White Spaces web access

A new form of wireless network known as White Spaces will come online next month, the FCC announced today.

White Spaces has been called "WiFi on steroids" and has been championed by the likes of Google and Microsoft.

Spectrum Bridge has been given the OK to become the first active White Spaces database administrator. The FCC says it can begin operations on January 26. The first approved device will be made by Koos Technical Services, and it will work much like a wireless router.

The downside is it will only be available in Wilmington, NC. The FCC is working on expanding approvals nationwide as fast as its little government fingers let it, although it didn't say when that might be.

White spaces brings with it tons of potential for new devices and applications. It is faster than WiFi so it can handle more data. It can bring (nearly) free Internet access to the most remote areas of the country, places that can't get WiFi.

It can aid in education. It can improve medicine. It can even make your favorite team win on Sundays (well, maybe not).

Because it uses broadcast television signals, any place that can pick up a broadcast TV signal should be able to tap into White Spaces. A large range of wireless frequencies have always been reserved for broadcast television, much of it unused. Researchers at Microsoft, Google, Dell and other companies, like Spectrum Bridge, developed methods to let data devices like PCs use those blank frequencies.

But when they first showcased their research, broadcasters weren't happy. They argued that TV Band Devices (TVBDs) would interfere with television signals. Years of bickering ensued between the broadcast companies, device makers like Microsoft and Google and the FCC. Many iterations of devices were built and tested. The data folks officially won in late 2010 when the FCC said it would allow TVBDs.

But there was a catch.

Before millions of devices could be sold and put into use, TVBDs needed a way to make sure they wouldn't knock out any TV stations. The FCC decided a complex database was the solution. This would keep track of TVBDs and assign them safe frequencies.

Such a database would in turn need “database administrators.” Earlier this year, the FCC selected nine companies to do the job -- all that applied -- including Google and Spectrum Bridge. They would be allowed to charge a small fee for their efforts.

After Google was accepted, Microsoft applied. And the FCC said, sure, why not? It let Microsoft be a database administrator, too.

But the real money will be in devices and applications for those devices, perhaps billions of dollars worth.

In a written statement, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said,  "Unleashing white spaces spectrum has the potential to exceed even the many billions of dollars in economic benefit from Wi-Fi, the last significant release of unlicensed spectrum, and drive private investment and job creation.”

One database and one device in one city does not a billion make. But it has to start somewhere.

Server-centric and Client-centric designs

Over the years, software development has ping-ponged between server-centric and client-centric designs. Today, with dominant mobile platforms like iOS and Android, apps have entered a hybrid client-server architecture.
What this means for developers is that they have to juggle more technologies than ever before. And in response, we’re seeing the rise of developer platforms that handle functionality that has never been outsourced before—everything from databases to sending email to providing user authentication. As more software moves to the cloud so too does the development tools used to make the final product.
From the Client to the Server to a Hybrid
Back in the ’90s, desktop software ruled. This meant that most software development was client-side. The world was also less connected. So, even if your application connected to the internet, users didn’t expect it to always be online. Developers could dutifully create client-side software and ship it to consumers as a simple download with no strings attached.
But then, the web slowly became ubiquitous by the ’00s. More and more software was being moved into the browser. For developers, this meant more time spent doing server-side coding. Requests are made to the server, the server crunches it to produce a result and sends it back to the browser. There were probably bits of client-side javascript, but most of the heavy lifting was being done on the server. Knowing server-side programming was key during this time.
Fast forward to the present and a complicated picture emerges. Networked mobile applications are at the forefront. It turns out that the eventual endpoints of the web won’t be desktop computers, but rather, mobile devices. The number of tablets and smart phones will dwarf desktops. Already, services like Facebook are seeing two times more mobile activity than desktop.
Hybrid is Complicated
Developers now have the challenge of creating both client and server code that deeply interact with each other. This means having to keep up with two different styles of development, and most likely more than one programming language and environment.The client code needs to work on resource-constrained devices with a network connection that is slow and unreliable. And because we’re dealing with clients that may be out of date, the server needs to be able to handle multiple versions of clients that are making requests. Add in data migrations and you have a recipe for disaster.
Consumer behavior is also becoming more demanding. Users expect their apps to always be online, or at least pretend to be. This means having to gracefully handle caching, queue up requests, and wrangle a whole slew of networking issues. Oh, and you’ll also need to have various 3rd party integrations like Facebook and Twitter.
Combine all these things and it’s clear that you’ll need something more than just a highly capable team of developers. You need to leverage developer platforms.
The Rise of Platforms
Over the past few years, we have seen the rise of X as a Service, where X could be anything from platforms to infrastructure and other services. One could argue that this all began with Amazon Web Services, and have since blossomed with countless services like Heroku, Mailgun, dotCloud, and AppEngine.
All these services have one thing in common: they increase the productivity of developers. Using these services is like standing on the shoulders of giants. Why create another deployment of Rails if Heroku focuses 100% of their time and energy on it?
Everyday, platforms are reducing the amount of time developers have to focus on non-app specific code. What this means is that apps can be developed faster at higher quality with a tighter focus on the core product. Yes, you are ceding some control over your app’s development to a third-party, but the whole point of these developer platforms is to do one thing very well at scale. The time for developer platforms is now, and it will only accelerate as more of the world comes online.

