We chat with John Maeda, Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient, about his journey into combining art and technology, going from working in academia to silicon valley, and his new book, “How to Speak Machine: Laws of Design For a Computational Age.”
John Maeda is an American technologist, designer, engineer, artist, investor, author, and teacher. He is Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient, the technology consulting and delivery arm of communications and marketing conglomerate Publicis. He has held positions with Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com; the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins; served as president of the Rhode Island School of Design; and began his early career at the MIT Media Lab at the intersection of computer science and visual art. Named as one of the “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century” by Esquire, Maeda draws on his diverse background as an MIT-trained engineer, award-winning designer, and MBA-community translator to bring people and ideas together at scale. He is the author of several celebrated books, including The Laws of Simplicity and Redesigning Leadership. He has appeared as a speaker all over the world, from Davos to Beijing to São Paulo to New York, and his talks for TED have received millions of views.
I released a new CLI tool today: sqlite-transform, which lets you run "transformations" against a SQLite database. I built it out of frustration of constantly running into CSV files that use horrible American date formatting - the "sqlite-transform parsedatetime my.db mytable col1" command runs dateutil's parser against those columns and replaces them with a nice, sortable ISO formatted timestamp. I've also added a "sqlite-transform lambda" command that lets you specify Python code directly on the command-line that should be used to transform every value in a specified column.
Google Cloud Run now has its own version of the Heroku deploy button: you can add a button to a GitHub repository which, when clicked, will provide an interface for deploying your repo to the user's own Google Cloud account using Cloud Run.
I’ve been in Wales this weekend, which isn’t actually a country I’ve been to many times. It really is a lovely place, even in the depths of Autumn when the drizzly rain envelops the landscape.
The reason I was there is for the third and final weekend of the Mountain Leader training course I’m undertaking. Whether or not I decide to do the (separate) assessment, it’s been a fantastic, hands-on learning experience. I feel a lot more confident in taking others up into the mountains and what to do if anything went wrong.
This time around, given it’s half-term with a random teacher training day on Monday, I brought the family along with me. We stayed in a great place which is run by a couple who are mountain guides themselves. My wife and children have been for a walk of their own this weekend while I’ve been (literally) learning the Mountain Leader ropes.
We drove straight from Snowdonia to Liverpool for the fireworks display across the River Mersey on Sunday. It was spectacular, and much better than the small-scale stuff we usually witness back home! We recognised some of the River of Light installations from our trip to Amsterdam a few years ago.
Over the past week I’ve been recovering from last weekend’s events and sorting out priorities for MoodleNet. It’s now only a couple of weeks before the beta launch in Barcelona. I think everything’s going to be alright, and we’re going to really be able to show the power of federation.
I recorded a Thought Shrapnelmicrocast this week containing my reflections on Redecentralize and the Mozilla Festival. There’s a great write-up of the former by Piper Haywood. I also posted my usual roundup of interesting links that I’ve come across recently.
Talking of Thought Shrapnel, it’s got to that time of year where I usually take a break from blogging and social media. On top of that, it’s almost time to launch MoodleNet, so the pressure is on a bit.
I also want to spend some time doing some research and preparation for a digital literacies workshop I’m running in January for AMICAL. That may also involve updating and creating a new version of my ebook.
Next week, I’m taking Monday off to explore Liverpool with my family and take it easy after the Mountain Leader training. Then, it’s full steam ahead for Barcelona, ensuring we have everything we need to be able to allow people to set up their own federated instances of MoodleNet!
At Canadian Thanksgiving, friends joined us at
our cottage for turkey and the fixings. The food (what we made and what
they brought) all came out great and we had happy stomachs. I did a lot of the cooking and wanted to check recipes and was brought
face to horrified face with the failure of publishing to work on the Internet. The solution seems plain to me and this won’t be the
first time I’ve offered it. But something really needs to be done.
What happened was, I wanted to refresh my memory on turkey and gravy. These are dishes one makes regularly but rarely and the
details don’t stick to my mind: What’s the meat-thermometer reading for a stuffed bird, and what order do you deploy the drippings,
roux, and giblet broth in for gravy?
It turns out the part of the Web where recipes live is a dystopian hellscape. Even though the medium seems made for the
message: Lists, pictures, and search are built-in! Not to mention voting and hyperlinks. Anyone who thinks they’ve got a really great
gravy procedure can tell the world, and as more people agree, the recipe should become easier to find.
Except for what you find is an SEO battle, red in tooth and claw, where recipe sites stinking of burn-rate terror plead
for engagement and as a matter of principle make it really hard to get to that damn ingredients-list and step-by-step. Newsletter!
Notifications! Survey! Also-see! Multidimensional parallax-enhanced five-way scrolling Single-Page Applications!
In fact, it bothered me so much that a few days later, I posted a
nice simple chicken-kebab recipe just for that good feeling when
you use the Web the way it was designed. I took the pictures, I wrote the text, and I posted it all on my own domain, and anyone who
follows a link will have the words and pictures in front of their eyes right away, and there won’t be any popups of any
kind.
But it’s not just recipes, obviously. It’s a disease that afflicts the larger community of those who try to add value to the Net
and to our lives by sharing their stories and pictures and movies and poems and dreams, in the process we generally call
“publishing”.
It isn’t working.
“Become a subscriber today!”
My words today are interspersed with pictures of the signs and signals that obscure an increasingly large proportion of the Web’s
surface: Imminent-closing-paywall-gate warnings.
I think there is something that is glaringly, screamingly obvious that at this point needs to be said loudly and repeatedly:
This. Will. Not. Scale.
I suspect that a high proportion of my readers know this is true just from the feeling in their gut, but as an exercise in
rhetoric let me offer some of the reasons why.
Subscription fatigue is setting in. I’ll make a spending decision, even a big one, quickly and without regrets when whatever
it is feels like the right thing. But a subscription, another bill showing up on every credit-card statement… forever?
