Below is Apple explaining an important feature — FaceTime — of the new iPhone 4:
These, they are saying, are the many ways in which this feature might be useful to the public. Straightforward, if a bit cloying.
And below are Google/Verizon/Motorola informing us of their mobile phone called the Droid:
In case the bizarre imagery and geek-fi sounds do not make it clear (how could they not?), leaving you wondering what exactly they are talking about, the voice over makes it clear: “It’s a robot”. Ah, yes, a robot, of course.
There are other Droid ads that are worse, and others that are better. But generally speaking, what is depressing on average is the unwritten marketing mantra that the user (“consumer” if you prefer that label) has to be treated as if she were an idiot. That is indeed a requisite if you are trying to sell her something she does not need, like gasoline or “high-definition” television sets. But so ingrained is this instinct that even when given a decent product (such as an Android phone) the mentality remains.
There are two unrelated success stories that I wish to tie together in this bit, and if I am successful and justified in doing so, then you too might worry as I do about the future of software.
First, I must clear the air: I am a staunch Free Software advocate. And specifically, I take the Richard Stallman position when it comes to Free vs Open Software. And towards the end of this post, I will try to reconcile that position with the worries raised below.
Now back to the story of the two successes. The first, MacHeist, is small, but only in comparison. MacHeist is an affair that occurs a few times a year where users solve puzzles on their way to a booty of fire sale priced Mac software. The operation is run by a few clever lads (and ladies?), sells software worth hundreds of dollars for as low as $50 in total, and nets a handsome profit (reputed to run into the hundreds of thousands) for the organisers.
When the MacHeist gets going (and I admit to having “participated” in one or two) one criticism that is often heard is that the developers of the software are not getting quite the fair shake, and that selling software at such unsustainably low rates devalues the effort that goes into their creation. I think both criticisms are legitimate.
The second success story is a big one: Google. A company that hires brilliant engineers to turn out complex software products, but then turns around and gives most of these away for free, preferring instead to make money by selling advertising. So much so that the reliable purveyors of quotable statements are wont to note that Google is not a search technology company, but an advertising one.
As a Free Software fanatic, you might think that all this would warm my heart, but it does not. To understand why, I will refer to the difference that Stallman draws between Free Software (“free as in free speech”), and Open Software which is “free as in beer”. Whereas Free Software, through the terms of the GNU Public License, fosters a culture of public ownership and ubiquitous contribution, Open Software in its paradoxical naive pragmatism (of gaining usage by adopting a more “liberal” license) undervalues the act of development making it no more than a form of cheap labour.
The claims in the previous paragraph are arguable, and argue about it we should. The point of this post however is to consider the impact of this cheap or free software on users.
Consider my recent experience with a remote file access application called Flow. Flow is a very useful application with an impressive set of features and a more than decent interface. Flow retails for $25, a fair price for the functionality it promises, but it was also recently given away as part of a MacHeist “nanobundle”, the popularity of which has led to a warning from the makers of Flow, ExtendMac, that they are swamped with feedback and that all users (including ones like me who did not acquire it through MacHeist) should exercise a bit of patience while we await a response.
Patience, we have been told, is the virtue of an ass, and my experience with contacting ExtendMac tends to justify the comparison (of me) with the maligned beast! More than two months ago I submitted a report of a problem with Flow that was making it close to unusable: the application would hang mid-way through a file transfer and provide me no means to recover from it. Not even an option to cancel the transfer. This is just one of many issues. Here’s another: the application hangs upon encountering a symbolic link on the remote host. I have since reported these problems two more times and promptly received a canned response. But ExtendMac has been reticent to communicate further on this matter.
If indeed the MacHeist fire sale and ensuing volume of users makes it impossible for ExtendMac to address the issues of its users, then there is a good bit of legitimacy to the criticism that such sales both shortchange the developer and ultimately harm the end user.
