These days, politics and current events weigh heavily on my thoughts. Perhaps you find yourself feeling similarly. Since I try to avoid writing about political topics on this blog, the nature of current events kind of puts a damper on other topics rising to the level of a blog post. Recently though, there's been an interesting aspect of politics that keeps reminding me of important marketing themes, so I thought I would share some thoughts.
In many ways, political candidates and elections are similar to the product marketplace. Candidates position themselves and their ideas, they try to differentiate themselves from the others on the market, and an election is a kind of purchase decision. Viewed through that lens, you can learn some interesting lessons about politics
One of the great themes of political positioning is this idea that candidates start out with more extreme, polarizing positions -- essentially, strong differentiation in certain areas -- particularly in the primary elections, then "move towards the center" as they move toward a general election. This softening of their positions is, theoretically, designed to expand their audience as they approach a more common denominator.
But there's a fundamental problem with this approach; the epitome of center, the lowest common denominator is boring.
In a somewhat broader framing of this process, the candidate is a supposed to build a broader appeal by not having any elements that might serve as barriers to people liking them -- the, "I don't see anything that I don't like about this candidate, so I'll vote for them" notion.
The reality is that products don't work this way, and I don't think that candidates actually succeed this way either. Nobody chooses a product because they believe that it's mediocre or that it's the least objectionable. Safe, qualified candidates frequently lose to incompetent candidates who can build excitement around themselves, positions they hold, or issues they're trying to advance.
Perhaps the easiest example to reference was the California governor election between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis. While Davis was more experienced in government processes and arguably more competent, Schwarzenegger was able to leverage his celebrity status and generate excitement around the issue of the "car tax", vehicle registration fees.
Exciting products and new ideas are risky. While it can be really easy to find people to tear down or minimize a new approach, it's easy to underestimate the appeal of some of these ideas. For example, consider when New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about a 70% tax on income above $10 million. While there was some outrage raised about the idea in the media, when polled, they found that 59% of people supported the idea. What's more, that support spanned many traditionally perceived political demographic borders.
The Problem with "Electability"
Another related political concept is the idea of electability. This concept is often used in an effort to drive this positional shift toward the lowest common denominator. It's also used to skew the true market-nature of some primary elections, pushing voters to try and select the candidate that they think that most other people would be willing to vote for, rather than selecting who they think is the best.
At the core, the problem with this is when people try to make calculations based on what they think that other people think.
Instead of thinking of electability in terms of specific candidates or perceived "reasons why some larger group the electorate might not vote for a specific candidate", it might be better to think about this in product terms. Often, electability is that pre-judgement of a product's marketability, usually wrapped in FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). It's like the thinking that says that the iPhone will fail because it doesn't have a physical keyboard, that people really want a physical keyboard. It's the kind of thinking that speculates people won't buy iPhones because they don't have user-serviceable batteries. What we know from history is that, when it came to buying iPhones, these factors didn't keep people from buying iPhones.
Similarly, perhaps you remember when people said nobody cared about what color their computer was -- you could pick any color, as long as it was beige. When the iMac came out, suddenly color mattered. Suddenly, the external design of the personal computer mattered. And, for a period of time, color was important. Then, as many computer manufacturers began copying Apple and making color computers, color became less important again. In the context of electability, just because something used to seem important or exciting, it doesn't mean that it's still an influential consideration.
What's more, when you think about those products that tried to leverage 'tired' features to help sell their product, there were probably a few seemingly knowledgeable product marketers who thought the idea was good enough and important enough to have it included in the product. These people knew -- or thought that they knew -- what the market wanted, and they got it wrong. They over-weighted the significance of a feature (or features) and the product failed.
Anyway, that's probably enough on this political topic for a while.
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Thoughts on how High Density Housing is Destroying Silicon Valley
Commuting home the other day, I took a route that was similar to my commute a couple of years ago and I was shocked by where I experienced traffic back-ups, and by how much traffic there was. My rough estimate, based on where I was seeing the back-ups, is that we may have double the number of cars on the road compared to just two or three years ago.
But where did all of these cars come from? Why are there more cars here?
