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- Eric Schmidt temporarily replacing Steve Jobs as Apple's CEO?
Doug Kass writes that
[...] Google (GOOG - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) CEO Eric Schmidt has already begun low-level discussions with several Apple board members regarding his role as a possible temporary replacement to Steve Jobs should the options-backdating issues intensify at legal levels.
I find the idea both fascinating and scary, especially if he runs both companies at the same time.
- Steve Jobs Thoughts on Music
Go read Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Music.
John Gruber tries to read between the lines of Steve Job's open letter:
Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Music” essay is really quite a good piece of writing, and an intriguing and aggressive strategic move on the part of Apple.
Is it a challenge to the major record labels? An answer to the increasingly hostile European governments (Norway, France, Germany) that are pressuring Apple to “open up” the iTunes Store? A message to the press to clarify Apple’s stance on DRM? A big fuck-you to Microsoft?
It is all of these things.
The main points are, in redux:
- DRM protections were forced by the music industry upon those who sell music online
- Because of the demands of the music industry, DRM technologies are extremely difficult to control even for a company that has an extensive control over the whole distribution-player chain, and impossible if that control is shared among lots of different actors — That's why Apple doesn't license its DRM technology “FairPlay”
- Therefore, Microsoft does exactly the same as Apple, music sold from the Zune music store plays only on a Zune player — a big departure from the open model of licensing their DRM (“PlaysForSure”) to others
- The music industry sells 90% of its production on DRM-free CDs
- On average, only 3% of the music stored on an iPod comes from Apple’s music store. The rest comes from elsewhere (most notably from already owned CDs)
- DRMs haven't worked to halt music piracy, and may never work as the technology itself is broken and fixed in a permanent cat-and-mouse game
- The way out is to get back to what has been the model for decades: music that is free from DRM — The music industry will benefit from that, and Apple will switch to a DRM-free model in a heartbeat
- Most complaints come from Europe, luckily Europe also owns the majority of the big four music giants — Job can’t be blamed for passing the hot potato back.
Steve Jobs’s message is that there are only two options: status quo, or no DRM. Apple wouldn't suffer at all from such a switch (they make their numbers on iPods, not music sold), but others would, or would simply disappear, such as those based on subscription. And in my book, that’s precisely the ugly hidden agenda behind DRM: prevent you to own your music and listen to it when, where and as much as you want, but force you to continuously pay for the privilege of listening to the same things over and over.
By the way, my iPod is shock-full of music ripped from the CDs I’ve bought, some of them 20 years ago. Do you think you’ll have a chance of being able to listen to your DRM-locked music 20 years from now? Me neither.
To finish on a positive glimpse of what a good online music shop can look like, just go see Linn Records. They have an outstanding catalog for lovers of classical, baroque and jazz, and they sell DRM-free music in different formats, including CD-quality downloads. Those guys know how to satisfy the audiophiles (my hifi equipment comes from Linn).
- The 1998 Bill Gates deposition video is back
We knew that Bill Gates has his own reality distortion field, but now we can see it again live in front of a camera with the return of the 1998 Bill Gates Deposition Video.
Ironically enough, the whole series is using Microsoft WMV proprietary format. I'm pretty sure there are a few execs in Redmond who are dreaming about a perfect DRM-driven world, where they could just press a button and poof! instantly make that video unplayable for all. Read your video player fine print, chances are that the legal provisions to do so are already there (they are, at least, in all recent versions of Windows Media Player, in addition to something akin to letting Microsoft do whatever they fancy with your computer and data, remotely and without any responsibility whatsoever [even better, you take the risk of being sued] — Same goes with Apple by the way, welcome to the dark side of DRMs).
[Via Tristan Nitot, aka Mozilla's Ballmer ;-)]
P.S. and there are some perls in the MS emails posted along with the videos: like Jim Allchin to Bill Gates, entitled 'losing our way,' in which Allchin states 'I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.'
- The best URLs
Simon Willison has a good write-up about the importance of unambiguous URLs, i.e. “that any logical piece of content should have one and only one definitive URL, with any alternatives acting as a permanent redirect”.
Simon gives a good example of how the exposure of one particular site is diluted within a social bookmarking service because its home page has four different URLs. Making sure that a resource has a unique URL has other benefits, most notably in facilitating site statistics and traffic analysis (although most stats packages will provide some way to aggregate "default" index names, aliases and missing trailing slashes, which in a way tends to hide the problem).
This is webmaster trivia, and — besides making them readable, reliable and hackable — good webmasters will knock two birds with one stone by also making their URLs cruft-free, hiding whatever technology they're using under the hood (and making everybody's life easier for future site redesigns or evolution).
