Category Archives: google

apple, google, iphone, itunes, spotify

Apple, Spotify, Google and iPhone: how to get into App Store

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I was mildly surprised to see that Apple has approved Spotify for iPhone. Reason: if someone buys into the Spotify subscription model, why would they ever want to purchase music from iTunes, whether for iPhone or elsewhere? The iPhone version lets you listen to selected tracks offline, so that is not a problem.

Here’s a bit of speculation. Maybe Spotify benefited from the fallout over Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application – though Apple says it “continues to study it”. The Google Voice move drew articles like Apple is growing rotten to the core from TechCrunch. The question for Apple: did it want another high-profile, self-interested app rejection while still fighting Google Voice?

A further consideration is that Spotify is a tiny company compared to Google; music download/streaming enterprises come and go, and Spotify has a tricky task ahead making its business model work, as Mark Mulligan observes. Further, there’s nothing to stop Apple launching its own streaming, subscription service if it chooses to do so.

If Apple felt it had to choose between the threat of Google Voice, and the threat of Spotify, it is easy to see why it would pick the latter.

It follows that if you want to get your difficult, might-compete-with-Apple app into App Store, you should:

1. Build a decent-sized community around your service first.

2. Make a lot of noise when you submit your app.

3. Make even more noise should Apple reject it (this did not apply to Spotify, but it has worked for others).

4. Choose a moment when Apple is already embroiled in App Store battles that are more important than yours.

Publicity makes all the difference.

With all this, will Spotify succeed? The service is fantastic, but I’m not sure about people’s willingness to add £10 per month to their already-expensive iPhone contracts. However, I still think what I have argued for years: that in the digital age, music subscription makes more sense than paid-for permanent downloads.

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adobe, bbc, flash, google, internet, media, multimedia, silverlight, web authoring

BBC trying out HTML 5, video element

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The BBC has an HTML 5 demonstration using the video element. The video itself is encoded in both Ogg and H.264. In the screenshot below I have just clicked on a navigation image to jump to a specific place in the video. The demonstration is meant to work in Firefox, Safari and Chrome, though for me it only ran in Firefox (3.5).

There is a detailed comment from the BBC’s Sam Dutton on why the proof of concept was put together here. There is an interesting remark on why the BBC is interested in this approach, which does not require a plugin like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight:

Flash and other Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) provide something like this already via timeline scripting, but RIAs are ‘black boxes’, using compilers and obfuscators to hide code and data: great if you want to protect intellectual property, whereas we needed to provide a mechanism whereby data and the code acting on it were open and accessible. HTML 5 and the jQuery JavaScript framework gave us the tools we needed without requiring extra plugins or proprietary software.

From a technical perspective, Dutton remarks that the HTML 5 solution is more efficient if you want to synchronize other elements with the playing video:

The HTML 5 audio and video elements remove the need for player plugins, work like any other HTML element in terms of styling and positioning, and standardise the programming interface for playback control. Less well known is that these elements emit a timeupdate event (at a frequency adjusted to fit available processing and memory) which removes the need to poll a player for the current time position. This makes media scripting far more efficient, since there is no need to run a loop or use setTimeout. In tests run on several machines we found that timeupdate events are emitted regularly and frequently (particularly in Firefox), whereas polling a media player for current video time is unreliable.

Dutton adds:

… it’s early days for us on this and there are a number of serious challenges before this becomes anything near mainstream – if ever.

The BBC is an influential site and its experiments will attract keen interest from those watching the evolution of web video.

adobe, flash, google, internet, web authoring

Google buys On2, plans to integrate video into web platform

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Google is buying On2 Technologies, a video technology company. Although On2 is not a household name, it is well-known to Adobe Flash developers since its codec is used in Flash Player 8; it is also in JavaFX. Flash has since moved to H.264 for high definition though the older codec is still supported.

Why does Google want a video compression company? This is from the press release:

Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform," said Sundar Pichai, Vice President, Product Management, Google.

That could mean any number of things; but it does imply that Google does not intend to rely on Flash for its video content. The acquisition will re-open the debate about the video element in HTML 5, which has been left without a codec because of lack of consensus about what might be suitable and affordable. See Ian Hickson’s post from June 2009:

After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for <video> and <audio> in HTML5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship.

Could Google now establish its own codec as the standard in HTML 5?

I’m guessing Google is also keen to integrate On2 technology with its communication products.

