Jobs’ life-long envy of “what it could have been” has just been put to sleep: Apple has become Microsoft. From the moment you start using the iPad, you become as aware of its wanders (the packaging, the minimalist interface, the user experience) as of its surgically removed potential, of its infuriating manipulated functional and hardware profile. It is cute, sleek and a pleasure to use. It’s also nothing like it could be, just a luke-warm projection of its potential.

But, what is it? Whatever it is, it stays away from threatening anything that Apple makes money on. Innovators are brave: the iPad is the creation of cowards.

As a phone, it fails because it doesn’t hold calls. As a media companion, the science-fiction thing that we all expected, it fails, because it excludes you from viewing 98% of all sites that hold that media, and it’s so obsessed with having you spend money in their store that its apps are manipulated as money grabs. As a computer, a 1980’s single-tasking OS will make you feel like if you were trying to type with boxing gloves on: another fail.

If you ask the castrati, I am sure they will love your assessment: the iPhone, the MacBooks, the iPods, can rest in their thrones, despite ever-shrinking innovation advantages. There, they can bask on the adoration of us, the fans, who have spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years on Apple. “A master move!” The castrati sing praises to each other, the app vendors take advantage of the confusion to ask for absurd prices (like $140 for the NYT for a year… would you please share the stuff you are smoking with us, the people?), the pundits congratulate each other.

Mmm… My assessment is that the castration is not only bad for innovation. I believe Apple is bleeding from it, and less and less people cares to see it go. Including us, the fans. I can give you many reasons why this is the death of the Apple we used to love, but let me just give you the two less controversial ones.

Good money after bad

Why protect business that are increasingly indefensible? Why protect an already inferior iPhone, or a mostly undifferentiated laptop business? To castrate the iPad just so that it does not cannibalize MacBook Pros is absurd in many fronts (except the castrati’s next quarter spreadsheet):

• Other players that are very eager to try the tablet business don’t have to protect anything. Thus, they can afford to create the tablet that could really be. Small companies such as Google. And no, the 140,000 apps will be no defense: they were when they costed $0.99 and you could whim your way through a few hundred ones. Not so when they cost several times more than desktop equivalents, if you price them by functionality delivered.
• Protective anti-innovation is what you do when you are Microsoft. Well, everybody knows that Jobs always wanted to be Gates, I guess he has succeeded.
• The businesses Apple is protecting deserve to die. No? You disagree? Ah, I see, you love to lug that laptop around… Or to have to wait two minutes for it to boot. Or carrying a car battery hanging from your left leg so that it doesn’t die in the middle of the movie. Come on! The laptop has been dead for years: we keep it alive through a battle of patents and… yes, protective moves. It takes you ten minutes using iPad to realize that not only the laptop is dead, but the tablet is its next evolutionary step. But wait, it can’t, because Apple has removed its balls. The device made by cowards…

About the iPhone, let’s face it, not even worth the ink to argue that it has fallen behind, is it? I never liked Google much (just another face of a common oligopoly), but I like them more and more because the Android beats the iPhone so many times over… coming from a company that never built a device!!! Can’t wait to see the second iteration: in the meanwhile my AT&T contract will expire… Can’t wait

The innovation cycle is working against Apple, not in its favor

Despite popular belief, Apple’s advantage in its markets has stopped being innovation a long time ago, and it has been packaging all along. Apple may not own the multi-touch interface, its OS may be a minor variant of BSD, the graphics advantage over other OS’s evaporated over ten years ago, and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t care, because its advantage is packaging of the right standard hardware and  functionality, at the right moment, with the correct marketing. Ounce per ounce, and dollar per dollar, a Sony Vaio or a Dell computer holds much more innovation than a Mac, and they do because they are much better at the margins game, not because they want to be good. But from the moment you open the box, “advantage Apple”.

How can Apple afford an integration-based advantage, when other companies can counterattack with lightening innovation cycles? Protective market manipulations is one way. Give you iPhone 3.0, which sucked really bad, until it couldn’t hold 4.0 (which sucked a little less) any longer, and then sold it back to you who has already paid for 3.0. By carefully manipulating its app marketplace (and the numbers: there is no such thing as even 70,000 apps if you remove the multiple apps instantiated through data segmentation – there is a soccer app that counts like 240 apps: because each soccer team has its own version– the apps that just don’t work, and those that flopped but obstinately remain around, and other tricks of the counting), Apple keeps the innovation trickle attractive, and leverages over and over our (the fans’) commitment.

