This Time It’s Personal
Steve Jobs was not leading Apple when the company lost the infamous “Look and Feel” lawsuit waged against Microsoft. Based on the existence of an ill-advised licensing agreement struck by then-CEO John Sculley, the courts ostensibly  gift-wrapped the Macintosh UI for Microsoft to pillage. When you listen to Jobs talk about the loss, he absolutely seethes. All of the marketing about Apple’s role as the innovator that Microsoft copies stems from something that was entirely out of Steve’s control.  It was much worse than if Jobs himself had lost the Mac’s GUI. But he didn’t. The person he personally recruited to put a Mac in every household – the person who ultimately betrayed him gave it away. This theft may not be all there is to Apple’s assault, but it’s definitely present. Consider the phalanx of patents cited, the unannounced nature of the attack (according to HTC) and Jobs’ own words about the lawsuit: they all suggest some of this came from a place that wanted to avenge a loss – and prevent another. To some, the “belligerent-feeling” nature of the suit is enough to detract from its virtue. It feels “evil“, “bullying” or “unnecessary“. The core of this sentiment, made by some of the smarter people on the tubes, is that this kind of whack-a-moling inhibits innovation, which leads me to my next point.

Apple is not Microsoft
Apple is not motivated by market share, earnings per share or number of markets entered. Apple’s motivation begins and ends with the design of excellent user experiences. The perception that Apple will get to a place in the industry where it stops innovating, sits on its cash cows and perpetuates its existence by bludgeoning more dextrous upstarts with its patent portfolio is simply never going to happen, at least not while Jobs is alive. Jobs relentlessly whips the crop at Apple, pushing innovation like WiFi, Firewire and DisplayPort to the point where comfortable technologies like floppy disks, serial connections and removable media drives are phased out with pundit (and occasionally fanboy)-wrankling regularity. Apple outpaces any other computer or consumer electronics maker in terms of version hustle. Anyone who believes that Apple is capable of laying off the gas at the expense of bleeding-edge innovation does not know the company.

Dragon Dictation is perhaps one of the coolest apps on the iPhone. For those not familiar, Dictation is an app that displays a single “record” button when launched. You then speak into your iPhone, and your audio is transformed into text, with some startlingly impressive accuracy. Unfortunately for many users and Dragon, the program uses AT&T’s network to transmit speech to Dragon’s servers to perform the transcription. If you’re in one of those “minor” markets like New York City or San Francisco, guess what happens about 1 out of every 4 times you finish dictating your Oscar acceptance speech?

Best part is having 5 bars

About that package – I hear brown paper dipped in candle wax lights especially easily.

HTC, upstart mobile phone maker saunters along a beautiful forest path, oblivious to the exquisitely-crafted “No Trespassing” signs. Sun is streaming through the trees as the company approaches a glittering spring. They stoop and drink deeply, savoring the delicious, refreshing water.

/cue shotgun pump

“Say…you got a purty mouth…”

AT&T
Sigh. Multiple choice question. You own a beleaguered wireless network. You’ve gone on record a few times bitching about Apple’s smash hit devices as being the root cause of your shittiness. What do you do?

A. Offer a modest apology to your consumers for spawning stupidity that carries the message “you use too much bandwidth, so you’re creating your own problems” and get to work fixing your shit.

B. Restructure your rate plans to punish evil content hogs while allowing people who use less to pay less.

C. Serve as the exclusive carrier for Apple’s next smash hit device, whose millions of additional customers using a device that’s even MORE data-intensive will further constipate your already piss-poor network.

Congratulations, dickheads.

B&M Book Publishers
For all of those that thought they were going to get $9.99 eBooks on a device that actually did more than read books, sorry. Apple’s eBooks are going to cost more, news of which obviously resulted in a deafening bitch chorus from people who thought they knew the exact value of electronic versions of books and. thought that publishers were happy with the current Amazon pricing.

Apple has zero obligation to preserve anyone’s pricing model, so people blathering on about “defending the consumer” should go out and bang a woodchipper. Apple did, however, have a very good reason to do what it took to line up publishers prior to the iPad’s announcement. This requires them to charge more for eBooks. I would contend that it’s because Apple has far less leverage than Amazon and publishers were pissed about the deal they were forced into by Amazon in order to get into the eBook business. Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan thinks Apple did this purposely to screw over Amazon with publishers. I’m sure Apple didn’t mind that Macmillan started the avalanche of publishers willing to take Amazon to the woodshed shortly after eBook prices for the iPad were announced, but to assume that the prices were purposely meant to put heat on Amazon is…well…actually pretty consistent with what I’ve come to expect of that shitshow.
The market will decide what people are willing to pay for an eBook. It all comes down to price x units, people. Neither variable means more than the total.

