There is a debate about ad blocking on the Internet every so often, and the release of iOS 9 with its support for content blockers has reignited it.
I am sympathetic to both sides. I don't block ads, but I do block both Flash and ad trackers. I block Flash because it slows down browsers, and I block the tracking because I don't think it's appropriate for any single entity to know by default what I do when interacting with completely separate entities. It's fine for Google to know what I do on YouTube since it owns YouTube. It's not fine for it to know what I do with every site I visit that runs Google Analytics.
That said, I also make a small amount of money from writing on the Internet, and that money ultimately comes from advertisers. I don't get paid anything close to a living wage for how much time I spend on it, but I'm blessed to be in a position where that doesn't have to matter if I don't want it to. Many people are not.
Right now, proponents of ad blocking list all the abuses of online ad technologies and say, "adapt or die". They might also point to focused (and non-abusive) ad networks like the Deck or point out that advertisers barely know anything about the effectiveness of their spots on TV or spreads in magazines. Those media can't track ad targets like online advertising can, and it was fine. Maybe just take that attitude online.
Those arguments are fine for a certain set of people who have audiences that skew affluent, but it's bad for everyone else in the short to medium term. If you tell advertisers that they will have less targeting, they'll pay lower rates. They already pay next to nothing, so it'd be a financial bloodbath.
It's tough for publishers. The hard fact of the matter is that the supply of content creators far outstrips demand. Internet technology makes publishing content of all kinds easier than it's ever been. A laptop is far cheaper than a printing press. A webcam is far cheaper than a TV studio. The upshot of that fact is that more people want to make a living by writing or making videos or whatever on the Internet than the market can possibly support. Take away the easy avenue of super intrusive ads and some publishers will go away because every other option is really hard.
I know this. I've been writing consistently, year-round on the Internet since mid-2007. By now, I think I've gotten pretty good at it, but "pretty good" isn't good enough to justify me doing it full time. The market has spoken by now. It says I'm not special enough to warrant a full-time gig. I am far from alone.
This is where it gets tough on the publishing side. A lot of new people appear on the Internet every year trying to make it by creating content. Sturgeon's Law says that most of them won't.
But everyone produces a lot of crap when they first start. Everyone who writes a lot says they look back on their early work and cringe because it's so awful compared to where they are in the present. A ruthless world where only the largest publications make it and it's mostly impossible to make any money without being a part of one of them means that only the people who can afford to write a lot for no money to prove themselves to those publications will make it. Only people who are decently well off will be able to break into the business, and that's not an appealing future. I realize it's kind of like that now in a lot of ways, but it has room to get worse.
I don't know what the answer is. Maybe it's micropayments, although I'm not bullish on them. Maybe it's some kind of scheme to essentially pay people to read sites and look at ads, although I'm not bullish on that either. If I did know, I'd be going and doing that instead of writing this essay. The long term good news for Internet content creators is that the future will have no TV or radio or magazines and only data flowing on the Internet. The ad dollars that go to old media now will go to online media in the future because they'll have to. That'll mean more ad money to go around. Its just that no one knows when that future will arrive, and many creators won't survive financially until then.
I hope there is something between the near privacy-less Internet we have today and the dystopian future without journalism. If it's out there to be found, iOS 9 and content blockers are giving the people searching for it a new sense of urgency.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Universal’s Harry Potter Areas Put the Rest to Shame
I finally had a chance to go to Universal Orlando for the first time since the Harry Potter areas opened. It highlighted a real problem that the Islands of Adventure park has.
So you know, I grew up in Orlando and even worked at Universal Studios for two summers and a Christmas break during college. I've been to all the Orlando theme parks more times than I can count. I know more about this stuff than a person probably should.
The Harry Potter areas in both Islands and Studios are the most impressively themed areas of a theme park I've ever seen. The new Diagon Alley in Studios is particularly great. Wide lanes for packing in the tourists aside, it really feels like you're walking onto the set from the films. The entrance to the area from the rest of the park is even inconspicuously located in an unmarked brick wall, going along with the bit from the books about Diagon Alley being hidden in London. Everything is just so well done. You could have fun standing just inside the entrance and listening to the cries of surprise and joy when people enter for the first time.
There is only one real new ride in both Potter areas. Universal re-themed two old rides in Islands for Hogsmeade—the Dueling Dragons as the Dragon Challenge and the Flying Unicorn as Flight of the Hippogriff—but those coasters are exactly the same. The Hogwarts ride in Hogsmeade is probably the better of the two, although its plot is incoherent. The Escape from Gringotts ride in Diagon Alley makes sense, and the queue is the best themed one in either park, but it's kind of short.
Aside from the fact that Universal spent almost no money in theming the old Dueling Dragons queue—it used to be the coolest area in the place, but now it's mostly just plain and boring "stone" walls—I don't really have complaints. Everything looks great, the train ride between Hogsmeade and Diagon is a themed ride in and of itself, and the Butterbeer is dangerously good given the astronomic sugar content.
The problem with these Potter areas is that they make anything that came before them look old and tired. Some of that is simple neglect on Universal's part, like the terribly faded pictures on the side of Shrek 4D. Some of it is the passage of time, with Men in Black now mostly looking silly where it once was cool. A lot of it is that the Potter areas are state of the art and had far higher budgets behind them than other attractions (looking at you, Simpsons ride).
The Studios park is mostly fine because it has been getting newer stuff. There’s the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit roller coaster in the front plus recently opened Transformers and Despicable Me attractions. Its general theme of simply “movies” means it’s easy to rotate things in and out.
Islands is a different story. Hogsmeade is the first major update the park has had since it opened in 1999. The rest is showing its age, and I don’t know how they’re going to proceed other than replace large sections entirely.
Marvel Super Hero Island has been a dead end ever since Disney bought Marvel. The major rides there—the Hulk coaster, Spider-Man, Dr. Doom’s Fear Fall—do all hold up well. The theming is pretty dated to the late ‘90s though, and there’s no way any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is making its way in. It’ll have to do as-is until it gets replaced some day, but it’s not going to age gracefully until then.
Toon Lagoon is also a dead end, being based on newspaper comics and old cartoons. Children don’t read newspaper comics anymore, and the most famous ones—Peanuts, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes—aren’t included in the area. It also only has water rides, so if you don’t want to get wet, there’s nothing much in the area for you to do. Big updates are unlikely because the area is basically composed of cultural relics. In 10-20 years, the name “Popeye” might be more well known for fried chicken than the sailor. It also will have to be replaced entirely instead of upgraded.
Jurassic Park is pretty safe because they keep making more JP movies. Plus, everyone loves dinosaurs. The only big ride there is another water ride, though, so unless you have kids who will look at the kiddie attractions there, people who don’t want to get wet have another entire area to skip. Another ride, perhaps based on the upcoming Jurassic World, would help.
What’s left of the Lost Continent is probably not worth saving. It used to be right there with Marvel as the best area in the park, but Hogsmeade took over its best ride (Dueling Dragons). All that’s left is a Sinbad stunt show and Poseidon’s Fury, a walkthrough show attraction that has always been embarrassingly cheesy. It wouldn’t surprise me if Hogsmeade or even a new Potter area eventually consumed the rest of it. It could even get pincered, with Potter taking some and Seuss Landing taking the rest.
Speaking of, Seuss Landing is fine. Dr. Seuss books are evergreen as a part of children’s entertainment. It could use some sprucing here and there—the Cat in the Hat ride is surprisingly unpleasant—but second to Hogsmeade, it’s in the best shape long term.
There is some conspicuous construction between Toon Lagoon and Jurassic Park, and supposedly that’s going to be a King Kong themed Skull Island. It’ll be a nice nod to people who remember the old Kongfrontation ride from Studios, and apparently it’s based on a new Kong movie that will come out in a couple years. That’s nice and all, but it’ll end up another new thing to make the old attractions look, well, old.
Universal is now spending $500 million per year on its parks, and overhauling Islands of Adventure has to soak up a lot of that money in the coming years. IOA immediately became the most exciting park in Orlando when it opened, but now, everything outside Hogsmeade just not very thrilling. The place is going to need to look completely different a decade from now to retain its viability.
So you know, I grew up in Orlando and even worked at Universal Studios for two summers and a Christmas break during college. I've been to all the Orlando theme parks more times than I can count. I know more about this stuff than a person probably should.
The Harry Potter areas in both Islands and Studios are the most impressively themed areas of a theme park I've ever seen. The new Diagon Alley in Studios is particularly great. Wide lanes for packing in the tourists aside, it really feels like you're walking onto the set from the films. The entrance to the area from the rest of the park is even inconspicuously located in an unmarked brick wall, going along with the bit from the books about Diagon Alley being hidden in London. Everything is just so well done. You could have fun standing just inside the entrance and listening to the cries of surprise and joy when people enter for the first time.
There is only one real new ride in both Potter areas. Universal re-themed two old rides in Islands for Hogsmeade—the Dueling Dragons as the Dragon Challenge and the Flying Unicorn as Flight of the Hippogriff—but those coasters are exactly the same. The Hogwarts ride in Hogsmeade is probably the better of the two, although its plot is incoherent. The Escape from Gringotts ride in Diagon Alley makes sense, and the queue is the best themed one in either park, but it's kind of short.
Aside from the fact that Universal spent almost no money in theming the old Dueling Dragons queue—it used to be the coolest area in the place, but now it's mostly just plain and boring "stone" walls—I don't really have complaints. Everything looks great, the train ride between Hogsmeade and Diagon is a themed ride in and of itself, and the Butterbeer is dangerously good given the astronomic sugar content.
The problem with these Potter areas is that they make anything that came before them look old and tired. Some of that is simple neglect on Universal's part, like the terribly faded pictures on the side of Shrek 4D. Some of it is the passage of time, with Men in Black now mostly looking silly where it once was cool. A lot of it is that the Potter areas are state of the art and had far higher budgets behind them than other attractions (looking at you, Simpsons ride).
The Studios park is mostly fine because it has been getting newer stuff. There’s the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit roller coaster in the front plus recently opened Transformers and Despicable Me attractions. Its general theme of simply “movies” means it’s easy to rotate things in and out.
Islands is a different story. Hogsmeade is the first major update the park has had since it opened in 1999. The rest is showing its age, and I don’t know how they’re going to proceed other than replace large sections entirely.
Marvel Super Hero Island has been a dead end ever since Disney bought Marvel. The major rides there—the Hulk coaster, Spider-Man, Dr. Doom’s Fear Fall—do all hold up well. The theming is pretty dated to the late ‘90s though, and there’s no way any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is making its way in. It’ll have to do as-is until it gets replaced some day, but it’s not going to age gracefully until then.
Toon Lagoon is also a dead end, being based on newspaper comics and old cartoons. Children don’t read newspaper comics anymore, and the most famous ones—Peanuts, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes—aren’t included in the area. It also only has water rides, so if you don’t want to get wet, there’s nothing much in the area for you to do. Big updates are unlikely because the area is basically composed of cultural relics. In 10-20 years, the name “Popeye” might be more well known for fried chicken than the sailor. It also will have to be replaced entirely instead of upgraded.
Jurassic Park is pretty safe because they keep making more JP movies. Plus, everyone loves dinosaurs. The only big ride there is another water ride, though, so unless you have kids who will look at the kiddie attractions there, people who don’t want to get wet have another entire area to skip. Another ride, perhaps based on the upcoming Jurassic World, would help.
What’s left of the Lost Continent is probably not worth saving. It used to be right there with Marvel as the best area in the park, but Hogsmeade took over its best ride (Dueling Dragons). All that’s left is a Sinbad stunt show and Poseidon’s Fury, a walkthrough show attraction that has always been embarrassingly cheesy. It wouldn’t surprise me if Hogsmeade or even a new Potter area eventually consumed the rest of it. It could even get pincered, with Potter taking some and Seuss Landing taking the rest.
Speaking of, Seuss Landing is fine. Dr. Seuss books are evergreen as a part of children’s entertainment. It could use some sprucing here and there—the Cat in the Hat ride is surprisingly unpleasant—but second to Hogsmeade, it’s in the best shape long term.
There is some conspicuous construction between Toon Lagoon and Jurassic Park, and supposedly that’s going to be a King Kong themed Skull Island. It’ll be a nice nod to people who remember the old Kongfrontation ride from Studios, and apparently it’s based on a new Kong movie that will come out in a couple years. That’s nice and all, but it’ll end up another new thing to make the old attractions look, well, old.
Universal is now spending $500 million per year on its parks, and overhauling Islands of Adventure has to soak up a lot of that money in the coming years. IOA immediately became the most exciting park in Orlando when it opened, but now, everything outside Hogsmeade just not very thrilling. The place is going to need to look completely different a decade from now to retain its viability.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Apple’s New Taste
That we know of on the outside, Apple has had four people highly influential in setting the company's taste during its golden era: Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Ron Johnson, and Scott Forestall. Singling out these folks alone is an oversimplification, but they certainly have had outsized influence.
Ive is now the design chief for both hardware and software, but Jobs, Johnson, and Forestall are gone. Ive certainly will continue on setting trends and direction, but he alone can’t do it for the whole company. Tim Cook is generally known to be a numbers guy and not really a replacement for the taste making roles that Jobs and Forestall had.
The hire of Angela Ahrendts along with the Beats acquisition might be Cook’s way of injecting some new talent in that whole area. It feels odd to think about Apple turning over its chief taste makers all at once, but the old guys were around forever. Ive became an Apple employee in 1992, and Jobs and Forestall came in the NeXT deal in 1997. Johnson was the newbie, only coming on in 2000. The positions haven’t been open for a while (except Johnson’s retail head position, of course).
Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre joining Ive and Ahrendts as the company’s top taste executives makes as much sense as anything for the Beats acquisition. Cook’s internal letter talks as much about those two as it does Beats itself, and Beats as a brand is held in much higher regard than any of its products are.
Part of Apple’s corporate DNA is having a distinct sense of taste and style. With some of the most important people responsible for its past placement there gone, others have to step in. Iovine and Dre are just the latest two to do so.
Ive is now the design chief for both hardware and software, but Jobs, Johnson, and Forestall are gone. Ive certainly will continue on setting trends and direction, but he alone can’t do it for the whole company. Tim Cook is generally known to be a numbers guy and not really a replacement for the taste making roles that Jobs and Forestall had.
The hire of Angela Ahrendts along with the Beats acquisition might be Cook’s way of injecting some new talent in that whole area. It feels odd to think about Apple turning over its chief taste makers all at once, but the old guys were around forever. Ive became an Apple employee in 1992, and Jobs and Forestall came in the NeXT deal in 1997. Johnson was the newbie, only coming on in 2000. The positions haven’t been open for a while (except Johnson’s retail head position, of course).
Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre joining Ive and Ahrendts as the company’s top taste executives makes as much sense as anything for the Beats acquisition. Cook’s internal letter talks as much about those two as it does Beats itself, and Beats as a brand is held in much higher regard than any of its products are.
Part of Apple’s corporate DNA is having a distinct sense of taste and style. With some of the most important people responsible for its past placement there gone, others have to step in. Iovine and Dre are just the latest two to do so.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Monument Valley Is a New Super Mario Galaxy
Monument Valley is a pretty great iOS game that came out not too long ago. If you like impossible objects and M.C. Esher, this is the game for you.
Gameplay-wise, it’s pretty simple. It’s like a point-and-click adventure game, in that you simply tap on where you want Ida to go. If she can get there, she goes; if not, she won’t. You have to step on switches to alter the level architecture, avoid crows that block your path, and use a movable block tower to help you at times.
It reminds me a lot of Super Mario Galaxy in a couple of ways. The obvious one is that Ida can walk on walls and ceilings, just like Mario can in some levels. Some levels in Monument Valley require rotating the stage all 360°, again, like some Galaxy levels.
The other way it reminds me of SMG is that it’s not terribly difficult. With few exceptions, Galaxy is not that hard of a game for anyone who’s not a complete beginner to 3D platform games. It itches your brain in some novel ways, but once you learn its conventions, it’s not overly challenging.
Monument Valley is also fairly easy. The only time I felt stuck to any degree was in an early level where I didn’t realize I could tap and drag a piece of the building to open up a new path. Once I learned to recognize what is movable, it really flowed easily from there. Some parts felt more like a “click to continue cutscene” experience more than playing through a game.
It’s also pretty short. It only has ten levels, some with multiple screens. Combine that with the low difficulty level, and you’ve got a pretty short game. The reviewer at Polygon needed three hours to complete it; I didn't time it, but it took me about one hour, if that. I don’t feel bad about the $4 I spent on it because it’s beautifully designed and forges an interesting path. It leaves me wanting more, but fortunately, more is on the way.
Super Mario Galaxy left me wanting more too. With that one, it had nothing to do with length. It has 120 level variations to complete, and I did it as both Mario and Luigi (their controls are different, so it’s a somewhat different experience). It almost never upped the difficulty though, and I wanted a challenge. Super Mario Galaxy 2 fulfilled that wish, thankfully.
I don’t know if future installments of Monument Valley will be significantly harder. It seems like the game is more about the design and atmosphere than really being a challenge. And that’s fine! It’s OK for some games to be like that. I just hope the difficulty curve ramps up at some point in the future, even if it’s not the next release.
Monday, March 31, 2014
How I Met Your Mother’s Finale Was Too Late
We finally saw how Ted finally met the mother of his kids. It was a really nice moment. A nice moment at the end of a very flawed episode of television.
(Spoilers ahead)
The problem with the HIMYM finale simply is that it came too late. If that was the finale of a hypothetical fifth or sixth season, it might have worked. I realize that it’s nearly impossible to turn down CBS when it offers you millions of dollars to continue making your series that peaks at over 10 million viewers a couple times a year. However, all that extra time ruined the story that Carter Bays and Craig Thomas wanted to tell.
It all goes back to the Ted and Stella storyline all the way from Seasons 3-4. Given the show’s established narrative structure, themes, conventions, etc., it was clear from that point on that the Mother wasn’t going to sneak up on us. If it wasn’t 100% obvious already, that plot thread confirmed that the moment of meeting the Mother wasn’t going to happen until the series finale. Stella got as far with Ted as anyone was ever going to without being the Mother.
Given that fact, every plot line involving Ted and a woman was going to feel hollow until we got the flashing neon sign that said, “HERE SHE IS”. The remainder of Season 4 after Ted got left at the altar and even into Season 5 was fine, as we got to see how Ted dealt with overcoming that big deal in his life. Season 5 is also when the Robin-Barney relationship first began, something that injected a lot of new energy to the show.
The opener of Season 6 is when HIMYM first teased Barney and Robin’s wedding. It wouldn’t reveal until that season's finale that it was Barney’s wedding, and it wouldn’t be until far later yet that we learned he was marrying Robin. Nevertheless, that episode is when the show began the end game. It aired on September 20, 2010; tonight was March 31, 2014.
That gap is too wide for the payoff to be satisfying. In Season 5 and really into Season 6, the show basically stopped being about Ted, the ostensible protagonist, and it became about Barney and Robin. It asked the viewers to get invested in Ted’s new crush Zoey, who clearly wasn’t going to be the titular Mother. It had to come up with things for Lily and Marshall to do, as there was no real dramatic tension in their relationship because a thousand flash forwards showed that they never would split up. Their marriage was in just as much mortal peril as Anakin Skywalker was in the Star Wars prequels.
From Season 6 through Season 8, the show basically just put things together in order to break them apart so it could put them back together again. It was marking time, just waiting for the last season to come to finally do the big reveal. Even someone who doesn’t overanalyze TV shows would have gotten the thought at some point: where is this going? Isn’t this supposed to be the story of how Ted met the kids’ mother? Why is it spending all this time on Barney and Robin? There eventually was an answer—Future Ted was still hung up on Robin—but it had to wait until after years of frustration set in to let us know.
So, the finale. It didn’t help its cause that it tried to fit about four episodes’ worth of story into one double-length episode. That made it feel rushed. It also took two storylines that were years in the making—Barney’s transformation from a womanizer into husband material and the Barney-Robin wedding that was the backdrop for every single episode this season—and wiped them away before the second commercial break. Years of buildup gone, just like that.
With Barney, I understand what Bays and Thomas were going for. They wanted him becoming a father to be the thing that finally turned him around. The problem is they had him make too much of that turnaround before getting married. It was an enormous letdown to see him go right back to being his old self when him wanting to be his old self isn’t even why he and Robin split up anyway.
Of course, the buildup for those things pales in comparison to the buildup of how Ted and the Mother would meet. That event is what the show ostensibly turned on, which is ostensibly what Ted’s life turned on. Turns out that Ted meeting a woman who, as far as any viewer could tell, was absolutely perfect for him, who he had a long relationship with, who he had two children with, was yet another speed bump on the way to him getting with Robin*.
Maybe they could have pulled that off if the series was shorter. Maybe. I don’t know. I do know it couldn't do it after nine years. The buildup for that moment ended up larger than I think the writers ever intended, as it’s evident now that the very title of the series was the first of so very many tongue-in-cheek misdirections. With a shorter run, it might have worked. After this much time, it never had a chance.
I think Bays and Thomas wanted the point when Ted holds up the blue French horn in the last shot to be a moment when the viewers shout, “Finally!” at their TV sets. Instead, that moment happened six episodes earlier in “Sunrise” when Ted let Robin go in a pretty embarrassing CGI sequence. After false start after fake out after aborted run after dead end conversation, we seemed to be past the Ted-Robin thing once and for all.
The show went to that well only to pull out an empty bucket too many times. We were all sick of the will-they-or-won’t-they with those two. The finale had enough to it with seeing the main characters’ developments over the years that it didn’t need one last left turn at the end. With about 12 fewer “either Ted or Robin wants it to work out between them but it’s just not going to happen” sequences, the last moment of the series might have been welcome. But at some point, you stop rooting for either Lucy or Charlie Brown and just want to stick a machete into the football.
Had the writers wanted to, they could have scrapped the planned ending and given us Ted and Tracy living happily ever after. It would have been a bit saccharine, but it wouldn’t have been infuriating. We got to know Tracy. She was great. She was just the right person for Ted, more so that Robin ever was.
I doubt Bays and Thomas ever seriously considered going with anything other than the ending they decided on when the conceived the show a decade ago. After all that time and commitment to it, they really couldn’t have done anything else. All that time was its enemy, though, and their big ending suffered greatly for it.
*Maybe! We still don’t know if things work out with them!
(Spoilers ahead)
The problem with the HIMYM finale simply is that it came too late. If that was the finale of a hypothetical fifth or sixth season, it might have worked. I realize that it’s nearly impossible to turn down CBS when it offers you millions of dollars to continue making your series that peaks at over 10 million viewers a couple times a year. However, all that extra time ruined the story that Carter Bays and Craig Thomas wanted to tell.
It all goes back to the Ted and Stella storyline all the way from Seasons 3-4. Given the show’s established narrative structure, themes, conventions, etc., it was clear from that point on that the Mother wasn’t going to sneak up on us. If it wasn’t 100% obvious already, that plot thread confirmed that the moment of meeting the Mother wasn’t going to happen until the series finale. Stella got as far with Ted as anyone was ever going to without being the Mother.
Given that fact, every plot line involving Ted and a woman was going to feel hollow until we got the flashing neon sign that said, “HERE SHE IS”. The remainder of Season 4 after Ted got left at the altar and even into Season 5 was fine, as we got to see how Ted dealt with overcoming that big deal in his life. Season 5 is also when the Robin-Barney relationship first began, something that injected a lot of new energy to the show.
The opener of Season 6 is when HIMYM first teased Barney and Robin’s wedding. It wouldn’t reveal until that season's finale that it was Barney’s wedding, and it wouldn’t be until far later yet that we learned he was marrying Robin. Nevertheless, that episode is when the show began the end game. It aired on September 20, 2010; tonight was March 31, 2014.
That gap is too wide for the payoff to be satisfying. In Season 5 and really into Season 6, the show basically stopped being about Ted, the ostensible protagonist, and it became about Barney and Robin. It asked the viewers to get invested in Ted’s new crush Zoey, who clearly wasn’t going to be the titular Mother. It had to come up with things for Lily and Marshall to do, as there was no real dramatic tension in their relationship because a thousand flash forwards showed that they never would split up. Their marriage was in just as much mortal peril as Anakin Skywalker was in the Star Wars prequels.
From Season 6 through Season 8, the show basically just put things together in order to break them apart so it could put them back together again. It was marking time, just waiting for the last season to come to finally do the big reveal. Even someone who doesn’t overanalyze TV shows would have gotten the thought at some point: where is this going? Isn’t this supposed to be the story of how Ted met the kids’ mother? Why is it spending all this time on Barney and Robin? There eventually was an answer—Future Ted was still hung up on Robin—but it had to wait until after years of frustration set in to let us know.
So, the finale. It didn’t help its cause that it tried to fit about four episodes’ worth of story into one double-length episode. That made it feel rushed. It also took two storylines that were years in the making—Barney’s transformation from a womanizer into husband material and the Barney-Robin wedding that was the backdrop for every single episode this season—and wiped them away before the second commercial break. Years of buildup gone, just like that.
With Barney, I understand what Bays and Thomas were going for. They wanted him becoming a father to be the thing that finally turned him around. The problem is they had him make too much of that turnaround before getting married. It was an enormous letdown to see him go right back to being his old self when him wanting to be his old self isn’t even why he and Robin split up anyway.
Of course, the buildup for those things pales in comparison to the buildup of how Ted and the Mother would meet. That event is what the show ostensibly turned on, which is ostensibly what Ted’s life turned on. Turns out that Ted meeting a woman who, as far as any viewer could tell, was absolutely perfect for him, who he had a long relationship with, who he had two children with, was yet another speed bump on the way to him getting with Robin*.
Maybe they could have pulled that off if the series was shorter. Maybe. I don’t know. I do know it couldn't do it after nine years. The buildup for that moment ended up larger than I think the writers ever intended, as it’s evident now that the very title of the series was the first of so very many tongue-in-cheek misdirections. With a shorter run, it might have worked. After this much time, it never had a chance.
I think Bays and Thomas wanted the point when Ted holds up the blue French horn in the last shot to be a moment when the viewers shout, “Finally!” at their TV sets. Instead, that moment happened six episodes earlier in “Sunrise” when Ted let Robin go in a pretty embarrassing CGI sequence. After false start after fake out after aborted run after dead end conversation, we seemed to be past the Ted-Robin thing once and for all.
The show went to that well only to pull out an empty bucket too many times. We were all sick of the will-they-or-won’t-they with those two. The finale had enough to it with seeing the main characters’ developments over the years that it didn’t need one last left turn at the end. With about 12 fewer “either Ted or Robin wants it to work out between them but it’s just not going to happen” sequences, the last moment of the series might have been welcome. But at some point, you stop rooting for either Lucy or Charlie Brown and just want to stick a machete into the football.
Had the writers wanted to, they could have scrapped the planned ending and given us Ted and Tracy living happily ever after. It would have been a bit saccharine, but it wouldn’t have been infuriating. We got to know Tracy. She was great. She was just the right person for Ted, more so that Robin ever was.
