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- Steve Jobs Is Wrong: The iTunes Model Won't Help Media
In his interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D8 conference (transcribed by All Things Digital and Engadget), Steve Jobs raised the hopes of media executives everywhere — including, no doubt, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, who made some opening remarks before the Apple founder took the stage — by saying he believes people will pay for other forms of media, just as they have been paying for movies and music. This is the closest Jobs has come to endorsing the “iTunes for news” model that many newspaper and magazine publishers have dreamed about. The Apple CEO said:
I think people are willing to pay for content. I believe it for music and video, and I believe it for the media.
And how would this work? Jobs described it this way:
I can tell you as one of the largest sellers of content on the internet to date — price it aggressively and go for volume. That has worked for us. I’m trying to get the press to do the same thing. They need to do it differently than they do it for print.
The vision of an iTunes that served up paid-for newspaper and magazine content to millions of adoring readers has captivated the traditional media for some time. One of the most eloquent pleas for such a model came from New York Times media writer David Carr last year, in a column entitled “Will Someone Please Invent iTunes For News?” Carr described Apple’s success in selling music, and then said he hoped that someone like Jobs would come along and convince “the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it's time to pay up.”
It seems like a slam-dunk idea in so many ways: If record labels can cut a deal with Steve Jobs that sees music sold through iTunes instead of being downloaded for free, then why couldn’t newspapers and magazines do the same thing with their content? Bundle it up, cut a deal with Apple to create an iTunes for news and watch the cash roll in.
But this vision has two fundamental flaws — one psychological and one economic. The psychological flaw is that news stories and other forms of content that appear in newspapers and magazines (with very few exceptions) are not the same as music or even movies or books, in the sense that users want to keep them forever and read or watch them repeatedly, as media gurus Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis have also pointed out. In addition, all of that content is currently available in a completely legal way for nothing, from the websites of the content creators themselves, whereas music and movies are not.
Both of these factors suggest that the price for news would have to be orders of magnitude lower than it is for music — pennies, or even fractions of pennies, instead of dollars. Is that really a viable model for these media entities?
The economic flaw, meanwhile, is that cutting this kind of deal would involve handing over control of a significant part of your newspaper or magazine’s destiny to Steve Jobs. Is that really a bargain that media outlets want to strike? It’s true that Apple has sold billions of songs through iTunes since the store launched, and that has done great things for one company: Apple. Record labels and movie studios, for the most part, haven’t seen truckloads of money come their way from the arrangement. If anything, iTunes pricing has put downward pressure on the prices they charge for CDs and DVDs.
The bottom line is that an iTunes for news might be in Steve Jobs’ best interests — primarily because it might help to sell iPads — but it’s not clear that it would be in media outlets’ best interests, as attractive as it seems. Nor is it obvious that it would even work, if it ever actually came to pass. More than anything, it feels like an industry grasping at any straw it can, in the hope of building a life raft.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Hot Topic: Apple’s iPad
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of All Things Digital
Переслать - Poll: How Much 3G Data Do You Use?
Given the recent news about AT&T’s decision to shift from unlimited 3G data plans for smartphone users to a new 2GB cap, we were curious how much data you actually use on your device.
Personally, I use the iPhone each month tethered to my MacBook for a two hour train commute to and from work. Taking a peak at my stats revealed that I’ve downloaded 4.1GB of data and uploaded nearly a gig, which would put me at over 5GB in the past three weeks alone. This is a train ride mostly consisting of blogging, email, skype audio chats and RSS reading with the occasional YouTube video.
AT&T hasn’t specifically said that tethering data will impact your 2GB monthly limit but, if it does, this is not the plan for heavy mobile users on the go. AT&T users can login to AT&T’s Wireless site and select, “See Data Usage” for a closer look at their usage.
You can check on your iPhone by visiting Settings > General > Usage.
So, about how much data are you using each month (Sent + Received)?
