Farhad Manjoo:

Tesla is trying to create this infrastructure by itself, which means everything’s moving more slowly than it could. If the entire car business worked together to improve this stuff, batteries and charging infrastructure would improve at a faster pace.

So how can Tesla persuade General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, and other car giants—not to mention other car startups that are similar in size to Tesla—to all work together to improve the world’s electric vehicle infrastructure? By licensing its tech to its competitors, in the same way that Google gives Android away to every phone-maker in the world.

That’s exactly what Tesla has started doing.

Interesting idea; I wasn’t aware that Tesla was licensing its motor and battery technology. Getting more electric cars on the road and a shared quick-charging infrastructure in place would certainly benefit everyone involved.

Marco Arment argues that free trials with higher-priced applications in the App Store would undermine people’s tendency to try out a number of applications even if they don’t use them long-term because they’re so affordable:

If the App Store mostly moved to higher purchase prices with trials, rather than today’s low purchase prices and no trials, this pattern would almost completely disappear. Instead, we’d get the free trials for almost everything, and then we’d only end up paying for the one that we liked best, or the cheapest one that solved the need, or maybe none of them if we didn’t need them for very long or decided that none were worth their prices.

In this type of market, the winners can make a lot more, because you can indeed charge more money. But the “middle class” — all of those apps that get tried but not bought — all make much less.

I think Marco’s right. (Please do read his entire piece. It’s very good.)

Since releasing Basil last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and paid upgrades, which is a related topic. Trials seem like they would be a positive thing for developers; users could try out our applications, see how good they are, and then, theoretically, they would be willing to pay a higher price, and would do so at such a volume that our current sales would increase or, at minimum, wouldn’t suffer. Charging $10 for an application sounds a hell of a lot better than charging $2.99 or $3.99.

Marco is right that this would fundamentally change the nature of the App Store. Rather than spend a couple bucks here and there to try out new applications, users would more likely try out a large number of applications and end up paying for the one that best fits their needs. Of course, that may be more fair; users only pay for the application they need, and only the developer who provided it is paid. But as Marco points out, that erodes the entertainment aspect of the App Store.

As a result, since that market would resemble the PC or Mac software market, he argues the outcome probably would, too. A relatively small number of developers and companies will do especially well, and most others will make very little. That’s convincing.

I don’t think there’s a net benefit here for introducing trials. That market may support deeper, more full-featured applications, but it could also throw out one of the App Store’s greatest attributes: the ability for a single developer or small team to take a single good idea, turn it into an application, and make it accessible to a huge audience—all while possibly making a decent income and having the chance to make it a huge success.

Rather than hope for trials or even paid upgrades, I think developers need to utilize the tools we have: in-app purchase and subscriptions. IAP can allow developers to reach a wide audience with a low initial price (or free, even), and make more from those customers who are willing to pay for more. Paper for iPad is an excellent example of how to do this. The application comes with a “pen” drawing tool for free, but pencil, marker, paintbrush and color mixing tools are available through IAP. There’s nothing predatory or abusive about Paper; it’s a beautiful, useful application, and the tools available for purchase make it even more useful.

Those are the kinds of things we should be thinking about. Not only is hoping/waiting for trials unproductive, but it limits what your application is capable of. IAP is an incredible tool that allows for unique, powerful applications for users, all while making it available to a very large audience. That capability shouldn’t be shunned; instead, we should think about how to use it to make businesses that are sustainable for us and useful for customers.

Andrew Ng is helping lead a group at Google dedicated to making giant advances with neural networks:

It was a shift that would change much more than Ng’s career. Ng now leads a new field of computer science research known as Deep Learning, which seeks to build machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does, and this movement has extended well beyond academia, into big-name corporations like Google and Apple. In tandem with other researchers at Google, Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain.

Pretty good piece about the increasing overlap of neuroscience and neural network research for technological purposes, but what I want to emphasize is how much Google has invested in neural networks (or “artificial intelligence” generally, if you’d rather, but that term is pretty misleading). Both Apple’s and Google’s futures depend heavily on using user data and other data sources to provide value for users, and Google has a huge advantage here because they’ve been investing heavily in it for a very long time. It’s just as important to Apple, but Apple had to acquire the Siri team to gain the capability. That’s a huge disadvantage.