I doubt Bays and Thomas ever seriously considered going with anything other than the ending they decided on when the conceived the show a decade ago. After all that time and commitment to it, they really couldn’t have done anything else. All that time was its enemy, though, and their big ending suffered greatly for it.
*Maybe! We still don’t know if things work out with them!
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Disney’s Frozen Has a Secretly Ominous Ending
I saw Disney’s Frozen recently, and it’s a really good movie for the most part. It does exist a bit in a Catch-22 though.
The most interesting character is by far Elsa, the only one who actually goes through a proper character arc. The other people in the movie largely are the same person at the end as when they’re introduced (one of the trolls even sings that “people don’t really change”). It could be a stronger movie if it focused more on Elsa, but it’d be a darker movie for it and probably too dark to be a children’s movie. They also couldn’t just go for it and jettison the children’s movie aspect, as so much of it relies on the viewer not overanalyzing it thanks to it being a children’s movie.
Anyway, keeping in mind that this is just a fantasy children’s movie, it’s notable that it’s the most business-focused Disney movie yet. The Duke of Weselton is obsessed with international trade, shopkeeper Oaken gives a quick lesson on supply and demand, and concern for Kristoff’s ice business is a running theme throughout.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
On that note, the ending of the movie is actually pretty ominous from a business perspective.
Elsa’s unintentional winter spell in the middle of summer would have disrupted the economy of Arendelle considerably. What little crops there are in the area would have largely died from the deep freeze, some of the livestock could have died too from exposure thanks to farmers being caught off guard, the frozen fjord would be awful for the fishing industry, and the logging of the area certainly would be set back a bit. From that alone, Arendelle is probably headed for at least a sharp recession as a result of the movie’s events. We know from the Year Without a Summer that winter-like conditions in the summer would be devastating to an early-to-mid 1800s European state like Arendelle.
However, that’s not all. Just before the end, Elsa issues a decree that Arendelle will no longer do business with Weselton, it’s largest trading partner. That’s understandable given that the Duke of Weselton sent people to assassinate her, and this preindustrial fantasy land wouldn’t have some kind of UN to settle the dispute.
It’s also the last thing the kingdom needs. With the local agriculture and industry severely stunted, Arendelle needs trade now more than ever. Cutting off relations with the kingdom’s largest trading partner will only make the recession that much deeper.
Some of the downturn might get offset by an increase of government spending. When the king shut off the castle from outsiders to protect Elsa early on, he reduced the staff. With Elsa’s new open-gate policy, government employment will rise. There also will be more social functions, of which there’s been one (the coronation) in the last 10-15 years, which will lead to more spending in the local area. The royal treasury likely can sustain this deficit spending for a while since it would have built up considerably during the decade plus of reduced staff and few expenditures. Having a few more castle servants and some fancy parties wouldn’t come close to offsetting the entire consequences of the week of winter, though.
Elsa would need to act quickly to repair the situation. She would need to send someone, perhaps the regent who ran the kingdom in the three years between her parents’ deaths and her coronation, to find new trading partners. She could also become Europe’s first entrepreneurial monarch. She might be able to bring in tourists from the region’s nobility by doing public demonstrations of her magic powers and setting up tours of her mountain ice palace. She could also travel to nearby kingdoms to create ice art for their special occasions. That money could then go to subsidize the rebuilding of the kingdom’s economy from the damage she unwittingly caused. I don’t know the extent of her powers, which seem considerable, but she might even be able to forestall the year’s coming winter to give her kingdom a chance to produce a few more goods to sell without competition.
Arendelle is probably in a better situation for the long haul with an open and confident monarch ruling it, but in the short run, there will be a struggle to fight off famine. For a seemingly happy movie that is actually the darkest Disney animated feature yet, a seemingly happy ending that is actually quite foreboding is only appropriate.
Addendum
This all assumes that Elsa doesn’t just create automatons from ice and snow to perform all economic tasks. They could work all hours of the day and dramatically expand Arendelle’s economy.
They also would put everyone out of work, creating a one of those utopias where everyone can live a life of leisure that philosophers once dreamed of. That would work, to whatever extent it can given that people generally prefer to work rather than do nothing all day, until Elsa dies. Presumably all of the automatons would then cease to function.
At that point, Arendelle would plunge into a dystopian situation where the entire infrastructure of the economy fell apart all at once. It would be a long, slow slog out of the depression as the populace would have lost all experience with actually running agriculture and industry.
It would be tempting to go the automaton route given the immediate economic crisis that is coming to the land not long after the credits roll. However if Elsa allowed her automatons to take over the whole economy, it would be far worse in the long run than accidentally plunging the kingdom into winter ever was.
The most interesting character is by far Elsa, the only one who actually goes through a proper character arc. The other people in the movie largely are the same person at the end as when they’re introduced (one of the trolls even sings that “people don’t really change”). It could be a stronger movie if it focused more on Elsa, but it’d be a darker movie for it and probably too dark to be a children’s movie. They also couldn’t just go for it and jettison the children’s movie aspect, as so much of it relies on the viewer not overanalyzing it thanks to it being a children’s movie.
Anyway, keeping in mind that this is just a fantasy children’s movie, it’s notable that it’s the most business-focused Disney movie yet. The Duke of Weselton is obsessed with international trade, shopkeeper Oaken gives a quick lesson on supply and demand, and concern for Kristoff’s ice business is a running theme throughout.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
On that note, the ending of the movie is actually pretty ominous from a business perspective.
Elsa’s unintentional winter spell in the middle of summer would have disrupted the economy of Arendelle considerably. What little crops there are in the area would have largely died from the deep freeze, some of the livestock could have died too from exposure thanks to farmers being caught off guard, the frozen fjord would be awful for the fishing industry, and the logging of the area certainly would be set back a bit. From that alone, Arendelle is probably headed for at least a sharp recession as a result of the movie’s events. We know from the Year Without a Summer that winter-like conditions in the summer would be devastating to an early-to-mid 1800s European state like Arendelle.
However, that’s not all. Just before the end, Elsa issues a decree that Arendelle will no longer do business with Weselton, it’s largest trading partner. That’s understandable given that the Duke of Weselton sent people to assassinate her, and this preindustrial fantasy land wouldn’t have some kind of UN to settle the dispute.
It’s also the last thing the kingdom needs. With the local agriculture and industry severely stunted, Arendelle needs trade now more than ever. Cutting off relations with the kingdom’s largest trading partner will only make the recession that much deeper.
Some of the downturn might get offset by an increase of government spending. When the king shut off the castle from outsiders to protect Elsa early on, he reduced the staff. With Elsa’s new open-gate policy, government employment will rise. There also will be more social functions, of which there’s been one (the coronation) in the last 10-15 years, which will lead to more spending in the local area. The royal treasury likely can sustain this deficit spending for a while since it would have built up considerably during the decade plus of reduced staff and few expenditures. Having a few more castle servants and some fancy parties wouldn’t come close to offsetting the entire consequences of the week of winter, though.
Elsa would need to act quickly to repair the situation. She would need to send someone, perhaps the regent who ran the kingdom in the three years between her parents’ deaths and her coronation, to find new trading partners. She could also become Europe’s first entrepreneurial monarch. She might be able to bring in tourists from the region’s nobility by doing public demonstrations of her magic powers and setting up tours of her mountain ice palace. She could also travel to nearby kingdoms to create ice art for their special occasions. That money could then go to subsidize the rebuilding of the kingdom’s economy from the damage she unwittingly caused. I don’t know the extent of her powers, which seem considerable, but she might even be able to forestall the year’s coming winter to give her kingdom a chance to produce a few more goods to sell without competition.
Arendelle is probably in a better situation for the long haul with an open and confident monarch ruling it, but in the short run, there will be a struggle to fight off famine. For a seemingly happy movie that is actually the darkest Disney animated feature yet, a seemingly happy ending that is actually quite foreboding is only appropriate.
Addendum
This all assumes that Elsa doesn’t just create automatons from ice and snow to perform all economic tasks. They could work all hours of the day and dramatically expand Arendelle’s economy.
They also would put everyone out of work, creating a one of those utopias where everyone can live a life of leisure that philosophers once dreamed of. That would work, to whatever extent it can given that people generally prefer to work rather than do nothing all day, until Elsa dies. Presumably all of the automatons would then cease to function.
At that point, Arendelle would plunge into a dystopian situation where the entire infrastructure of the economy fell apart all at once. It would be a long, slow slog out of the depression as the populace would have lost all experience with actually running agriculture and industry.
It would be tempting to go the automaton route given the immediate economic crisis that is coming to the land not long after the credits roll. However if Elsa allowed her automatons to take over the whole economy, it would be far worse in the long run than accidentally plunging the kingdom into winter ever was.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
Apple Is One Rule Away From Ruling Console Gaming
Apple is very, very close to being able to just about kill off Ninendo and Sony's gaming console businesses and perhaps Microsoft's too if the media features of the Xbox One don't work as well as advertised. Only one very Apple-y rule will keep it from doing so.
Let's start with something that leaked a while ago (I'm going off the leak so I don't break the Apple Developer NDA). iOS 7 will support game controllers. Some legit images leaked out a while back, so you can see what they're planning. There are going to be three kinds of controllers. One cradles phone-sized iOS devices and has a limited button set: ABXY, two shoulders, a D-pad, and pause. The next cradles a phone-sized device and adds two analog sticks and two more shoulder buttons. The third kind is standalone (the diagram of which appears to have been inspired by the Wii Classic Controller), and it has the same, larger button set as the second one. The standalone controller image shows that up to four controllers can be used at once.
The implications for single-use handheld gaming devices are dire. The Nintendo DS and PlayStation Vita can provide a much wider variety of gaming options than touchscreen phones and tablets can thanks to having buttons. With these cradle controllers, now iOS devices can provide those experiences too on top of everything else they do. Well, they would if not for that rule I mentioned. But that's not all.
Thanks to AirPlay, you will be able to play a traditional controller-based game on iOS while sitting on your couch with the video on the TV. In fact, this setup is like the Wii U, only reversed. The Wii U has a smart box hooked up to the TV with a dumb tablet you hold in your hand:
Whereas Apple's setup has a smart tablet in your hand that connects to a dumb box hooked up to the TV:
The killer aspect for Apple is pricing. The Wii U, even after its upcoming discount, will go for $299, and it's the least expensive console of the new generation. A lot of people will already have iOS devices, or at least they can justify getting one because they can use it for far more than just games. A person who has an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad can buy into Apple's living room gaming setup for a $99 AppleTV and whatever one controller costs. Even if it's $35 or $40 like a traditional console controller, the combined price still less than half of the Wii U.
There is an immense advantage to buying into this kind of gaming setup. The hardware on iOS devices gets revised about every year. You won't have to wait six to eight years for the Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft to provide updated specs. Plus, the App Store model makes it far easier for games to get to you and opens up the door for a wealth of third party developers who might never get something on a Wii U, Xbox, or PlayStation due to their barriers. And, again, the console part of it would be "free" to someone already committed to buying iDevices every couple of years anyway for their multitude of non-gaming functions.
Now, the red flag. The fact that there are two different button sets is a bit worrisome for fragmentation reasons, but that's not it. It's that Apple has made a rule that says controllers must be optional. An iOS game must be designed for touch and motion first with the controller only being a bonus add-on.
I know why Apple did this. It's to maintain simplicity for the store. It's also to remove a potential support headache. Apple doesn't want people calling them up asking for refunds when they buy a game and they find out they have to buy a controller in order to play it. Having a game in the App Store that requires a controller just wouldn't do at all.
It also means that Apple won't kill off the other game console makers as quickly as it could have. Think about some traditional handheld or living room console titles, anywhere from Zelda to Smash Bros. to Madden to Halo. They require a boatload of buttons for a reason. Making a game that functions well both with the limitations of touch input and the freedom of buttons is going to be tough, and the categories of games that require controllers will still not be feasible to provide for iOS.
Apple should know this. It knows well the difference between touch input and bucket-o-buttons input. It's why it keeps iOS and OS X separate. Any gamer can tell you that this rule is a bad idea, and people inside Apple should be able to tell you that too.
As far as the living room goes, this strategy makes total sense for Apple. It can make a limited play for living room gaming while not disrupting its plans for the AppleTV. It doesn't have to turn the AppleTV into a full fledged gaming console on top of everything else; an iDevice, a controller, and AirPlay will cover that use case just fine. It can keep selling $99 hockey pucks to people who have no interest in gaming, which makes far more sense as a living room strategy than Microsoft's apparent gambit of wanting to sell $500 Xbox Ones to people who don't play games.
Between controller support and Sprite Kit in iOS 7 and Mavericks, Apple is making a real effort at competing in games this fall. This one rule that controllers must be optional keeps it from being able to take over everything. Between apps that run on either iPhones or iPads but not both and iBooks Author creations that only work on iPads, Apple already has things in its stores that don't work everywhere. I would have thought that a simple modal dialog box saying something like "This game requires a separate controller. Do you want to buy?" might be enough to allow them to have apps that require controllers, but the powers that be chose not to go that route.
As long as that rule exists, there still is room for dedicated gaming hardware. We'll see how long that rule lasts.
Let's start with something that leaked a while ago (I'm going off the leak so I don't break the Apple Developer NDA). iOS 7 will support game controllers. Some legit images leaked out a while back, so you can see what they're planning. There are going to be three kinds of controllers. One cradles phone-sized iOS devices and has a limited button set: ABXY, two shoulders, a D-pad, and pause. The next cradles a phone-sized device and adds two analog sticks and two more shoulder buttons. The third kind is standalone (the diagram of which appears to have been inspired by the Wii Classic Controller), and it has the same, larger button set as the second one. The standalone controller image shows that up to four controllers can be used at once.