Переслать - Dangerous New Mac Spyware Making the Rounds
Luckily, it’s not often that we have to make announcements regarding dangerous malicious software for the Mac. But not often isn’t never, and right now there’s a very nasty piece of spyware attacking Apple’s computer platform. It’s called OSX/OpinionSpy, and it piggybacks in on free screensaver and media conversion software.
Specifically, around 30 screensavers developed by a company called 7art and one app called Mishinc FLV to MP3 carry the spyware, according to security firm Intego. The programs were available on popular sites, like Softpedia, MacUpdate and VersionTracker, though they’ve since been pulled from those locations. MacUpdate told CNET that it had been aware of the problem as far back as March and had acted accordingly.
The spyware app isn’t part of the software itself, but instead downloads during the installation of the originally downloaded programs. It often masquerades as a market research program called PremierOpinion that tracks browsing and purchasing information for market research purposes, but it also can come completely unannounced. The aim of OSX/OpinionSpy is to collect data from files and programs. Here’s a breakdown of a few ways it does its dirty work:
- Runs as root, allowing complete access, including modification, to all files
- Scans all accessible files on local and network drives
- Opens a back door using port 8254
- Analyzes data transmitted via a LAN connection, allowing a single Mac to collect data from an entire network
- If the application is killed, it automatically relaunches via launchd, the system-wide OS X service launcher
- Injects code into Safari, Firefox and iChat without any user authorization or action required, and then copies personal data from these applications. Code is injected into Mac memory, not the actual application’s files, allowing it to go undetected
It can be upgraded via the backdoor access without the user’s knowledge, and just deleting the original program it came in on won’t eliminate the spyware itself. To rid yourself of the infection, if you think you might have it, you should grab ClamXav or iAntiVirus or another trusted Mac malware scanner. Signs that you may be infected include your computer sometimes asking for your name or prompting you to fill out forms and surveys. Also, your computer may stop working correctly and require a reboot.
Intego is using the opportunity to push its anti-virus products, which is only fair given that it’s at least warning people about it, but as always, I recommend sensible downloading and browsing practice before any other means of virus or malware protection. If something seems suspicious, it probably is, and if you find you have no internal means of analyzing what constitutes danger and what doesn’t in term of online activity, consult with someone who you know definitely does. Finally, if something is free, always exercise extra caution.
Переслать - AT&T Announces iPhone Tethering, Cuts Price and Quality of 3G Service
It’s easy to make a claim that AT&T is effectively cutting the quality of its 3G service, but that’s the gist of what it announced last night via a press release. The timing of this release is odd as it conveniently came a couple of hours after Steve Jobs stood by them at Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference in Southern California. When asked about Apple’s relationship with AT&T, Steve Jobs said things are, “pretty good actually” and that the wireless provider is “handling way more data traffic than all of their other competitors combined.” Steve may be right as he followed up with an assurance that the AT&T network would improve by the end of the summer.
Shortly after journalists had their chance to weigh in on the interview, AT&T announced changes to its 3G data plans. Press releases are generally pretty dry so I’m going to lay out exactly what happened and how AT&T managed to time things perfectly to fit its needs and not the needs of its customer base.
First, let’s point out that on June 7, tethering for iPhone will be available, which is the same day Steve Jobs takes the stage at WWDC. It’s a breath of fresh air that iPhone users in the U.S. will finally be able to have tethering via an official means…only 9 months late. Of course, AT&T wasn’t just going to give us tethering for free and without limitations, since AT&T’s data network is already strained with millions of iPhones and other data-hungry smartphones.In order to add tethering to your iPhone, you have to switch to the new data plans, specifically, the DataPro plan. Before this change, iPhone users on AT&T would pick a voice plan plus a data plan that was $30 a month and that included unlimited data and tiered SMS plans. Voice and SMS prices remain unchanged but AT&T is going to drop the term “unlimited” from its data plan offerings and let users pick between two plans.
- DataPlus: Includes 200MB of data per month for $15.
- DataPro: Includes 2GB of data per month for $25. Add $20 if you want tethering.