A very high proportion of the world’s curious-minded well-educated people subscribe to some subset of The
Economist, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and the New
Yorker. Most of us feel we’re subscribed enough.
There’s a huge class of publications who’ll put out a handful of articles every year that I want to read, but not remotely
enough to justify a subscription.
The offers are sleazy. Whenever I read an absurdly low-cost subscription offer, I know the number showing up my bill is
going to be a lot higher pretty damn quick.
Obviously it’s not just journalism. What madness makes huge companies think that people will sign up for Netflix
and Hulu and HBO and Amazon Video and Apple TV+ and Disney? I’m sure I’ve forgotten
a few, and even more sure that more are on the way.
This. Will. Not. Scale.
We need friction somewhere
Information may want to be free, but writers want to be paid. In a world where you can follow any link and read
whatever it points at instantly and for free, writers are going to starve. It’s the writers I care about the most, but let’s not
forget the designers and copy-editors and fact-checkers and accountants and so on.
People who write and gather and curate recipes want to be paid too.
How about advertising?
The Grand Theory of the Web long said that the money comes from advertising. After all, there’s always been lots of free
information out
there, and there still is if you’re willing to put up a TV antenna. The reality is that unless you’re Google or Facebook, advertising is
deeply broken. My favorite exposition of why ads as they are today don’t work is by Josh Marshall in
Data Lords: The
Real Story of Big Data, Facebook and the Future of News. It’s important to note that Marshall isn’t arguing that Web advertising is
inherently broken; just that the current Facebook/Google business model is so successful that they’re basically
skimming all the profit off the top of the system, and in particular ripping the guts out of independent niche publishers.
If you think “I already knew that”, take a minute and read that “Data Lords” piece linked above; it’s not as obvious as you might
think.
Marshall is the founder and publisher of
Talking Points Memo, one of the best US left-wing political publications, and had the
good fortune to recognize the dead-endness of advertising early on and, starting in 2012,
made a hard pivot to
subscriptions. They’ve been innovative and aggressive and executed well, and it looks like they have an excellent chance of staying
in it for the long haul.
What we’re seeing now is that more or less every Web publication has, in the last couple of years, come to the same conclusion and
is trying the same pivot. Only it’s obviously not going to work.
Because This. Will. Not. Scale.
Which way forward?
One helpful thing would be to fix advertising. It’s easy to hate the ad business and ad culture but at the end of the
day they’re probably a necessary facilitator in a market economy. And hey, if they want to pay part of the cost of the publications
I like to read, I’m down with that. I’m not smart enough to have designed a regulatory framework that would restore health to the
market, but I don’t think it’s controversial to say that it’d be really great if someone did.
But it seems to me that there’s a more obvious way; let me buy stories one-at-a-time without signing up for a
monthly-charge-forever.
The idea is this: When I follow a link to a juicy-sounding story in, say, the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune or the
The Melbourne Age, instead of the avalanche of subscription wheedling,
I get a standardized little popup saying “Ten cents to read this”, with
several options: Yes or no on this piece, and Always-yes or Always-no for this publication. Someone is operating the service that
makes this happen and will do an aggregate charge to my credit card every month.
Suppose the Net lights up because some site has got their hands on Donald Trump’s tax returns. Maybe when I follow
that link, the standard popup asks me for a buck instead of a dime.
Subscriptions would still be possible and still make sense if you were reading a lot of pieces from some publication, and could
come with benefits — for example, Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo offers a
super-subscription which subtracts all the ads and makes the pages wonderfully fast and lightweight.
Is that even possible?
It’s not exactly a new idea. Something like it was originally proposed by Ted Nelson in
Literary Machines in 1981.
The fact that nobody’s made it work so far might make a reasonable person pessimistic as to whether anyone ever will.
Well, I’m here to tell you that on the technology side, we have the tools we need to build this. You could spend a bunch of time
devising an Internet Standard protocol for subscription services and wrangle it through the IETF or W3C or somewhere, and that’s not
a terrible idea, but I’d probably want to build the software first. With an Amazon-style two-pizza team and modern cloud
infrastructure I’d have it on the air in 2020, no problem.
The one design constraint I’d impose would be that this thing would have to work at small scale, not just for the The Bigs.
[Disclosure: Yes, I’m a blogger and I’d like us to be able to make a buck too.]
But once again, I just don’t see it as hard.
Bootstrapping the business side would be tough because the publishing industry is led by people who not only are not focused on
technology but suffer from unrealistic fantasies as to what it is and isn’t.
It’d be dead easy for Amazon or Google to offer this as a service, but the publishing community would, rightly or wrongly, assume it
to be another way to suck all the money out of the sector.
Maybe there’s a role here for a consortium or institute; or for some large far-sighted publisher with a stable of properties to
build this for themselves but with careful attention to making attractive to the rest of the industry?
My advice would be to get working on it fast. Because ads are broken and burn rates are high and pivoting to subscriptions was a
really great idea in 2014 but it’s too late for that now.
Stratified design is one where you build more specific things on top of more general things, typically with many layers. But why is this powerful? In this episode, we explore why it's sometimes easier to solve a more general problem than a specific one.
Last week, I flew from London to Las Vegas for precisely one day.
The purpose was to get various stakeholders in the same room to begin executing the roadmap.
Ideally, the people in the room include the senior leader (whoever controls the budget), the implementation partners, and the community team. It also helps to have scheduled meetings with other key stakeholders (technical, legal, PR, marketing).
The value of these meetings is three-fold.
First, they build the social capital you need for the team to cooperate effectively with one another. Emails and calls can be misinterpreted, but it’s easier to assume good intent when you can hear someone’s tone of voice, body language, and learn how best to communicate with each other.
Second, it allows you to go through everything in detail. Sometimes obscure aspects of a project can trip you up if every single detail isn’t wireframed and confirmed in writing.
