iPhone Push services are the death of SMS

Today Apple invited iPhone developers to test out the new version of AOL Instant Messenger for the iPhone. The big different? Push notifications are now live.

It flat out works great.

Its now possible to send messages to iPhone users, and they will always get the notification, regardless of what apps they have open, or if the phone is in standby. Previously the only two things that would always notify the phone were actual phone calls and SMS messages.

This is the beginning of the end for SMS. The most over-priced 'feature' of phones is finally being attacked. Not by laws, not by outrage, but by innovation.

Thanks Apple!

App Stores are Hard

Walt Mossberg:

The Pre’s biggest disadvantage is its app store, the App Catalog. At launch, it has only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone, and thousands each for the G1 and the modern BlackBerry models. Even worse, the Pre App Catalog isn’t finished. It’s immature, it’s labeled a beta, and Palm has yet to release the tools for making Pre apps available to more than a small group of developers.

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools.

Maybe this is why Apple released the App store a year after the iPhone had been on the market?

Apple does the right thing with MobleMe rocky rollout.

Today I got an email from Apple about the MobileMe transition from .Mac. Basically they agree that it was pretty messed up.

MobileMe Services are now available

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.

Another snag we have run into is our use of the word "push" in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe "cloud," changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word "push" until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.

We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.

We hope you enjoy your new suite of web applications at me.com, in addition to keeping your iPhone and iPod touch wirelessly in sync with these new web applications and your Mac or PC.

Thank you,

The MobileMe Team

I think this is a pretty decent thing to do. 30 days free more than makes up for the 3-4 days of flakiness the past weekend.

It's also cool that they are owning up to the fact that 'push' doesn't work the way customers envisioned it on the desktop yet.

This seems like a potential new level of openness from Apple regarding problems, and I very much welcome it.

[ update ]

It looks like Apple has started an official MobileMe status blog: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/status/

How Many Times do I have to Buy This?

I have no problem compensating artists for their work.

How many times must I do it?

I have purchased Nine Inch Nail's Pretty Hate Machine album 3 times on CD, and once on iTunes. My first few CDs were lost or scratched, or in storage when I got my first iPod. What are the record companies selling? They keep saying they are selling licenses to listen to a song, but what they are trying to create is an infinite continuum of potential licenses, one for each format, device, thought, or dreamed up service, with them taking their 0.99, 1.99, 3.99 etc at each and every opportunity.

I love Nine Inch Nails. Trent has, I believe, received enough money from me in the past to allow me to continue to enjoy Pretty Hate Machine now, and in the future. Regardless of what new formats or paradigms arise.

Middlemen

They've been around for a long time now.  They're around in almost every market segment, taking their slice of transactions.  Lawyers are the middlemen between to parties in a legal dispute.  Grocery stores are the middlemen between farms and consumers.  Up until now, record labels have been the middlemen between musical artists and their fans.

Bringing two people together to do business has always been a hard thing to do.  Direct contact between buyer and seller is almost always the best, but sometimes its just really hard to connect.  Enter the middleman (or middlewoman).  New middlemen are popping up all over the internet.  Social networking sites are the middlemen between people trying to connect.  Sites like Digg and Technorati are the middlemen between Bloggers and readers. Google is now the middleman between just about everything (content) and everyone (searchers).

Which brings be back to the record labels.  It used to be if you wanted to make music and get it into the hands of your fans, you pretty much had to go through a record label.  What did the record label really do for you though?  For the most part, they did some advertising, and they got your Vinyl / 8-track / Tape / CD from you to record stores, and then into the hands of your fans.  

With the costs of producing music plummeting, and the ability to do your own advertising and distribution, where's the value from the record labels anymore?