Beijing or SV? Hmmmmm

Twenty years ago, Zhongguancun was but farming fields and small houses, far from the city center of Beijing. The ‘cun’ at the end of Zhongguancun literally means “village.” As with much else in China, the change has come lightening fast.
Today, Zhongguancun is China’s closest equivalent to Silicon Valley. It’s host to electronics super malls, research centers, publicly-listed tech giants, and hundreds of startups. During my walk to work between twenty-story office towers, it’s hard to imagine this land was farmed but one short generation ago.
Here are three reasons why Zhongguancun (or the larger Haidian district) has grown into China’s top tech hub:
1) Academic Hub
Right next door are China’s top two universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University. But the northwest of Beijing is also home to countless other universities, including technical universities like USTB, BIT, BUPT, and Beihang. It’s the raw talent pool that has American industry leaders and politicians bemoaning a new “engineering gap.”
The transition from farming village to technology hub began with technology research. In addition to the universities, funding came from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and later multinational corporations (MNCs). As Daniel Shi notes on Quora, “There is just a ridiculous number of MNCs with their R&D centers in Beijing: Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle, BEA, Alcatel Lucent, Google. Nowhere in the US do you have such a huge concentration of R&D organizations in one city.”
Soon, a small market emerged in Zhongguancun to sell electronics to students and academics. Jack Xu, founder of lite-blog Diandian, describes a serendipitous meeting in that scene:

In 1997, Zhongguancun Technology Park was a tiny village. It had only two buildings, and an assortment of entrepreneurs hustling their programming skills, taking government contracts, and hiring [Tsinghua] students like me to do the work. At times they might get RMB 100,000 for a contract, but pay us only RMB 5000, thus retaining 95% for themselves. Back then I could make a mere RMB 2000 a month, 1000 for myself and 1000 for my parents, so they wouldn’t need to farm anymore. To me, it was a responsibility, to survive on my own as early as possible. It was also because of my work in Zhonguancun that I became a well-known programmer in a small circle and later a real opportunity came along.