Third, it allows for immediate creative problem-solving. When people have flown or travelled to a meeting for a day, you typically get their full attention. People are engaged in figuring out solutions.
It’s not always cheap to do meetings like this, but they always pay off many times over. Even if you can’t get everyone in the room, it helps to bring as many people involved in the community together when you begin the process.
You can have a distributed team if you like but bring them together when the project begins.
In most fields of endeavor progress is achieved by the accretion of knowledge over time.
In medicine, for example, we learned of the germ theory of disease. Then we learned that there were not just bacteria causing diseases, but other agents like viruses. Then we learned that parasites and fungi could also cause disease. But it all started with the basic knowledge that diseases weren't caused by frogs or witch's spells, but by germs.
In aeronautics, the materials we use to make airplanes are completely different from the ones used 100 years ago. But we still use the fundamental design of a fuselage and a pair of wings. The principles of lift and acceleration are still basic to airplane design and function.
Copernicus taught us that the universe did not revolve around the Earth, but that the Earth revolved around the sun. Then we discovered that there were other bodies revolving around the sun, called planets. Then we discovered that that there were stars that didn't revolve around the sun. And then we found there were things that we thought were stars that turned out to be galaxies comprised of hundreds of billions of stars. One thing lead to another.
Advertising is different. We respect no history. We observe no principles. We have no connective tissue.
Every generation tosses out what was learned before and declares it dead. Marketing is dead. The Big Idea is dead. Positioning is dead. Brands are dead. Traditional media are dead.
Every generation invents its own clichés that mean nothing, but for a brief time pass for principles -- likeanomics, engagement, conversations, storytelling, empowerment.
The absence of principles is the dirty little secret behind why we engender so little respect in the business world. A field of endeavor without principles is not a discipline -- it's a free for all.
What are the principles that everyone in advertising agrees on? In most disciplines there are unifying principles. Some examples: Physics has the law of conservation of energy. Biology has natural selection. Medicine has the germ theory of disease. Economics has the law of supply and demand. These are fundamental to the nature of the field. In advertising, what are the proven unifying fundamental principles that we all accept? If there are any, I don’t know what they are.
We used to believe that creativity was the essence of successful advertising. No longer. We used to believe that big ideas were the backbone of outstanding advertising. No more. We used to believe that an agency's primary job was the delivery of outstanding ads to its clients. Not today.
What do we believe in now? Likeanomics, engagement, conversations, storytelling, and empowerment? These aren't principles. These are the tired clichés of a struggling industry.
Reports are that macOS 10.15 has issues. I am holding off upgrading until it is more stable. I used to a third party tester to check that Hyper Plan runs Ok on 10.15, so that I didn't have to upgrade my development machine.
Human life expectancy is about 80. A company’s life expectancy is about 15 years. When they disappear they will take your data down with them. You can use platforms for reach and collaboration fine, but also having your own ‘mothership’ to host your original material is about 5 times as sustainable.
Adam Gessaman@adamrg
First the Seahawks win, then there’s this beautiful view of the sunset over Puget Sound from the Sounder. Today was… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Today 17 years ago, at 14:07, I published my first blog post, and some 2000 followed since then. Previously I kept a website that archive.org traces back to early 1998, which was the second incarnation of a static website from 1997 (Demon Internet, my first ISP other than my university, entered the Dutch market in November 1996, and I became their customer at the earliest opportunity. From the start they gave their customers a fixed IP address, allowing me to run my own server, next to the virtual server space they provided with a whopping 5MB of storage .) Maintaining a web presence for over 22 years is I think the longest continuous thing I’ve done during my life.
Last year I suggested to myself on my 16th bloggiversary to use this date yearly to reflect:
Last year the anniversary of this blog coincided with leaving Facebook and returning to writing in this space more. That certainly worked out. Maybe I should use this date to yearly reflect on how my online behaviours do or don’t aid my networked agency.
In the past 12 months I’ve certainly started to evangelise technology more again. ‘Again’ as I did that in the ’00s as well when I was promoting the use of social software (before it’s transformation into, todays mostly toxic, social media), for informal learning networks, knowledge management and professional development. My manifesto on Networked Agency from 2016, as presented at last year’s State of the Net, is the basis for that renewed effort. It’s not a promotion of tech for tech’s sake, as networked agency comes part and parcel with ethics by design, a perception of digital transformation as distributed digital transformation, and attention in general for how our digital tools are a reflection and extension of our human networks and human nature (when ‘smaller‘ and optionally networked for richer results).
Looking back 12 months I think I’ve succeeded in doing a few things on the level of my own behaviour, my company, my clients, and general communities and society. It’s all early beginnings, but a consistent effort of small things builds up over time steadily I suppose.
On a personal level I kept up the pace of my return to more intensive blogging two years ago, and did more to make my blog not only the nexus but also the starting point for most of my online material. (E.g. I now mostly send out Tweets and Toots from my blog directly). I also am slowly re-adopting and rebuilding my information strategies of old. More importantly I’m practicing more show and tell, of how I work with information. At the Crafting {a} Life unconference that Peter organised on Prince Edward Island in June I participated in three conversations on blogging that way. Peter’s obligation to explain is good guidance in general here.
For my company it means we’ve embarked on a path to more information security awareness, starting with information hygiene mostly. This includes avoiding silos where possible, and beginning the move to a self-hosted Slack-like environment and our own cloud. This is a reflection of my own path in this field since the spring of 2014, then inspired by Brenno de Winter and Arjen Kamphuis, whose disappearance a year ago made me more strongly realise the importance of paying lessons learned forward.
With clients I’ve put the ethics of working with data front and center, which includes earlier topics like privacy law, data sovereignty and procurement, but also builds on my company’s principle of always ensuring the involvement of all external stakeholders when it comes to figuring out the use and value of open government and open data. Some of that is awareness raising, some of that is ensuring small practical steps are taken. Our company is now building up a ‘holistic’ data governance program for clients that includes all this, not just the technical side of data governance.