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apple, cloud computing, google, internet, microsoft

Apple is like Microsoft

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That was my first thought after seeing the news that Google CEO Dr Eric Schmidt is leaving the Apple board. Steve Jobs:

Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.

I realise that we are more used to the idea that Apple is Microsoft’s polar opposite. Apple has design and beautiful hardware, Microsoft has OEM’s with their model-a-minute systems that are never quite right. Apple has iPhone which everyone wants, Microsoft has Windows Mobile which everyone puts up with (if they don’t have an iPhone). Apple has iPod which everyone uses, Microsoft has Zune which nobody uses. And so on.

Nevertheless, Apple and Microsoft are companies from the same era, and they both make most of their money by constantly upgrading the client and persuading us to buy into the latest version. Although Apple has some investment in the cloud, with Mobile Me and more importantly the App Store, these exist primarily to support its client devices.

Google on the other hand is invested in the cloud. Projects like Android and Chrome OS may run on the client, but they are not profit centres in themselves – they exist to promote Google’s web-based services (see Google Chrome OS – the Web’s the thing). It is important for Google to make these investments, as without them the client-centric giants (Apple and Microsoft) have too much power to impair web-based computing in favour of the old model.

Recently Apple has been been making life miserable for App Store developers by denying applications that compete with built-in iPhone features – most visibly in the case of Google Voice. Unfortunately by protecting the iPhone in this way Apple is diminishing its usefulness in the cloud era.

Apple is not quite like Microsoft. Apple can grow by taking market share from Microsoft, whereas it is harder for Microsoft to do the reverse (though Windows 7 is a good attempt). Apple can make more inroads into business computing. It can broaden the market for the iPhone by making a wider range of device and lowering the price of entry, as it did with the iPod. The digital home is another promising market.

On the other hand, Microsoft has more of a cloud platform than Apple. Microsoft has Bing-Yahoo search, Hotmail and Messenger, Windows Azure and Silverlight. It has failed so far, but in theory it could build this into a viable alternative to Google.

Still, now that Apple and Google have started to break their alliance and openly compete, it’s clear that Apple and Microsoft are on the same side of a great divide, with Google on the other.

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google, internet, microsoft, windows, windows 7

No more Windows E – Europe will get full Windows 7 plus upgrade editions

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Microsoft’s Dave Heiner has announced that plans for a separate Europe-only release of Windows 7, without Internet Explorer, have been abandoned at the last minute. This follows a new proposal to include a menu of browser choices instead:

In the wake of last week’s developments, as well as continuing feedback on Windows 7 E that we have received from computer manufacturers and other business partners, I’m pleased to report that we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe in October that we will ship in the rest of the world.

Did Microsoft ever intend to ship Windows E, or was the whole thing some sort of bargaining proposition? Heiner even threatens to re-introduce it:

… if the ballot screen proposal is not accepted for some reason, then we will have to consider alternative paths, including the reintroduction of a Windows 7 E version in Europe.

Although Microsoft is making a significant concession by promoting other browsers, its proposal does mean that some users will still get IE by default. These are the users who either install Windows 7 themselves by purchasing Microsoft’s standalone package, or who receive a PC from an OEM that has chosen to leave IE as the default. In this case, here’s what happens:

Shortly after new Windows PCs are set up by the user, Microsoft will update them over the Internet with a consumer ballot software program. If IE is the default browser, the user will be presented with a list of other leading browsers and invited to select one or more for installation. Technically, this consumer ballot screen will be presented as a Web page that can be updated over time as new browsers become available.

There will be a proportion of users who have a “don’t bug me with this” reaction and just close the screen, in which case they will keep IE.

However, if the OEM supplies a PC with a browser other than IE as the default, the ballot screen will not appear, so Microsoft is at a disadvantage in that respect.

I am not sure how this will be handled in corporate environments. IE is arguably more attractive in a Microsoft-centric business environment, because it integrates with network management tools and should work properly with other Microsoft products such as SharePoint or Outlook Web Access. If IE is the corporate standard, I doubt admins will want users to see a ballot screen offering other browsers, and I imagine there will be some way of blocking it.

One final observation. Personally I have never felt locked into using IE or had any problem making choices between different browsers, email clients or other applications on Windows. That’s not the point of course; owning the defaults gives a vendor a substantial advantage because of inertia or lack of technical confidence among a certain proportion of users. It is still worth noting that users have always been able to install alternative browsers, and that the adoption achieved by Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and others would not have been possible if Windows were truly a closed platform.

google, internet, microsoft, software development, yahoo

After Microsoft deal, what next for Yahoo’s developer platform?