This isn’t just about speeding up voice recognition or making it more accurate, although that is an advantage Google Now has over Siri—using voice recognition in Google’s iOS search app feels much faster than Siri because it shows you what it thinks you’re saying as you say it. It’s much more than that; since this has been something very important to Google for a long time, and something of an intrinsic organizational competence, Google can move much quicker to develop the capability in Google Now than Apple can. Apple must move even quicker to make it a skill for Apple, too, and to take advantage of their own unique resources that Google doesn’t have.

For just a small fee, you too can have your screenplay analyzed for maximum box office effectiveness:

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

How long before a similar process just writes screenplays? And, really, what would be lost?

Enstitute is a group providing apprenticeships for college-age people:

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

Colleges are incredibly expensive, the cost continues to rise, and yet they are increasingly less effective at preparing people to be successful. There’s absolutely value in a liberal arts education (in fact, I think there’s even more value now), but many schools don’t even do a good job of exposing students to a variety of disciplines to make them more well-rounded. Universities crank students through, make them take class after class with lecture-midterm-lecture-midterm-lecture-final, put them tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and leave many of them not much better off than they were before entering.

So new education organizations like this should be welcomed. Perhaps they’re not exactly what we need to replace universities, but we don’t need to replace universities—we need different options, different paths, different ideas that allow people to take a route that fits them better, and places pressure on our bloated, staid education system to change.

Jay Haynes claims Ron Johnson failed at JC Penny because he misunderstood Steve Jobs’s statement that “You can’t just ask customers what they want”:

Ron Johnson took away the wrong message from Apple and decided not to analyze the jobs-to-be-done for JC Penney customers. Like almost every innovation effort that fails to analyze the customer’s job-to-be-done first, Johnson’s effort was a failure. But his biggest failure may be learning the wrong lesson from Apple and his former boss.

Jobs’s point was that you have to understand the needs customers have, rather than their expressed wants. Haynes presumes that because Johnson said that JC Penny shouldn’t test their changes since customers don’t know what they want, he meant customers don’t know what needs they have. That’s a huge leap that isn’t at all justified by the (second-hand) quote Haynes references nor by Johnson’s decision not to test changes. And one of Jobs’s other famous sayings is they do no market research for their products, and that they didn’t do any for the iPad because it isn’t the consumer’s job to know what they want.

I’m willing to bet that Johnson understands Apple quite a bit better than Haynes does, based upon this rather lazy attempt to connect a valid point—that there’s a difference between ignoring what people say they want and ignoring their needs—to Johnson’s failure at JC Penny. If you want to read a much more plausible take on why Johnson failed, Ken Segall’s is the one.

Benedict Evans points out that the smartphone market is mostly tapped out:

Growth for any given manufacturer necessarily becomes a matter of taking sales away from other smartphone manufacturers, not featurephone manufacturers (i.e. Nokia). Moreover, Moore’s Law is at work, driving down prices; you can now get a 4.5″ dual core Android phone from Huawei for just $200, and one from a generic Chinese manufacturer for $120-$150. 

This is clearly a challenge for any handset OEM, but especially for one at the high end. There are fewer and fewer new high-end buyers coming into the market and the ones you sold to in the past may increasingly be tempted by ever improving cheaper phones. So a high-end phone maker risks losing sales if it stays at the high-end, or losing margin if it makes cheaper phones, or both. 

This transition is the biggest threat to Apple’s future because the iPhone is responsible for so much of the company’s earnings.

Janko Roettgers notes that Pandora users are slightly more likely to report that owning music is important to them, and then argues:

The company didn’t make any data available about people who pay for a streaming subscription, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see significantly lower interest in music ownership amongst users who pay for unlimited access.

That’s why it’s smart for Apple to invest in iRadio. The goal is not to kill Pandora, but to actually bring that type of radio service to more users, and keep them from switching to a full-blown access model. In other words: It’s not about Pandora, and all about Spotify.

I’m skeptical that the data Roettgers is using, which comes from the NPD Group, means much of anything in this case; while streaming service users may have much lower interest in owning music, I doubt that Pandora users would report higher interest because they use Pandora. Instead, it may be self-selecting—people who care less about owning music (or care more about selection) might choose streaming services, whereas everyone else will use non-random access services like Pandora and purchase songs and albums they really like.