On the community side several things I got myself involved in are tied to this.
We’ve seen several car dealerships that were developed along West Georgia Street in the early part of the 20th century, including Consolidated Motor Company who were located on the other side of the street from here. On the north side the showroom of the McLaughlin Carriage Company, seen in an image that’s undated, but which we’re guessing might be 1918. McLaughlin started manufacturing automobiles in Oshawa in 1907. They had previously been a carriage company, so it wasn’t a dramatic shift. When they were unable to get their own engines designed, they used Buick drive trains, built in Flint, Michigan. McLaughlin became part of General Motors, and car production under the McLaughlin name continued until 1942.
Before this garage was built there were several houses, dating back only a few years, but demolished for this 1912 building, designed by W M Dodd for H W White who spent $30,000 on the new investment. Harry W White was the manager for McLaughlin Motor Cars, so we assume they paid for the development. As well as McLaughlin, the building was home to the Pierce-Arrow Motor Co, a US car manufacturer based in Buffalo, New York, from 1901 to 1938.
In 1911 Harry was 63, and from England; his wife, Lydia was from Ontario, and they lived on West Pender Street with three daughters and a son still at home, aged from 14 to 37. Their journey west can be traced in their province of birth; the eldest, Rosa was born in Ontario, but Ethel, Mabel and Percy, the youngest were all born in Manitoba.
McLaughlin moved from here in 1926, to new premises on Burrard Street, where the vehicles were sold by Clark Parsons Buick. Gray Campbell Ltd took over this showroom as a Chrysler dealership. By the mid 1930s A E Stephens Ltd were based here, run by Alfred Stephens, selling used cars. During the war the building became used as the Canadian Government Ordnance Machine Shop. By 1950 Clarke Simpkins auto dealership was here. Clarke Simpkins was Ford of Canada’s vice-president, and he sold their cars here, and repaired them on Seymour Street. He had moved a block to the west by 1955, when BC Garage Supply Ltd ‘auto jobbers’ were using the building.
Today the site is the garden of Venus, a 36 storey residential tower designed by Bingham Hill Architects and completed in 1999.
Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 99-5178
I always enjoy me some scale of space graphics. Neal Agarwal made an interactive browser that starts at astronaut scale and quickly zooms you out to larger objects with a fisheye view.
Catalina is causing issues on quite a number of forums. My concern is more due to the growing lockout from the core of my own system. Every update makes it harder to access the core of my macos.
In terms of upgrading the old adage of don't fix what isn't broken applies. Because apple offer the OS upgrade for free, somehow people feel they need to upgrade. My experience is that each new macos is buggier than the one before. When I used Tiger there was rarely a beachball, now I see them all the time. Also things like Facetime just don't work consistently. The camera often refuses to come on without a restart. I read a recent report that stated apple now have a 48% markup on their products. I'm not sure I'll be able to afford a new one when the time comes and am already thinking about what I'll do (certainly not microsoft). Might need to try a Hackintosh or Linux.
Saying that a company with an agreement to be acquired for $2.1 billion was killed may sound like an exaggeration. Many start-ups aim to one day be “killed” in such fashion. However, Google’s decision to acquire Fitbit amounts to a mercy kill, putting an official end to Fitbit’s implosion at the hands of Apple Watch. In just three years, the Apple Watch turned Fitbit from a household name as the wearables industry leader into a company that will eventually be viewed as an asterisk when the wearables story is retold to future generations.
The Offer
When news first broke that Google LLC had offered to acquire Fitbit for $2.1 billion, or $7.35 per share, many observers noted how low the offer price was compared to Fitbit’s earlier valuations. This was a company that had its initial public offering at a $4.1 billion valuation and had seen its stock price peak at a $13 billion valuation ($51.90 per share).
My initial reaction was that Google was being extremely generous with its offer. On an enterprise value basis, which excludes $565 million of cash and cash equivalents on Fitbit’s balance sheet, Google is valuing Fitbit at $1.5 billion. For a hardware company with $1.5 billion of annual revenue and declining ASP and margins, questionable intellectual property, a dying ecosystem, and a non-existent product strategy, Google looks to be overpaying for Fitbit.
Industry observers speculate that Google’s offer price reflects the company seeing something in Fitbit that the marketplace missed. Instead, Google’s generous offer price has the makings of being a goodwill gesture aimed at Fitbit employees who have wealth tied to Fitbit stock. The $7.35 offer price represents close to a three-year high in Fitbit’s stock price. Holding Fitbit’s feet to the fire in terms of valuation wouldn't have helped Google retain Fitbit employees for beefing up its fledging hardware team.
On the flip side, Fitbit co-founder and CEO James Park and the board deserve a round of applause for securing such a generous offer from Google. The acquisition can be viewed as Google offering Fitbit a dignified and gracious death and Fitbit’s board as correct to take the opportunity.
Fitbit’s Story
There are two chapters to Fitbit’s life as an independent company. From 2013 to 2016, Fitbit leveraged low-cost, relatively rudimentary fitness tracker bracelets worn on the wrist to consolidate what had been a fragmented market for quantifying one’s physical movement. Fitbit even managed to move into the realm of coolness. Wearing a Fitbit in public contained positive connotations as the user was viewed as being on the forefront of technology. The smartphone revolution also played a role in Fitbit’s rise as people became comfortable giving a new crop of mobile devices an increasing number of roles to handle.
During the early years, Park successfully navigated Fitbit through a tumultuous period that included the company recalling the Fitbit Force for causing skin rashes and burns on nearly 10,000 people. Park also competed effectively against other early wearables pioneers. An ugly battle with the well-funded Jawbone regarding intellectual property theft ended in a settlement. Fitbit became a household name for health and fitness tracking.