The implications for single-use handheld gaming devices are dire. The Nintendo DS and PlayStation Vita can provide a much wider variety of gaming options than touchscreen phones and tablets can thanks to having buttons. With these cradle controllers, now iOS devices can provide those experiences too on top of everything else they do. Well, they would if not for that rule I mentioned. But that's not all.
Thanks to AirPlay, you will be able to play a traditional controller-based game on iOS while sitting on your couch with the video on the TV. In fact, this setup is like the Wii U, only reversed. The Wii U has a smart box hooked up to the TV with a dumb tablet you hold in your hand:
Whereas Apple's setup has a smart tablet in your hand that connects to a dumb box hooked up to the TV:
The killer aspect for Apple is pricing. The Wii U, even after its upcoming discount, will go for $299, and it's the least expensive console of the new generation. A lot of people will already have iOS devices, or at least they can justify getting one because they can use it for far more than just games. A person who has an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad can buy into Apple's living room gaming setup for a $99 AppleTV and whatever one controller costs. Even if it's $35 or $40 like a traditional console controller, the combined price still less than half of the Wii U.
There is an immense advantage to buying into this kind of gaming setup. The hardware on iOS devices gets revised about every year. You won't have to wait six to eight years for the Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft to provide updated specs. Plus, the App Store model makes it far easier for games to get to you and opens up the door for a wealth of third party developers who might never get something on a Wii U, Xbox, or PlayStation due to their barriers. And, again, the console part of it would be "free" to someone already committed to buying iDevices every couple of years anyway for their multitude of non-gaming functions.
Now, the red flag. The fact that there are two different button sets is a bit worrisome for fragmentation reasons, but that's not it. It's that Apple has made a rule that says controllers must be optional. An iOS game must be designed for touch and motion first with the controller only being a bonus add-on.
I know why Apple did this. It's to maintain simplicity for the store. It's also to remove a potential support headache. Apple doesn't want people calling them up asking for refunds when they buy a game and they find out they have to buy a controller in order to play it. Having a game in the App Store that requires a controller just wouldn't do at all.
It also means that Apple won't kill off the other game console makers as quickly as it could have. Think about some traditional handheld or living room console titles, anywhere from Zelda to Smash Bros. to Madden to Halo. They require a boatload of buttons for a reason. Making a game that functions well both with the limitations of touch input and the freedom of buttons is going to be tough, and the categories of games that require controllers will still not be feasible to provide for iOS.
Apple should know this. It knows well the difference between touch input and bucket-o-buttons input. It's why it keeps iOS and OS X separate. Any gamer can tell you that this rule is a bad idea, and people inside Apple should be able to tell you that too.
As far as the living room goes, this strategy makes total sense for Apple. It can make a limited play for living room gaming while not disrupting its plans for the AppleTV. It doesn't have to turn the AppleTV into a full fledged gaming console on top of everything else; an iDevice, a controller, and AirPlay will cover that use case just fine. It can keep selling $99 hockey pucks to people who have no interest in gaming, which makes far more sense as a living room strategy than Microsoft's apparent gambit of wanting to sell $500 Xbox Ones to people who don't play games.
Between controller support and Sprite Kit in iOS 7 and Mavericks, Apple is making a real effort at competing in games this fall. This one rule that controllers must be optional keeps it from being able to take over everything. Between apps that run on either iPhones or iPads but not both and iBooks Author creations that only work on iPads, Apple already has things in its stores that don't work everywhere. I would have thought that a simple modal dialog box saying something like "This game requires a separate controller. Do you want to buy?" might be enough to allow them to have apps that require controllers, but the powers that be chose not to go that route.
As long as that rule exists, there still is room for dedicated gaming hardware. We'll see how long that rule lasts.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
A Few Good Years Have Passed
Last night, my wife and I watched the 1992 classic A Few Good Men. I was of course familiar with the famous courtroom scenes, but it's actually the first time I had seen it all the way through. My wife hadn't seen it either, but she is in the Navy now, so I figured she'd enjoy it for that reason. Her favorite line actually didn't end up being any of the famous ones. Rather, it was Kevin Pollack's Lieutenant Weinberg wryly stating that, "No one likes the whites". This is true; no one she knows likes the Navy's dress white uniforms. It had some inaccuracies that bugged her though, not the least being Tom Cruise's Lieutenant Kaffee treating Demi Moore's Lieutenant Commander Galloway as though he outranked her throughout.
Anyway, I had recorded it off of AMC, and it had little fact boxes popping up at the bottom periodically. It wasn't until one of those boxes appeared some time into it that it really clicked for me why Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup was so intense about being on the wall and so forth. He was the leader at the Guantanamo Bay base, and at the time that Aaron Sorkin wrote the play on which the movie was based, the Cold War was still going on. Not that Cuba is the United States' friend now or anything, but the implications of the island being Communist were far more important then than now.
I was born three years before Sorkin's play first hit the stage. I can remember old maps from elementary school that said USSR and can recall seeing fallout shelter signage here and there, but I have no recollection of the Cold War and its existential threat to the US. I was four when the Berlin Wall fell; I was six when the Soviet Union dissolved. Even if I had learned about Russian nukes being pointed at my country at the time, I wasn't old enough to really understand the implications.
For my generation, Guantanamo Bay has a very different connotation. It's not an outpost of democracy on the edge of Communist territory; it's a holding cell for War on Terror suspects. The incident that started everything for the plot in A Few Good Men was a Marine shooting a single bullet outward across the fence unprovoked. While that's never something you want to see happen, it probably would be more or less a nonevent these days beyond whatever punishment a Marine gets for unnecessarily discharging a weapon. It wouldn't be an event that could potentially cost lives. Cuba isn't a battlefield anymore. Guantanamo is a very different part of the wall that keeps America safe now.
The climactic scene with Kaffee haranguing Jessup on the stand is still as intense as ever, but it has lost a little something because of the way the film takes for granted that the audience understands the Cold War subtext of the film. I am pretty well versed in history and probably would have put it all together eventually, but it's not something that people in the Millennial generation and beyond will get instinctively. I certainly understand it in an intellectual sense, but I don't feel it viscerally. A young person could make it through the whole thing and think that Jessup is just really cranky because he thinks every member of the military who isn't in an office in D.C. plays a part in guarding the wall that protects the homeland. The latent yet very specific threat of nuclear war will be lost in that scenario.
If Hollywood ever decides to remake this film, it will definitely hammer (probably excessively so) on that element of it during the first couple of acts. The future Jessup will throw around terms like "the Red Menace" to make sure it's clear (crystal, even) that the stakes here are related to the Cold War. For him and his generation, "Cuba" probably primarily conjures feelings surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Bay of Pigs; for me, it conjures Elian Gonzalez well before any of JFK's incidents down there. It's still a really good movie if you don't have that in the forefront of your mind, but it's not as good as it can be without it.
One of the other popup fact boxes said that Rob Reiner had hoped to make A Few Good Men be a timeless movie and that, aside from Cruise's civilian wardrobe, it is. We must add one other caveat besides loud shirts: it's timeless except for its inherent assumption that Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will always have Cold War connotations for its audience. It certainly does not for most anyone younger than 30, and it might not for those older than that anymore either given its prominence in the last decade's news cycle.
To watch A Few Good Men again:
Anyway, I had recorded it off of AMC, and it had little fact boxes popping up at the bottom periodically. It wasn't until one of those boxes appeared some time into it that it really clicked for me why Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup was so intense about being on the wall and so forth. He was the leader at the Guantanamo Bay base, and at the time that Aaron Sorkin wrote the play on which the movie was based, the Cold War was still going on. Not that Cuba is the United States' friend now or anything, but the implications of the island being Communist were far more important then than now.
I was born three years before Sorkin's play first hit the stage. I can remember old maps from elementary school that said USSR and can recall seeing fallout shelter signage here and there, but I have no recollection of the Cold War and its existential threat to the US. I was four when the Berlin Wall fell; I was six when the Soviet Union dissolved. Even if I had learned about Russian nukes being pointed at my country at the time, I wasn't old enough to really understand the implications.
For my generation, Guantanamo Bay has a very different connotation. It's not an outpost of democracy on the edge of Communist territory; it's a holding cell for War on Terror suspects. The incident that started everything for the plot in A Few Good Men was a Marine shooting a single bullet outward across the fence unprovoked. While that's never something you want to see happen, it probably would be more or less a nonevent these days beyond whatever punishment a Marine gets for unnecessarily discharging a weapon. It wouldn't be an event that could potentially cost lives. Cuba isn't a battlefield anymore. Guantanamo is a very different part of the wall that keeps America safe now.
The climactic scene with Kaffee haranguing Jessup on the stand is still as intense as ever, but it has lost a little something because of the way the film takes for granted that the audience understands the Cold War subtext of the film. I am pretty well versed in history and probably would have put it all together eventually, but it's not something that people in the Millennial generation and beyond will get instinctively. I certainly understand it in an intellectual sense, but I don't feel it viscerally. A young person could make it through the whole thing and think that Jessup is just really cranky because he thinks every member of the military who isn't in an office in D.C. plays a part in guarding the wall that protects the homeland. The latent yet very specific threat of nuclear war will be lost in that scenario.
If Hollywood ever decides to remake this film, it will definitely hammer (probably excessively so) on that element of it during the first couple of acts. The future Jessup will throw around terms like "the Red Menace" to make sure it's clear (crystal, even) that the stakes here are related to the Cold War. For him and his generation, "Cuba" probably primarily conjures feelings surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Bay of Pigs; for me, it conjures Elian Gonzalez well before any of JFK's incidents down there. It's still a really good movie if you don't have that in the forefront of your mind, but it's not as good as it can be without it.
One of the other popup fact boxes said that Rob Reiner had hoped to make A Few Good Men be a timeless movie and that, aside from Cruise's civilian wardrobe, it is. We must add one other caveat besides loud shirts: it's timeless except for its inherent assumption that Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will always have Cold War connotations for its audience. It certainly does not for most anyone younger than 30, and it might not for those older than that anymore either given its prominence in the last decade's news cycle.
To watch A Few Good Men again:
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Apple Wants iCloud to Be the World's DVR
The Wall Street Journal has been revealing some details about Apple's plans in the television space. Steve Jobs famously said he thought he had "cracked" the problem of television shortly before he passed away last year, and everyone has been trying to figure out what he meant ever since.
The latest report from the WSJ, if true and I'm interpreting it correctly, likely reveals what Jobs thought was the breakthrough:
The vision here is pure Apple. The company identified an area of complexity, in this case managing TV recordings, and plans to offer a simple solution where it simply does it for you. Here, iCloud becomes the world's DVR. There won't be boxes in every individual home making millions of individual recordings of the same programs; there will be one place that "records" the programs (Apple's datacenter) and all of the boxes will stream that copy.
You won't miss a show because you forgot to set up a recording; Apple is recording it for you. You won't miss a show because the DVR filled up; Apple is recording it for you. You won't miss a recording because you're out of free tuners, or because the cable went out, or because a cloud went between you and the satellite. Don't worry. Apple's recording it for you.
Obvious road blocks have to be overcome before this vision of the future can come to pass. For one, the WSJ reports that Apple doesn't have a single deal worked out yet with any content providers or cable providers to make this happen legally. For another, this setup requires a completely reliable Internet connection. If the Internet goes out, you not only have no TV anymore (not a guaranteed problem today) but you can't watch your recordings in the meantime either.
Plus, ISPs aren't going to be happy about a system like this because it would put an enormous strain on their networks. They are already playing around with bandwidth caps, and that's without most people getting their TV through the Internet. Perhaps the new H.265 standard will solve this particular issue, but it's not going to be available for anything until "as soon as 2013" (which probably means later than that, given the choice of weasel words here).
This sounds like a really cool way forward. I have my doubts that we'll see anything like it any time soon because content owners, cable providers, and ISPs are some of the worst companies in the world. Of course, Apple worked things out with cell operators, who are just as bad if not worse, so there is some hope out there.
The latest report from the WSJ, if true and I'm interpreting it correctly, likely reveals what Jobs thought was the breakthrough:
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company proposes giving viewers the ability to start any show at any time through a digital-video recorder that would store TV shows on the Internet. Viewers even could start a show minutes after it has begun.
The vision here is pure Apple. The company identified an area of complexity, in this case managing TV recordings, and plans to offer a simple solution where it simply does it for you. Here, iCloud becomes the world's DVR. There won't be boxes in every individual home making millions of individual recordings of the same programs; there will be one place that "records" the programs (Apple's datacenter) and all of the boxes will stream that copy.
You won't miss a show because you forgot to set up a recording; Apple is recording it for you. You won't miss a show because the DVR filled up; Apple is recording it for you. You won't miss a recording because you're out of free tuners, or because the cable went out, or because a cloud went between you and the satellite. Don't worry. Apple's recording it for you.
Obvious road blocks have to be overcome before this vision of the future can come to pass. For one, the WSJ reports that Apple doesn't have a single deal worked out yet with any content providers or cable providers to make this happen legally. For another, this setup requires a completely reliable Internet connection. If the Internet goes out, you not only have no TV anymore (not a guaranteed problem today) but you can't watch your recordings in the meantime either.
Plus, ISPs aren't going to be happy about a system like this because it would put an enormous strain on their networks. They are already playing around with bandwidth caps, and that's without most people getting their TV through the Internet. Perhaps the new H.265 standard will solve this particular issue, but it's not going to be available for anything until "as soon as 2013" (which probably means later than that, given the choice of weasel words here).