That said, this sort of service could help compete with Spotify, Rdio et al., but not because it will provide similar functionality to them. Rather, it could make iTunes more useful. iTunes’ Genius auto genre and playlist-making features are actually incredibly good, so using it across iTunes’ entire library of music could be terrific. Embedding that in iTunes, iPhone and iPad would be great, and would give people more reason to stay on the iTunes platform.

What it won’t do, though, is convince people who highly value unlimited access to replace Spotify or Rdio with iTunes or to stick with iTunes over those services. They’re simply not substitutes.

Ken Segall wrote an excellent analysis of Ron Johnson’s tenure at JC Penny:

In my opinion, there is one very simple reason. I don’t mean to minimize it, because it’s a horrific miscalculation, and I can understand why Ron would be dismissed because of it:

Ron failed because he changed the prices long before he could visibly change the stores.

He did a basic cleanup of the selling environment (eliminated junk and switched to whole-number pricing). Then, before he could widen the appeal of jcp, he took away the one thing traditional customers were hanging onto: sales and coupons.

Sounds right to me: when sales drop 25 percent and you put in a $552m net loss in the fourth quarter, it’s hard to recover.

In his last episode of the Talk Show with Michael Lopp at the Úll Conference, John Gruber compared Johnson’s taking over of JC Penny to Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997, saying that Jobs received a lot of time to work. He’s right, but the comparison is flawed; Apple made a profit in the first quarter of 1998 of $47 million after dramatically reducing operating expenses. That quarter certainly wasn’t a success, but they turned a small profit after losing $120 million in the year-ago quarter. JC Penny, on the other hand, has seen a scary erosion in sales and income.

Jobs wasn’t given carte blanche to do whatever he wanted without consequences; rather, he stabilized the company’s position while making serious changes. Segall is arguing that Johnson failed to do that. His plan may have been sound, but he further destabilized the company before he could make his vision a reality.

Ouch:

A year and a half into his dismal attempt to turn around J.C. Penney, Ron Johnson was ousted as chief executive on Monday and replaced with his predecessor, Myron E. Ullman III, as the board searched for a new direction for the struggling retailer.

The board said Mr. Ullman, who was at the helm for seven years, “is well positioned to quickly analyze the situation J.C. Penney faces and take steps to improve the company’s performance.”

It’s disappointing that his no sales, fair-pricing plan failed so miserably.

Jake Lodwick argues that an acquisition is always a failure:

I typically refer to the IAC sale as “the worst business decision of my life.” I’m not sure IAC is worse than any other large company in this regard. An entrepreneur is someone who, almost artistically, designs a living entity which embodies the values, beliefs, and ambitions of the creator. It’s impossible for a larger entity to swallow a smaller one without completely reshaping it. When this process begins, a wild visionary – the entrepreneur type – is the most toxic, indigestible actor imaginable. And this is why I roll my eyes when a new acquisition is announced: Because I don’t see it as a triumphant graduation but a sacrifice to an industry that is afraid to dream big.

I started this article wanting to disagree, because while I think acquisitions are rarely the right choice for both parties since they are so difficult to do, I also think that sometimes—sometimes—they are the correct choice. But Lodwick is convincing: the technology industry has created an efficient process not for starting visionary and “disruptive” companies, but rather an efficient process for established companies to hire new talent.

This piece combines nicely, I think, with the Matt Stone quote I linked to earlier.

Dream bigger.

Mark Bittman:

Twelve years after the publication of “Fast Food Nation” and nearly as long since Morgan Spurlock almost ate himself to death, our relationship with fast food has changed. We’ve gone from the whistle-blowing stage to the higher-expectations stage, and some of those expectations are being met. Various states have passed measures to limit the confinement of farm animals. In-N-Out Burger has demonstrated that you don’t have to underpay your employees to be profitable. There are dozens of plant-based alternatives to meat, with more on the way; increasingly, they’re pretty good.

The fulfillment of these expectations has led to higher ones. My experience at the airport only confirmed what I’d been hearing for years from analysts in the fast-food industry. After the success of companies like Whole Foods, and healthful (or theoretically healthful) brands like Annie’s and Kashi, there’s now a market for a fast-food chain that’s not only healthful itself, but vegetarian-friendly, sustainable and even humane. And, this being fast food: cheap. “It is significant, and I do believe it is coming from consumer desire to have choices and more balance,” says Andy Barish, a restaurant analyst at Jefferies LLC, the investment bank. “And it’s not just the coasts anymore.”

