Feel free to play this game with your favourite tech conference organizer:
Found via Kate Shea Bird.
Click the bingo card to see it at full size.
And here’s the Twitter conversation it came from:
@paulbradshaw @_suziemccracken Bingo! http://t.co/7aZiqo6Oco cc @NoWomenSpeakers pic.twitter.com/ZBGg7xAbMQ
— Kate Shea Baird (@KateSB) February 10, 2014
The best videogames are the ones that tap into that masochistic, addiction-prone part of your brain, the one that tells you to play just once more, because this time you’ve got it figured out. They are, to borrow a line from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, “easy to learn, hard to master”. The latest game to meet these criteria for 50 million frustrated-but-addicted players was Flappy Bird, a free iOS game where you tapped the screen to make a bird’s wings flap and give it lift as it navigated an increasingly maddeningly impassable field of Mario-esque tubes. Coded by 29-year-old Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen over the course of a few nights after work, it got millions of downloads and was making $50,000 a day just through advertising.
Then came this tweet:
I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.
— Dong Nguyen (@dongatory) February 8, 2014
Some people suspected that he was facing legal action from Nintendo, as a lot of the visual elements of the game look a helluva lot like those from the various Mario games. Nguyen gave no explanation, other than this:
I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.
— Dong Nguyen (@dongatory) February 8, 2014
And as he promised, 22 hours later, Flappy Bird vanished from the App Store.
Never mind the eBay listings from people selling their iPhones and iPads with Flappy Bird installed for ridiculous prices — the real action, if you’re a developer, may be in the job listings for programmers who can clone the game. At the time of this writing, there are 12 results on the freelance job-seekers’ board Elance for the search term “Flappy Bird clone”. Here’s a screen capture:
If you’ve got the skills, the time to spare, and some negotiating savvy, you may be able to parley yourself some “walking around money”. But you’d better hurry, as the clones are already appearing on the App Store:
For more, check out Sarah Perez’ article in TechCrunch: Gone But Not Forgotten: Flappy Bird Clones Fill The App Store’s Top Charts.
The “follow the money” scene from All the President’s Men.
ZDNet’s Ed Bott says that if you ignore a company’s marketing and PR and instead look at its quarterly reports, you’ll find out what that company’s actual business and motivations are. Following that maxim and following the money, he (and presumably a research assistant or two) looked at the quarterly reports recently put out by Apple, Google, and Microsoft and put together the three graphs below, which show where each company’s revenue comes from. We look at these graphs, and some recent related stories to help shed more light on the kinds of businesses these companies are really in.
If you follow Apple’s vision statement, it’s “bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings”. If you follow Apple’s money, they’re a hardware company, making 90% of their money from products you can actually hold in your hands.
Three-quarters of their money comes from the iPhone and the iPad, two products came into existence and redefined their markets 7 and 4 years ago, respectively:
What you should take away from this is that everything Apple does — including the development of operating systems, software, and online services — is all in the service of selling devices, and for the time being, the priority is on mobile ones.
If you follow Apple’s products, you may end up following money anyway, as there are place where the iPhone is either so expensive or so hard-to-get that it’s practically currency. Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Vernon Silver writes that someone who did work for him in Italy — “where domestic work comes cheap and technology is expensive” — asked for a new, unlocked iPhone in the place of cash as payment. He writes:
Within a couple days of my return, I exchanged both phones for domestic work, valuing them at the $815 I’d paid. The second phone’s recipient sold hers for its local value ($1,130) to an acquaintance, she said, with payments to be made over time. She told me the new owner sold the phone at an additional markup on an installment plan that will cost the final buyer about $1,350.
On a trip to Los Angeles a few weeks after my Fifth Avenue purchases, I found myself in front of another Apple Store. Walking in felt like a visit to an ATM. I asked the salesperson for an unlocked iPhone 5s. The response: Just one?
About a fifth of Apple’s revenue comes from the iPad, which should be cause for concern if Andreesen Horowitz partner Zal Bilimoria is right in his Re/code article, Our Love Affair with the Tablet is Over. He says that there’s room for devices that fit in the pocket (smartphones) and devices that go on our desks (desktops/laptops), devices that exist in that nowhere-space in between (tablets) are on their way out, and that in the end, we’ll use phablets — phone/tablet hybrids that fit in a single hand. I think he’s wrong, and that his thinking is reminiscent of the dismissal of personal computers in the early 1970s and 1980s by pundits who said that they’d eventually disappear as people rediscover “real” computers. I’ve also seen how non-techies view their tablets (particularly iPads) versus their desktop or laptop machines: the tablets are the machines they love and want to use, the desktops/laptops are the machines that are “just okay” and that they have to use.
Google, if you look at their core mission statement, is all about organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful. Google, if you follow their money, is in the advertising business, making over 90% of their money from it.
Bott writes that from 2009 to 2011, advertising accounted for at least 96% of Google’s revenue. Advertising’s slice of the pie got a little smaller with Motorola Mobility, but with its sale to Lenovo, Google will likely go back to being more of an advertising company than Apple is a hardware company.