I have one simple answer -- high-density housing. Over the past five years or so, there has been a trend to transform areas of land that once held one and two-story buildings into high-density residential and multi-use/residential structures. In the photo above (that I happened to take about three years ago), what was once a Santa Clara technology campus with about three 2-story buildings was being transformed into a multi-story, high-density multi-use housing facility. The same transformation is also taking place in a couple of blocks in every direction from here.
The big joke with these places is that they make the claim that these high-density residences won't significantly increase traffic because they're close to the train station and public transit. The reality is that, with most of these places, you need to estimate an additional 1.5 cars on the road.
It's surprising to me that so many of these developments have been approved (and continue to be approved) by local city councils. While there are always calls for more affordable housing (and claims that a lack of housing is the problem), these developments are simply eroding any semblance of quality of life in the area. Here's my latest analogy for the problem:
Imagine the Bay Area like an awesome Internet Cafe, good food, nice environment, good Internet connectivity. Then, people start having meetings there and more people keep coming in. Soon, there is no space to sit, all of the tables are occupied and all of the chairs are full.
Troubled by this, the patrons call for more chairs, more places to sit. Comfy chairs are changed to benches and counters are added to walls, so more people can fit in, but soon there is no place for coffee cups and few places for computers.
But the worst is that, while the number of patrons has grown significantly, the cafe's Internet connection is still running on the same DSL line that provided reasonable broadband 15 years ago. The Internet Cafe has no Internet.
The Bay Area is collapsing under the weight of too many users while the roads, our broadband connectivity.
It would be one thing if we had the infrastructure to support the human density that they are building for, but we don't. We have no subways, no metro train system. And if you look at San Francisco as an example, we're going on 10 years and they still haven't completed the Muni line from Union Square to the Caltrain station.
And just when you thought they couldn't pack any more in, there's more high-density housing on the way...
Friday, March 22, 2019
San Diego Bike Share - What Happened to the Bikes?
I just spent the week in San Diego for a conference and it made for an interesting comparison to last year's San Diego event.
In San Diego last year, everywhere you went, there were bicycles -- GPS-enabled bike share had taken over the downtown convention center area. There were probably three or four different companies with bikes all around. What was surprising was that I'd seen a few ride share bikes in the time, but in nowhere near the number that there were there in San Diego. Still, the bikes didn't seem out of place -- between the climate, the beach culture of San Diego and the transportation around the downtown area, the bikes seemed like a great complement to the transportation infrastructure there.
Last year there were only two options for electric scooters, Bird and Lime, and the actual number of scooters you saw was rather limited. While I used the bike share bikes for all of my around-town trips last year, I didn't rent a single scooter. In part, it was because the scooters were kind of hard to find, but some of it had to do with the whole scooter experience itself. For example, if I went for a late night run to the store for water and snacks, the idea of a nighttime ride back to the hotel on a scooter with an imbalanced load of groceries seemed like a good recipe for hitting the pavement. In contrast, most of the bike share bikes have baskets so that you could load a small amount of groceries in them.
This year, I saw only one GPS enabled bike company here, and bikes were few and far between. Instead, there are electric scooters everywhere. Everywhere. I saw scooters from three or four companies, including Lyft (something I hadn't seen before). There are also these little electric things that looks sort of like a mash-up between a bike and a mini-bike -- you sit on a bike seat to ride them, but they have something like 16" tires with bicycle disk brakes. There are no pedals, just foot-pegs. These things seemed to be a bit faster than scooters too.
The wholesale invasion of the electric scooters is kind a mixed bag. When I was getting ready to go to San Diego, I was actually looking forward to getting some bicycle time in, turning the pedals and burning some calories. Instead, there's not much for calorie burn on the electric scooters.
The scooters were okay for making the short trip from the hotel to the convention center faster. If you had your stuff in a backpack, you didn't really notice the load, but I don't know that someone with a briefcase style bag would say the same thing. That being said, the couple of times that I took a scooter out to restaurants in the Little Italy area, it was a ride that bordered on madness. Between the small wheels and the overall condition of the roads, each and every ride had moments when I thought that there was a better than even chance that I was going to crash -- and I would consider myself someone with better skills with my cycling background and decent sense of balance.