AT&T’s angle is that its most expensive data plan is now $5 less which is good for consumers but the fine print is that the previously unlimited plan is now a 2GB per month plan. To be fair to all wireless carriers, unlimited was a term that should have been retired long ago. Verizon and Sprint’s unlimited plans are roughly capped at 5GB even though it’s not a set in stone number. AT&T’s was rumored to be around the same cap per month. Assuming 5GB is the average data cap for U.S. carriers, prior to June 7, iPhone users on AT&T were paying $6 per gigabyte each month and now they’re paying $12.50 per gigabyte, so AT&T’s spin of making wireless data cheaper for the general public is a stretch at best.
I’ve written about AT&T before and received phone calls from corporate communications with their spin and I assume they’ll tell me that a majority of users never use more than 2GB of data so this plan is more accessible for the general public and will save the average DataPro user $60 per year over the current plan and casual data users on the DataPlus plan will save $180 per year. That’s great, but what about the users like me who would like to use their phone as Steve Jobs intended? The iPhone is one third “Internet Communicator” according to Steve’s 2007 Macworld Keynote and I’d like to be able to use it that way. Well, AT&T has an answer to that as well.
It’s promoting a free addition to all AT&T users on the DataPlus or DataPro data plans which is unlimited access to any of AT&T’s 20,000 Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the U.S. This is a perk that AT&T has given away to iPhone users for quite a while now, so if you call up complaining about hitting the 2GB limit, they’ll simply direct you to the nearest Starbucks as a solution for your mobile Internet needs.
Tethering is only available to DataPro subscribers at an additional $20 a month. This is in line with what other carriers such as Verizon are charging for tethering on devices such as RIM’s Blackberry. AT&T notes that this won’t be available to iPhone owners until iPhone OS 4 ships, “this summer.” It’s unclear if tethering will affect the 2GB per month limit of the plan but I’m confident that AT&T is going to enforce it heavily.
AT&T didn’t forget about Apple’s iPad saying that, “the $25 per month 2GB plan will replace the existing $29.99 unlimited plan.” which effectively kills the deal that Apple announced at the iPad launch that many customers bought into when they purchased the 3G iPad. For legal reasons, any iPad users currently on an unlimited 3G plan at the old price will remain on this plan with no changes to service. In other words, activate your 3G iPad service immediately for unlimited 3G goodness while you still can. Remember, as soon as you cancel the 3G iPad service and decide to start back again (since there’s no contract required), you’ll be on the new $25 a month 2GB plan.
To recap, AT&T is dropping “unlimited” data, doubling the price per gigabyte for 3G customers, offering tethering but charging $20 for it on top of the $25 a month DataPro plan and telling iPad users that unlimited data is no longer an option. Steve Jobs assured us that AT&T service would be improving, but it looks like the wireless carrier has decided to simply cut our data and raise the price in order to do that instead of actually improving their service to fit the needs of the user base.
I’m sympathetic to AT&T’s bandwidth issues but that’s how it is when you’re the carrier of the highest selling and most data hungry smartphone on the market.
What do you think of the new changes?
Переслать - Steve Jobs at D8: Competitors, Flash, Prototype iPhones, and Foxconn
Steve Jobs yesterday appeared onstage at the D8: All Things Digital conference, hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Jobs talked about Apple’s rivalry with other companies, Flash on the iPad, the infamous iPhone 4G debacle, and the Foxconn suicides.On Competitors
Mossberg brought up the recent news that Apple surpassed Microsoft in market cap. Jobs had this to say:
For those of who have been in the industry a long time, it’s surreal. But it doesn’t matter very much.
Later, Mossberg asked whether Jobs sees competition with Google, Microsoft, and others as a platform war:
No. And I never have. We never saw ourselves in a platform war with Microsoft, and maybe that’s why we lost. We just wanted to make the best thing — we just thought about how can we build a better product.
Kara asked how Jobs feels about Google as a competitor:
Well they decided to compete with us. We didn’t go into the search business!
