NOOK Media LLC—The Ill-Begotten or Isogamy for the Rest of Us

Who wants to buy a bookstore? You remember what a bookstore is; a place you enter to purchase handheld content items, formerly known as "books!" Durable, reusable, occasionally beautiful objects existing for several centuries of human history. Fortunately, bookstores haven't quite reached dinosaur status, but the last and largest of the giant thunder lizards, Barnes & Noble, has been thrashing mightily in this new climate of digital reading and publishing.

And since none of the fleeter mammals on the ePublishing planet were interested in coming close to Tyrannosaurus Nookus, the choice seemed to be death in a bricks and mortar tar pit, or an ungodly union with some other mighty being. This latter window of hope has arrived in the form of Brontosaurus Microsoftus, and thus, full-blown from the heads of old gods, NOOK Media LLC is born.

Forevermore, let this creature be known as a Barnes & Noble subsidiary in a strategic partnership with Microsoft. For a paltry dowry of $300 million, Microsoft acquires a 17.6% genetic equity stake. No mention of visitation rights for the child stated in its birth announcement.

NOOK Media LLC begins life with the burden of its DNA in the form of Windows 8, to be launched on October 29th, just in time for Halloween. The spin:

• B&N Nook is a "leader in the emerging digital reading and digital education market," a provider of "world-class digital reading experiences." Does "world-class" refer to a multi-language reading experience? 

Even more impressively(?), "NOOK Media is a leader in developing the next generation of digital reading Windows 8 devices," How do you get to be a leader of anything on the day of your birth? And furthermore, there are as yet no Windows 8 devices, so I suppose we're speaking of the life of the unborn. Not a problem, I can accept that as the premise for a $300 million investment.

And Windows 8, where is it coming from? Its progenitor is the Windows Phone 7 Series, which replaced 9 generations of Windows Mobile Computing and quickly became Windows Phone 7 and then Windows Phone 7.5. The burning question, "Which version of Windows Phone do I have?", is the #1 How-to Basic at WindowsPhone.com. My answer, if you need to ask, better off slinking back into your cave until Spring arrives.

But so many people love their Windows phones. Our ever vigilant friends at Gartner report something between a 1% and 2% marketshare for WindowsPhone devices, and about three million sold over a 6-month period. For perspective, there were five million iPhone 5s sold in the first weekend they were available.

On the other hand, perhaps Apple's time has run out, and Google's, too. Obviously, the canny business minds at B&N and Microsoft have ample evidence of pent-up demand waiting to burst forth and purchase Windows Phone 8 devices. Maybe, but then what does this paragraph from Wikipedia's Windows Phone entry mean?

• The low market share of Windows Phone might be explained by a study by Bernstein Research that concluded that consumers don’t want Windows Phones. The research points out: "The lack of consumer interest for Windows-based phones has been very consistent in marketing surveys we have carried out across the globe over the last several years." and that "The situation of Windows in mobile phones is now very unlikely to revert."

I'm reminded of the movie, "Rosemary's Baby," which was actually a book by Ira Levin that you could buy in bookstores. The poor actor sells his first-born to the devil in return for the starring role in a Broadway play, and his wife, Mia Farrow, gives birth to a little devil. I think this is every mother's worst fear. "What if my child turns out to be a little devil?"

In the case of NOOK Media LLC, I don't think there's anything to worry about, because this is the offspring of two fathers—two male gametes uniting to form a single zygote. Not to worry, this sort of thing happens. Back to Wikipedia:

• Isogamy is the state of gametes from both sexes being the same size and shape, and given arbitrary designators for mating type. 

So there's hope, but what form this isogamous corporate being with arbitrary designators might assume is yet to be determined. If it becomes viral and threatens all of mankind, we'll be left with no alternative but to ask "will it blend?"

-Professor Walrus

When Bigger is Biggest—Big New iPhone 5

iPhone 5, The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone.

It's not quite the grammatical gauntlet Apple threw down with "Think Different," but the iPhone 5 slogan still achieves a puzzling lack of syntactical precision. No matter that the next biggest thing is also the first big thing, but bigger, there are plenty of reasons to want one.

Here's Apple PR's one-line summary of new big things:

"Apple Introduces iPhone 5
Thinnest, Lightest iPhone Ever Features All-New Aluminum Design, Stunning 4-Inch Retina Display, A6 Chip & Ultrafast Wireless."

That's six comparatively bigger things: thinner, lighter, newer design, bigger display, faster A6 processor, faster wireless.