This sounds like a really cool way forward. I have my doubts that we'll see anything like it any time soon because content owners, cable providers, and ISPs are some of the worst companies in the world. Of course, Apple worked things out with cell operators, who are just as bad if not worse, so there is some hope out there.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Paul Ryan Is Mostly Unremarkable
Paul Ryan is the pick as Mitt Romney's vice president. Lots of pixels and ink have been devoted to what that means and how Ryan changes the game (or not, as the case may be).
Ultimately, Ryan isn't that remarkable among Republicans. Look over his record.
He voted for George W. Bush's unfunded tax cuts and his unfunded Medicare Part D expansion. He voted in favor of the unfunded war of choice in Iraq. He voted for TARP and the bailouts, practically begging his colleagues to support the former. When Barack Obama took office, Ryan got religion about deficits and eventually put together his famous series of budgets that cut taxes and spending.
In other words, he is a garden variety politician. Spending by his party's leader is a judicious use of our resources that strikes the right balance, while spending by the other party's leader is wasteful and a burden to future generations. Deficits created by his party aren't worth worrying about, but those racked up by the other party are dangerous. Nothing is new under the sun.
Ryan does shine as a communicator, as he's able to state his cases in a clear and often convincing manner. He will do a better job at advancing his party's ideas than Romney does. However, there's nothing in his record that makes Ryan all that special. He's a Republican who mainly just votes the party line.
Ultimately, Ryan isn't that remarkable among Republicans. Look over his record.
He voted for George W. Bush's unfunded tax cuts and his unfunded Medicare Part D expansion. He voted in favor of the unfunded war of choice in Iraq. He voted for TARP and the bailouts, practically begging his colleagues to support the former. When Barack Obama took office, Ryan got religion about deficits and eventually put together his famous series of budgets that cut taxes and spending.
In other words, he is a garden variety politician. Spending by his party's leader is a judicious use of our resources that strikes the right balance, while spending by the other party's leader is wasteful and a burden to future generations. Deficits created by his party aren't worth worrying about, but those racked up by the other party are dangerous. Nothing is new under the sun.
Ryan does shine as a communicator, as he's able to state his cases in a clear and often convincing manner. He will do a better job at advancing his party's ideas than Romney does. However, there's nothing in his record that makes Ryan all that special. He's a Republican who mainly just votes the party line.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Why Government Austerity Isn't a Good Idea Right Now
The practice of government austerity, defined as the raising of taxes and lowering of spending to improve the government's balance sheet, is not what the United States needs right now. Here's why.
The economy can basically be summed up as the total number of goods and services produced in the country. The measure for that is GDP. At present GDP is growing, but at a very slow rate.
Also at present, private American citizens are deleveraging in aggregate, or paying down their debt loads together. They're doing it at a faster rate than the citizens of many other developed economies with high private debt.
In the economy, one person's spending is another's income and vice versa. The banker who buys a latte at Starbucks helps pay for the barista's salary, while the interest paid on the barista's credit cards helps pay for the banker's salary.
The economy grows from year to year as people produce more (and more valuable) goods and services. Some people spend less than they make and save the rest, while some others spend more than they make. It's not all spendthrifts who do the latter; retirees, for instance, spend more than their incomes as they live off of their retirement savings. An entrepreneur bootstrapping a new business would also be expected to spend more than his or her income.
Under normal circumstances, there will be a good mix of people spending less than they make and spending more than they make. We don't have that now. Far more people are looking to spend less than they make than the opposite as they pay down their debts and/or increase savings. The large number of people who are behind or underwater on mortgages are a significant part of those net savers. Their preference will be to pay down that debt no matter how alluring increased consumption becomes. This state of affairs has become known as a balance sheet recession.
Due to the deleveraging, economic activity in the private sector is lower than it otherwise would be. Due to high unemployment, it's really lower than it otherwise would be. Only two things could compensate for it. One is running a trade surplus, but the country hasn't done than since the 1960s.
The other is if the government steps in and spends more than it takes in by running a deficit. It does that already, of course, and has for many years.
Now let's think about government austerity. The government would roll back its economic activity by spending less, and it would further inhibit private sector activity by raising taxes. Some people claim that an austerity program would help the economy by unleashing a flood of economic activity currently held back by people worried about a potential sovereign debt crisis in America. I don't see it.
If regular people were only just saving money, I might believe that. They're not. They're paying down debts, and they will continue to do so until their overall level of debt is sustainable. Most regular people also pay no attention to current events, have no idea what the state of the government's debt is other than "it's big", and do not think about future tax rates when planning purchases.
Cutting back government economic activity right now will just hurt the economy. That will just put more people out of work, thereby slowing economic growth. Growth is already slow right now; cutting back on government spending might cause the economy to shrink as it has in some European countries. Austerity in a bad economy is self-defeating in that way. If the economy shrinks, the government collects fewer taxes and can't reduce its deficits as quickly as it had intended to (or at all, if it's a severe case).
The government can try to jump start the economy by doing more spending, but it must do it smartly. Passing out tax rebate checks probably won't get the job done, as many of them will just go to paying off debt. That might bring the ultimate end of the deleveraging cycle a tiny bit closer, but $400 or $800 is peanuts compared to a mortgage.
It'd be better to use it to directly employ people and invest. Have state and local governments re-hire teachers, police officers, and firemen who have been laid off. The government could fix the nation's infrastructure and put construction workers back to work, something that will benefit everyone. High unemployment takes a toll, and long term unemployment takes an even larger one.
I am still working to understand economics better and figure out what is the best way forward. I'm not sure of a lot of things, but that austerity would be bad for the US is one thing I'm certain of.
The economy can basically be summed up as the total number of goods and services produced in the country. The measure for that is GDP. At present GDP is growing, but at a very slow rate.
Also at present, private American citizens are deleveraging in aggregate, or paying down their debt loads together. They're doing it at a faster rate than the citizens of many other developed economies with high private debt.
In the economy, one person's spending is another's income and vice versa. The banker who buys a latte at Starbucks helps pay for the barista's salary, while the interest paid on the barista's credit cards helps pay for the banker's salary.
The economy grows from year to year as people produce more (and more valuable) goods and services. Some people spend less than they make and save the rest, while some others spend more than they make. It's not all spendthrifts who do the latter; retirees, for instance, spend more than their incomes as they live off of their retirement savings. An entrepreneur bootstrapping a new business would also be expected to spend more than his or her income.
Under normal circumstances, there will be a good mix of people spending less than they make and spending more than they make. We don't have that now. Far more people are looking to spend less than they make than the opposite as they pay down their debts and/or increase savings. The large number of people who are behind or underwater on mortgages are a significant part of those net savers. Their preference will be to pay down that debt no matter how alluring increased consumption becomes. This state of affairs has become known as a balance sheet recession.
Due to the deleveraging, economic activity in the private sector is lower than it otherwise would be. Due to high unemployment, it's really lower than it otherwise would be. Only two things could compensate for it. One is running a trade surplus, but the country hasn't done than since the 1960s.
The other is if the government steps in and spends more than it takes in by running a deficit. It does that already, of course, and has for many years.
Now let's think about government austerity. The government would roll back its economic activity by spending less, and it would further inhibit private sector activity by raising taxes. Some people claim that an austerity program would help the economy by unleashing a flood of economic activity currently held back by people worried about a potential sovereign debt crisis in America. I don't see it.
If regular people were only just saving money, I might believe that. They're not. They're paying down debts, and they will continue to do so until their overall level of debt is sustainable. Most regular people also pay no attention to current events, have no idea what the state of the government's debt is other than "it's big", and do not think about future tax rates when planning purchases.
Cutting back government economic activity right now will just hurt the economy. That will just put more people out of work, thereby slowing economic growth. Growth is already slow right now; cutting back on government spending might cause the economy to shrink as it has in some European countries. Austerity in a bad economy is self-defeating in that way. If the economy shrinks, the government collects fewer taxes and can't reduce its deficits as quickly as it had intended to (or at all, if it's a severe case).
The government can try to jump start the economy by doing more spending, but it must do it smartly. Passing out tax rebate checks probably won't get the job done, as many of them will just go to paying off debt. That might bring the ultimate end of the deleveraging cycle a tiny bit closer, but $400 or $800 is peanuts compared to a mortgage.
It'd be better to use it to directly employ people and invest. Have state and local governments re-hire teachers, police officers, and firemen who have been laid off. The government could fix the nation's infrastructure and put construction workers back to work, something that will benefit everyone. High unemployment takes a toll, and long term unemployment takes an even larger one.
I am still working to understand economics better and figure out what is the best way forward. I'm not sure of a lot of things, but that austerity would be bad for the US is one thing I'm certain of.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Does High Debt-to-GDP Ratio Inhibit Growth?
A Twitter friend of mine sent me a paper by Reinhart, Reinhart, and Rogoff titled "Debt Overhangs: Past and Present". It presents evidence that periods in advanced economies where the public debt/GDP ratio is above 90% for five or more years are marked by lower growth than periods where the public debt/GDP ratio is lower. The implication, if not the conclusion, is that a large debt overhang can cause GDP growth to be lower than it otherwise should be.
The introduction of the paper reveals the question that its trying to answer: if interest rates for a high debt/GDP economy are low, should the government take it as a sign that it should not worry about the debt and use borrowed money to try to stimulate the economy? The authors seem to argue that the lower growth rate during high debt/GDP periods means that no, that isn't the right approach to take.
The debt-to-GDP ratio has two factors: debt and GDP. For public debt to go above the 90% threshold, either debt had to rise greatly versus GDP, GDP had to fall greatly versus the debt load, or both. It's interesting to see how that plays out with the paper's core data.
The data it presents covers the past 200 years for today's advanced economies. Page 13 of the paper is where the table of it begins. If you look at each period of at least 90% debt-to-GDP ratio, you'll see that nearly all coincide with at least one of four factors: war, financial crisis, the Great Depression, and international recessions. There are two exceptions. One is when Spain lost the last of its colonies. The other is Greece in the 1800s, and that country, as best as I understand it, wasn't really an advanced economy during that time.
War causes debt to rise as governments mobilize, and it can negatively affect GDP quite a bit if its on your own soil. A financial crisis will not only hit GDP but also cause a government to start running deficits (or much larger deficits) as tax revenues fall and social safety net spending rises. The Great Depression lowered GDP for everyone, and international recessions do the same thing on a smaller scale.
The paper doesn't discuss the possibility that both the high debt/GDP ratio and the sustained period of low growth might have been caused by some other element (war, financial crisis, etc.), which would mean that the solution to slow growth might not have anything to do with reducing the public debt load. It devotes only two sentences to this kind of question of causality:
It's probably not due to the regular ups and downs associated with the business cycle. However I don't think that war, severe banking panics, equity market collapses, the popping of enormous asset bubbles, or things of that nature are part of the regular business cycle either.
Two of the authors, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, wrote a Bloomberg editorial in 2011 well before this paper was published but along the same lines. They've been working on this issue for years. They do at least admit there that, "Anyone familiar with doing empirical research understands that vulnerability to crises and anemic growth seldom depends on a single factor such as public debt."
In both that editorial and especially the paper, they talk about how the overhang of private debt can be a big problem too. That's definitely for sure. If you're a believer in the idea that we're in a balance sheet recession, you're definitely on board with private debt being a problem. Individuals deleveraging will consume and invest less, depressing economic growth rates.
But how would high public debt take a toll on the economy? One way is if the government also deleverages by cutting spending and/or raising tax revenue to pay down the debt. That certainly could be problematic, but it hasn't been so far in the US. The federal government has not done anything substantial to address its deficits and debt loads. State and local governments have had to though, and it has resulted in a large decrease in the public sector workforce. That is keeping unemployment high and is depressing the growth rate for sure.
The other way is if the private sector savings rate rises due to fears of higher taxes to pay down that debt in the future. I really doubt that's a big factor. Only 61.7% of voting age people voted in the 2008 election, and that was the highest turnout since 1968. A 2007 study showed that only 35% of Americans nationwide qualify for a "high" level of knowledge of current affairs. Furthermore, 43% of US households live paycheck-to-paycheck. They can't afford to adjust their spending based on decades-out tax expectations even if they wanted to. The likelihood that a significant number of people consider future taxation in their purchasing decisions is low.
Finally, I used FRED data to run a correlation between the federal debt/GDP ratio and the personal savings rate. The range is since 1966, the maximum I could do. It came out to -0.743, meaning that as the debt/GDP ratio has risen, the savings rate has fallen. Running a regression yields a microscopic p-value, meaning that we can reject the premise that the two things are related. If lots of people consider the national debt load when deciding their savings rate, they certainly aren't acting on it or at least assuming that they need to tighten up in the face of future taxes for debt payments.
What I was really looking for from the paper was some kind of call to action or policy recommendation. It doesn't contain one other than "don't impose austerity, but don't leave the long term debt question unanswered, and do try to get it below 90% of GDP as soon as possible". That's not all that useful, although even getting the first part correct is somehow difficult for world governments right now.
Ultimately I don't think this paper leads to a real policy recommendation because it doesn't look at all about how countries left periods of 90% debt/GDP or higher. Did higher growth occur before or after the end of the period? Did the countries leave the periods more due to growth or focus on paying down the debt? They don't say. And anyway, the most important question is not what caused the nations' debt loads to fall but what ignited growth. Again, they don't say.
The closest they get to answering the exit strategy for a country (other than noting defaults) is mentioning that Belgium's 1920-26 period of high debt was associated with a rebuilding boom after WWI. It's implied that the country grew out of its high debt problem. So does that then mean that countries should embark on similar build-to-grow campaigns (such as massive infrastructure investments, perhaps) to solve the problem? They don't say. The UK was able to grow quite well from 1830-68 with far higher debt than the US has now thanks to being the largest and most powerful country in the world. Might the US's similar status allow it to do the same, or are the situations too different to be comparable? They don't say.