Death of a Record Label

I predict that within 50 years, maybe less, the record labels will look nothing like they do today.  Oh they'll probably manage to hang around, but instead of the media titans they are today, they will be relegated to online bit bucket hosting and credit card processing.  That's really the only thing that's a little bit hard to do still.  The real power will be in the internet's new middlemen.  Google, iTunes, Amazon, these are the places where fans go to look for music these days.  What music fan goes to Universal's website to look for new music?  Bands in the future will simply check the 'music host' option from their local internet service provider, register with iTunes, and then do some advertising and play shows.

Will this mean the end of music superstars?  Probably not.  I think it just means that hype will die down, and only the bands with true talent will last long enough to get their music into enough fans hands to be called superstars.

Will there be more bad music out there?  Probably.  However social networks, peer ratings and the collective audience will quickly sort the good from the bad and allow you to find good music that you like.  Sites like Last.fm are doing this now.

So there's my prediction.  I'll check back in 50 years and see how I did.

NBC To offer video download service

The New York Times is running a story about NBC offering their own video download service this fall. So it looks like NBC is wanting to get in on the download action directly. At least they're not trying to hide their reasons for it.

“We did this to eliminate the middleman,” said Jeff Gaspin, the president of NBC’s digital division.

NBC seems to be waking up to the fact that the business they are in is media distribution, and that the distribution model has shifted online. Apple saw this much earlier and jumped on it. Now that the model has proven successful, NBC is looking to go it alone.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Initially NBC says they will offer shows free for download just after they air. It looks like you only have one week from the air date to download and watch it however, and then it seems they won't let that episode be downloaded. The downloads themselves will be restricted to Windows-based PCs, and will stop working after seven days. It's unclear if that's seven days from the day it is downloaded, or seven days from the initial making available after the air time. This sounds like it makes it impossible to pick up a new show mid-season, then go to NBC and back sample the earlier episodes. If you really like a new show you'll have to hope for re-runs, or buy the DVDs at the end of the season.

It doesn't sound like the free part will last long however. From the NYT article:

But NBC intends to transform the service into a model similar to iTunes by the middle of 2008 - that is, consumers will pay NBC directly to download episodes of the shows.

I will have to reserve judgement on the pricing until it is announced, but I'm not optimistic. One of the rumored reasons for the NBC-iTunes breakup was pricing, that NBC wanted to charge more. I can't really see how NBC expects to charge more that Apple's $1.99 per show, especially if the shows are really only rented for a week.

I will have to test this out on a Windows machine at work, since I don't have one at home. I'll be curious to see if NBC can put together an offering that is as easy to use as iTunes. I'm a little worried about the implications for 'TV Video' downloads if NBCs model proves effective. It seems each of the old guard Networks would likely follow suit with their own video download services.

Apple got out in front of all the old guard media companies, and quickly became the new network, the new aggregator. As a customer, I don't really care about NBC, or Apple. What I care about is a simple, direct path from the content creators to me. If NBC can pull this off, and I can still watch Battlestar Galactica on my schedule instead of theirs, more power to them.

iPhone Price Drop - Go For Market Share

A lot has been said about the recent iPhone price drop. Fairness aside, I think that the price drop is signaling a shift in Apple's overall strategy that's been happening slowly ever since the first iPod was introduced.

Apple is going for market share.

The 90s were plagued by Apple executives creating niche products and being happy with their great profit margins. However the iPod success has given Apple a taste of what its like to be the market leader. Apple sees another opportunity to become a market leader in the phone space, and they know they have to compete on price. Sure they could have held the price of the iPhone high through Christmas, and probably would have ended up making more money, but selling fewer phones. The price drop indicated Apple's desire to sell more phones, not necessarily to make more money. Apple is learning from watching other companies dominate in other markets. Step 1, become the de-facto standard, worry about profits later.

Apple has a long, long way to go to become that standard, but they have a shot at least. Nokia, Motorolla, Microsoft, Blackberry, Palm, etc all have a piece of the pie right now, but it would be hard to argue that any one has become a standard in the way that the iPod has. I don't know if Apple will succeed in this market, but the price drop indicates that they are going to make a serious push to dominate it.