Here's my list of new iPhone 5 things:

1. New body is bigger, lighter, and thinner;
2. New display is longer*, clearer, and the colors more accurate;
3. New Lightning connector* is smaller, all digital, more durable, and reversible;
4. New A6 processor is 2x faster, 22% smaller;
5. New dynamic antenna;
6. New Wi-Fi with 2.4ghz and 5ghz on 802.11n;
7. New HSPA+, DC-HSDPA, and LTE added;
8. New battery lasts longer, 8-10 hours of use;
9. New iSight camera with sapphire lens is smaller, sharper, quieter, clearer, more dynamic, more precise, it's 8 mp, and it has panorama mode;
10. New FaceTime over cellular, take photos while shooting video, and both video stability and face detection improved;
11. New 3-microphone design—bottom, front, and back;
12. New speaker design with smaller five magnetic transducer, sideband audio, and noise-canceling earpiece;
13. and with new iOS6, but that's another story.

It's worth noting that this is the
* First screen-size change since the original iPhone, 2008
* First connector update since the original iPod 30-pin connector, 2003

And probably just as importantly, the iPhone 5 will ship to 100 countries and 240 carriers before the end of the year. What other company could manage logistics of this scale and on such a relatively tight schedule?

I find it an impressive list, even though the Wall Street Journal found the following "technology gaps:"

the iPhone 5 is missing:
• Digital Payments (Near Field Communication, NFC, technology)
• Touch to Share (Seems to be unique to WebOS, HPs defunct mobile operating system)
• Dynamic Home Screens (A feature of Android 3.1 (Honeycomb), which runs on tablets. Doesn't seem to be a hardware function.)
• Face Unlock (Android software security feature linked to the camera. It doesn't seem to be available, yet.)
• Even Bigger Screens (Meaning something bigger than the iPhone and smaller than the iPad)
• Wireless charging (Inductive charging devices are available from third-party suppliers)

Of this list, I'd like NFC capability in my phone, but the rest seem pretty uncompelling. If there's a technology gap, it's the one Apple maintains over its competitors. Apple needs the competition, but there remains no mobile device as thin, light, clear, elegant, and useful as the current iPhone 4S. As of this Friday, we'll be comparing everyone else to the biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone; the newer, bigger iPhone 5.

N.B. Auspicious, inauspicious, coincidence, or bad planning—the 4" iPhone 5 runs iOS 6.

Millions and Millions Sold

Ray Bradbury died on Monday and his legacy is justly secure. Celebrations of his life and works are everywhere, and I find myself wanting to fill in some gaps in my reading list. Why have I never read “The Martian Chronicles?” Fortunately, all of Bradbury’s works are readily available and will remain so. Which brings up an interesting point of contrast.

The New York Times obituary, Ray Bradbury, Master of Science Fiction, Dies at 91, includes this summary statistic of Bradbury’s work:

“More than eight million copies of his books have been sold in 36 languages.”

and life:

“His writing career stretched across 70 years, to the last weeks of his life.”

Impressive, but then I was looking over Nielsen BookScan’s 100 best sellers and noticed that the top three titles for the week belong to E. L. James and the “Fifty Shades” trilogy. Not too surprising, but these three books, first released in the U.S. in April, have already sold over five million copies—that’s just Nielson’s retail sales numbers and just in the U.S. and Canada, and it’s less than three months and the blockbuster movies aren’t even close to release!

I admit, it’s not a meaningful comparison, and yet it doesn’t feel quite right. It doesn’t seem fair or just, and I want to stand up and rail against ignorance, or something, but that would be stupid, wouldn't it? I haven’t read the shaded gray books, so who am I to judge? I must calm down, be realistic, put aside my passionate idealism and tell myself that raw book sales numbers have nothing to do with fairness or justice. I’m trying to see this imbalance in a different, more businesslike light.

In fact, E. L. James success is everyone’s success, which is a less personal and more “macro” view of things. Think how many people are making money because E. L. James’s books, no matter what we may think of them, have become a publishing phenomenon. We’ve got trickle-down success to all the editors, marketing and PR people, printers, booksellers, and even the truckers and warehousers for so many tons of printed paper. Then there’s the trickle up success, because Vintage Books, which was started by Knopf, which was owned by Random House, is now owned by Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate, which makes this an international success story. The entire publishing ecosystem is grateful to E. L. James.