That real opportunity was Jack Xu’s meeting with Joseph Chen in 1998. Today, Chen is the CEO of the social network Renren (NYSE: RENN), where Xu worked for five years, including as VP of the Interactive Division.
2) Government and Media
In America, an entrepreneur hears “government” and runs the other way. In China, government is best kept close, out of choice or necessity. The Internet is one of the most private of industries in China, one of the few without huge state-owned firms, but the government still plays a key role.
At the early stage it can be government contracts, subsidized office space in a tech park, or financing from a government-affiliated research institution. The government wants to build Beijing as a showcase capital in all aspects, so there’s extra funding for tech too.
Once a startup reaches scale, government connections are key to everything from payment licenses to “content management.” When your video website is blocked because it was found to contain sensitive political or pornographic content, who you gonna call?
Virtually all business in China is of “strategic national interest,” but some is extra-strategic. All media firms or even sites with user-generated content must have a big presence, if not their headquarters, in Beijing.
3) A Virtuous Cycle
A tech hub can build momentum that feeds upon itself. Startup founders come out of research centers and large technology firms, drawing upon their network for advice, seed funding, and talented employees. When the boss leaves to launch his own venture, it’s common for half of his division—the talented half—to go with him. The employee networks of Beijing-based tech giants like Baidu, Sohu, and Sina are becoming Chinese versions of the “PayPal Mafia.”
In “Why Startup Hubs Work,” Paul Graham of Y-Combinator writes, “I think there are two components to the antidote: being in a place where startups are the cool thing to do, and chance meetings with people who can help you. And what drives them both is the number of startup people around you.” Like Silicon Valley, Zhongguancun also has a critical mass of people who are crazy enough to do startups.

Beyond Beijing

I wrote that Zhongguancun is China’s closest equivalent of Silicon Valley. The caveat is because there’s a lot happening elsewhere in China too. China’s three Internet giants are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, but only search giant Baidu is headquartered in Beijing.
Hangzhou is home to the Alibaba Group and its e-commerge empire (Taobao, TMall, Alipay, and Alibaba.com). Neighboring Shanghai is rich in gaming, MNCs, and venture capitalists, although they fly up to Beijing to do most of their deals. As far as tech hubs, this area is second after Beijing.
Shenzhen is the headquarters of Tencent, China’s largest social networking and gaming company. Equally impressive is the hardware hacking coming out of the region. It’s home to countless entrepreneurial Shanzhai electronics manufacturers who copy, mix-and-mash, to create ”Motoloba” handsets and “commemorative” Steve Jobs Android tablets. When you hear about “sub-$100 Chinese-flavored Android devices”, it’s Shenzhen leading the charge.
Other up-and-coming hubs include Dalian, Chengdu, and Xi’an,

Silicon Valley is often said to draw top talent because it has one of the best living environments on earth. No one would say that about Beijing.
Beijing is an acquired taste, one that’s often smoky with pollution. In a Sinica Podcast discussing the soul of Beijing, China hand Jeremy Goldkorn of the blog Danwei.org called it “the anti-lifestyle capital, the anti-San Francisco.” The unpleasantness of the city, the lack of Shanghai’s creature comforts or Shenzhen’s sunshine, gives it an edge. There’s a gritty determination to seize the moment, whatever the obstacles in the way.
One friend told me that Kai-fu Lee was recently asked why his startup incubator InnovationWorks wasn’t based in picturesque Chengdu, where the cost-of-living is low and the ladies are said to be the fairest in all of China. Lee jokingly replied to his entrepreneurs that when they’re happy and relaxed, he’s not.
But do not mistake it for a city of automaton entrepreneurs. Beijing is at once ”the center of authority and a hotbed of creative thinking” as Evan Osnos writes in “City of Dreams.” There are leaps of creativity. Sites that start as copycats evolve to become unrecognizable from the original, like the red-hot microblog Sina Weibo that today bears little resemblance to Twitter.
When TechCrunch held its first international Disrupt Conference, it was right to come to Beijing. It’s dynamic, messy, and very different. But Silicon Valley aside, there’s no better place on earth for tech right now.