Another way is mystique. What can I say, I hate to be censored by Apple, I hate to be milked over and over, by Apple and Friends alike, but what can I say, rather give Apple the money than give it to Microsoft… right? Well, not so right any more. Fans know they are being abused: even Jobs tells them so when he unwraps his gigantic ego in the next MacWorld and talks with zen (and medieval) zest about how the future is carefully planned and staged for them. The iPad may brake the balance for many of them. You mean that you don’t spend that extra 34 cents on a USB port just so that you can sell it to me for $29? Or that memory card reader, another awesome $0.65, so that … $29 AGAIN? You mean that I could REALLY work with this beauty, but you are going to wait to sell it to me as a non-upgradeable fix in the next version, and it will be just an OS multi-tasking unlock?

When fans feel abused, they start routing for the underdogs. Why do you think that the last SuperBowl was the most watched in history? Have you heard about the ultimate underdog, Google? Or ITC, who Apple is fending off through a miserable patent grinding lawsuit? Or that tiny company orders of magnitude larger than Apple called Nokia? These guys have no laptop to protect, no fans to abuse: they can only leverage their HUGE sizes and innovation pools…

Guess what: I can’t wait to see it happen. I wander what it would be like to be an ex-fan: it would be like leaving a disfunctional “family” once and for all, wouldn’t it?

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  UPDATE (4/6/9)

I just read an article in Boing Boing that expresses my feelings about the iPad quite well, specially as they relate to how Apple assumes the user to be (a) slightly retarded and (b) happy to just consume. Highly recommended…

Kudos to Cory Doctorow

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– UPDATE (4/6/9)

Umar Haque (another great thinker of the Enterprise and Media 2.0 space), brings his great analytical skills to the fore in his analysis for HBR of how Apple is shooting itself on the iFace [sic] by trying to support the revolution of media as a service, *as well as* the financial benefits of last century’s product lock-in at the same time. Industrial revolution and services economy in the same drive… Great thinking from a very articulate and insightful observer.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

iPad: a timid, luke-warm, defensive move from an Apple with no gonads

The 1.1 in “enterprise 1.1″ is actually quite important. It’s not just an artifact of communication. I use it to reflect a very simple fact, it goes like this:

• First came Enterprise 1.0 – You know what it was about: control, secrecy (even amongst peers), need-to-know-basis, access-control, “business rules”, “process”, all that junk that business leaders learnt at all those very prestigious institutions where “business is war”, there is a thing called “guerrilla marketing”, social solidarity is abbreviated as “socialism”, where even selling you unneeded junk is called “market penetration” (guess why? ). Want to know what it feels like in Enterprise 1.0? Perhaps you do… Hypothetically, let’s say you worked at Ford Motors about ten years ago, when the Explorer was about to be released to great forecasts. While the car is being designed, a quick calculation in your Cad/Cam system shows that the vehicle will flip over under lateral pressures on its tires (e.g., turning a curve while breaking slightly). now, let’s say that, hypothetically always, you go to your boss with your findings. Here comes the test: what do you get?
  • If the answer is something like “A reprimand, severe admonitions, threats to shut the hell up… followed by a surprise promotion to a position far away organizationally from your last one, for which you need to sign a non-disclosure about your previous job that basically hands over your gonads and children to the company if you ever mention the incident again”, you already know what Enterprise 1.0 feels like. E1.0 is another term for “glacial, absolute and indisputable lack of movement and change”; what is, will be.
• Then, of course, Enterprise 1.1 showed up – What was it? Same crap, just marketing angles on top. A great example: SAS, cloud-based software, you may be old enough to even remember ASP. Whatever the case, this is the same old: same old control, same old secrecy, same old ideology, same old… but now you don’t even need to own the hardware. Why do I choose SAS, instead of many other categories? Well, because I consider SalesForce.com a perfect example of 1.1: “Change something that makes exercising control cheaper and you will create the illusion of movement”. What the software does is exactly what it did before; it’s just slightly cheaper (arguably) to operate. Slight of hand. E 1.1
• Enterprise 2.0 is now emergent – The pervasive Internet has made it possible for all of us to be heard (take this obscure blog as an example), but also to excite our network (something E1.0 and E1.1 would never let you do) around us, and in the process create conditions for many emergent phenomena: the same way that you can easily bring a freeway to its knees by synchronizing traffic across three lanes (usually right in front of me), you can now create a PR disaster for Ford (always hypothetically, of course), for killing hundreds of people in Explorers that turn over, over, and over, as soon as people turn corners and touch the brakes. Yes, you are that empowered, you just need to learn other rules of engagement (social networking 1.0.1), but you can do it, and Ford would have a very hard time sweeping you under the rug. You see, even as all those large companies have all this control-driven infrastructure, you, and your network, are not part of it: they can control their infrastructure, but it’s becoming too hard to control you: too many possible outlets for your voice… at least until this oxymoron called “social CRM” gets to “embrace you, the customer”. But that is another story, let’s go back to Reason #2.