(And, of course, I'm not applying the advice here, yet. www.padawan.info should redirect to padawan.info, I'm just getting lost at my own Apache redirect maze :p)
- Bill Gates on Mac OS X security
Bill Gates, trying to “turn their reputation for swiss-cheese security around on Apple” (as TUAW puts it), claiming:
Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
When I read that interview for Newsweek, I knew it wouldn't take long for John Gruber to respond: Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates.
It’s either an angry, slanderous lie, or Bill Gates is an uninformed jackass.
He he. Exactly as John points out, I've yet to see a single exploit in the open that allows a stock Mac OS X 10.4 to be taken over. Not that there aren't any security issues in Mac OS X (or risks in Unix if you leave the door open). But as far as I'm concerned, Apple stands way higher than Microsoft (and Unix vs Windows) in terms of security, and that has been true for a LONG time.
Oh, and I love to hear that the next version of Windows after Vista will be more “user-centric”. I guess we'll all get an idea of where they're heading when Mac OS 10.5 goes out this semester :p.
- IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition
IBM and Yahoo! have teamed up to produce a new search engine dubbed IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. This entry-level enterprise search engine is offered for free, with optional paid support delivered by IBM. The Flash demo looks promising, as is the "open source mash" done by the developers. I already knew Lucene, but this is the best looking package built around it I've ever seen so far.
I need to give it a try, it looks like a serious contender to the Google Mini (except that here you have to provide the server, which isn't downloadable for free from IBM.com ;-)).
- Survive the Métro
Via Parisist I found this hilarious list of ten tourist tips for the Métro.
It's obviously been written by someone who know the parisians and their subway very well. I stopped counting how many times I was just about to kill someone for one of those reasons (and numerous others, like someone taking freaking ages for entering the car while all the empty seats get snapped before your eyes). Now I'm much, much happier on my bike though.
One useful, handy, serious tip I can share: to calculate how much time you need between two subway stations, count 1 min 30 s per station (or count the number of stations and add 50%) and add 5 min for each interconnection between two lines if any (more if you don't
runwalk as fast as a parisian ;-) ). It's been working just perfectly for me for years. - How NOT to use social network services
Recently I've received several requests from acquaintances asking me to endorse their work on social network services such as LinkedIn or Xing. Those are from people that I've met in person, but I've never worked with them! Writing a business recommendation for someone I've never worked directly with would be the equivalent of accepting a direct connection on those services with someone I don't know, which is diluting the worth of those social networks. I'm absolutely amazed to see, right in my own network, people with more than 500 connections (LinkedIn subtly stopped showing the exact number, but I remember that a guy like Loic had something like a thousand in no time!) and I really wonder 1) if they really know all those people, 2) if all those contacts are valuable, 3) isn't their network size becoming a burden at some point?
I really don't blame those who have contacted me, firstly because they thought I could help, secondly because the social network services make it way to easy to send out all sorts of requests with the click of a button. But sometimes I think those services are shooting themselves in the foot. How can I trust network connection and endorsements if they're that easy to request and are distributed like candies?
My policy on social network services is to accept connections with people that I know (that doesn't necessarily mean that I've met them in meatspace, because my notion of "real life" is slightly larger than its normal conception ;-) and to give endorsements to people I've worked with directly.
- iPhone vs iPhone
Corporate blogs are popularizing a new trend in corporate communications: washing business dirty laundry in public. The latest story in case is Mark Chandler, Cisco's SVP and General Counsel, calling after Apple for the infringement of Cisco's iPhone Trademark on Cisco's blog.
Putting aside, for a moment, any commentary on the merits or base of such action, the communication tactic chosen by Cisco might be a good move, for it is exactly the opposite of the habits of Apple and Steve Jobs, whose secrecy and tightfisted, carefully planned communication methods are well known. It will be very interesting to watch this story unfold, just in terms of corporate communication management. My only guess at the moment is that no Apple exec will reply via their own blog ;-).
Somehow it reminds me of Sun's Jonathan Schwartz moking HP on his blog (evidence), to which HP reacted by sending a legal reply by snail mail. From my perspective, Sun won the battle (and poked some more blog fun that made some wonder about a new kind of war). I'm not sure this is going to be a trend, although execs bloggers seem to be testing the waters here.