Something I’ve been wanting for years is happening: quick, healthy, unpretentious and (more) affordable food. This is a big deal.

There are many insightful things in this interview with Alan Kay and I suggest you read it in its entirety. Here are two:

By contrast, it is not a huge exaggeration to point out that electronic media over the last 100+ years have actually removed some of day to day needs for reading and writing, and have allowed much of the civilized world to lapse back into oral societal forms (and this is not a good thing at all for systems that require most of the citizenry to think in modern forms).

For most people, what is going on is quite harmful.

And:

One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea. All the companies I’ve worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent “agriculture” we could put the world back together and all would prosper.

When Apple announced the iPhone in 2007, they presented it as a device that did three things: made calls, played music and video, and browsed the web. When I saw the announcement, I knew that day that I had to have one when it was released.

That wasn’t because I was an Apple geek (although I certainly was). It was because I immediately knew what it did and what it would do for me. It would do what I’d tried to do with a PocketPC for a couple years—put the web, my contacts and calendar in my pocket, wherever I am—and combine my phone and iPod into a single device that is superior to them at their intended function. I knew it because that’s how Apple presented it. They presented it as a device that did those three things.

They could have presented it as a technological marvel, a device that combines a high-resolution multitouch screen, fast mobile processor, cell and WiFi radios, and proximity, ambient light and accelerometer sensors into a handheld device with desktop-breed software and surprisingly-good battery life, a PC in your pocket. But they didn’t; rather, they presented it in terms of what it did for users and what they would find useful about it.

This isn’t important just for presenting the iPhone, however; of course, doing so made it immediately intelligible to me and many others, even those for whom the technology underneath it is closer to magic than science. They presented it from the user’s perspective, rather than from the creator’s, and showed what role it could play in our own lives, rather than make the viewer do that translation on their own. That’s an important lesson for how to market a product, but I think what’s even more important is that this focus on what it does for the user didn’t start at Apple when they began creating the presentation to introduce the iPhone—it began all the way at the beginning of the project itself. They envisioned and designed the product as a user, rather than as a designer or engineer.

What this means is starting with a problem or unfulfilled need that people have, something that, if it were improved, would make people’s lives better in some way. Then, you must understand precisely what that problem is, what the person really wants, and what the underlying causes of it are. Only then will you start designing a product or service. By doing so, the entire product creation process—from generating ideas (“ideation,” a word I loathe) to packaging and delivering it to customers—is within the context of solving a concrete problem. Every design and engineering decision made happens within it, and there is a built-in decision process for whether to add or remove something, and metric for how well each part succeeds: does it better solve the problem for the user?

This goes beyond “empathizing” with users.¹ Instead, it means thinking as a user, from beginning to end, and using that perspective to decide what you should or shouldn’t do, and what your product or service should or shouldn’t be.

Apple does this better than any other company, and that’s the case in part because they are ruthlessly focused on it. One of Jobs’s more well-known sayings is that he is as proud of the products they didn’t ship as the ones they have shipped. This line is held up as a reminder that to do great work, companies must focus. But focus on what? This provides us with an answer: focus on what will do the most good for users. All decisions flow from that.

1. “Empathize with your users” has always seemed rather disgusting a concept to me—it shouldn’t be some great insight to empathize with your users, and in fact, it sounds clinically calculating to me: empathize with your users and you will have more success! Empathy—understanding the feelings of others and caring for them—should be the starting point for all businesses rather than something to bolt on in order to increase sales. [↩]

Wow:

In March 2010, just a couple of weeks before the iPad was due to be released publicly, I had a reason to contact Steve. A friend of mine was dying of liver disease and I was going to San Francisco to hopefully see and communicate with her while it was still possible. She was a friend from my Adobe days and was very much into technology. I thought it would be a treat for her to see an iPad. And I had one. But until the product was officially released I could not show it to anyone without permission from Apple management.

This is a short little story from David Gelphman, but it’s a must-read. This is an example of how a company should be run: make exceptions when necessary, empower employees, and trust them to do the right thing with that power.

Oh, and be human.

What a beautiful story.