Would Steve Jobs Have Approved? Artist Offers His Apple Monologue, Performance Rights, For Free

As sales of its products soar, and its share price continues to climb, Apple has come under increasing scrutiny because of the working conditions in the Chinese factories where its iPhone and iPad are manufactured. This has led Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, to announce recently that the Fair Labor Association will be conducting audits of Apple’s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in China. 

On Techdirt.

What Happens When The Company Backing Up Your Passwords In The Event of Your Death Itself Dies?

The unprecedented public outpouring of grief in the technical community at the death of Steve Jobs seems to go well beyond the fact that he was an undeniably important and powerful figure in that world for several decades. Perhaps it's because the people involved in technology are disproportionately young compared to most other industries: death often seems very far away at that age. The demise of the charismatic Jobs comes as brutal reminder that even leaders of the most successful companies must, one day, die. And hence, by implication, that we too will die. 

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Why the iPhone Cannot Keep up with Android

Although I have never owned an iPhone, nor even desired one, I do recognise that it has redefined the world of smartphones. In that sense, it is the leader, and will always be historically important. However, as my title suggests, I don't think that's enough to keep it ahead of Android, however great you may judge the feature gap to be currently. Here's a good explanation of why that is:

Through a bevy of handset makers, Android can offer a variety of phones that will make it difficult for Apple to beat with just one hardware release a year. While it is hard to ever go wrong with an iPhone, Android offers a ton of alternative form factors, price points and carriers: Sprint (NYSE: S) has released the first 4G phone on Android; T-Mobile has a new competitive Android phone with a slide-out keyboard; the HTC Incredible sold by Verizon has been flying off store shelves; and even Google’s Nexus One still boasts some of the latest hardware. Not to mention new Android phones from Samsung and LG (SEO: 066570) coming later this summer.

The thing is, no matter how amazing any given feature of the iPhone, in any iteration, sooner or later (and probably sooner) there will be an Android smartphone that matches it. And alongisde that handset will be dozens of others offering other features that the iPhone hasn't yet implemented - and may never do.

It's an unfair race: iPhone iterations, even blessed by Steve Jobs' magic pixie dust, can only occur so fast; Android innovations, by contrast, are limited only by the number of players in the market. Want a new Android handset ever week? Easy, just wait until the ecosystem grows a little more.

And don't even get me started on the fact that the Android code is already starting to appear in totally new segments, bringing yet more innovation, yet more players....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Steve Jobs as a Ratchet of Openness

Normally, I would hawk and spit at the mere mention of the iPhone, since it's not exactly an open platform. But here's a more measured analysis of what's going on:

This is, in other words, a one-way ratchet in the right direction. Every time a handset maker wrings increased openness out of one wireless carrier, and thereby produces a handset that's superior to what's already on the market, that device will set a new baseline for the capabilities a phone should have. And the other carriers will have little choice but to follow suit by allowing similar features on their own networks. It may take a long time, but de facto open networks will get here eventually.

Put this way, I suppose we can say that more generally Jobs has been a ratchet of openness - for example, there's no doubt that it was the iPod that paved the way for DRM-less music, even if, ironically, it has not itself eschewed DRM. Perhaps we need individuals like Jobs, who, though outside the open world, are important catalysts for change towards openness.

iDon'tPhone

I seem to be one of the few people on this planet unaffected by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field; indeed, I find the Fake Steve Jobs more, er, authentic. Desptie this, I have to confess I much enjoyed this Jobs profile by John Heilemann.

But in all its shrewd and witty analysis, it seems to miss the key thing about the iPhone: that it is not just expensive, but obscenely expensive in a world where many people earn less than $500 per year. In other words, the iPhone - rather like Jobs - is supremely narcissistic.

Perhaps that why Apple's products stick in my craw: with their self-assigned exclusivity and implicit sense of superiority, they are the antithesis of free software, which is inclusive and fundamentally egalitarian. The fact that MacOS is built on free software only adds insult to injury.

Fake Steve Jobs: Suck 2.0?

I was heartened to see that the future of the Fake Steve Jobs blog now seems assured, following a deal with Wired (kudos). God knows we need more such snarky sites in an increasingly humourless and pusillanimous world.

Taking advantage of this new stability, I settled down to read a few of the many postings that I'd missed, and a distant cyber-bell began ringing. I thought: "I have been here before... I know the grass beyond the door", and then it struck me.

Once upon a time, in an online world far away, there was a little Web site called Suck. Its motto:

"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"

It came out of nowhere, starting on 28 August 1995, and ran for nearly six years. It was wonderful: it deflated the growing hype bubble that was Dotcom 1.0, and it did it with cool, mordant wit. (If you want the whole, roller-coaster story of Suck, read it here in Wired - rather appopriately, as it turns out.)

FSJ is Suck 2.0: it punctures that which must be punctured, and it does it with a different kind of wit, this time black and scabrous. But along with the similarities, there is an important difference between the two sites.

Suck, for all its undoubted virtues, took itself far too seriously, as any adolescent genius might. FSJ, by contrast, is more mature, more cynical; it takes nothing seriously, least of all itself (it is a parody site, after all). In other words, FSJ is the perfect mirror for the Web 2.0 world we live in.

Namaste, Steve.

Damn DRM

The FT has little votette underway:

Should music companies drop DRM?

Steve Jobs, Apple’s charismatic chief executive, has proposed that record companies drop their insistence that music sold over the web be protected by digital rights management technology. DRM is designed to combat piracy but limits the ways consumers can use music they have purchased.

You may want to join in (no registration required)....