On the other hand, lots of people benefitted from Ray Bradbury’s monetary success, as well, however diffused by time and scale in comparison. But more importantly, Bradbury’s success exceeds any measure of financial reward, and I need to remind myself of the overriding importance of such realities. Again, from The New York Times:

“By many estimations Mr. Bradbury was the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream. His name would appear near the top of any list of major science fiction writers of the 20th century, beside those of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and the Polish author Stanislaw Lem. His books are still being taught in schools, where many a reader has been introduced to them half a century after they first appeared. Many readers have said Mr. Bradbury’s stories fired their own imaginations.”

We shall read Bradbury and watch the movies of his books. I will read his stories aloud to Katharine as we lie in bed at night, and we will talk about Bradbury with our friends and families because they will and have read him, too. I’m not too interested in reading the Fifty Shades books, but I really don’t mind if you purchase and read them. Please tell me what you think of them and why you think they’re so popular!

We Are All Travelers?

Nearly a month in Roxbury and we haven’t managed to get a mailbox mounted. So we went to the Post Office to collect our mail, where it seems the post mistress knows everyone in town. As newcomers, she told us that we could get our passports and even our passport photos at the Roxbury P.O., which seemed like a rather odd thing to mention.

“You look like travelers,” she said, which seemed like a compliment. We didn’t disabuse her of this notion or mention that we were stick-in-the-mud home bodies. Though perhaps we should take this as prophecy. We really are travelers and just didn’t know it!

Time to dust off the old passports and head for the airport. But first, we better start packing. And what about the dogs, and the plants, and all of the things in the refrigerator likely to go bad, …?

Outlook: Cloudy

I'm a long-time follower of The Visual Thesaurus and enjoy receiving the daily Visual Thesaurus Magazine. Today, May 10, 2012, came this:

Outlook: Cloudy

It's hard these days to be in the computer business and avoid "the cloud." All the big companies — Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Cisco, and Apple, among others — tout their cloud services. For the most part, the folks who have to think about cloud computing are programmers. But odds are that you’re using the cloud today, and definitely will be tomorrow. What is "the cloud," anyway?

The linked article was contributed by a Microsoft Technical Writer, Mike Pope, who blogs about writing, and he does an admirable job of explaining The Cloud using metaphor and plain language. Since The Visual Thesaurus is a site about words, Pope includes a quote explaining, Why Cloud?

[M]any years ago those of us who built and sold client server applications, software and hardware used to draw a picture with the PC connected to a network and the network connected to a server. Since none of us actually understood how the network worked, we drew a cloud and labeled it "network" and left it at that. -Timothy Chou, Introduction to Cloud Computing (in about 1,000 words)

I've never seen a convincing story for the invention of The Cloud as a term to describe the collection of technologies and services this has come to stand for, but I am convinced that the ascendancy of The Cloud has a lot to do with the need for a label. So I've posted the following as a comment to Mike Pope's excellent explanation:

There's an another explanation for the coming of The Cloud, at least as a popularly used term for describing the nebulously amorphous services that happen off-site and out of mind. The Cloud is a marketing jackpot! 

All of the technologies that have come together to make The Cloud have existed for some time, but like so many things, they never had much application to consumer-oriented computing—Virtual Machines, client server computing, Software as a Service (SaaS), and a hundred other sugary snack terms for the Information Technology school lunch program have zero value to the rest of us. But wrap it all up in nice packaging for easy consumption, and you've got an amalgam every bit as delicious and habit-forming as chocolate granola bars. 

We may not know, understand, or care what's in this stuff, but we know it's good for us. I'll take second helpings on The Cloud, please, and don't be stingy!

While writing this, I looked up Timothy Chou and found his eBook available on Amazon as a free download. Coincidentally, it lives in Amazon's Cloud and it's now the first eBook I've examined using Amazon's relatively new Cloud Reader. I'm hoping that Mike Pope will follow up Outlook: Cloudy, with an explanation of cloudy articles and the difference between The Cloud and A Cloud!

Apple @ $1 Trillion

There's an open inquiry posted on the Zintro website:

Seeking Experts for Question re: Apple at a Trillion

Their blogger-in-chief, Maureen Aylward, asks:

QUESTION: Some analysts predict that Apple will become the first company valued at $1 trillion dollar in a few years. With stock prices hovering at $600 per share, what does a market capitalization prediction like this mean for Apple and the market itself?

ANSWER: As a prediction, it means nothing. But is this a reasonable prediction, and if so, what will Apple and its market be like when this happens?

It's surprisingly easy to justify a not-too-distant future cap over $1 trillion for Apple stock. Has there ever been a company so successful in so many ways? Even bad news doesn't seem to tarnish Apple's golden image. But how long can a company maintain such exponential growth?