Leadership

One of the most often overlooked aspects of leadership is the need for pursuit. Great leaders are never satisfied with traditional practice, static thinking, conventional wisdom, or common performance. In fact, the best leaders are simply uncomfortable with anything that embraces the status quo. Leadership is pursuit – pursuit of excellence, of elegance, of truth, of what’s next, of what if, of change, of value, of results, of relationships, of service, of knowledge, and of something bigger than themselves. In the text that follows I’ll examine the value of being a pursuer…Here’s the thing – pursuit leads to attainment. What you pursue will determine the paths you travel, the people you associate with, the character you develop, and ultimately, what you do or don’t achieve. Having a mindset focused on pursuit is so critical to leadership that lacking this one quality can sentence you to mediocrity or even obsolescence. The manner, method, and motivation behind any pursuit is what sets truly great leaders apart from the masses. If you want to become a great leader, become a great pursuer. A failure to embrace pursuit is to cede opportunity to others. A leader’s failure to pursue clarity leaves them amidst the fog. Their failure to pursue creativity relegates them to the routine and mundane. Their failure to pursue talent sentences them to a world of isolation.  Their failure to pursue change approves apathy. Their failure to pursue wisdom and discernment subjects them to distraction and folly. Their failure to pursue character leaves a question mark on their integrity. Let me put this as simply as I can – you cannot attain what you do not pursue. Smart leaders understand it’s not just enough to pursue, but pursuit must be intentional, focused, consistent, aggressive, and unyielding. You must pursue the right things, for the right reasons, and at the right times. Perhaps most of all, the best forms of pursuit enlist others in the chase. Pursuit in its purest form is highly collaborative, very inclusive and easily transferable. Pursuit operates at greatest strength when it leverages velocity and scale.
I also want to caution you against trivial pursuits – don’t confuse pursuit with simple goal setting. Outcomes are clearly important, but as a leader, it’s what happens after the outcome that you need to be in pursuit of. Pursue discovery, seek dissenting opinions, develop your ability unlearn by embracing how much you don’t know, and find the kind of vision that truly does see around corners. Don’t use your pursuits to shift paradigms, pursue breaking them. Knowing what not to pursue is just as important as knowing what to pursue. It’s important to keep in mind that nothing tells the world more about a leader than what or who they pursue – that which you pursue is that which you value. If you message to your organization you value talent, but don’t treat people well and don’t spend time developing the talent around you, then I would suggest you value rhetoric more than talent. Put simply, you can wax eloquent all you like, but your actions will ultimately reveal what you truly value. Lastly, the best leaders pursue being better leaders. They know to fail in this pursuit is nothing short of a guarantee they’ll be replaced by those who don’t. All leaders would be well served to go back to school on what I refer to as the science of pursuitology.
What’s been the best thing you’ve pursued? What pursuit has led you astray. Thoughts?

Highly specific skill sets

 IT staff in too many enterprises are employed rather like corkscrews, spiraling deep into a specialty and embedding themselves there. They are not treated as people capable of learning and performing multiple functions.
This concentration of specialists is part of a gradual evolution that has led to IT teams whose costs are top-heavy with personnel who have highly specific and generally under-used skill sets. Without intending it, both CIOs and the IT personnel working in their shops are effectively conspiring to enact mind-numbingly narrow job definitions, relegating personnel to just one task, even as they work with digital technologies.
Yet these same teams are often under-built at the generalist level, where multiple work functions could be handled – if only the tools available to IT allowed it. An inflexible IT department not only limits what IT can do for the enterprise, but also can limit career growth for the IT specialists themselves: a classic lose-lose proposition.
IT Faces Dramatic Changes
Why has this happened? When technology was sold and run in silos, the corkscrew approach to staffing was the only way. And it worked – the hard way. Specialists who understood a specific system in depth were rewarded at the expense of more agile and versatile generalists. Today’s IT departments, however, must deal with situations that are changing dramatically. IT requirements for such things as managing a supply chain, or managing internal and external services, are not going to be met with silos of limited, inflexible legacy products.
New tools now appearing in the market are cloud-based, open, efficient and easy to use. IT departments are most affected by these new tools, and within the departments, those most affected by them are the specialists trained on legacy tools. As the older tools disappear, so too will their jobs.
Many IT departments are feeling threatened, and some are going through denial. “We’ve always done business with these tools,” they think. “We’ve weathered storms like this before. We can weather this one.”  Denial, however, is hope’s desperate cousin – and never an effective business strategy.
The convergence of multiple factors– the move from siloed tools to cloud-based solutions, the simplification and broadening of IT management tools, and the ability to supplement resources by accessing service providers in the cloud – is having far-reaching effects. With vendors introducing solutions developed for generalists and their level of understanding, technology teams are changing, starting to be comprised of generalists rather than IT specialists.