The correlation between high public debt/GDP ratios and slower growth than normal is compelling, but as always, correlation doesn't imply causation. The Great Depression caused 90% debt/GDP or more in some countries, but it didn't in the US and a few other nations. They languished for well over a decade with low growth without high debt/GDP causing it. That as much as anything proves that a nation can have an extended period of low growth without debt/GDP over over 90% as the cause. Without that causal link, the idea that this paper's central thesis offers any universally applicable practical advice disappears.
It's certainly possible that low interest rates on US debt are not a green light to borrow more to try to stimulate the economy, but I didn't really get that out of this paper.
The introduction of the paper reveals the question that its trying to answer: if interest rates for a high debt/GDP economy are low, should the government take it as a sign that it should not worry about the debt and use borrowed money to try to stimulate the economy? The authors seem to argue that the lower growth rate during high debt/GDP periods means that no, that isn't the right approach to take.
The debt-to-GDP ratio has two factors: debt and GDP. For public debt to go above the 90% threshold, either debt had to rise greatly versus GDP, GDP had to fall greatly versus the debt load, or both. It's interesting to see how that plays out with the paper's core data.
The data it presents covers the past 200 years for today's advanced economies. Page 13 of the paper is where the table of it begins. If you look at each period of at least 90% debt-to-GDP ratio, you'll see that nearly all coincide with at least one of four factors: war, financial crisis, the Great Depression, and international recessions. There are two exceptions. One is when Spain lost the last of its colonies. The other is Greece in the 1800s, and that country, as best as I understand it, wasn't really an advanced economy during that time.
War causes debt to rise as governments mobilize, and it can negatively affect GDP quite a bit if its on your own soil. A financial crisis will not only hit GDP but also cause a government to start running deficits (or much larger deficits) as tax revenues fall and social safety net spending rises. The Great Depression lowered GDP for everyone, and international recessions do the same thing on a smaller scale.
The paper doesn't discuss the possibility that both the high debt/GDP ratio and the sustained period of low growth might have been caused by some other element (war, financial crisis, etc.), which would mean that the solution to slow growth might not have anything to do with reducing the public debt load. It devotes only two sentences to this kind of question of causality:
Another line of reasoning for dismissing concerns about public debt and growth is the view the causality mostly runs from growth to debt. The multi-decade long duration of past public debt overhang episodes suggests that at very least, the association is not due to recessions at business cycle frequencies.
It's probably not due to the regular ups and downs associated with the business cycle. However I don't think that war, severe banking panics, equity market collapses, the popping of enormous asset bubbles, or things of that nature are part of the regular business cycle either.
Two of the authors, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, wrote a Bloomberg editorial in 2011 well before this paper was published but along the same lines. They've been working on this issue for years. They do at least admit there that, "Anyone familiar with doing empirical research understands that vulnerability to crises and anemic growth seldom depends on a single factor such as public debt."
In both that editorial and especially the paper, they talk about how the overhang of private debt can be a big problem too. That's definitely for sure. If you're a believer in the idea that we're in a balance sheet recession, you're definitely on board with private debt being a problem. Individuals deleveraging will consume and invest less, depressing economic growth rates.
But how would high public debt take a toll on the economy? One way is if the government also deleverages by cutting spending and/or raising tax revenue to pay down the debt. That certainly could be problematic, but it hasn't been so far in the US. The federal government has not done anything substantial to address its deficits and debt loads. State and local governments have had to though, and it has resulted in a large decrease in the public sector workforce. That is keeping unemployment high and is depressing the growth rate for sure.
The other way is if the private sector savings rate rises due to fears of higher taxes to pay down that debt in the future. I really doubt that's a big factor. Only 61.7% of voting age people voted in the 2008 election, and that was the highest turnout since 1968. A 2007 study showed that only 35% of Americans nationwide qualify for a "high" level of knowledge of current affairs. Furthermore, 43% of US households live paycheck-to-paycheck. They can't afford to adjust their spending based on decades-out tax expectations even if they wanted to. The likelihood that a significant number of people consider future taxation in their purchasing decisions is low.
Finally, I used FRED data to run a correlation between the federal debt/GDP ratio and the personal savings rate. The range is since 1966, the maximum I could do. It came out to -0.743, meaning that as the debt/GDP ratio has risen, the savings rate has fallen. Running a regression yields a microscopic p-value, meaning that we can reject the premise that the two things are related. If lots of people consider the national debt load when deciding their savings rate, they certainly aren't acting on it or at least assuming that they need to tighten up in the face of future taxes for debt payments.
What I was really looking for from the paper was some kind of call to action or policy recommendation. It doesn't contain one other than "don't impose austerity, but don't leave the long term debt question unanswered, and do try to get it below 90% of GDP as soon as possible". That's not all that useful, although even getting the first part correct is somehow difficult for world governments right now.
Ultimately I don't think this paper leads to a real policy recommendation because it doesn't look at all about how countries left periods of 90% debt/GDP or higher. Did higher growth occur before or after the end of the period? Did the countries leave the periods more due to growth or focus on paying down the debt? They don't say. And anyway, the most important question is not what caused the nations' debt loads to fall but what ignited growth. Again, they don't say.
The closest they get to answering the exit strategy for a country (other than noting defaults) is mentioning that Belgium's 1920-26 period of high debt was associated with a rebuilding boom after WWI. It's implied that the country grew out of its high debt problem. So does that then mean that countries should embark on similar build-to-grow campaigns (such as massive infrastructure investments, perhaps) to solve the problem? They don't say. The UK was able to grow quite well from 1830-68 with far higher debt than the US has now thanks to being the largest and most powerful country in the world. Might the US's similar status allow it to do the same, or are the situations too different to be comparable? They don't say.
The correlation between high public debt/GDP ratios and slower growth than normal is compelling, but as always, correlation doesn't imply causation. The Great Depression caused 90% debt/GDP or more in some countries, but it didn't in the US and a few other nations. They languished for well over a decade with low growth without high debt/GDP causing it. That as much as anything proves that a nation can have an extended period of low growth without debt/GDP over over 90% as the cause. Without that causal link, the idea that this paper's central thesis offers any universally applicable practical advice disappears.
It's certainly possible that low interest rates on US debt are not a green light to borrow more to try to stimulate the economy, but I didn't really get that out of this paper.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Two Charts That Illustrate Why Unemployment Is So High Still
The answer to why the employment part of the recovery has been so slow is a very simple one. I'll use two charts to show why: private sector employment and public sector employment. The data is seasonally adjusted and comes from FRED, and the public sector figures have temporary census workers removed (because they're just that: temporary) thanks to data published by Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University.
First up, the private sector:
Click the image to make it bigger. The X-axis is months after the official end of the recession.
Compared to the last two recessions, the rate of job growth from the official end of the recession (June 2009) is actually doing OK. The public sector is by no means "fine", as it lost nearly 8.9 million jobs from its peak of employment (January '08) to its trough (February '10) and it's still about 4.5 million jobs below that peak. That deficit in jobs doesn't even account for the number of jobs needed to keep up with population growth either.
However, its growth is similar to that after the 1990-91 recession, and it's doing better than after the 2001 recession. It would be great if it was growing jobs at a higher rate, but its current rate is not out of the ordinary for a post-recession economy.
Now, the public sector:
There's your problem. Overall public employment has done just about nothing but fall since the end of this recession. The terrible recent jobs numbers can mostly be blamed on the decline of the number of government workers. It's less a federal problem than a state and local problem, but that's your explanation for why unemployment isn't lower.
First up, the private sector:
Click the image to make it bigger. The X-axis is months after the official end of the recession.
Compared to the last two recessions, the rate of job growth from the official end of the recession (June 2009) is actually doing OK. The public sector is by no means "fine", as it lost nearly 8.9 million jobs from its peak of employment (January '08) to its trough (February '10) and it's still about 4.5 million jobs below that peak. That deficit in jobs doesn't even account for the number of jobs needed to keep up with population growth either.
However, its growth is similar to that after the 1990-91 recession, and it's doing better than after the 2001 recession. It would be great if it was growing jobs at a higher rate, but its current rate is not out of the ordinary for a post-recession economy.
Now, the public sector:
There's your problem. Overall public employment has done just about nothing but fall since the end of this recession. The terrible recent jobs numbers can mostly be blamed on the decline of the number of government workers. It's less a federal problem than a state and local problem, but that's your explanation for why unemployment isn't lower.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
What Mitch Hedberg Teaches Us About Tax Rates
The late Mitch Hedberg was one of the best one-liner comics who has ever lived. In this clip, he explains the concept of marginal utility more concisely than anyone I've ever heard attempt it. The first pancake is great, the second pancake is good, but the fifth pancake brings you almost no benefit whatsoever.
What does this have to do with tax rates? Think of dollars instead of pancakes. For someone who doesn't have much in the way of assets or income, each additional dollar that person acquires is of more value to him or her than someone who has lots of assets and income.
Consider Herman Cain's cartoonish 9-9-9 plan. Under it, everyone would pay 9% income tax. Someone making $20,000 per year would pay $1,800 to the federal government, leaving $18,200 left over for everything else. That could be the difference between having a car or not, or having an important medical procedure done or not.
Now think about someone making $200,000 a year. That person would pay $18,000 per year to the federal government, leaving $182,000 left over for everything else. This person may or may not even miss the income tax given the abundance left over depending on how closely that person manages his or her finances. The tax rate for both people is the same, but the amount paid is more precious to the first person than the second.
That's one reason why we have a progressive tax system where the rich pay more than the poor. It goes beyond non-quantifiable things like "fairness". It's better for the rich to pay more because the amount of marginal value they lose with each additional dollar assessed in taxes is much lower than that of people who have much less.
tl;dr crowd, thanks for coming. You're dismissed.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Google's Android Revenue is Still Difficult to Determine
Google develops the Android operating system and gives it away for free as an open source project. Manufacturers have to meet certain standards in order to get the official Google apps like GMail and the Google Play store (formerly Android Marketplace), but those standards don't involve fees.
Google makes money via taking a cut of paid apps and running an advertising platform that developers can use. According to documents that have come out thanks to Oracle's lawsuit against Google, from 2009-11 Android made $543 million for the company that develops it. The Guardian estimates based on the rough numbers of activations Google has released that it comes out to a little over $10 per device. By comparison, Microsoft makes at least $5 per device on 70% over Androids out there thanks to patent royalties.
So is Android a business failure? It's still difficult to say even when you compare that $543 million over three years to the $38 billion of revenue the company brought in during 2011 alone (and consider that it's probably not the full amount of direct revenue anyway).
Google is not like most companies. It doesn't make most of its money by producing products and services and then selling them for more than they cost to make. It is perfectly content to pour money into products that it doesn't charge for so long as it can collect information about users and their habits and sometimes serve ads on them. It then uses that information to tune its advertising algorithms, the real core of the company. Serving up the most relevant ads possible to its users increases the likelihood of people clicking on them, which then maximizes revenue on the ads.
Android is a both an offensive and defensive play for the company. It's offensive in that Google can get information about users to use in its ad algorithms on top of the app and ad income. It's also a defensive play because Google wants to make sure there's a major mobile OS out there that won't shut out its services.
Google bought Android in 2005, well before the iPhone in a time when Windows Mobile was rapidly growing in the smartphone space. Google probably could envision a future where Windows Mobile dominated smartphones like regular Windows did on PCs, and the default search setting on there would be Microsoft's competing search engine. With mobile the future of computing, such a future would hurt Google's growth prospects drastically.
Windows Mobile obviously tanked and Windows Phone 7 is out there to replace it, but Apple is the big rival on mobile now. Apple does use Google Maps in iOS, but that may not last for too much longer. It also uses Google as the default search engine in Mobile Safari, but there's no guarantee that will last. It was even rumored heavily a couple years ago that Bing would replace Google as the search default.
I really wonder how long a play Android is for Google. I really think the company has already shown us what it wants the future of computing to be with Chrome OS: everything is on the web where Google can track users and serve up ads. If everything does become a web page or app, it doesn't matter which hardware or OS you use because Google could still track and serve ads to everyone. That vision can't come to fruition yet because web technologies can't match the functionality or speed of native code yet, so the company must develop Android in the meantime.
In any event, Android may have indirectly provided the company more revenue than was reported in the court documents thanks to information from tracked Android users helping to hone the ad algorithms. It might also have kept the company from losing revenue. RIM's Blackberry would probably be No. 2 behind iOS absent Android and, for instance, the Blackberry Bold I have for work has Bing as the default search provider.
Google is probably content not to include such considerations when it comes to how much it might have to pay to Oracle in royalties for Java patents, but it does go into the consideration for the value proposition of Android to the company. Because Android provides some sense of security for the company's core business in the fast-changing and uncertain mobile computing market, its value to Google cannot be distilled down to a single number.
Google makes money via taking a cut of paid apps and running an advertising platform that developers can use. According to documents that have come out thanks to Oracle's lawsuit against Google, from 2009-11 Android made $543 million for the company that develops it. The Guardian estimates based on the rough numbers of activations Google has released that it comes out to a little over $10 per device. By comparison, Microsoft makes at least $5 per device on 70% over Androids out there thanks to patent royalties.
So is Android a business failure? It's still difficult to say even when you compare that $543 million over three years to the $38 billion of revenue the company brought in during 2011 alone (and consider that it's probably not the full amount of direct revenue anyway).
Google is not like most companies. It doesn't make most of its money by producing products and services and then selling them for more than they cost to make. It is perfectly content to pour money into products that it doesn't charge for so long as it can collect information about users and their habits and sometimes serve ads on them. It then uses that information to tune its advertising algorithms, the real core of the company. Serving up the most relevant ads possible to its users increases the likelihood of people clicking on them, which then maximizes revenue on the ads.