Anyone can look at the numbers and see that Apple's stock price and total valuation are in a range well outside several standard deviations of historic norms. This makes any sort of statistically-justified prediction ludicrous. Much of Apple's growth has come at the expense of its competitors; they have shrunken in value by about the same amount that Apple has gained. 

Extending this train of thought leads us to wonder if Apple's future lunch is just a larger share of a finite pie—the zero-sum game? How many companies will be driven out of business before Apple can reach the trillion dollar plateau? Apple's stock value is already greater than it's largest competitors combined! What's left but for Apple to consume itself?

On the other hand, it doesn't take an economist to know that we live in an ever-expanding world pie, and the most rapidly expanding pie slice is China. We can hardly begin to conceive of how large this market might become, or at least I have no means of calculating the effect Chinese consumerism will bring. But judging from the wild popularity of Apple's products in China, the trillion dollar goal doesn’t seem at all unreasonable.

While we’re making wild speculations, it should be noted that India is growing faster than China and is expected to become the largest country in the world before this decade is out? India might be also be the most tech-mad country in the world. 

Okay, so there's room enough for Apple to become the first company to require 13 columns of digits on their balance sheet, but have they got the technology and marketing savvy to continue their incredible string of new products, each one more popular than the one before? It strains credulity to believe that such a thing is possible. And yet, why not? 

For one thing, the culture of innovation Apple created is spreading, and not to it's historic competitors. The dogged competitiveness of other innovators, such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook is certainly a huge driving force, but there’s an even greater source of innovation helping Apple maintain its technological and product design advantages.

An Apple ecosystem has sprung up with an enormous international pool of independent and freelance developers and entrepreneurs. It’s as if there’s an endlessly expanding power grid spreading out from Cupertino, and the energy to drive it comes from the sheer brain-power wattage of so many brilliant, driven, people who find this the most exciting place to be.

It’s all quite intangible, but consider how many people would be willing to drop everything to work for Apple? This is what it used to be like for places like IBM and Bell Labs, the great innovators of half-a-century ago. IBM had so much brain power, that Thomas Watson Jr. had plans for building IBM University in Connecticut, and Apple is already larger than IBM ever was!

With so much innovation supporting Apple’s products, Apple can concentrate on pushing the entire ecosystem ahead, and this is exactly what they appear to be doing. Instead of reacting to competitor’s threats by blanketing the market with endless product variations, Apple remains focused on “the next great thing.” This strategic vision is what’s driven growth and will continue to drive Apple up to and on beyond the trillion mark.

Finally, can Apple remain Apple without Steve Jobs? Every colossus is different for being immense, so I think that even with Steve Jobs, Apple can’t help being transformed. Can they maintain the Jobsian focus and vision that created the colossus that is Apple? I believe the vision is clear for some years to come. I don’t know how long the current leadership can maintain the energy and drive needed to keep this vision in tact, but so far, it’s an incredibly impressive and successful group.

Apple’s challenge really is to remain focused. The distractions of being pre-eminent are huge. For instance, the U.S. Department of Justice price-fixing lawsuit brought against the six largest publishers and Apple, is always referred to as DOJ vs Apple! Similarly, the very real plight of Chinese technology workers is most notable and newsworthy because one of the factories sited makes Apple products! This isn’t unfair or unreasonable, just part of being #1.

So far, there’s no indication that the Apple juggernaut, the headlong consumer dash to mobile devices, and the storm of spinoffs creating an ever larger mobile market, shows no signs of running off the tracks. Apple at $1 trillion within two years? Sure thing!

Diminishing Elder Andreses

Cousin: Dena Andres Fried
Sister: Julie Andres Schwait
September, 2011

The eldest member of the Andres clan died yesterday, Dena Andres Fried, aged 98. My father, Reubin, 88, inherits the mantle of eldest from her. I did not know Dena or her three children particularly well, but we did see them on our semi-annual summer visits to Dallas when I was growing up. There would be large gatherings of relatives with much eating and a genuine sense of family. I always ate too much and ended up feeling sick, but my memories are primarily happy ones.

Dena was one of 10 first-generation-American cousins, the children of the four Andrusier brothers who emmigrated from Odessa (the one in the Ukraine) to Texas before WWI. Their father followed and died in post WWII Dallas without ever learning English; they all spoke Yiddish.

There are only two left, Reubin, and the youngest of the 10, Dolly, a mere slip of a girl at 75. I've got this nice recent picture of Dena looking pretty pleased with things at a recent family gathering in Dallas, which I did not attend. Brother, Tom, is responsible for the photo.