Virtual Assistants revived by Apple

Looking over the web and especially the blogosphere over the past couple of days, it seems there is only one thing everyone wants to talk about: Siri. With the iPhone 4S now in millions of peoples’ hands, as expected, it’s clearly the stand-out feature of the device.
But wait. Voice technology has been around for a long time. Or, as one TechCrunch commenter succinctly put it on Erick’s video demo post of Siri: “4 year old software, 8 year old technology.” This recalls one of my favorite aspects of tech blogging. You write about something, then everyone and their mother rushes out to yell something along the lines of “OLD!”. Or, even better, competitors trip over themselves to yell “FIRST!”. So if the stuff Siri is doing is old, and if others did do it FIRST, then why is everyone so damn excited about the feature?
There are a few reasons. But the simplest answer is one that has played out time and time again over the past several years: Apple did it right.
No, Apple is not the first to implement voice technology. Nor are they the first to do it on a phone. In fact, Siri isn’t even Apple’s first foray into voice controls. But their first attempt on the iPhone, quite frankly, sucked. It’s no surprise that no one used it. As for Siri, it’s a company that Apple acquired — they were actually doing some of the same things as a stand-alone third-party app previously. Credit Apple for having the vision and foresight to realize that their previous voice control offering wasn’t competitive, and that system-level integration of Siri into iOS could be magical.
What about Google? It’s true that they’ve been far ahead of Apple in the voice control space for years now. I recall being at an event that Google held in August 2010 in which they showed off some new voice functionality for Android. As I wrote at the time, “Google Unveils Awesomely Fast And Accurate Voice Actions For Android“. And that was true. At the time.
But Google failed on a few fronts with this functionality. First of all, while on paper and in staged demos Google’s technology looks great, they failed to make it compelling enough to entice everyday users to use it. They had a pre-defined set of instructions as to what you could say to get the system to work, and they were pretty rigid. By comparison, Apple placed an emphasis on natural language usage with Siri. There are a number of ways to say something to trigger a certain action. You don’t have to remember a set of commands.
Put another way, Google’s voice search and Siri may look comparable on paper. But in reality, one is something best used by a robot, the other is something best used by a human. And robots don’t buy phones — at least not yet.
In the bigger picture, this is something that Apple seems to understand time and time again that their rivals do not. Technology is an ever-important part of everyones’ lives, but the only way to make it truly accessible to the vast majority of users is to humanize it. That’s Siri. Google, Microsoft, etc — they all fail miserably at doing this.
I’m sure in a few weeks, we’re going to see Google come out and say, “wait, but look, we can do all of the stuff Siri can do too!” They’ll tweak their voice recognition to pick up more human phrases, etc. But it won’t matter. They already lost the mindshare battle. Yes, Android had better voice controls first, but if you ask anyone on the street right now which is the phone with the awesome voice controls, they’ll tell you it’s the iPhone.
The funny thing is that while Apple are normally brilliant marketers in this regard, they’re actually holding back on Siri right now. Why? Because they consider the product to still be in “beta”. And while every Google product starts in beta, it’s not a tag Apple takes lightly. Talking with them leading up to the launch, they clearly feel that Siri as it stands right now, while a great first step, is nowhere near where they want it to be. It may take six months to get there. It may take a year. But when Apple does get it to where they feel it’s ready, I bet we’ll see a massive marketing push. And we may even see it come to other devices at that point.
Earlier today, Search Engine Land did a nice side-by-side comparison of Siri versus Google voice actions. Again, on paper, they’re similar, but in reality, they’re far apart right now. But the more interesting aspect of the piece to me was when author Greg Sterling goes against the this-will-kill-Google early reactions and notes that Siri should lead to even more Google searches. I totally agree. For now.
But again, this is a beta product. Does anyone really think Apple isn’t going to work quickly to integrate it with other data partners? Imagine it tied to Quora. Imagine it tied to Twitter (and how is it not already?!). Imagine it tied to Foursquare. Imagine it tied to… Facebook. If and when that happens, Google will have a very legitimate reason to be concerned.
Right now, Google is a middle man between us and information. And we love Google for it. There’s simply too much information out there for anyone to find by themselves. There needs to be a middle man. We need Google. Apple has been hinting for a while that mobile applications could change this game. But apps are just a new, perhaps more accesible wrapper of information. There still needs to be a search mechanism powering the discovery of information — that’s why everyone keeps insisting that Apple will eventually get into the search engine business.
Well they have. But not in the way that everyone was thinking. Siri is their entry point. Again, it’s a small step right now, but it has the potential to be massive. (Perhaps the more pressing question: is Apple okay relying heavily on a third party, Nuance, for what may become a core component of their stack?)
And that’s another fundamental reason why people are so excited by Siri where they aren’t by Google voice search. Google voice search, like basically every Google product, is ultimately a way to drive more Google searches. It’s just a new layer. Even if people don’t fully understand that, they sense that it doesn’t point to something totally new. Siri does point to something totally new. With it, Apple wants to change the information search and creation paradigm. It’s an evolution powered by mobile and a new, more powerful input: voice.
This is a vision that has been 24 years in the making at Apple. The video below first re-surfaced around the launch of the iPad. “Apple envisioned their tablet 20+ years ago!,” everyone yelled. But at the time, everyone overlooked the arguably more powerful aspect: natural language voice interaction. Apple was quietly working on that too. And now it’s here. Heralding the future.