Android is a both an offensive and defensive play for the company. It's offensive in that Google can get information about users to use in its ad algorithms on top of the app and ad income. It's also a defensive play because Google wants to make sure there's a major mobile OS out there that won't shut out its services.
Google bought Android in 2005, well before the iPhone in a time when Windows Mobile was rapidly growing in the smartphone space. Google probably could envision a future where Windows Mobile dominated smartphones like regular Windows did on PCs, and the default search setting on there would be Microsoft's competing search engine. With mobile the future of computing, such a future would hurt Google's growth prospects drastically.
Windows Mobile obviously tanked and Windows Phone 7 is out there to replace it, but Apple is the big rival on mobile now. Apple does use Google Maps in iOS, but that may not last for too much longer. It also uses Google as the default search engine in Mobile Safari, but there's no guarantee that will last. It was even rumored heavily a couple years ago that Bing would replace Google as the search default.
I really wonder how long a play Android is for Google. I really think the company has already shown us what it wants the future of computing to be with Chrome OS: everything is on the web where Google can track users and serve up ads. If everything does become a web page or app, it doesn't matter which hardware or OS you use because Google could still track and serve ads to everyone. That vision can't come to fruition yet because web technologies can't match the functionality or speed of native code yet, so the company must develop Android in the meantime.
In any event, Android may have indirectly provided the company more revenue than was reported in the court documents thanks to information from tracked Android users helping to hone the ad algorithms. It might also have kept the company from losing revenue. RIM's Blackberry would probably be No. 2 behind iOS absent Android and, for instance, the Blackberry Bold I have for work has Bing as the default search provider.
Google is probably content not to include such considerations when it comes to how much it might have to pay to Oracle in royalties for Java patents, but it does go into the consideration for the value proposition of Android to the company. Because Android provides some sense of security for the company's core business in the fast-changing and uncertain mobile computing market, its value to Google cannot be distilled down to a single number.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
A Sign of the Times
I was reading an article on PCMag.com this morning about a comparison of iPad and Android tablets. I noticed something interesting at the bottom of the page:
Let's see, we've got a MacBook Air, the Office for Mac icons, iPhone app recommendations, and the Editor's Choice iPad. I notice a pattern here.
Perhaps these were simply the recommendations because it was an article partially about the iPad, so I went to some others. No matter which articles I went to, from Windows Phone to Google Play to MegaUpload, these were the same article recommendations.
You'll also notice that, at the very top of the page, among standard, black-colored links like "REVIEWS" and "DOWNLOADS" is an attention-grabbing red link that says "APPLE IPAD". Time have really changed for PC Magazine, huh?
Let's see, we've got a MacBook Air, the Office for Mac icons, iPhone app recommendations, and the Editor's Choice iPad. I notice a pattern here.
Perhaps these were simply the recommendations because it was an article partially about the iPad, so I went to some others. No matter which articles I went to, from Windows Phone to Google Play to MegaUpload, these were the same article recommendations.
You'll also notice that, at the very top of the page, among standard, black-colored links like "REVIEWS" and "DOWNLOADS" is an attention-grabbing red link that says "APPLE IPAD". Time have really changed for PC Magazine, huh?
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Two Reasons a 4.6-Inch iPhone is Unlikely
Reuters has picked up a story about how there supposedly will be a 4.6-inch iPhone coming out this year. It attributes the rumor to a South Korean publication called the Maeli Business Newspaper, which itself heard this from an "unnamed industry source". Nothing like third-hand information to get everyone going on a Thursday.
The kernel of truth to this that makes it worth considering is that the South Korea-based Samsung is the supplier for the third-gen iPad Retina displays. It's a major supplier of components to Apple, so there are, in fact, some people in South Korea who are familiar with Apple's future roadmap.
There are two big reasons why I am very skeptical of this rumor. One is complicated, while the other is simple.
Let's start with the complicated one. The iPhone screen has always used a 3:2 aspect ratio, first at 480x320 and then at 960x640. The reason why Apple used the same ratio when going to a Retina display is that it wouldn't require developers to re-code their apps. Everything would just scale up 2X, and that would do nicely until developers double the size of all of their raster image resources.
Using a different aspect ratio for the screen would have added a lot of headaches for developers as the layout would have to be tweaked. That is part of the fragmentation problem with Android; it's not just about a wide range of OS versions in the wild but also different screen sizes. The screen dimensions matter greatly when all apps are full-screen apps. Apple took the same tack with the third-gen iPad's Retina display, as it is double the resolution of the first two iPads' displays.
When Apple introduced the "Retina display" term for the iPhone 4, it claimed that for the distance that phones are typically held from the eye, the screen must have 300ppi to qualify for the "Retina" title. A 4.6-inch screen at 960x640 computes to about 251ppi. In order for this mythical, monstrous iPhone to keep the Retina designation and maintain the same aspect ratio as previous models, the resolution would have to be doubled again to 1920x1280. That comes out to a ridiculous 502ppi, clearing the "retina" bar with ease.
While the A5X is certainly capable of driving that many pixels, as the third-gen iPad has more than that, I don't know if it could do it in a phone form factor without draining the battery too quickly. Let's imagine that it could though, granting that the larger frame of the phone would give more room for a sufficiently large battery.
App developers would have to put three different sizes of their images in their packages, one for the iPhone 3GS's 480x320 screen, one for the iPhone 4/4S's 960x640 resolution, and yet another for the new 1920x1280 screen. Not only would that be a pain for developers, but each app would take up a lot more room (especially photo-heavy apps). The 3GS and 4 models still on sale only have 8 GB of flash memory on them, and the 4S starts at 16 GB. Storage space is a significant constraint, and forcing apps to have three different sizes of images would be untenable.
So that's the complicated reason. The simple one is that a 4.6-inch phone is simply too big for most people.
The iPhone's 3.5-inch screen wasn't chosen at random. It's roughly the biggest screen you can have where everything can be operated by a single, normal-sized adult hand. It's unlikely that anything will be out of your thumb's reach while holding an iPhone. On 4-inch and larger phones, it becomes difficult to impossible to operate one-handed, in particular being able to access both toolbars at the bottom of apps and the notification drawer at the top of the screen. That is the kind of detail that Apple considers when building these things.
I'll never say never about a larger iPhone in the future, but jumping to a 4.6-inch display this year isn't likely. At the very least, such a jump would probably require that most of the non-Retina display and 8GB iPhone models be cycled out of use, and that won't happen for at least two years following 2012's new iPhone announcement.
For what it's worth, the largest a 960x640 screen can go while still being above 300dpi is 3.8 inches. That might still be small enough to operate in one hand, but it would feel like change for change's sake. Change for change's sake is not the sort of business Apple is in.
The kernel of truth to this that makes it worth considering is that the South Korea-based Samsung is the supplier for the third-gen iPad Retina displays. It's a major supplier of components to Apple, so there are, in fact, some people in South Korea who are familiar with Apple's future roadmap.
There are two big reasons why I am very skeptical of this rumor. One is complicated, while the other is simple.
Let's start with the complicated one. The iPhone screen has always used a 3:2 aspect ratio, first at 480x320 and then at 960x640. The reason why Apple used the same ratio when going to a Retina display is that it wouldn't require developers to re-code their apps. Everything would just scale up 2X, and that would do nicely until developers double the size of all of their raster image resources.
Using a different aspect ratio for the screen would have added a lot of headaches for developers as the layout would have to be tweaked. That is part of the fragmentation problem with Android; it's not just about a wide range of OS versions in the wild but also different screen sizes. The screen dimensions matter greatly when all apps are full-screen apps. Apple took the same tack with the third-gen iPad's Retina display, as it is double the resolution of the first two iPads' displays.
When Apple introduced the "Retina display" term for the iPhone 4, it claimed that for the distance that phones are typically held from the eye, the screen must have 300ppi to qualify for the "Retina" title. A 4.6-inch screen at 960x640 computes to about 251ppi. In order for this mythical, monstrous iPhone to keep the Retina designation and maintain the same aspect ratio as previous models, the resolution would have to be doubled again to 1920x1280. That comes out to a ridiculous 502ppi, clearing the "retina" bar with ease.
While the A5X is certainly capable of driving that many pixels, as the third-gen iPad has more than that, I don't know if it could do it in a phone form factor without draining the battery too quickly. Let's imagine that it could though, granting that the larger frame of the phone would give more room for a sufficiently large battery.
App developers would have to put three different sizes of their images in their packages, one for the iPhone 3GS's 480x320 screen, one for the iPhone 4/4S's 960x640 resolution, and yet another for the new 1920x1280 screen. Not only would that be a pain for developers, but each app would take up a lot more room (especially photo-heavy apps). The 3GS and 4 models still on sale only have 8 GB of flash memory on them, and the 4S starts at 16 GB. Storage space is a significant constraint, and forcing apps to have three different sizes of images would be untenable.
So that's the complicated reason. The simple one is that a 4.6-inch phone is simply too big for most people.
The iPhone's 3.5-inch screen wasn't chosen at random. It's roughly the biggest screen you can have where everything can be operated by a single, normal-sized adult hand. It's unlikely that anything will be out of your thumb's reach while holding an iPhone. On 4-inch and larger phones, it becomes difficult to impossible to operate one-handed, in particular being able to access both toolbars at the bottom of apps and the notification drawer at the top of the screen. That is the kind of detail that Apple considers when building these things.
I'll never say never about a larger iPhone in the future, but jumping to a 4.6-inch display this year isn't likely. At the very least, such a jump would probably require that most of the non-Retina display and 8GB iPhone models be cycled out of use, and that won't happen for at least two years following 2012's new iPhone announcement.
For what it's worth, the largest a 960x640 screen can go while still being above 300dpi is 3.8 inches. That might still be small enough to operate in one hand, but it would feel like change for change's sake. Change for change's sake is not the sort of business Apple is in.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Apple's Dividend and Its Future Opportunities
It's becoming clearer and clearer over time that for an outlet to have proper coverage of Apple as a company, it must assign someone to focus almost if not entirely exclusively on the firm. Apple has become an edge case where normal analytical rules either don't apply or require detailed knowledge to be applied properly.
For instance, consider this article about Apple's newly-announced dividend and stock buy-back program that was the biggest headline on Yahoo! Finance today. The main analysis comes from a "senior stock analyst" from Morningstar named Michael Holt. He's merely quoted as noting that Apple's cash (and cash equivalents) hoard had gotten to the "definitely excessive" figure of $100 billion and that the company needed to do something about that. A question I would ask is this: if $100 billion is excessive, what is $122 billion?
Apple added $38 billion in cash during calendar year 2011, including $16 billion in 2011's holiday quarter alone. The dividend and stock buy-back program will cost the company roughly $13.21 billion per year. If Apple's cash growth continues at 2011's pace, and it'll likely speed up as the company's sales continue to grow, Apple will finish 2012 with about $122 billion in cash. It had about $97.6 billion at the end of 2011, and adding another $38 billion minus the dividend and buy-back costs gets you to around $122 billion. Holt acts as though this new program solves the "problem" of having too much cash. Instead, it only slows the rate of cash growth. Apple's so-called war chest will just keep growing.
Or, consider this howler also from Yahoo! Finance. It's by a staff writer named Matt Nesto, and he promises five suggestings for how Apple could have better used its cash (though he only actually gives four). Never mind the merits of those ideas, which are opinions and are fine for him to have. He expresses anger at Apple for agreeing to part with 20% of its cash pile in an entirely conventional manner. He makes the same problem of ignoring the rate of cash growth. Apple isn't going to be giving up 20% of its cash; it's going to be parting with roughly one third of its annual cash growth based on 2011's figure. That percentage will fall with each subsequent year of course as sales continue to rise.
Apple already spends a lot of money each year. Its quarterly report divulges that its fiscal 2012 1Q (ended December 31, 2011) included a 32% year-over-year increase in R&D spending to $758 million for that quarter alone, and its spending on Selling, General & Administrative Expense rose $709 million year-over-year to $2.6 billion in the quarter largely due to opening new retail stores. It spent another $1.4 billion on property, plant and equipment. Among that spending is the solar farm for its recently completed North Carolina data center, which will soon be joined by another data center in Oregon and its upcoming new "spaceship" campus. It's also well known that the company pays big money up front for supplies of integral components like flash memory and high-quality displays.
Apple is already using its cash effectively, and it will keep accumulating more as long as its products keep selling at heavy profit margins. So what could possibly be next?
That question is one that Wired's Jon Phillips asks in his third generation iPad review. He wants to know what precisely Apple can do to improve on the iPad concept now that it has put a Retina display in it. I think this is a very poor approach. The iPad will not change much cosmetically because there's only so many ways you can do "just a big ol' touchscreen", but that doesn't matter too much. The iMac exterior hasn't changed except in materials since the iMac G5 introduction in 2004. The MacBook Pro has barely changed since the switch to unibody construction in 2008, and the MacBook Air is roughly the same as it was externally when introduced the very same year. The lack of external changes with both the iPhone 3GS and 4S versus the 3G and 4 did nothing to slow that product's growth.
We'll see if the long-rumored Apple television set comes out, but an area of differentiation with massive potential is one that the average stock analyst knows nothing about. It's one that Apple has been working on since the release of Snow Leopard: parallel computing.