Print Media

Apple knee-capped music sharing sites by offering a viable pay alternative. Print media, which is on a similar path to irrelevance, is losing to free alternatives loaded with eye spam and shoddy content. Everyone who values good journalism is losing out as a result. If Apple can make create a way for newspapers and periodicals to showcase their content, they may be able to create a pay-per issue and/or subscription model that actually works. Whether the Times realizes it or not, this is their best chance for survival.

You

If you listen to some of the more prominent asshat tech blogs whoring themselves out for hits, you may think that Apple’s newest device is intended solely to line Cupertino’s pockets and lock people into the iTunes ecosystem. Apple’s business model is to lock in customers by providing the best computer and consumer electronics experiences – period.  The real winners with any major Apple release are consumers who benefit from devices that make it easier to access and enjoy their content, surf the web and do their jobs.  It’s really that simple, folks.

So as many denial-riddled pundits yawn at SJ’s claim that “this is the most important thing I’ve ever worked on” (which would include the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, to name a few), several other businesses are making messes in their shorts – and not the euphoric kind of mess. So now that the iPad’s here, who wins and who loses? Here’s Part 1 of a quick round-up, starting with the losers.

Adobe

When Apple made it clear that they had no interest porting Flash to the iPhone, many analysts shrugged it off as an anomaly. I mean: Flash is ubiquitous on the web and Apple always did weird shit like this. Besides, Adobe was working its plow improving a stripped down version of Flash that would sip battery power like a hummingbird and play super nice with mobile browsers. Just wait for the next version…or the next one. Anyway, even if Apple never adopted Flash and grabbed 50% of the smartphone market, it was only a small percentage of the entire mobile device market. There were still plenty of people to maintain Adobe’s Flash as the de facto runtime on the web, right?

Well the iPhone and now the iPad won’t support it. And Google doesn’t care much for it either. And now Firefox is switching off plug-ins by default for its RC3 Maemo mobile browser, in essence because Flash is a hog. HTML5 support is picking up. And up. Technorati everywhere are going on record as plainly stating that Flash is a dog and HTML5 is the wave of the future. Adobe’s response to the threat: Flash is everywhere. Sound familiar? Keep throwing up your Bang Bros. references to the ubiquity of Flash, guys. Jig’s up. Might not happen this year, but it’s happening: you’re fucked.

Amazon

Poor Jeff Bezos. After all that work getting the eInk technology to perfectly mirror a dead form of media interaction, Apple has to come out with a device that does 20 times as much and a ridiculously competitive price point. That whimpering you hear is no longer the effect Kindle is having on the eBook market; it’s now coming from the CEO’s office. First he’s going to get to see sales of his devices freeze (not that we ever knew how many they sold) and then he’ll get to see his margins – if there ever were any – crash through the floor.

But there’s hope! Amazon just acquired Touchco, a maker of multitouch panels, so a touch version of the Kindle is surely on its way. Because didn’t Apple get multitouch by acquiring Fingerworks? You just plug that shit right into your business model and – BAM! iPad competitor! Right? Right?

Guys, seriously: kick the clown shoes under the bed. A minor feature of one of Apple’s products just buried you.

The Windoz Ecosystem

Granted, no one expects Redmond to respond to the iPad with anything that anyone would rather use (except maybe Paul Thurrortt). But in typical Microsoft fashion, they’ll make a lot of noise about it and respond with something underwhelming. It won’t be the Courier, because the Courier is a bullshit cloud of vapor that smells exactly like Cairo, Longhorn, etc. The only people who’ve made money off the Courier are the people working for the design firm who did the rendering for this non-device. HP, who had the distinguished honor of having their tablet device fondled my Steve Ballmer’s sweaty mitts onstage at CES, is one known entry. Lenovo is another. M$ will respond not with some innovative take on slate computing, but with some bastardization of Windows 7. It will be a customized assemblage of some commodity PC giblets made to look like an iPad to a drunk 6 year old. Because M$ has been playing the me-too game with Apple for at least the last 15 years, and because the cash they spew into this space will have little – if any – return, M$ is clearly in the loser’s column, which should shock no one. Their unfortunate hardware partners, who really don’t have much of a choice, will be dragged right down with them.