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In May I attended a Yahoo Hack Day in London and wrote it up for the Reg. Although I found the business story unconvincing, I was impressed by the technology – things like BOSS, SearchMonkey, and especially YQL (Yahoo Query Language), which lets you treat the entire Internet as a structured database.

One thing all these services have in common is that they are search-related. If the Microsoft-Yahoo deal goes ahead, responsibility for Yahoo’s search engine moves to Microsoft. My high-level understanding is that Bing becomes the search engine, with some Yahoo engineers possibly moving to Microsoft, and others being let go.

There are big implications for Yahoo and the developers which depend on its services. Here’s the official statement quoted by Ashim Chhabra on the BOSS team:

This is the beginning of a process and we’ll be working with Microsoft to determine what makes the best sense for both us and developers. Regardless, we are certainly committed to continuing to innovate on the user experience of search all across Yahoo! and on continuing to engage with the developer community on several fronts, opening up leading audience experiences and data to third-party innovation. In that context, SearchMonkey can add a lot of value to how we help people get the most out of search and out of Yahoo!. Over the next several months we’ll determine what makes sense with our developer offerings and provide information when available.

though Chhabra adds:

Honestly the team is still absorbing the implications and we just don’t know. We can tell you that BOSS will remain live for the time being. There are many aspects still to be considered. Over the next several days we’ll be working hard to get clarity and will update the community as soon as we can.

A reasonable guess is that the APIs will continue to work – it is not usually that hard to map one set of APIs onto another – but that the focus of the development effort will change, and the actual results will be different when based on the new engine.

Bing’s engine is not bad, as one developer observes:

Do not take me wrong, have been using the Bing API since 2.0 and find it very similar to BOSS for integration purposes and results are good, but I guess my point is that Yahoo! Search Technology is pretty much dead from my understanding and hence the "real" BOSS is dead too.

There is another problem though, which is that the Yahoo culture, which draws on open source (Yahoo runs largely on PHP), is different from that of Microsoft. Some developers who use Yahoo APIs will likely feel uncomfortable with moving to Microsoft’s Live platform – prompting comments like this one:

Don’t use Bing please please please please please

Such folk may well find Google more congenial. Google’s search engine is far from open source, but the company supports a large amount of open source code (not least its web browser, Chrome/Chromium) and has been more successful than Microsoft in engaging with the open source community.

Although I suspect Yahoo gets little direct revenue from its developers, they are a dangerous group to disrupt, because of the influence they wield. If the Yahoo platform loses momentum, it is likely to impact its other initiatives as well.

Update:

See also this announcement:

For SearchMonkey and BOSS, we currently do not have anything concrete to tell you. Clearly, we’ll need to work with Microsoft to determine what makes the most sense for you and for us. For more details, please see Ashim Chhabra’s post to developers on the Yahoo! Search BOSS group. We’ve also received questions about the future of Yahoo!’s other developer offerings, such as YUI, YQL , and Pipes. We wanted to let you know that today’s news does not affect these products.

google, microsoft, search, yahoo

Microsoft – Yahoo search deal: 2+2 makes 5, or 3?

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Microsoft’s search deal with Yahoo makes more sense than the attempted full acquisition last year. The 10-year deal provides for Microsoft’s Bing to become the back-end search engine for Yahoo, while Yahoo becomes the exclusive sales force for premium search advertisers on both Bing and Yahoo.

Listening to today’s conference call, the rationale for the deal seems to be like this:

Maintaining a search engine is expensive. Yahoo has no appetite for it. So Yahoo saves some cash (in fact, makes some cash) while no longer having that cost burden.

On Microsoft’s side, it is convinced (probably rightly) that large scale is mandatory in order to compete with Google. As Ballmer put it:

the more searches you serve, the more you learn about what people search for and click on

When I was researching Bing, I was told that some of Bing’s features only work if there is sufficiently high usage. You cannot identify patterns of usage without a certain volume of data, which is easy to get for the most common searches, but not so much for those that are more specialist. The long tail applies – there are lots of niche searches.

The value of the data goes beyond search. Search and browsing patterns must enable some remarkable insights into human behaviour, which can inform product development.

A more humdrum fact is that advertisers like large audiences, and the combined search platform may appeal to some advertisers who would otherwise pass it by.

Microsoft is therefore relying on the combined value of the two companies’ search businesses being more than the sum of their individual values.