Everything changed in 2016. Fitbit’s unit sales, as shown in Exhibit 1, peaked. On the surface, the subsequent decline in unit sales may not have looked too bad considering that demand stabilized around 15M units per year. However, for a hardware company dependent on rising unit sales, the development was alarming. Once again, Fitbit management did the right thing and quickly cut expenses at the first sign of demand weakness. The belief was that Fitbit could manage its way out of the sales slump.
Exhibit 1: Fitbit Unit Sales (Annual)
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What management did not realize at the time was that Fitbit was beginning to feel the consequences of one giant mistake that Park had made years earlier. Park did not foresee the fundamental change that would take place on the wrist in the form of dedicated fitness trackers turning into full-fledged computers. Smartwatches aren’t just gloried fitness trackers. Instead, smartwatches are alternatives to smartphones and tablets.
After dragging his feet for far too long, Park knew that the only way forward for Fitbit would be to come out with a smartwatch. With the $300 Ionic, Fitbit launched its first smartwatch in 2017. The device flopped. Fitbit quickly pivoted to a lower-cost smartwatch with the $200 Versa. Once Fitbit had established channel inventory and satisfied pent-up demand for the Versa in its existing installed base, demand evaporated. Despite an even lower price, the Versa has failed to catch in the marketplace.
Why Sell?
In early 2019, Fitbit management began waving the white flag when it decided to pivot yet again, this time into services. In an effort to grab more users who could be monetized via paid services, Fitbit management began to cut into hardware pricing and margins. With the all-important 2019 holiday shopping season quickly approaching, Fitbit’s situation looked dire. Enter Google last week to officially put Fitbit out of its misery.
The only alternative for Fitbit, which was far from unproven, would be for the company to become a much smaller company, essentially a shell of its former self, in order to sell a certain number of dedicated fitness trackers each year to a declining installed base. Even if successful, Fitbit would have looked and acted like nothing that the world had come to know Fitbit as - a leader in the wearables category. Fitbit would instead become something of a zombie company.
How did Fitbit go from being considered the wearables leader to viewing a $2.1B acquisition as its best hope for shareholders to recoup any value? What led Fitbit to run out of options as an independent company?
Two words: Apple Watch.
Redefining the Industry
Apple didn’t just steal customers away from Fitbit. In such a scenario, Fitbit may actually have had a chance to survive as the company could have had a means to respond competitively. Apple ended up doing something that ultimately proved far worse for Fitbit. The Apple Watch altered the fundamentals underpinning the wrist wearables industry. This left Fitbit unable to remain relevant in a rapidly-changing marketplace.
Apple placed a bet that wrist real estate was being undervalued. The Swiss had dropped the ball and were primarily selling the wrist as a place for intangibles with high-end mechanical watches. Instead of following Fitbit and selling a $99 dedicated fitness tracker, Apple looked at the wrist as being a great place for additional utility beyond just telling time or tracking one’s fitness and health. Apple turned health and fitness tracking from a business into a feature. The Apple Watch redefined utility on the wrist.
This change led to consumers wanting more from wrist wearables. Apple Watch established a stronghold at the premium end of the market. Taking a page from its product strategy playbook, Apple then methodically began to lower entry-level Apple Watch pricing, which had the impact of removing oxygen from increasingly lower price segments. Fitbit was squeezed as the company had no viable way to compete directly with Apple Watch. Fitbit’s existing business wasn’t profitable enough for management to ramp up R&D in an effort to go up against Apple. Fitbit had generated just $200M of free cash flow over the past five years. Apple spends that much on R&D in a few days. Meanwhile, competition remained intense at the low-end of the market, which only added pressure to Fitbit’s existing business of selling low-cost dedicated fitness trackers.
Exhibit 2 highlights the number of active Fitbit users compared to the Apple Watch installed base (the number of people wearing an Apple Watch). The Apple Watch figures are my estimates. The exhibit ends up being the most damning evidence of Fitbit’s demise. Fitbit’s installed base lost all momentum just as Apple Watch began to take off. Unit sales trends continue to hide this deterioration in Fitbit’s installed base fundamentals. While Fitbit claims to have 28 million active users, that total isn’t enough to sustain a thriving ecosystem. In addition, there are valid reasons to question the loyalty and engagement found with those users.
A good argument can be made that Fitbit died a while ago, and the company is merely running on fumes from the dedicated fitness tracker glory days. With Fitbit, Google is acquiring a dying wearables platform.
Exhibit 2: Number of Active Users (Fitbit versus Apple Watch)
View fullsize
Fitbit and Google
There is no rationale argument in support of Google buying Fitbit. Both companies lack a workable strategy in wearables. Fitbit doesn’t bring anything to the table for Google. Buying a fitness and health tracker going off of fumes is not a legitimate way to find success in wearables. Not only did Fitbit lack a sustainable product strategy going forward, but it’s fair to assume that Fitbit products will become even less attractive following a Google acquisition.
When a services company with data-capturing tools buys a dying hardware ecosystem built on tools that weren’t just data-capturing tools in disguise, an exodus of users is likely. Judging by how Fitbit decided to include the following paragraph in the press release announcing the acquisition, both companies are acknowledging the exodus risk:
“Consumer trust is paramount to Fitbit. Strong privacy and security guidelines have been part of Fitbit’s DNA since day one, and this will not change. Fitbit will continue to put users in control of their data and will remain transparent about the data it collects and why. The company never sells personal information, and Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.”
That paragraph won’t provide any comfort to Fitbit users concerned about their privacy in a post-Google acquisition. However, that didn’t matter to Fitbit’s board when accepting Google’s offer as their concern was found with Fitbit shareholders, not Fitbit users.