Google

Google’s a loser on 2 fronts. First, as the always-brilliant Daniel Eran Dilger points out, the Google model of advertising is much more compelling on desktop and laptop devices (if you can use the word “compelling” to describe the experience of getting targeted ads dumped on your browsing experience). On devices like the iPhone, the probability of people clicking on an ad is much lower. People don’t want to rabbit-trail ads on mobile devices; they want access to the content they’re looking for. Apple’s iPad, while allowing for a greater surface to browse the web like a laptop, still sticks with the iPhone’s touch model, which one would think would continue to discourage ad clicks. More people using iPads to browse the web means fewer people using laptops and desktops. The value of Google to advertisers drops. Some content providers may even prefer to go to a subscription model instead of trying (and almost always failing – or producing content like 99% of the toiletries that dominate tech websites) to get advertising to support their online presences. Apple does subscription models pretty well. Less business for Google

The second front is Google’s suggestion that they’re going to compete with the iPad with a port of Chrome to a tablet device. Maybe Google will shop their tablet-ready versions of the OS to some device-makers before branding their own device, something I’m sure mobile device makers and carriers loved when they did it with Android and the Nexus One. Funny thing is: this business keeps falling for the “Lucy/Charlie Brown field goal” trick perfected by Microsoft. Google’s insistence on continuing to invest money in making inferior OS ports that compete with Apple products lands them smack in the middle of Failsberg.

Next up: the Winners

TMA knows that version 1 of products like the iPad are going to have their limitations – just like the iPhone did in 2007.  But then came the SDK, and the App Store and 3G, etc. Even at version 1.0, the iPhone was itself an amazing device, not just because Apple made it but because of what came before it. Do you remember a lot about your cell phone before you got your iPhone? Me either. Those memories are tucked away like a childhood incident of inappropriate touching.  The iPhone rocketed to success off the back of an industry that seriously needed – and got – its ass kicked.

TMA also knows the iPad – in the short term – may also be a victim of Apple’s prior successes.  2 of Apple’s most innovative products, the MacBook Air and the iPhone, are the parents of the iPad. The light/thin Air with its non-removable battery and the touch-based UI of the iPhone combined. That awesome bloodline may also limit some people’s perception of what is possible with the device.   The iPad is an evolution of 2 existing products made by Apple, not a revolution against crappy products made by others. People may perceive the *want* factor slightly differently because several Apple products share some of its functionality.

I believe the ultimate success of the device – which it will enjoy by the way – will come down to how quickly developers can take advantage of the iPad’s increased real estate and some of the SDK’s bonus goodness like “popovers”.  Scaled up iPhone apps are nice, and the fruits of the 2 week development cycle afforded the handful of developers that presented the iPad at the Apple event give an inkling of what’s possible, but what’s concocted before the late March/early April release will be much more of a harbinger of the iPad’s success – in the short-term.  No one thought the iPhone would resonate in the market the way it did, but Apple took its revolutionary 1.0 product and proceeded to make measured, relentless improvements to keep it well ahead of the market. Apple’s commitment to that leadership, backed by the App Store model bodes well for the long-term success of the device.

People made retarded comments when the iPhone was announced.  There’s as much accountability as there is memory on the internet.  That didn’t make a whit of difference with the iPod or the iPhone. It won’t make a difference with the iPad.

Unit sales of Macs and iPhones both sold at record levels, with the revamp of the iMacs boosting units above the million mark for the first time ever this quarter. Earnings were announced at $3.67 per share, up from $2.50 a year ago.

Macworld, as usual, has a nice recap of the earnings call.

These are lofty times, Macheads.

Tell you what guys: I support your scary proposition to charge people for what they use and to smash the buffet table of unlimited use you currently grace all of us ingrates with.

Here’s the thing: if $30 represents unlimited use – by your definition - then $30 should be your ceiling.  So those piggish 3% should pay $30 – or more if they account for more than the established average bandwidth of that 3%. The rest of us should pay less.

That’s what you had in mind, right?

Oops! Steve just nuked employee #10,220.

UPDATE: Ars reports that ATV 3.0  is in the wild out and it looks to be worthy of “full point upgrade” status.  TMA’s happy muscles are officially twitching a little jig.