Mobile over desktop & laptop

Mobile TV and video platform MobiTV has filed its S-1 with the SEC this afternoon. In the public offering, MobiTV plans to raise as much as $75 million.
For background, MobiTV was founded in 1999 and was one of the pioneers in bringing live and on-demand TV to mobile devices. The company boasts partnerships with a number of carriers and content providers such as NBC, ESPN, Disney, CBS, Warner Music and more. And MobiTV has raised approximately $115 million from a wide range of investors, including Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Adobe Ventures and Hearst Ventures.
According to the filing, the company is the national provider of mobile television services for AT&T U-verse Live TV, NFL Mobile on Verizon, Sprint TV and T-Mobile TV, among others. The company’s technology works on 375 different types of mobile devices, across wireless and broadband networks and all major operating systems, including Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry OS and Windows.
MobiTV licenses content from major television studios, including ABC, CBS, Disney, ESPN, Fox, MTV Networks and NBC; and in 2010 delivered over 3,000 live events to mobile devices. The company grew its mobile minutes streamed from 264 million minutes in 2007 to 1.4 billion minutes in 2010.
For 2010, MobiTV’s total revenue was $66.8 million in 2010. In the six months ended June 30, 2011, the company made $37 million. Revenue for 2008 and 2009 was $55 million and $62 million, respectively.
Unfortunately, MobiTV has yet to make a profit. The company has taken a loss for the past three years. In 2008, 2009, and 2010, the company posted losses of $25 million, $14.6 million and $14.7 million, respectively. In the first six months of 2011, MobiTV lost $8 million.
And the company warns in the filing that it depends on three customers, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, for most of its revenue and if any of those customers were to limit or terminate their relationship with MobiTV, “it could be difficult or impossible for us to replace that revenue.” Sprint represented 56%, 69% and 54% of the company’s revenue in 2008, 2009 and 2010. AT&T and T-Mobile combined represent 24%, 17% and 24% of the company’s revenue in 2008, 2009 and 2010, respectively, and 42% of its revenue in the six months ended June 30, 2011.
To make matters worse, beginning September 2012, MobiTV’s agreement with Sprint converts to a month to month contract. T-Mobile will automatically renew in December 2011 for a one-year term but the agreement is subject to T-Mobile’s right to terminate on 30 days notice. AT&T’s contract expires in January 2013.
MobiTV is just the latest in a slew of companies who filed to go public in the past two weeks. Angie’s List, Brightcove, and Jive both threw their hats into the ring last week.