Steve Jobs Gets Sane on DRM

A worryingly sensible viewpoint espoused here by Steve Jobs:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

In a heartbeat? The cynic in me is suspicious: if DRM were dropped, then Apple would be subject to much more direct competition. So why would Apple ever do this? Is Steve Jobs angling for a Nobel Prize for Peace, or something? (Via Wired News.)

Update: Larry Lessig makes a good point here.

iHavenosenseofhumour

Catch it while you can.

He Gave Me of the Tree

And I did eat.

Wicked.

Scratching an Icon

Who is this Steve Jobs whereof they speak? I just don't get the mindless adulation of this person (try reading "The Journey is the Reward" to get some perspective).

Take the iPhone: a large mobile phone that has the whizzo idea of making the screen - the most vulnerable part - cover the entire surface, so that it will get scratched to kingdom come in about a week in most people's pockets (remember the iPod Nano saga?).

I suppose it will drive a huge aftermarket in phone protectors: maybe all the Jobs fanboys sell third-party add-ons to his products.

Keeping DRM is a Win?

Someone who has clearly had their brain frazzled by the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. Not opening up DRM is a win? Well, maybe for Apple, but certainly not for music lovers....

Time for Mac users to see the OSS light?

The good news just kept on coming in Steve Jobs's recent MacWorld speech: $5.7 million revenue in the last quarter for Apple; 14 million iPods sold during the same period; a run-rate of a billion songs a year sold on iTunes. And of course some hot new hardware, the iMac and MacBook Pro. What more could Mac fans ask for?

How about an office suite whose long-term future they can depend on?

Microsoft may have announced “a formal five-year agreement that reinforces Microsoft’s plans to develop Microsoft Office for Mac software for both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs,” but Mac users would do well to consider the company's record here, as its has progressively shut down its line of Macintosh software. First, it dropped its MSN client, then Internet Explorer and more recently Windows Media Player.

Microsoft has good reason to hate Apple. Steve Jobs and his company represent everything that Bill Gates and Microsoft are not: hip and heroic, perfectionist yet popular. Apple has always been Microsoft's main rival on the desktop, but the appearance of Intel-based Macintoshes will make the company more dangerous than it has ever been. Probably the only reason that Microsoft has kept alive its Macintosh division is that it looks good from an anti-trust viewpoint: “See? We're not abusing our position – we even support rivals...”. The Macintosh version of Office may bring in money, but it's a trivial amount compared to the Windows version, and hardly worth the effort expended on it.

This means that the future of Microsoft Office for the Mac can never be certain. The agreement with Apple might be extended, but knowing Microsoft, it might not. At the very least, Microsoft is likely to ensure that the Windows versions of Office has advantages over the one running on the new Intel Macs – otherwise the incentive to buy PCs running Windows will be reduced even more.

So what should concerned Mac users do? The obvious solution is to move to an open source alternative. An important benefit of taking this route – one often overlooked when comparisons are made with proprietary offerings – is that free software is effectively immortal. Sometimes it goes into hibernation, but when the code is freely available, it never dies.

Just look at the case of the Mozilla Application Suite. The Mozilla Foundation decided not to continue with the development of this code base, but to concentrate instead on the increasingly successful standalone programs Firefox and Thunderbird. Had Mozilla been a commercial outfit, that would have been the end of the story for the program and its community. Instead, some hackers were able to take the old Mozilla Application Suite code and use it as the basis of a new project called SeaMonkey.

A similar desire to get things moving outside existing structures motivated the creation of the separate NeoOffice project, the port of the free OpenOffice.org office suite to run natively on MacOS X (there is also a version that uses the X11 windowing system). As the FAQ explains: “The primary reason that we stay separate is that we can develop, release, and support a native Mac OS X office suite with much less time and money than we could if we worked within the OpenOffice.org project.” This is hardly an option for the Mac Office team at Microsoft; so when Gates and Ballmer give Mac Office the chop, there will be no Redmond resurrections.

It is true that NeoOffice is not yet quite as polished as the versions on other platforms. And maybe Microsoft Office is superior – at the moment. But there is nothing that some hacking won't fix, and with serious support from the Macintosh community (and perhaps even financial help from Apple) any outstanding issues would soon be resolved. The emergence of OpenDocument as a viable alternative to Microsoft's Office formats only strengthens the case for switching to free software.

The wild excitement generated by Steve Jobs's MacWorld announcements is understandable, but also dangerous. Mac users may be so focussed on the hot new hardware as to forget something crucial: that, ultimately, it is the application software that counts. Macintosh enthusiasts should refuse the poisoned chalice that Microsoft is offering them with its generous offer to keep Office for the Mac on life support for a few more years, and instead should channel some of their famous passion into supporting the creation of a first-class, full-featured open source office suite.

Real-time, voice-activated blogging

By their very nature, blogs have a real-time element (the "log" in "weblog"). The reverse chronological nature of them means that as they are updated every day or two, you are aware of time passing.

I've noticed that beyond this common kind of daily blogging, another significant element for some sites is a schedule based on hours or even minutes. These are typically when an important event is breaking, and represent a new kind of online reporting. A good example is the coverage of Steve Jobs' MacWorld announcement.

What is particularly interesting about this - aside from the sense of excitement that it can generate - is its dependence on a good wireless connection. You can't really follow events if you're plugged into an ordinary network. This explains why many of these up-to-the-minutes blogs make reference to the presence, absence and quality of the local WiFi connection.

Taking this a step further, it occurs to me that mobiles will be even more suited to this kind of blogging on the move. All that is needed is some good voice recognition software that can transcribe your words - and ignore the extraneous noises - as you pursue your topic, both literally and metaphorically.

What we need is a name for this kind of real-time, voice-activated blogging: any suggestions?