There is a risk though, which is that some users who like Yahoo’s current search engine may not like Bing so much. If they perceive Yahoo search as merely Microsoft search rebranded, they might jump ship, most likely to Google.

Still, you have to believe in your product. In theory, both companies could benefit from stronger search results and features.

It is important not to forget the context. Google is utterly dominant in search; this is two smaller players struggling to remain relevant in that market. I hope Yah-Bing succeeds because competition is good but the chances are that Google will sail on unperturbed.

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adobe, google, internet, web authoring

Google names its Chrome OS partners – including Adobe

Google has posted a Chrome OS FAQ, in which it lists its partners for the new operating system. This features the usual suspects in terms of PC and hardware vendors – though no Dell as yet – but with one interesting addition. Adobe:

The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

Adobe is the only pure software company listed. What is the significance? My assumption is that Google intends its Chrome OS to work well with Adobe Flash, needed for compatibility with a zillion web sites out there, and to support multimedia such as the BBC iPlayer. Adobe will also want to get its offline, desktop runtime, called AIR, onto the device; and seeing the company named here makes that even more likely. Put this together with Chrome’s fast JavaScript engine and innovations like O3D – hardware-accelerated graphics for the browser – and my guess is that this will make an excellent platform for Rich Internet Applications and multimedia.

If there is a war between HTML 5 and Flash, Google is more aligned with HTML 5; but that won’t get in the way of excellent Flash support in Chrome OS.

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google, linux, windows

It’s war: Google announces Chrome OS

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Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.

says Google. So the gloves are off – not content with targeting Microsoft Exchange and Office with Google Apps, the company is now going for the whole piece, client operating system included.

It’s not as new as all that, of course:

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

says Google’s Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management. According to the release, it intends that developers will write web applications that will run in any “standards-based” browser – though I’m guessing Google will continue to use its Gears extensions which are not part of any W3C standard.

One of the interesting questions is whether Google Chrome OS will stick with these limited goals, or whether it might end up running local applications such as, say, OpenOffice, or a media and DVD player, or games. What about Adobe AIR, will it run on Chrome OS and provide offline capability? My guess, almost certainly yes.

Linux is an excellent choice for a netbook, and it’s been sad to see Windows almost take over there. The reasons seem to be lack of customer acceptance combined with sloppy releases from some OEMs more familiar with Windows. Google won’t be sloppy; but it faces many of the same challenges in winning users. Expect modest initial success, with more interesting implications for the long-term.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year.

says Pichai.

adobe, google, microsoft, software development, web authoring

Mozilla takes aim at Flash and Silverlight with Firefox 3.5

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I reviewed Firefox 3.5 for The Register. I found the new features unexciting from a user perspective, but not so for developers. The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, improvements to the Canvas element, JavaScript threading and various bits of HTML 5.0 make this a more powerful platform for web applications – provided that you workaround the problem of users with Internet Explorer. The arrival of video and audio elements is also worth highlighting:

Another new feature is SVG effects for HTML, including masking, filtering and clipping. The point I made in the review is that this is a shot at Adobe as well as Microsoft. Although it is a long way from a viable alternative to Flash for now, the direction is clear.

That does not mean it will succeed. On the other hand, if Apple, Google and Mozilla pull together in making browser standards rich enough not to need plug-ins for most of the scenarios where Flash is used today, this could disrupt Flash momentum.

What about IE? That’s the big question. Here’s a few questions:

1. Will Microsoft implement these standards or hold back, arguing that Silverlight makes them unnecessary?

2. Will IE retain its market dominance – still over 65% last time I looked, even though it is losing among developers and influencers?

3. Could IE add-ons along the lines of Screaming Monkey for JavaScript and the Mozilla Canvas plug-in that has been discussed pull IE along anyway?

This article by Ryan Paul from last year discusses the issue. He says, why shouldn’t Adobe embrace HTML 5.0 rather than fighting it:

Although Canvas arguably competes with Adobe’s Flash plugin in a certain set of use cases, it’s worth noting that Adobe doesn’t generate revenue from the Flash plugin itself. Adobe cashes in on Flash by selling its powerful authoring tools, which the company could easily extend to support standards-based web technologies.

It’s a fair point; but given the commercial advantages of owning the platform, as opposed to being just another tools vendor, I doubt Adobe would make this shift unless it saw no realistic alternative. Even fully open-sourcing the Flash runtime would be less risky.

You can find Firefox here, and the developer features are described here.