The practical upshot of all this is that Google’s activity, whether it’s search engines, productivity applications, mobile operating systems, or devices for the home, is in the end all about putting someone’s ad in front of you and then collecting money from that someone.
On Friday, The Guardian published the most recent call for Microsoft to drop its own Windows Phone operating system and instead work on their own fork of Android instead. Ars Technica’s Peter Bright counters this by explaining that Android is “unforkable”, since it has two major parts:
The good stuff lives in Google Mobile Services, and many third-party apps — that is, apps not written by Google — rely on APIs in Google Mobile Services. These apps will simply not run on a forked Android, because it would lack Google Mobile Services. To an end user, it would be an Android that doesn’t run many Android apps, which to them would not be Android.
Since Google is in the ads business, it’s in their best interests to keep control over its services, which feed that business. Hence Android — at least the Android that users know and love — is unforkable.
Microsoft’s most recent mission statement, as put forth in Steve Ballmer’s last letter as CEO to the shareholders is “…to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.” Follow the money, and you’ll find that Microsoft is in the Windows and Office business.
In the graph above, “Commercial Licensing” refers to business licenses of Windows and Office, while “Consumer Licensing” refers to OEM licenses of Windows and Windows Phone operating systems, as well as the Home, Small Business, and Student versions of Office. Put together, these two slices account for 70% of Microsoft’s revenue. If Microsoft really wants to be more like the business described in their “devices and services” mission statement, they’re going to have to grow the other slices beyond 30%.
Nearly three-fifths of Microsoft’s business is commercial, while the remaining two-fifths is consumer. Paul Thurrott, quite possibly the best-known professional Windows fan, wrote that Microsoft is pleasing no one by trying to please everyone, and should focus on its commercial business. Calling Windows 8.1’s Update 1 a “design-by-committee” effort made in an attempt to please different, disparate market segments, he calls for a single vision behind Windows, and in the service of business/productivity usage:
I always accepted the messy bits of Windows in the past because the system addressed such a large audience. But given the way things are going, Windows should evolve into a system that is laser targeted to the customers who will in fact continue using it regularly. That’s mostly business users, but even when you look at the consumers who will use Windows, that usage is almost entirely productivity related. Windows should focus on that. On getting work done. On an audience of doers. Job one should be productivity.
Everyone likes to compare Apple or the Mac to BMW and, you know what? Fair enough, and if that’s true then Windows is obviously GM, the overly-big messy GM of a decade ago. But Microsoft can’t afford for Windows to be like GM anymore—just like GM couldn’t, for whatever that’s worth. Maybe Windows needs to be more like GMC, the part of GM that only makes trucks (and truck-based SUVs). After all, while many people choose to use a truck for basic transportation, they’re really designed and optimized for work. You know, as should be Windows.
You can’t please everybody, Microsoft. So stop trying. It’s time to double down on the people who actually use your products, not some mythical group of consumers who will never stop using their simpler Android and iOS devices just because you wish they would.
Once again, some mobile technology video diversions for your Friday afternoon. We hope that yours is as productive as ours (although these videos might not help)!
Back in 2010, 300 million smartphones were sold, and Nokia was the market leader, and BlackBerry and HTC were in the top 5. In 2013, a billion smartphones were shipped, and Nokia, BlackBerry, and HTC don’t even register on the chart. The leaders these days are Samsung, Apple, LG, Huawei, and Lenovo. The Economist’s live chart shows this evolution, backed by a voice-over with an erudite-sounding English accent.
Here’s a report from business insurance company QBE that says that 63% of companies in the UK aren’t managing the use of employee devices at work, even though 57% of companies in the UK allow the use of personal devices to access company resources such as email. This could come back to bite them…
In these two videos, T3 look at rumors of the Nokia phone codenamed “Normandy”, which is believed to be an Android phone…
…as well as rumors of the Samsung Galaxy S5, which is expected to be unveiled at the end of the month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of the month:
And finally, a 1978 film on something called AMPS, short for Advanced Mobile Phone Service, or what would eventually get called cellular phone networking. The devices, uses and networking technology are different, but the basic principle — dividing a service area into a pattern of small cells — remains the same.
Here’s another roundup of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) news…
Creative Commons photo by v1ctor Casale. Click to see the source.
Most IT departments are used to having full control over company-owned desktop and laptop computers, and many come into BYOD programs expecting the same level of control over BYOD devices. They’re not used to the delicate balancing act of dealing with both access to company information and resources and doing so on workers’ personally-owned devices. ZDNet points to a Gartner report that says that by 2016, 20% of companies that implement a BYOD program because they’ll exert too much control over employee-owned devices in the name of information security.
In response to concerns expressed by a number of people about having MDM software on their devices, Talkin’ Cloud’s Ashar Baig put together a quick table of what an employer can see or access on a device with MDM:
| What an employer CAN see or read | What an employer CAN’T see or access |
|---|---|
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Creative Commons photo by N. Feans. Click to see the source.