You can't win if you don't play

Earlier today, I was reading Joshua Topolsky’s editorial on This is my next about Apple’s “mistake” in turning their back on the Web and I kept stopping. I disagreed with basically everything.
First of all, his entire argument is based on what I believe to be a fallacy: that Apple is going to completely turn their back on Web support for iCloud. I have reasons to believe this is not the case, as I stated last week, and reiterated today. Others have since chimed in with similar notions and a bit of evidence to the contrary. While Apple may not have anything to say about web support for iCloud apps right now, let’s revisit the situation in a few months.
Beyond that, there is no denying that with iCloud, Apple is placing a very strong emphasis on native applications versus Web-based applications. You could argue this has been the case since the initial release of the App Store in 2008 (remember in 2007 when developers were told to make Web apps for the iPhone?). But I absolutely agree that the message seems more clear than ever: native is the way forward.
But as his argument progresses, Topolsky seems to do what many of us now do: interchange the meaning of the words “Web” and “Internet”. He bemoans Apple turning their back on the Web (that is, the World Wide Web — HTML documents linked together) and argues that Apple still doesn’t get and cannot compete on the Internet as a result.
I woud argue that Apple is attempting to redefine at least a part of what the Internet is with iCloud. In fact, I already have argued that.
Further, I applaud Apple for not taking an approach to the Internet that is more or less creating another Google Docs clone. Or Flickr killer. Gmail replacement. Facebook eater. Etc.
Topolsky seems to want Apple to attempt to do those things — even though, as he rightly points out, when they have tried to compete in similar ventures outside of their wheelhouse, like social, we get Ping — or syncing, we get the first iteration of MobileMe. So instead, Apple is doing what they do best: re-imagining the way things are done.
Apple is not afraid to venture forward on something while thumbing their collective nose at the conventional wisdom of the “right way” to do it. They take a concept and cut it down to its essentials and re-work an idea from there. That is why they are the most successful tech company on the planet right now. They set trends — or reset them, if they have to — they don’t follow them.
When most people (meaning the vast majority of the planet, not you and me) think about the Web, they still view it a bit of a wildcard in many ways. There’s a reason Microsoft Windows and Office are still making so much money. It’s certainly not because they’re the best products out there that are the most convenient to use at the best price. Many businesses don’t yet fully trust the Web, and neither do plenty of consumers. Apple has an opening to take what consumers trust, native apps, and infuse them with the Internet in a way that most people will not even realize.
iCloud will enable a new class of Internet apps, but many people (like Topolsky, for example) won’t even consider them Internet apps because they won’t be Web apps. Instead, the way they seamlessly keep everything up-to-date behind the scenes may as well be magic.
They will just work — better with an Internet connection but just fine without one (and better again when one is available). Unlike the Web, Apple’s Internet for these apps will be one you hardly ever think about — if at all. It will just exist in the background. To plenty of consumers content to play in Apple’s ecosystem (Mac, iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch), that will sound fantastic.
But again, I don’t view Apple’s emphasis on native over the Web as anything against the Internet itself. Nor do I believe they do. For what they see works on the Internet already, Apple is doing something somewhat uncharacteristic (at least in recent times) for them: they’re partnering up. Hence, Twitter/iOS integration.
I would argue that the move is brilliant. Had Apple tried to create a “Twitter killer”, we all would have laughed. Instead they’re leveraging what Twitter has already proven to be good at (social, syndication, etc), and tying it into what they do well (mobile, devices, user experience).
Topolsky also glosses over the fact that every iOS device (and Mac) has a Web browser built-in. In fact, as Apple is always quick to point out, they’re largely responsible for the code behind both their own and Google’s popular browsers (WebKit). Despite some paranoid theories to the contrary, Safari is not going away. And Apple is not going to stop you from accessing whatever you want on the Web through it.