The other, larger point of the matter is learnt from the example of Google. Having separated the source of their income (advertising) and their source of value (software), they are now wedded to “web apps”, applications that often coerce (though to Google’s credit, not always) you to using Google supplied browser based interfaces (so that money-making advertising can be targeted at you) irrespective of how well suited they are to your needs (recently I wrote about Google Voice, where the lack of a desktop client severely hampers the usability of the product). Better, I think, a choice between: software as a public good as envisioned by Stallman; or software as a valuable product solving a user’s needs in the best possible way, and hence worthy of charging a fee, as seen by Apple.
Update: in the spirit of the philosopher Peter Singer, who follows up his meditations on ethical eating with practical recipes, a recommendation: for a powerful GPL licensed free alternative to Flow, take a look at CyberDuck.
Back at the height of the Soviet Union, the story goes, a biologist named Lysenko won the favour of über-dictator Stalin, in major part due to his notion (not original to him, see: Lamarckism) that acquired traits can be passed on genetically i.e., inherited. This scientifically unsubstantiated but emotionally appealing idea, which served the general philosophy of the Soviet Union and communism well, was declared unquestionable and academies were purged of dissenters, and so on. As most historical stories go, there are all sorts of simplifications and misrepresentations at play with this one, but nonetheless, the moral of the story is worth consideration: don’t let your ideological commitments unduly influence your research and development.
Which brings me to Google Voice, a telephony service that offers many attractive features (such as using a single number to ring at multiple locations), but one crippling weakness. The weakness is not a technical or design one, but an ideological one: Google’s commitment to the web (and web browser) as the primary, and often only, interface to its applications. The result (made worse by Apple’s self-serving rejection of Google Voice app for the iPhone) is that making a telephone call involves (in my usage pattern, YMMV):
Some of these steps can be eliminated, but I am fairly certain not enough of them can be, to get the workflow down to the simplicity of using Skype instead:
It would take less than a week for one of Google’s highly skilled developers to whip up a native Mac App, a cross-platform AIR application, or a Dashboard widget, that would provide the same simplicity as Skype’s application does. It is not technical ability, but, I suspect, Google’s commitment to replacing the desktop and desktop OS and application environment with the browser and browser based applications that lies behind the lack of such tools.
Which returns us to the Lysenkoism analogy. It is not that Lamarckism is provably wrong and therefore a wrong route to pursue even if dictated by one’s other commitments. Rather, it was not, at the time, [anywhere near] provably right and, for that reason, the wrong basket to put all of one’s eggs in. Recently, in response to a set of tweeted criticisms (of the failings of HTML/CSS for building serious user interfaces) from celebrity developer and blogger Joe Hewitt, Google countered that such criticisms were perhaps applicable two years ago, but not any longer. A few days later, Google added (and advertised with some gusto) a feature to one of their flagship products, Gmail: drag and drop file attachment to a message. A feature that has been available in desktop applications for more than a decade (two decades, arguably).
Once again, the moral: Lamarckism, or web applications (such as Gmail or Google Voice) are not destined to failure. It is quite possible that they (web apps) are destined to succeed, given the many advantages they offer (universal access, zero user software maintenance, so on). However, if one just added drag and drop to one’s mail interface, that future is distant enough to warrant a more pluralist approach. A failure to do so is in effect a punishment of one’s [academic] biology and biotech, in the case of the Soviet Union, or one’s users, in the case of Google.
From John Gruber today, a quote from MG Siegler on the superiority of the iPhone:
MG Siegler on the Nexus One MG Siegler: Perhaps the single biggest reason that I like Apple products, and their software, in particular, is the attention to detail the company puts in. In my mind, that’s exactly what still separates the iPhone from all the Android phones. It’s the little things. The things that are almost too small for you to even notice, but which make the experience subtly better.
Which is all fine, but it seems to me that history (even Apple’s own) has demonstrated that design, “attention to detail”, and so on have rarely fared well against buzz, FUD, user entrapment, collusion and other tactics (different subsets of which are the advantages enjoyed by Apple’s two primary competitors: Microsoft and Google). The difference in the “smartphone” market is, of course, that Apple for once is the most successful and advanced device, but let us see how this pans out three years from now.
[ link: Daring Fireball Linked List: MG Siegler on the Nexus One ]
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