On an aside note, my personal feeling is that this isn't going to be a piece of cake for Cisco. IANAL but I have been close enough to IP matters to sniff a few stumbling blocks along the road. It's not enough to register a brand to protect it, you have to exploit it commercially within 5 years and show that you defend it against dilution. In the former case, from what I read in Cisco's defense, it seems there's a big gap (2000-2006) between their acquisition of the brand and the release of a commercial product (and the brand might have been inactive before 2000). For the later issue, the iPhone name has been widely (and wildly) used in public to describe the future Apple phone, to which Cisco didn't object as far as I know and therefore will have a hard time proving that they took proper measures to protect their brand (that requirement of IP laws is frequently misunderstood by open source zealots each time a company makes a necessary defensive move about trademark infringement, in order to have a record of action for future legal cases against its brand). Add to that the iphone.com domain owned by the Internet Phone Company (registered in 1995, I just noticed they changed their whois information recently), and the iphone.org domain owned by Apple (registered in 1999 and which has been redirecting to Apple.com for quite a while). As a consequence, on the contrary, it will be a piece of cake for Apple to demonstrate that for most people the iPhone name is linked to Apple, not Cisco (to which Cisco can argue about brand confusion, then Apple about dilution, etc. Not an easy pick, I'd love an IP-specialist's take on that case). And as for the purpose of the lawsuit, for knowing a little bit Cisco inside, it's a purely financial results-driven company so it's totally about business, i.e. money.
P.S. 1: Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for HP Eric Kintz chimes in to remind me that HP later joined the blog-bandwagon, leveling the game. My expressed feeling that Sun won the battle was due, at a point in time, to their execs being first to start using blogs to push corporate communication to a whole new level while HP had resorted to good old snail mail in reaction.
P.S. 2: I discovered those articles after writing this post: Cisco on brink of losing iPhone name in Europe and Did Cisco lose its right to iPhone trademark last year? which comfort me in thinking that the legal risk is more on Cisco than on Apple.
- Back from Cuba
Back from Cuba with a friend, which is better than nothing, the eyes full of images and the skin better prepared for its futur cancer.
Comments moderation is back to normal, now I'll pause while I readapt to the parisian life...
- Internet detox (bis repetita)
Off to Cuba for ten days, in love, without a computer. My second internet detox in two years. Be nice.
P.S. For the first time in the history of this blog I'm activating an a priori moderation for all comments while I'm away. Be nice anyway please ;-).
- Sign and find images online
While discussing various rights and fair use of images online with Michel V yesterday*, I wished that the major search engines (aka GYM) would provide us with a way to sign any image (via steganography) then a simple feature allowing to search for signed images published online. This would allow anyone to easily track reuse, fair or not, of their works.
May be it already exists, I don't know. This would be the graphical equivalent of the link: feature in Google (ex. links to this blog home page), and I'm sure it'd be very popular.
Michel pointed out that people could possibly alter the signature if the encode/decode algorythm is know. I don't know this one either, though if we can safely encrypt stuff via public/private keys via open algorithms, this might not be an issue. He also pointed out that different means exist to sign an image, to which I responded that once a prominent actor such as Google comes out with such a feature and a very simple tutorial for webmasters, it would set an industry standard.
(*) we talk notably about the interesting case of images of oneself taken by others and published on Flickr and other online image banks. Questions discussed: in French law, one can object to the publication of any picture of themselves (where recognizable without any doubt) does this promises Flickr and consorts a flurry of legal cases soon? Can I reuse a picture of myself taken by someone else, without their authorization, when it's been published without my consent? Case in point: I've not taken or published any of those images (and I haven't got a clue who "The Shrine of Dr. No" is!)
- Opquast goes international
Opquast is a popular online tool for quality assessment of web sites. Until recently it was only available in French, but the team behind it (Temesis, headed by Elie Sloïm) has localized ;-) it in English, including its useful online evaluation tool: My-Opquast which allows you to benchmark a site against 153 best practices that were elaborated with the community (more info over here).
Disclaimer: I know Elie personally and I briefly participated in the community effort during the launch phase. This said, if you're serious about quality testing, you should give Opquast a try, it's free for up to three sites and cheap for the benefits it brings to larger design projects.
- Germany withdraws from Quaero, c'est la vie !
Germany and France split on Google-beater:
German officials told The Guardian co-operating with the French government had been tricky and they were not convinced it would ever compete effectively with the likes of Google and Yahoo!.
Germany will now develop its own search engine called Theseus while France is expected to continue with the Quaero project.
Why am I not astonished for a second, especially about co-operating with the French government? Let's hope we (France) bury this public-money-wasting-monster after we get rid of his originator later this year.
P.S. and reading between the lines in this article, it's clear that this is just a disguised public founding for Exalead and Thomson, administered by yet another French administration (Aii - pronounce "aïe", i.e. "ouch!" in french) for yet another layer of red tape and politics. No mystery why the Germans withdrew.
- Apple 2007
It looks like Apple is cooking some big things for 2007.
What's shining behind the Apple logo, in your opinion?
