and ecologically sustainable.
The accelerated globalization is posing both huge challenges and offering new opportunities which require designers that are both talented and competent to influence and define new trends in regards to mastering outsourcing to 'lower cost' economies and reversing the current excesses of overproducing generic and hard-to-use products. Designers also need to invent new concepts for 'homesourcing' by converting local and tribal cultures into beneficial concepts.
To succeed as competent and respected 'executive partners' in the rational world of business, designers must become creative entrepreneurs or creative executives themselves. However, ultimately, design must rise above all commercial-functional benchmarks and aspire to near-eternal cultural relevance and spirituality."