Success in Wearables
Many industry analysts, possibly in an effort to appease Google’s ego, have been going around talking up Fitbit as having a treasure trove of data for Google. The narrative concludes with Google somehow turning this data into an ingredient for success in wearables. This line of thinking makes no sense and is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Google’s problem in wearables isn’t due to a lack of data. In addition, Google’s lack of silicon expertise and dependency on Qualcomm aren’t fatal issues either. Ultimately, Google’s problem in wearables is that it isn’t a design company. At Google, designers are not given control over the user experience. Even if Google ramps up investment and hiring so that it is able to one day ship custom silicon that is competitive with Apple, the company would still need to come up with wearables that people want to be seen wearing. These products need to be born from a design culture in which the way people use technology is given more importance than just pushing technology forward.
Instead of acquiring Fitbit to find success in wearables, Google should work on changing its internal culture to empower designers at the expense of engineering. However, that change isn’t likely to materialize as the people who would be tasked with making such a decision would themselves hold less power and importance as a result of the change.
Fitbit will serve as a case study for what happens to a company underestimating Apple’s ability to redefine not just a product category, but an entire industry. Apple’s culture allows it to succeed in wearables. The company has spent decades learning to make technology more personal, and those lessons are being used to establish the most formidable wearables platform in existence. Apple Watch redefined what it meant to put utility on the wrist, and Fitbit simply wasn’t built to succeed in such a world.
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Here’s a guest post from friend-of-the-blog Peter Ladner:
I recently got my most retweets ever, for agreeing with Patrick Condon and Scott Hein’s call in The Tyee to convert half the land in the City of Vancouver’s municipal golf courses into much-needed housing, and turn the other half into real parks.
Mmm, that warm feeling of people flooding in to agree with me! Like! Like! Like!
Then I read the pushback comments. Then I changed my mind.
I now agree with those who say we need to save the golf-course green space, that we have plenty of other space for more housing all over town in the single-family zones. I realized part of my enthusiasm for the golf course conversion was the prospect of converting those golf greens into more accessible and varied public parks.
I mention this because “changing minds” (advocacy, campaigning, rallying, persuading, writing op-eds, sloganeering…) is such a large part of what so many of us do these days. But it’s all push and no followup. Outing and celebrating our own mind changes is seldom practised. It’s not easy to do. But only we can do it.
Sure we lavish praise on others who “come around” to our point of view. But what is it like for the mind-changer? I haven’t gone on Twitter to announce my change. I much prefer to duck, lay low, and hope this all blows over before I ever have to admit I was wrong.
Recently a man approached me at a grocery store lineup. “You might not remember me,” he said, “but I led the opposition to the condo project at 16th and Granville.” I certainly remember sitting in Vancouver City Council being bombarded with the heavily-financed campaign to “Save Shaughnessy”: a roused angry mob arraigned in designer T-shirts slogans, armed with lawyers and a PR firm.
“Well I thought you might be interested to know,” he went on, years later now, “that I moved into that project and love living there.”
We need a better place than random grocery lineup encounters for such reveals. It was only last month, more than 10 years after it happened, that I shared with someone outside my personal circle that I regretted pushing out then-mayor Sam Sullivan in my unsuccessful run for mayor in 2008.
I have been a little more open about my mistake in opposing dedicated bike lanes displacing auto traffic on the Burrard Bridge, but it’s not something that’s easy to talk about. We all fear recrimination, “I-told-you-so” scolding, and that politically-toxic label: “flip-flopper”. We dread the smug satisfaction we might be offering to objectionable people who once shouted at us, splittle flying.
And yet the end-game of all advocacy is to get people to flip.
Wouldn’t it be great if those who once opposed us came out somewhere and admitted that they had seen some wisdom in our arguments and now agreed with us? It would be heart-warming to me if someone from Brock House Society stepped out and said that they had once opposed the Point Grey Greenway I championed but now they love it. They now have organized bike rides for seniors down that protected route that never could have happened before.
Or if someone openly admitted that the new housing development they feared would ruin their neighbourhood actually didn’t generate all the traffic congestion they had cried out against.
Or if someone who had insisted needle exchanges wouldn’t lead to more needles in nearby parks, playgrounds and schoolyards admitted they were wrong: yes, free needles actually did result in more needles where kids play.
We need that forum – #iwaswrong. It would empower advocates, and give them a chance to seek a graceful exit for opponents, to learn to hold the gloat. It would give protagonists in the next similar fight some valuable perspective to share.
It would demonstrate that yes, even in our echo-chamber world, people do listen, learn and change their minds.
Maybe we need an annual day of disclosure, where crowds of flip-floppers can confess their former goofs together, strengthened by their numbers– a day of atonement where onlookers would promise to keep quiet and be forgiving.
So here’s an offer: dare to share with Price Tags readers some change of mind you’ve made about a civic issue, and how you feel about it now.
I’ve just done it and it feels good.
I’m savouring the release—at least until the Twitter bots come storming in.
Licences to work with Huawei will be coming soon, according to U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Ross said that they “will be forthcoming very shortly,” adding that the U.S. government has received 260 licence applications as of now.
“That’s a lot of applications — it’s frankly more than we would’ve thought,” Ross said. “Remember too with entity lists there’s a presumption of denial. So the safe thing for these companies would be to assume denial, even though we will obviously approve quiet a few of them.”
Ross did not explicitly say how many licences the government intends to approve, nor did he mention a timeline.
In this process, most people will be paying attention to Google and whether or not the tech giant will be able to work with Huawei again.
In May, U.S. President Donald Trump banned Huawei from working with any U.S.-based company. Shortly after, Google pulled its business from the company, which includes pulling services from Huawei phones.
The U.S. has accused Huawei of using backdoor equipment to spy on citizens. It has also charged the company, its subsidiary Skycom and its CFO Meng Wanzhou 13 counts of bank and wire fraud. Meng, who was arrested in Vancouver, currently under house arrest in the province as she awaits her extradition to the U.S.