Apple is not anti-Internet, they just believe that they can serve it to users better as a backend to their native apps rather than through a frontend in the Web browser. I don’t think that sounds so crazy at all. What sounds crazy is the notion that Apple has to compete with Google and Microsoft on document editing tools on the Web just because that’s what everyone else does.
And how has battling Google on their own turf — the Web — worked out for Microsoft over the past several years? Not so good.
Apple is simply making the argument (and a bet) — and I believe rightfully so — that native still trumps the Web when it comes to applications. Yes, the gap is closing, but it will take a long time to fully close — particularly in mobile. Hell, even Google’s own actions acknowledges this — that’s the reason Android exists!
Further, while it might annoy many people, Apple is in the business of selling products. They do this both by making the products themselves attractive, and by making the services that run on them attractive. It’s symbiotic. Apple focusing on Web apps would not help sell more iPads. This should be far from shocking.
The reason why this approach works for Apple is because when they make these products and services, they generally make them better than everyone else. Topolsky seems to argue that they should separate some of these services from the products and focus on the Web for the betterment of everyone. I would argue that they cannot do this. It would undermine the cohesion that makes their products so great.
“You know, if the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software in them is their soul,” Jobs said during his WWDC keynote address. Do those sound like the words of a company that is going to focus on software that can run anywhere?
The Web has given us the idea that software should be able to run anywhere, on any machine. And that’s great. But that’s not Apple. And love it or hate it, that’s not the bet they’re going to make.
But it’s a mistake to think that they don’t get the Internet as a result. With iCloud, they’re setting out to carve their own piece of it. “At long last, the brains in Cupertino seemed as if they were set to fully embrace the internet and its inherent, omnipresent power,” Topolsky writes before arguing that they haven’t actually done that. I would argue that this is exactly what they’re doing. It’s just that the front-end Web is not the entire Internet. Somewhere, we lost sight of that.
And that may not be a very popular thing to say, because the Web is open and open always equals good, right? Sure, but sometimes closed environments lead to products that are better than just “good”. And consumers tend to flock to such products — until something better comes along (as it always does). The fear that Apple’s relatively closed system will somehow lock us in forever is irrational.
Meanwhile, the notion that the Web should be the only way to use and approach the Internet is dangerous — and decidedly un-open. Such thinking would stifle innovation — innovation like iCloud.
If and when Apple does offer iCloud web apps, much of this may sound overblown and/or moot. But the underlying tension is real. Apple does believe that native apps backed by the Internet will best pure Web-based apps for the foreseeable future. It’s a big bet, but it’s not as crazy of a bet as some may have you believe.
In his headline, Topolsky asks, “can you win if you don’t play?” Yes, by changing the game.

TechCrunch 2011

Disruptions can happen to any industry anywhere in the world, which is why this year TechCrunch Disrupt is going global. The conference we launched last year in New York and San Francisco is coming back to both cities, but we are also adding a third Disrupt in Beijing. All three conferences will be filled with all-star speakers, the best new startups that launch on our stages, and the coup of working WiFi.
The first Disrupt will once again take place in New York City on May 23-25, preceded by our ever popular Hackathon on May 21-22 in which pizza-fueled developers gather to hack together a product in 24 hours. Anything can happen at these events. Last year, Charlie Rose kicked off the event by interviewing legendary VC John Doerr, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told Michael Arrington to “#@*k off,” and a real company emerged from the Hackathon—GroupMe, which later raised $10.6 million. During the main event, we launched two dozen startups, and the winner was an international startup, Soluto. That told us something.

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