When I got off the scooter at the end of a scooter ride between Little Italy and the hotel, not once did I think, "man, that was fun. I can't wait to do that again."
Even more surprising for me were the times when I saw adults taking kids for a ride one of the scooters.
Ultimately, while I understand that the scooter model offers a lower cost element that enables these businesses to scale more easily and that the individual vehicles take up less physical space, I'm not optimistic about any sort of grand scale growth for this transportation alternative. I think it's only a matter of time before something like reports of serious injuries put a damper on the enthusiasm surrounding the whole electric scooter thing. I just wish that they would bring back the bikes.
In San Diego last year, everywhere you went, there were bicycles -- GPS-enabled bike share had taken over the downtown convention center area. There were probably three or four different companies with bikes all around. What was surprising was that I'd seen a few ride share bikes in the time, but in nowhere near the number that there were there in San Diego. Still, the bikes didn't seem out of place -- between the climate, the beach culture of San Diego and the transportation around the downtown area, the bikes seemed like a great complement to the transportation infrastructure there.
Last year there were only two options for electric scooters, Bird and Lime, and the actual number of scooters you saw was rather limited. While I used the bike share bikes for all of my around-town trips last year, I didn't rent a single scooter. In part, it was because the scooters were kind of hard to find, but some of it had to do with the whole scooter experience itself. For example, if I went for a late night run to the store for water and snacks, the idea of a nighttime ride back to the hotel on a scooter with an imbalanced load of groceries seemed like a good recipe for hitting the pavement. In contrast, most of the bike share bikes have baskets so that you could load a small amount of groceries in them.
This year, I saw only one GPS enabled bike company here, and bikes were few and far between. Instead, there are electric scooters everywhere. Everywhere. I saw scooters from three or four companies, including Lyft (something I hadn't seen before). There are also these little electric things that looks sort of like a mash-up between a bike and a mini-bike -- you sit on a bike seat to ride them, but they have something like 16" tires with bicycle disk brakes. There are no pedals, just foot-pegs. These things seemed to be a bit faster than scooters too.
The wholesale invasion of the electric scooters is kind a mixed bag. When I was getting ready to go to San Diego, I was actually looking forward to getting some bicycle time in, turning the pedals and burning some calories. Instead, there's not much for calorie burn on the electric scooters.
The scooters were okay for making the short trip from the hotel to the convention center faster. If you had your stuff in a backpack, you didn't really notice the load, but I don't know that someone with a briefcase style bag would say the same thing. That being said, the couple of times that I took a scooter out to restaurants in the Little Italy area, it was a ride that bordered on madness. Between the small wheels and the overall condition of the roads, each and every ride had moments when I thought that there was a better than even chance that I was going to crash -- and I would consider myself someone with better skills with my cycling background and decent sense of balance.
When I got off the scooter at the end of a scooter ride between Little Italy and the hotel, not once did I think, "man, that was fun. I can't wait to do that again."
Even more surprising for me were the times when I saw adults taking kids for a ride one of the scooters.
Ultimately, while I understand that the scooter model offers a lower cost element that enables these businesses to scale more easily and that the individual vehicles take up less physical space, I'm not optimistic about any sort of grand scale growth for this transportation alternative. I think it's only a matter of time before something like reports of serious injuries put a damper on the enthusiasm surrounding the whole electric scooter thing. I just wish that they would bring back the bikes.
Monday, January 7, 2019
Apple Ragnarøkkr
It's a new year and, following a warning from Apple on earnings, Apple's stock price has dropped significantly. In the warning, Apple blamed China's economy and consumer delays in upgrading their iPhones as key factors. Beyond problems with the economy and the monkey at the wheel flinging tariffs around, Apple's product problems have been a continuing trend, so it's hardly surprise that we're seeing that play out in their sales results. In terms of their product offering, the last time that Apple was this far off the rails, Steve Jobs came in for the turnaround rescue, reshaping not just the company, but the core product line. Something like that happening at this point seems rather unlikely, but rather than staring off into the distance looking for the rescue ship, let's drill down into some of the places where the current boat is taking on water.