Developers have reported that apps made using Electron, a cross-platform desktop app making framework, are being rejected by the Mac App Store.
The automated review process is rejecting the apps on the Mac App Store because of their use of private API calls.
A private API acts as a front end interface to back end data and application functions. The API calls are part of the underlying Electron framework, and are not part of the apps themselves.
The Electron framework has always had APIs, but Apple has recently upgraded its review processes to identify policy violations, as noted by 9to5Mac. This has caused the private APIs to be detected.
Although it does not seem that Electron is doing anything that would be considered malicious, review processes generally don’t care why an app is using private APIs.
Developers can choose to publish their apps independently if they choose not to submit them to the App Store. They would still need to be notarized through a developer account, which ensures that it can’t be tampered with.
Following rumours that Samsung planned to shut down its Austin, Texas-based CPU team, the South Korean company has officially done so.
According to The Statesman, Samsung filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining (WARN) letter notifying Texas that 290 employees will be laid off as part of the shutdown of its CPU unit. The layoffs will reportedly go into effect on December 31st.
Samsung confirmed the news to Android Authority, saying it decided to transition part of its U.S. research and development teams in Austin and San Jose, California. It made the decision “based upon a thorough assessment of our System LSI [large scale integration] business and the need to stay competitive in the global market.”
Samsung says it remains committed to its U.S. workforce.
The company’s Austin CPU team was behind its custom Mongoose CPU cores primarily used in Exynos processors. Samsung started using its Mongoose cores in 2016 with the Exynos 8890 in the Galaxy S7.
However, the Exynos chips often weren’t quite as powerful as comparable Qualcomm processors. For example, the Exynos variant of the S10 performed better in single-core scenarios, but the Snapdragon version had better multi-core scores.
If Samsung does abandon its custom CPUs, the company will likely adopt ARM CPUs or semi-custom versions of them. Huawei uses ARM CPUs in its flagship devices, and Qualcomm uses tweaked versions or ARM cores to build its 800-series Snapdragon processors.
Considering Samsung announced plans to work with AMD to develop mobile GPUs a few months ago, the company likely isn’t entirely abandoning its custom components yet.
After almost a year of waiting, Adobe’s photoshop for iPad is now available to download from the iPadOS App Store.
While it may not be exactly the same as the computer, it does offer a lot of powerful photo editing tools that weren’t available on its other mobile apps. Even though it is missing some tools, the company’s blog post says, “Over time, we’ll add more capabilities and workflows as we learn more about how customers use Photoshop on a mobile device.”
So far, on iPadOS users can expect to edit and manipulate multiple layers, use layer masks, Cloud PSD files, among other features.
The app is built on the same codebase that is used for the main Photoshop apps, so it has the potential to be just as good as the desktop version after some updates.
That said, Adobe is trying to see how users interact with the mobile version of the photo editor and plans to update it to suit mobile users’ needs, instead of focusing on feature parity with the desktop version right away.
The company has also launched a section of its forums to help users solve problems and get familar with the app.
You can download the app for free in the App Store, but you’ll need a Photoshop subscription to be able to use it for longer than a week.
Joe Cressy@joe_cressy
The Bloor bike lane is back and, with separation coming, it’s better than before. Now, to expand it West and East. pic.twitter.com/OiemC1GPdi
I thought I’d write a bit about Apple for a change, seeing as the Mac was the whole point of this site to begin with, and the lack of an October event didn’t stop them from launching new stuff. But they didn’t launch the stuff I wanted, so I’m going to do what every random person on the Internet does these days, which is to rant on about things from a totally egotistical perspective.
Another reason for returning to topic, as it were, is that most of my personal projects are temporarily on hold, since I’m currently either waiting for miscellaneous electronics parts to arrive from China or bereft of ideas and headspace to deal with software–plus real life keeps impinging on me.
So let’s get going.
AirPods Pro
Just to get that out of the way, I find them interesting but completely illogical from a personal budget perspective–spending 279 EUR on something with less than a 4-year lifespan and which provides less bang for the buck than my current daily driver (30 EUR TaoTronics TT-BH042 earbuds with active noice cancellation, actual volume controls, and a cable that makes it impossible to lose half of them) makes exactly zero sense.
The Sony WH-1000MX3 I bought during my last trip to Seattle were a much better purchase, and if you can tolerate over-ear headphones (a sticking point for many folk in open space offices, but one that I have made peace with), I think that kind of audio gear is a much better investment.
Apple TV+
I am genuinely intrigued. Let’s cast aside for a moment the broader picture–the implications of their digging further into the services revenue rabbit hole, the challenge of entering an already saturated market and all the wallet share considerations.
Focusing on it from a purely end user standpoint, For All Mankind is exactly the kind of thing I’d like to watch, and even considering I’ve (so far) resisted subscribing to Netflix or HBO, I am certain to jump on the free 1-year subscription whenever I get a new piece of Apple hardware just to check out the experience.
It’s a trap, I know, but given that most evenings we watch either YouTube or Plex on the Apple TV instead of the (quite sizable) channel bundle we get from Vodafone Portugal, it is one I am quite likely to fall into, although I suspect we will eventually move to Netflix for better quality content.
After all, other than cartoons and occasional news coverage, everything we watch at home is on-demand, and to be honest telcos (even Vodafone Portugal, which is our current provider and where I worked for over a decade) have yet to deliver a seamless, highly interactive on-demand experience like I get from the Apple TV.
The sticking point here is not just the UI and basic UX, it’s core EPG functionality being broken: my kids keep complaining about truncated episodes whenever they try to watch on-demand, and losing the last five minutes of a movie (picked from catch-up TV highlights) is so much of a put-off that we mostly avoid it–and to pay for a movie, I’d rather get a 4K version from Apple or Netflix.
OTT has been in the cards for a long time now, and we will be tweaking our service bundle towards more bandwidth (we’re at 200Mbps fiber, which is great but could be better) and less channels we never actually watch, and which are somewhat frustrating when we do.