The center of reason #2 is that E1.0, as well as E1.1, are paradigms driven by control, secrecy and exclusion; you “don’t need to know that the damn cars will turn over, that’s ‘proprietary’ information”, “you don’t need to know that your Internet 6 browser is exposing everything you do in the Internet to others –for the same reason”– and so on. We even have software and infrastructure to make sure  you don’t know. We call those pieces of software Content Management, Intranets, ERP, Back Office Apps, and oh, yes, CRM.

You see, CRM doesn’t let YOU the customer, see what the sales person knows about product defects. Nope. Neither does it empower to talk to many other customers on your terms, controlling the conversation yourself. What it does, is to make sure that the vendor controls the conversation, that no “proprietary information” is exchanged, that “business rules” are enforced. It’s role is to preserve the status quo, not to impact it. What is, will be.

Social business services, on the other hand, are all about you controlling conversation, relationships and interactions. It works because it lets you choose how to deposit your trust into individuals and companies, and it does so precisely by letting you control the terms of the conversation. As a result, “customer-managed relationships (CMR)” emerges. CMR is social, by definition and by its own merits; CRM, on the other hand, is the negation of social: it’s the total loss of control of the conversation by the customer.

So, why do these companies (mostly SalesForce.com) and pundits (too many to list) create the oxymoron?

• Good intentions by some pundits – If you believe customers should be empowered, or if you believe that they will be empowered regardless of what you say, “social CRM” is a good way to bring out the good in every one. That is cool, but it’s a contortion of an argument:
  • “Customers are increasingly empowered, they have too many channels, the channels are auto-emergent, and thus customers will take control of the conversation”. OK, I agree with that.
  • “Companies will need to adapt in order to sell to the new customer”. OK, I agree with that as well. As a matter of fact, when you look at the way the really big companies are selling these days, how they are creating “influencers” out of “soccer moms”, how there is a networked way of doing everything, even buying Clorox, how you can fart on Tweeter and have twenty companies who make perfume immediately pinging you, and all that, they are already doing that. Their answer is to deploy massive troops whose job is to sneak into your conversations. They adapted the same way China adapted to the Internet: growing their ability to sneak into the dialog.
  • “The software that will let them adapt is Social CRM”. Oops, fallacy alert! Yes, I know, Benioff needs something to energize his 1.1 company, and he is a brilliant marketer, and he can command the pundits and experts alike (who indirectly leave out of his crumbs), with a snap of the finger… but that’s just not what CRM does. CRM does not empower conversation… unless you are the salesperson; social CRM doesn’t change the nature of CRM, it’s just an attempt by the company to control your conversation… even as what “your conversation” mutates into a social discussion.
• Follow the leader intentions by the rest – Yeah, you already know all about this one
• Stale enterprise categories – Want boring? Want old? Want dinosaurs? Just look at ERP, CRM, CMS, all those enterprise software categories. Not only the tools are boring: the categories themselves are. How boring? Well, let me use an example from the CMS side: so boring that even a monolithic piece of architecture like SharePoint is called innovative… that at a time when everyone is moving to light weight ones. How boring? Have you ever used SalesForce.com, or Siebel, or …? If you have, I don’t need to tell you more. Where these vendors have already reached everyone that can be reached, Social Business Services vendors are just emerging, and are recognized as the best big thing. Wouldn’t you do the same? What, if I was in the business of selling horse-powered carriages, I would have changed my marketing too: I would be selling “SOCIAL carriages”. You bet!
• The failure of a model to evolve – You sell things that are all about control, manipulation, need-to-know, secrecy, walls and silos, “corporate controls”, and all of that. In other words, you sell CRM, or you sell CMS’s. You have a good business selling to the very old. The guy who buys from you wears suits and has trouble using even his Blackberry (yes, HIS). He is worried to see the conversation moving away… but you need to keep selling him. The irresolvable conflict between these two modalities is worth a separate post (where I will tell you, as an example, why “Social SharePoint” is another oxymoron, and yet for the same reasons), but its essence remains: CRM, ERP, CMS’s, they all excel at supporting all those structures of control and secrecy (I really mean it, they are EXCELLENT at it). I made a lot of money through my career supporting those mechanisms as well. It’s just that they are outdated: there is no slight coat of paint that will save them. Dinosaurs.