In the earnings call, Tim Cook attributed part of Apple's revenue issue to people not upgrading their iPhones as quickly as they did in the past. For many in the media, this is directly related to the high price of the newest iPhones. Apparently, there has even been talk of price cuts across the iPhone line.
While I don't disagree with an assessment that the cost of the device is a big negative on the current line of iPhones, I don't think that that is the only answer. After all, I bought a new iPhone XS; however, in using it, I found the device to be so functionaly frustrating, I switched my phone back to my old iPhone SE. I carry the iPhone XS -- the camera is really good -- but I don't use it as a phone.
With the current state of the iPhone product line and the implied strategic direction, I expect that my next phone will come from eBay, since that's the only place that I can find an iPhone like the iPhone SE.
What's Wrong With Apple's Products
Apple's product mess extends far beyond iPhone X series. Over the holiday break, Macrumors published this post, "What do you want to See From Apple in 2019?" While lower prices topped the comment responses, you'll also see several top ranked comments focused on product. A couple of highlights include:
Consider this Techcrunch post lamenting the loss of the headphone jack from over the break. Normally, I'd expect a "will the next iPhone include Bluetooth 11.7 Superband and theoretical 6G wireless?" from many of the tech blogs, but this post actually includes a look back at the history of the headphone jack on cellular phones. It's actually a nice walkthrough and a reminder of what a significant step it was for Apple to include a standard headphone jack on the iPhone and how that changed the industry. It was an important design decision that, by the time we got to 2016, Apple forgot it.
Why? The Techcrunch piece focuses on the idea of selling proprietary Airpods, but I think that is just another symptom because this disregard for the factors behind some of these design decisions, factors that were solved by Apple, then forgotten and abandoned. Good design understands history. Fashion follows the wind.
While I've written also about my complaints about the removal of the headphone jack, the removal of the MagSafe charging interface is another example of this same kind of disregard for the value and historical significance of the design. Over the years, I've has a number of Apple laptops. From Powerbooks to Macbook Pros, I've used and carried multiple versions over the years. Before MagSafe, all of my Apple laptops suffered from the same problem -- the charging connection became problematic and would only work in certain positions and my laptop became a desktop because I couldn't unplug it risking that I couldn't get it plugged in again. This issue was always caused by the same thing -- periodic accidental yanking of the cord like when the laptop was moved or when you happened to trip over the cord or such.
The MagSafe interface was a godsend. I can't tell you how many times the power cord was ripped from my laptop with the MagSafe connector on -- with no problem. Typically, these instances involved a few strong words, a sense of reassurance, and a return to work. Having spoken to product people in the PC industry, this was one of the most envied, desired features for PC laptops, but Apple's patent mojo was strong. There's a reason why Microsoft included a magnetic charging connection on it's Surface Pro devices.
And what did Apple replace it with? A USB-C charging interface that requires a special class of USB-C cables to charge the device. Gone is the magnetic connector. Gone is the LED that displays whether the device is charging -- another extremely popular, easily overlooked innovation that took multiple years and multiple product iterations to bring to market.
What's worse is that, while the old MagSafe charging port was kind of dumb, using a data-capable USB-C port for charging presents a potential threat vector. Back in September, I came across this article about hackers/security experts crafting a malicious USB cable that could be used to compromise a system in a few seconds. It's probably also worth noting that the USB-C standards body has just recently began to discuss an Authentication Program to protect against malware and firmware/hardware based attacks. So, while I haven't ever had to worry about malware and viruses through my laptop charger before, Apple's new systems have all incorporated this brilliant innovation.
Resistance to Upgrading
One of the factors cited by Apple in their recent earnings call was an observed slowdown in the rate of users upgrading from their existing devices. Some of this is similar to what we saw in the PC industry several years ago. While processor performance provided some percentage of performance improvements, when the base level of the device had reached "good enough" and perceived requirements were not growing at the same rate, people started holding onto their systems longer and longer.