SC Magazine reports these numbers from Forrester’s most recent “State of Enterprise Mobile Security” report:
The trends indicated by these numbers are creating tremendous pressure on IT departments, many of who have their hands full with their server/desktop/laptop/networking caseloads, never mind the relatively new and rapidly-changing area of mobile technology. Phil Cracknell, head of security and privacy services at Company 85, says:
BYOD is putting pressure on IT right now. Many of the elements which reflect a total cost of ownership of BYOD are not being fully recognised when business is considering and implementing or at least planning to implement.
HR/Legal issues, responsibility for a replacement device in the event of theft or malfunction – who would that lie with? The individual or the company? What would that person do if they couldn’t afford a replacement right away?
The article also quotes Richard Absalom, an analyst with Ovum, who says that in certain cases, a COPE (Company-Owned, Personally-Enabled) approach might be more appropriate and still just as palatable to employees who want devices of their own choosing:
BYOD isn’t always the right way to go, as organisations in highly regulated industries in particular may have very legitimate security and privacy concerns around it. But they do need to do something about it as it will simply go unmanaged and cause even more problems if they don’t.
It’s important therefore for a mobility strategy to understand and address the drivers of BYOD, such as employees wanting to use a single device rather than carry two phones around with them, one for personal and one for work usage. Having a CYOD (choose your own device) or a COPE (corporate owned, personally enabled) policy would still mean corporate deployment but may go down just as well as BYOD with employees.
In January 2012, the Android version situation looked like this:
At that time, the latest major version of Android was 4.0 — the first half-decent version, in my opinion — which was released three months prior, in October 2011. If you were building an Android app back then, you’d have to target the 2.1 version of Android if you wanted it to run on most people’s Android phones and tablets.
By way of comparison, the current version of iOS at the time — iOS 5 — hit 20% adoption within 5 days of release. That’s because you get iOS updates directly from Apple, while with Android, you get your updates from your carrier. They’d much rather have you update your OS the more lucrative way: by buying a new phone and matching contract.
The situation was greatly improved the following year, driven by the success of Samsung’s Galaxy S III (released May 2012) and Galaxy Note II (released September 2012), both of which came with Android 4.0.4 or later. I wrote about this change last year:
At that point, we finally hit the point where modern versions of Android — 4.0.x or later — made for more than half of all the versions out there. You still had to account for the just-tolerable 2.3.x variants if you wanted to reach most of the market, but if you just wanted to target devices with not-so-oldie-and-moldie Android, it was actually practical to do so.
Here’s the present situation, taken straight from the Android Developer site’s Dashboards page, based on data collected for the 7 days leading up to February 4, 2014. These days, its data comes from the Google Play Store app, which runs on Android 2.2. or later, which is why pre-2.2 versions of Android (Cupcake, Donut, and Eclair) don’t appear on the graph:
If you want the latest data on Android version shares, you’ll want to bookmark the Android Developer Dashboards page and hit it weekly.
Those stubborn Android 2.3.x versions still make up one in five Android versions out there in the wild, but the good news is that over three-quarters of the Android world is now running 4.0 or later. If you’re targeting those Samsung Galaxy S III/S4, Moto X, HTC One or other modern device users, you shouldn’t feel bad about doing this on ADT’s New Android Application window:
Good news, indeed.
Click the poster to see it at full size.
Microsoft had a kick-ass mantra in its first 24 years. From 1975, when computers were thought of as machines that occupied entire walls, if not entire rooms, to 1999, when the final line on most startups’ business plans was often “And then we get bought out by Microsoft”, that statement was:
A computer on every desk and in every home.
In nine words, it made a very clear, easy-to-understand point. It was also a BHAG — a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, which has its own Wikipedia entry.
The problem, as I wrote back in 2009, was that they met that goal. In 1975, it was unusual to see a computer in a home; in 1999, it was unusual to not see a computer in a home. Since then, they’ve been flopping from vague mission statement to hand-wavy platitude:
And if you read Steve Ballmer’s final letter to shareholders, the current mantra is:
…to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.
There’s a lot of sound and fury there, but not much to signify. Starbucks could just as easily claim it as their mission statement: lots of people rely on their devices and services to be empowered at home/work/on the go, in the activities they value most.
As I also wrote in my 2009 article on Microsoft mantras, I looked at Microsoft’s post-1999 ones and couldn’t help thinking of Jeffrey Zeldman’s quote:
“…provide value added solutions” is not a mission. “Destroy All Monsters.” That is a fucking mission statement.
In his most recent post on Daring Fireball, John Gruber looks at Microsoft’s history and the opportunities that its new CEO, Satya Nadella, brings to The Empire. He says — and I agree — that it’s a good sign that Nadella comes from the Server and Tools Business (STB) group, and that Microsoft’s cloud offerings are the part of the company that are best-suited for the present and future world:
Cloud computing is one potential path forward. The cloud is nascent, like the PC industry of 1980. In 30 years we’ll look back at our networked infrastructure of today and laugh, wondering how we got a damn thing done. The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. Apple and Google each have glaring (and glaringly different) holes among that list of adjectives.
He even suggests a new Microsoft mantra, based on its original one, but far better-equipped for today:
Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world.
If Microsoft doesn’t officially adopt it, they should at least embrace and extend it.