Kara also asked whether Apple was going to remove Google from the iPhone:
No. We want to make better products than them. What I love about the marketplace is that we do our products, we tell people about them, and if they like them, we get to come to work tomorrow. It’s not like that in enterprise…the people who make those decisions are sometimes confused. Just because we’re competing with someone doesn’t mean we have to be rude.
On Flash
Mossberg brought up Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” essay that he wrote explaining Apple’s stance on Flash, and then goes on to question whether being abrupt with consumers over Flash was really the best choice. Jobs’ response:
Apple is a company that doesn’t have the resources that everyone else has. We choose what tech horses to ride, we look for tech that has a future and is headed up. Different pieces of tech go in cycles…they have summer and then they go to the grave. We have a history of doing this. The 3 1/2 floppy. We made that popular. We got rid of the floppy altogether in the first iMac. We got rid of serial and parallel ports. You saw USB first in iMacs. We were one of the first to get rid of optical drives, with the MacBook Air. And when we do this, sometimes people call us crazy. Sometimes you have to pick the right horses. Flash looks like it had its day but it’s waning, and HTML5 looks like it’s coming up.
Mossberg then brought up how developers are affected by Apple’s decision not to use Flash, to which Jobs responded:
An even more popular development environment was Hypercard and we were OK to axe that. Our goal is really easy — we just made a tech decision. We aren’t going to make an effort to put this on our platform. We told Adobe to show us something better, and they never did. It wasn’t until we shipped the iPad that Adobe started to raise a stink about it. We weren’t trying to have a fight, we just decided to not use one of their products. They made a big deal of it — that’s why I wrote that letter. I said enough is enough, we’re tired of these guys trashing us.
When Mossberg brought up concerns with whether the market was affected by Flash, Jobs said:
Well things are packages. Some things are good in a product, some things are bad. If the market tells us we’re making bad choices, we’ll make changes. We’re just trying to make great products. We don’t think this is great and we’re going to leave it out. We’re going to take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers! If we succeed, they’ll buy them! If we don’t, we won’t sell any. And I have to say, people seem to be liking the iPad!
On the Missing iPhone Prototype
When Mossberg asked Jobs about the missing iPhone prototype that wound up at Gizmodo, he had this to say:
There’s an ongoing investigation. I can tell you what I do know, though. To make a product you need to test it. You have to carry them outside. One of our employees was carrying one. There’s a debate about whether he left it in a bar, or it was stolen out of his bag. The person who found it tried to sell it, they called Engadget, they called Gizmodo. The person who took the phone plugged it into his roommates computer. And this guy was trying to destroy evidence…and his roommate called the police. So this is a story that’s amazing — it’s got theft, it’s got buying stolen property, it’s got extortion, I’m sure there’s some sex in there…the whole thing is very colorful. The DA is looking into it, and to my knowledge they have someone making sure they only see stuff that relates to this case. I don’t know how it will end up.
Later in the interview, Jobs brought up the issue again:
You know, when this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got advice from people who said: ‘You gotta just let it slide; you shouldn’t go after a journalist just because they bought stolen property and tried to extort you.’ And I thought deeply about this, and I concluded the worst thing that could happen is if we change our core values and let it slide. I can’t do that. I’d rather quit. You go back five or 10 years, what would you do…we’re not going into that…we have the same values that we had back then. The core values are the same. We come into work wanting to do the same thing that we did back then — build the best products. Nothing makes my day more than getting a random email from someone talking about how cool the iPad is. That’s what keeps me going. That’s what kept me going back then, and now, and will keep me going in the future.
On the Foxconn Suicides
Swisher brought up the suicides that have taken place at Foxconn, the factory that manufactures iPhones:
We are on top of this. We look at everything at these companies. I can tell you a few things that we know. And we are all over this. Foxconn is not a sweatshop. It’s a factory — but my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theaters…but it’s a factory. But they’ve had some suicides and attempted suicides — and they have 400,000 people there. The rate is under what the U.S. rate is, but it’s still troubling. We had this in my hometown of Palo Alto, copycat suicides. We’re over there trying to understand this. It’s a difficult situation. We’re trying to understand this. We have people over there.
Photo courtesy of All Things D.
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