Remember when the idea of "Netbooks" were all the rage? Remember how people were pushing for Apple to offer a Netbook? In a sort of response, Apple introduced the iPad and we all know how well that went. Looking back, we now know that Netbooks didn't really succeed in doing anything other than undercutting most PC hardware manufacturers' average selling price and devaluing their hardware on the whole. Meanwhile, the creeping trend for today's Apple has been increasingly trying to convince people that the iOS-driven iPad Pro is as good as a Macbook and that a lot of core iOS software framework should be used on the Mac.
If you didn't believe them initially, wait until you see how they've added an iPhone like LCD function-bar to your Macbook Pro so that you can watch your laptop battery juice ooze out. Can't believe on revolutionary and innovative it is? Wait until you see us add it to all of our other systems' keyboards (oh wait). Still concerned about how much power it might drain? Try our new "dark mode" in the Mac OS...
Remember when getting the Beatles on iTunes was a big deal? Little did everyone realize that "Helter Skelter" was going to become the soundtrack for Apple's product strategy.
To add insult to injury, you get things like this, Yes, the 2018 MacBook Air's FaceTime HD Camera is Awful. Yes, finally the venerable MacBook Air was upgraded in 2018. Finally it had a Retina display. Sadly, it was also the end of MagSafe and the end of USB-A support on Apple's portable line. Other than that, it seemed like a pretty decent upgrade -- until you started to look into the nooks and crannies and under the rug. Hidden from view, they stuck an Intel Y series processor. Of course, Apple didn't really play this up (and most consumers look at the "i5" or "i7 number), but many of the things that I read were poo-pooing this decision.
I could go on for a while with more examples. Perhaps the simplest thing to say is, many people characterize this reluctance to upgrade being driven by price or a lack of innovation driving enough need/interest in newer hardware (remember when everyone was looking for "the killer app"). I think that there may be a third contributing explanation that is being under-factored into a reluctance to upgrade -- a concern that from a quality and utility perspective, the newer product is going to be worse by many degrees of measure.
Is this Apple Ragnarøkkr -- the "twilight of the gods"?
In the earnings call, Tim Cook attributed part of Apple's revenue issue to people not upgrading their iPhones as quickly as they did in the past. For many in the media, this is directly related to the high price of the newest iPhones. Apparently, there has even been talk of price cuts across the iPhone line.
While I don't disagree with an assessment that the cost of the device is a big negative on the current line of iPhones, I don't think that that is the only answer. After all, I bought a new iPhone XS; however, in using it, I found the device to be so functionaly frustrating, I switched my phone back to my old iPhone SE. I carry the iPhone XS -- the camera is really good -- but I don't use it as a phone.
With the current state of the iPhone product line and the implied strategic direction, I expect that my next phone will come from eBay, since that's the only place that I can find an iPhone like the iPhone SE.
What's Wrong With Apple's Products
Apple's product mess extends far beyond iPhone X series. Over the holiday break, Macrumors published this post, "What do you want to See From Apple in 2019?" While lower prices topped the comment responses, you'll also see several top ranked comments focused on product. A couple of highlights include:
"Some new leadership, especially over in product." (the second most up-voted comment)
"Back to basic that Design is about how it works, not how it looks."These comments echo the kinds of things being said within the professional design community where Apple products have been a staple for decades. Cast in a different light, these are things the "Pro" user community is saying.
Consider this Techcrunch post lamenting the loss of the headphone jack from over the break. Normally, I'd expect a "will the next iPhone include Bluetooth 11.7 Superband and theoretical 6G wireless?" from many of the tech blogs, but this post actually includes a look back at the history of the headphone jack on cellular phones. It's actually a nice walkthrough and a reminder of what a significant step it was for Apple to include a standard headphone jack on the iPhone and how that changed the industry. It was an important design decision that, by the time we got to 2016, Apple forgot it.
Why? The Techcrunch piece focuses on the idea of selling proprietary Airpods, but I think that is just another symptom because this disregard for the factors behind some of these design decisions, factors that were solved by Apple, then forgotten and abandoned. Good design understands history. Fashion follows the wind.