It also bears noting that RTP, the national Portuguese broadcasting company, has a pretty decent Apple TV application, but they botched it by not having any way to turn off ads, so that’s a missed opportunity right there (although I suspect they would never get the pricing right if they charged for it).
The Mac
I haven’t upgraded to Catalina yet, and still don’t think I will until it gets a proper point release–i.e., one that does not eat my e-mail and has less visibility on Twitter.
Apple’s software QA has become so much of a risk to my personal productivity that I’m (again) considering switching to a Linux desktop, and only a combination of inertia, real life and my working at Microsoft has prevented that from happening.
This is not news–I did the research, have the hardware (it’s currently put to use as a KVM server that runs a Windows 10 VM and a bunch of development containers), and although it would pain me to get rid of my 27” iMac, I know it’s feasible for me personally and for what I need to do on a conventional machine.
After all, how can you trust an operating system where the content filter can bring down the entire operating system? How can something like that, an essential feature for parental control, be so fundamentally broken to the point of rebooting the machine?
I haven’t pulled the trigger yet because I can make do with Windows, and spent so much time using a Surface Laptop that the ghost of “bad PC hardware” has all but been exorcised.
The upshot of all this is that, surprisingly enough, until Apple fixes their keyboards1 and desktop OS, I am much more likely to spend my own money on a Surface device than a new MacBook. It has, surprisingly enough, become the rational choice.
I don’t like Windows, but it is currently the lesser evil as far as destroying my personal productivity is concerned, and being able to run Linux on it makes it so much more viable for me.
iOS and the iPad
The only thing that Apple had going for them was iOS, and all of a sudden 13.x (and the flurry of rushed updates leading up to 13.2) is so bad that it defies explanation–and I won’t even try to provide one.
I too got bit by the sudden death of background applications in 13.2 (even as I type this on my iPad Mini, Safari keeps reloading, and Mail takes forever to re-sync) and, in a variant of the long-standing tradition of alarms failing to go off on time, it completely bungled Do Not Disturb during the DST shift last weekend.
But the real annoyance for me was the iPad Pro refresh cycle skipping this October–I was seriously considering buying an iPad Pro this Autumn (both as an upgrade to my Mini 4 and as a hub for my music hobby), and it looks like I’ll have to either get a new Mini 5 (always a viable option, and far more budget-friendly) or wait six months.
And yes, getting a Surface Go on sale and sticking Ableton Live Lite on it was an option I considered, but I quite like the iOS music app ecosystem.
WatchOS (and a note on FitBit)
I won’t go into much detail for now (there will be a separate post with a long-term review in a few weeks, maybe months), but I got myself a Series 5 recently, and even though it too is buggy (some complications only update when the watch face is fully active, and it often requires two taps to fully wake up), the thing has already paid for itself health-wise.
So far, I have only two things to say on the matter:
I don’t think they’ll reboot WearOS with it (I too think this is has a lot more to do with user data).
I am deeply sad to see Pebble’s heritage (small such as it was at this point) to be further dissolved into a corporate conglomerate that is so utterly disconnected from their user base.
More to the point, I don’t think that we’ll ever get anything as nice as the Pebble user experience out of that deal, nor that Android users will get decent smartwatches anytime soon.
My dream non-Apple smartwatch would be a slim, Pebble-like device built (and massively marketed) by the likes of Swatch, but I don’t think traditional watch manufacturers will ever pull it off successfully, since they lack both the supply chain and integration skills required to even come close and the tech chops to build an open, Pebble-like ecosystem.
Now that I think of it, developing a product like that would be an interesting challenge for someone like me… But I digress.
Best to enjoy these rainy afternoons with a good book and take my mind off what could be–I have plenty on my plate right now, on all fronts.
And I’m not just talking about the Esc key here, although rumors point to sanity having prevailed and its return on future MacBooks. I could go on about utter lack of understanding of what customers actually expect from their laptops, but a reliable keyboard that actually outlasts the rest of the hardware seems like a pretty obvious thing to prioritize over thinness. ↩︎
From time to time people note, in feature requests, that a particular feature should be easy, and they’re surprised it hasn’t been done yet. Sometimes they even say that it’s so elementary that they really consider it a bug that it hasn’t been done yet. Especially given how easy it is.
A feature is pretty much never as easy as it seems. The main function of a feature — whether that’s making a https call to a read-it-later service or adding some fairly simple new view — is often the easiest part.
It’s everything around the feature that makes it harder: UI design, localization, refactoring, accessibility, state restoration, getting new artwork (for a toolbar button, for instance), dealing with errors, testing, updating the documentation, etc.
And then you still have to schedule it: as important as a feature request is, there might be others with a higher priority, and resources are always limited. Doesn’t matter who you are.
* * *
When you get developers alone, and you make a joke like “Why don’t you just…” or “I bet you could do this in an afternoon…”, they all laugh, because they’ve all heard this.
I most definitely do not want to discourage people from making feature requests, whether for my app or anybody else’s app. Please make feature requests! And report bugs!
But I would ask that you try not to call something easy. The developer of that app will have a pretty good idea of the requirements and the level of effort, and it’s never as simple as it looks on the surface. And they also have a good idea of what needs to happen, for various reasons, before work starts on that feature.
These prime ministerial TV debates should end. They've accelerated the presidentialisation of UK politics - dislocating our parliamentary system - & limiting them to Corbyn & Johnson shores up the "closed shop" of the Big Two, when voters are looking for a wider range of options. twitter.com/itvpresscentre…
ITV will show the first head-to-head debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn on 19th November. Details of further multi-party debate and comprehensive general election coverage in due course pic.twitter.com/XTKEZI1EuH
.) Maintaining a web presence for over 22 years is I think the longest continuous thing I’ve done during my life.
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