When you look at Chatter, for example, all there is there is a thin layer of social artifacts (the usual, discussions, posts, small groups of people, avatars, profiles) coming to the sales person rescue, helping him CONTROL the conversation a little longer; somewhere in there are you. You are now surrounded by other “influential customers” who are “just like you” (in prisons, they would call them snitches: you see, this “others like me” is not only a new type of social filter for information, it’s old enough to be built into your genes, it’s just that now even “they” know that); you are still the prisoner of the conversation (as determined by the asymmetry between the information YOU gain and control and the information THEY own and control). Does that sound like a new type of relationship to you?

What is that you just said? That it doesn’t matter because you, the user, don’t buy the software?

Yep, you are right… But notice that I didn’t say Benioff isn’t brilliant: on the contrary, he knows he will sell to ignorants as long as he steals a few concepts from that “other thing” called Social. Further, that reality is even OK with me: ignorance is its own narcissistic dictator, and, at the end of the game, everyone playing with it will succumb to it.

I just don’t think that Social CRM will buy SFC (and the ignorants) too much time, because in the meanwhile you are setting up your own social filters, your own BS traps, your own lie detectors, your own social smarts, much, much faster than SFC can spin this crap around. When that oxymoron  called “social CRM” shows up in your business transaction, you will recognize it for what it is: just another trap.

When you do, you will go back to the place where customers manage their relationships. It’s called social networks, and if companies are involved, it will be called Social Business Services. No need to contaminate it with the old dinosaur genes.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Reason No. 2 why Social CRM is an oxymoron

Neat idea, eh? It truly is. And an invaluable service if you have a small business, a cash-strapped non-for-profit, or a spreadout family that would love to chat as a group every so often.

Neat, that is, unless you use COX Cable Phone in Santa Barbara. There, COX Cable censors your calls, so that if you call a number provided by FreeConference.com, you get an ambiguous message that says “All circuits are busy. Call later”. Which is, of course, a lie. How do I know? All other participants, calling from any other town, or even from Santa Barbara but not on COX, get through without a problem. Go to another house with COX service, call any of those numbers and guess what… you get the same message.

I am, of course, looking for ways out of COX. In my case, because there is no previous phone line coming into my house, it may take a more expensive service to replace them. But even so, I will. These troglodytes that turned “customer service” into an oxymoron need to disappear, once and for all. Right now they play the monopoly (or oligopoly) games: you don’t bug me and my dirty practices, I won’t bug you and yours. But with increasingly social efficiencies brought about by the Social Internet, we can all help each other identify crooks like COX Cable, and get rid of them.

I may not be worth anything to them, but I have service with them in two properties (one of them in Santa Barbara). The way I see it, I can hurt them at the tune of approximately $6,000 a year, $60,000 in ten years. That’s really sweet.

Don;t take more abuse from COX: cancel your cable and phone. Yes, there will be other options. And by the way, next time somebody mentions net neutrality, remember it means that these crooks will not be able to select which numbers you call, which IP services you use, or which bytes are worth more to you than others. Companies like COX want to be in the extortion business.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

COX Cable censors the numbers you can call