While I've written also about my complaints about the removal of the headphone jack, the removal of the MagSafe charging interface is another example of this same kind of disregard for the value and historical significance of the design. Over the years, I've has a number of Apple laptops. From Powerbooks to Macbook Pros, I've used and carried multiple versions over the years. Before MagSafe, all of my Apple laptops suffered from the same problem -- the charging connection became problematic and would only work in certain positions and my laptop became a desktop because I couldn't unplug it risking that I couldn't get it plugged in again. This issue was always caused by the same thing -- periodic accidental yanking of the cord like when the laptop was moved or when you happened to trip over the cord or such.
The MagSafe interface was a godsend. I can't tell you how many times the power cord was ripped from my laptop with the MagSafe connector on -- with no problem. Typically, these instances involved a few strong words, a sense of reassurance, and a return to work. Having spoken to product people in the PC industry, this was one of the most envied, desired features for PC laptops, but Apple's patent mojo was strong. There's a reason why Microsoft included a magnetic charging connection on it's Surface Pro devices.
And what did Apple replace it with? A USB-C charging interface that requires a special class of USB-C cables to charge the device. Gone is the magnetic connector. Gone is the LED that displays whether the device is charging -- another extremely popular, easily overlooked innovation that took multiple years and multiple product iterations to bring to market.
What's worse is that, while the old MagSafe charging port was kind of dumb, using a data-capable USB-C port for charging presents a potential threat vector. Back in September, I came across this article about hackers/security experts crafting a malicious USB cable that could be used to compromise a system in a few seconds. It's probably also worth noting that the USB-C standards body has just recently began to discuss an Authentication Program to protect against malware and firmware/hardware based attacks. So, while I haven't ever had to worry about malware and viruses through my laptop charger before, Apple's new systems have all incorporated this brilliant innovation.
Resistance to Upgrading
One of the factors cited by Apple in their recent earnings call was an observed slowdown in the rate of users upgrading from their existing devices. Some of this is similar to what we saw in the PC industry several years ago. While processor performance provided some percentage of performance improvements, when the base level of the device had reached "good enough" and perceived requirements were not growing at the same rate, people started holding onto their systems longer and longer.
Remember when the idea of "Netbooks" were all the rage? Remember how people were pushing for Apple to offer a Netbook? In a sort of response, Apple introduced the iPad and we all know how well that went. Looking back, we now know that Netbooks didn't really succeed in doing anything other than undercutting most PC hardware manufacturers' average selling price and devaluing their hardware on the whole. Meanwhile, the creeping trend for today's Apple has been increasingly trying to convince people that the iOS-driven iPad Pro is as good as a Macbook and that a lot of core iOS software framework should be used on the Mac.
If you didn't believe them initially, wait until you see how they've added an iPhone like LCD function-bar to your Macbook Pro so that you can watch your laptop battery juice ooze out. Can't believe on revolutionary and innovative it is? Wait until you see us add it to all of our other systems' keyboards (oh wait). Still concerned about how much power it might drain? Try our new "dark mode" in the Mac OS...
Remember when getting the Beatles on iTunes was a big deal? Little did everyone realize that "Helter Skelter" was going to become the soundtrack for Apple's product strategy.
To add insult to injury, you get things like this, Yes, the 2018 MacBook Air's FaceTime HD Camera is Awful. Yes, finally the venerable MacBook Air was upgraded in 2018. Finally it had a Retina display. Sadly, it was also the end of MagSafe and the end of USB-A support on Apple's portable line. Other than that, it seemed like a pretty decent upgrade -- until you started to look into the nooks and crannies and under the rug. Hidden from view, they stuck an Intel Y series processor. Of course, Apple didn't really play this up (and most consumers look at the "i5" or "i7 number), but many of the things that I read were poo-pooing this decision.
I could go on for a while with more examples. Perhaps the simplest thing to say is, many people characterize this reluctance to upgrade being driven by price or a lack of innovation driving enough need/interest in newer hardware (remember when everyone was looking for "the killer app"). I think that there may be a third contributing explanation that is being under-factored into a reluctance to upgrade -- a concern that from a quality and utility perspective, the newer product is going to be worse by many degrees of measure.
Is this Apple Ragnarøkkr -- the "twilight of the gods"?
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