Grand Central Dispatch is Apple's foray into helping developers make their applications better for multi-core environments. It doesn't solve the hard problems for you, but once you have solved the hard problems, it makes it easy to implement the solutions. If Apple can get all of its third party developers using GCD, and continue developing it to make it more and more friendly to those developers, then it will be a huge advantage for the OS X and iOS platforms. It's no big deal that the third-gen iPad doesn't have a quad-core CPU because most applications aren't multithreaded. However, it's been obvious for years that the future is more about a proliferation of cores than gigahertz increases. Having a truly developer-friendly and widely-used multithreading solution for best using that ever expanding number of cores would be a tremendous competitive advantage.
Beyond that, it's not hard to see where other growth areas are. Apple is only scratching the surface of what it can do with iCloud, which is understandable given that it only went live six months ago. Apple is modernizing under-the-hood aspects of Objective-C, but it's nowhere near finished there. At some point HFS+ will need to be replaced, and its successor could enable better and more efficient methods for backup and file versioning (to say nothing about data security). All of that has to do with software, and it's far more important than the cosmetic aspects of what has to be affixed behind a touchscreen to make a functioning device.
For as much room to grow in market share as Apple has, and Tim Cook likes to point out that it's quite a lot every time he gets a chance, it has plenty of room to grow technologically as well. We're nowhere near an end-of-history moment when it comes to personal computing, and everyone, not just Apple, has tremendous opportunities for improvement. The only way to come to the conclusion that Apple is out of ideas or is somehow done with big innovations is to know almost nothing about where the company is at.
This dividend and stock buy-back program is not a sign that the company is transitioning out of a high growth phase. It means that the company is executing at such a high level that it can part with an extra $13 billion a year and still stockpile over $20 billion a year in cash. As long as Apple's senior management doesn't rest on the laurels of its current product line, and it doesn't appear to be in the post-Jobs era, then there's no reason to think that returning some of its cash to shareholders has any deeper meaning than its mere face value.
For instance, consider this article about Apple's newly-announced dividend and stock buy-back program that was the biggest headline on Yahoo! Finance today. The main analysis comes from a "senior stock analyst" from Morningstar named Michael Holt. He's merely quoted as noting that Apple's cash (and cash equivalents) hoard had gotten to the "definitely excessive" figure of $100 billion and that the company needed to do something about that. A question I would ask is this: if $100 billion is excessive, what is $122 billion?
Apple added $38 billion in cash during calendar year 2011, including $16 billion in 2011's holiday quarter alone. The dividend and stock buy-back program will cost the company roughly $13.21 billion per year. If Apple's cash growth continues at 2011's pace, and it'll likely speed up as the company's sales continue to grow, Apple will finish 2012 with about $122 billion in cash. It had about $97.6 billion at the end of 2011, and adding another $38 billion minus the dividend and buy-back costs gets you to around $122 billion. Holt acts as though this new program solves the "problem" of having too much cash. Instead, it only slows the rate of cash growth. Apple's so-called war chest will just keep growing.
Or, consider this howler also from Yahoo! Finance. It's by a staff writer named Matt Nesto, and he promises five suggestings for how Apple could have better used its cash (though he only actually gives four). Never mind the merits of those ideas, which are opinions and are fine for him to have. He expresses anger at Apple for agreeing to part with 20% of its cash pile in an entirely conventional manner. He makes the same problem of ignoring the rate of cash growth. Apple isn't going to be giving up 20% of its cash; it's going to be parting with roughly one third of its annual cash growth based on 2011's figure. That percentage will fall with each subsequent year of course as sales continue to rise.
Apple already spends a lot of money each year. Its quarterly report divulges that its fiscal 2012 1Q (ended December 31, 2011) included a 32% year-over-year increase in R&D spending to $758 million for that quarter alone, and its spending on Selling, General & Administrative Expense rose $709 million year-over-year to $2.6 billion in the quarter largely due to opening new retail stores. It spent another $1.4 billion on property, plant and equipment. Among that spending is the solar farm for its recently completed North Carolina data center, which will soon be joined by another data center in Oregon and its upcoming new "spaceship" campus. It's also well known that the company pays big money up front for supplies of integral components like flash memory and high-quality displays.
Apple is already using its cash effectively, and it will keep accumulating more as long as its products keep selling at heavy profit margins. So what could possibly be next?
That question is one that Wired's Jon Phillips asks in his third generation iPad review. He wants to know what precisely Apple can do to improve on the iPad concept now that it has put a Retina display in it. I think this is a very poor approach. The iPad will not change much cosmetically because there's only so many ways you can do "just a big ol' touchscreen", but that doesn't matter too much. The iMac exterior hasn't changed except in materials since the iMac G5 introduction in 2004. The MacBook Pro has barely changed since the switch to unibody construction in 2008, and the MacBook Air is roughly the same as it was externally when introduced the very same year. The lack of external changes with both the iPhone 3GS and 4S versus the 3G and 4 did nothing to slow that product's growth.
We'll see if the long-rumored Apple television set comes out, but an area of differentiation with massive potential is one that the average stock analyst knows nothing about. It's one that Apple has been working on since the release of Snow Leopard: parallel computing.
Grand Central Dispatch is Apple's foray into helping developers make their applications better for multi-core environments. It doesn't solve the hard problems for you, but once you have solved the hard problems, it makes it easy to implement the solutions. If Apple can get all of its third party developers using GCD, and continue developing it to make it more and more friendly to those developers, then it will be a huge advantage for the OS X and iOS platforms. It's no big deal that the third-gen iPad doesn't have a quad-core CPU because most applications aren't multithreaded. However, it's been obvious for years that the future is more about a proliferation of cores than gigahertz increases. Having a truly developer-friendly and widely-used multithreading solution for best using that ever expanding number of cores would be a tremendous competitive advantage.
Beyond that, it's not hard to see where other growth areas are. Apple is only scratching the surface of what it can do with iCloud, which is understandable given that it only went live six months ago. Apple is modernizing under-the-hood aspects of Objective-C, but it's nowhere near finished there. At some point HFS+ will need to be replaced, and its successor could enable better and more efficient methods for backup and file versioning (to say nothing about data security). All of that has to do with software, and it's far more important than the cosmetic aspects of what has to be affixed behind a touchscreen to make a functioning device.
For as much room to grow in market share as Apple has, and Tim Cook likes to point out that it's quite a lot every time he gets a chance, it has plenty of room to grow technologically as well. We're nowhere near an end-of-history moment when it comes to personal computing, and everyone, not just Apple, has tremendous opportunities for improvement. The only way to come to the conclusion that Apple is out of ideas or is somehow done with big innovations is to know almost nothing about where the company is at.
This dividend and stock buy-back program is not a sign that the company is transitioning out of a high growth phase. It means that the company is executing at such a high level that it can part with an extra $13 billion a year and still stockpile over $20 billion a year in cash. As long as Apple's senior management doesn't rest on the laurels of its current product line, and it doesn't appear to be in the post-Jobs era, then there's no reason to think that returning some of its cash to shareholders has any deeper meaning than its mere face value.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
The new iPad vs. Android Tablets
There was a time not too long ago when I could give decent reasons as to why someone might want to get an Android tablet over an iPad 2. Many Android tablets have high definition screens, HD cameras, voice recognition software, and 4G cellular networking. I suppose all of that is still valid in a comparison with the iPad 2.
But the new iPad? It has all of those things and more. I can only think of two reasons why someone might buy an Android tablet over the third gen iPad: if having a widescreen display is absolutely, positively, unequivocally your top priority and nothing else is close, and if you have some kind of problem with Apple stylistically, philosophically, or what have you.
The gap in the software ecosystems is gigantic. I've heard good things about Ice Cream Sandwich, but it is nigh impossible to find in the wild. With as scattershot as Android updates are, there's no way of knowing when devices will get the upgrade to it as well. Honeycomb just isn't that good, and the third party software support for Android tablets is worse. Go into the Android Market (Google Play Store?) and hit the category of staff picks for tablets. It's impossible to determine which apps are actually tablet apps and which are just phone apps that happen to scale nicely. Dont worry about it though; any given app is more than likely to be a phone app.
The new iPhoto only increases the gap between the platforms. It's a tough case to be made that a single app is a big point of differentiation, but bear with me on this one. You can get a browser, email, and Angry Birds on anything these days. The iWork apps are nice to have, but I don't think an office suite is a make or break thing on tablets just yet. iMovie and Garage Band are impressive, but I don't know how many people do heavy video editing, and even fewer do much with audio recordings.
But photos? Everyone does photos. The new iPhoto is incredible, and people's iPhone pictures will be coming into it automatically via Photo Steam. If, as rumored, Microsoft Office ends up on iOS, then you might as well turn out the lights in the Android tablet development department.
Look, I think it's very generous for Verizon to have loaned me this Droid Xyboard 8.2 as a part of its ambassadors program. That it came with unlimited 4G and tethering only makes it more so. I like the hardware (except the button placement) and the network is incredibly fast. I want to like this thing. I even wrote this post using Google's Blogger app on it with only a little cleanup done later on my laptop.
The problem is that Android and its ecosystem let the hardware and network down. The process of writing this illustrated the problem perfectly. Blogger is one of Google's A+ properties, but the app for it is a phone app that only has extremely basic post composition and editing features. You can't use it to look at stats, manage comments, or adjust the blog layout. If the developer for Android itself is going to have a shabby app for one of its top services, then what does that say about the platform as a whole?
I cannot in good conscience recommend this device to anyone now. I was on the fence about it before this iPad announcement, but when this tablet is only $30 less than the new iPad off contract, forget it. I can recommend Verizon's 4G network for the new iPad if you go with a model with cellular connectivity, though. That is one part of the Droid Xyboard experience that has been anything but a disappointment.
![”Verizon]()
But the new iPad? It has all of those things and more. I can only think of two reasons why someone might buy an Android tablet over the third gen iPad: if having a widescreen display is absolutely, positively, unequivocally your top priority and nothing else is close, and if you have some kind of problem with Apple stylistically, philosophically, or what have you.
The gap in the software ecosystems is gigantic. I've heard good things about Ice Cream Sandwich, but it is nigh impossible to find in the wild. With as scattershot as Android updates are, there's no way of knowing when devices will get the upgrade to it as well. Honeycomb just isn't that good, and the third party software support for Android tablets is worse. Go into the Android Market (Google Play Store?) and hit the category of staff picks for tablets. It's impossible to determine which apps are actually tablet apps and which are just phone apps that happen to scale nicely. Dont worry about it though; any given app is more than likely to be a phone app.
The new iPhoto only increases the gap between the platforms. It's a tough case to be made that a single app is a big point of differentiation, but bear with me on this one. You can get a browser, email, and Angry Birds on anything these days. The iWork apps are nice to have, but I don't think an office suite is a make or break thing on tablets just yet. iMovie and Garage Band are impressive, but I don't know how many people do heavy video editing, and even fewer do much with audio recordings.
But photos? Everyone does photos. The new iPhoto is incredible, and people's iPhone pictures will be coming into it automatically via Photo Steam. If, as rumored, Microsoft Office ends up on iOS, then you might as well turn out the lights in the Android tablet development department.
Look, I think it's very generous for Verizon to have loaned me this Droid Xyboard 8.2 as a part of its ambassadors program. That it came with unlimited 4G and tethering only makes it more so. I like the hardware (except the button placement) and the network is incredibly fast. I want to like this thing. I even wrote this post using Google's Blogger app on it with only a little cleanup done later on my laptop.
The problem is that Android and its ecosystem let the hardware and network down. The process of writing this illustrated the problem perfectly. Blogger is one of Google's A+ properties, but the app for it is a phone app that only has extremely basic post composition and editing features. You can't use it to look at stats, manage comments, or adjust the blog layout. If the developer for Android itself is going to have a shabby app for one of its top services, then what does that say about the platform as a whole?
I cannot in good conscience recommend this device to anyone now. I was on the fence about it before this iPad announcement, but when this tablet is only $30 less than the new iPad off contract, forget it. I can recommend Verizon's 4G network for the new iPad if you go with a model with cellular connectivity, though. That is one part of the Droid Xyboard experience that has been anything but a disappointment.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
The iPad is Already in Its Final Form
In the run up to any Apple product announcement, rumors and linkbait abound like in few other situations. A number of articles and videos heading into Wesnesday's iPad 3 announcement are about what the thing will look like.
The answer is quite simple: a lot like what the iPad 2 looked like. The iPad 2 itself largely looked like the original iPad, with only the only drastic change being the introduction of a white face plate option. Unless more colors come down the pipeline, all future iPads will look roughly alike.
Think about it: the external iPad hardware is just a touchscreen with a home button and a couple of cameras. The models with cellular connectivity have an extra black stripe at the top of the back for the antennas. That's it, and that's all it's really ever going to be.
The iPhone has changed form several times, but it has far more constraints than the iPad does because of its smaller size. It will probably keep evolving over time as the company comes up with new ways to deal with those constraints. The iPad doesn't have those same constraints. Everything crucial can fit inside with plenty of room to spare for an enormous battery.
Other Apple products have hit the design wall, so to speak, in this same way. The iPod Classic hasn't changed since 2007. The fourth and fifth generation iPod Nanos were basically the same thing, and the seventh generation introduced in 2010 wasn't updated for 2011. The Mac Pro's external design basically hasn't changed since it was introduced as the Power Mac G5 in 2003.
The iMac was once the company's big showpiece for design. The original iMac G3 had a bulbous and translucent case. The iMac G4 was the famous sunflower design, a radical change from the G3. The iMac G5 was yet another big change, packing the whole computer behind the screen. The basic form hasn't changed since the G5's introduction 2004, except that it now is made of aluminum and glass instead of plastic and comes in different screen sizes.
While the iPods and Macs took time to hit their end-of-design phase, the iPad basically launched that way. When the product design is "just a big ol' screen", where do you go from there? Until and unless the aluminum backing gets replaced by another material (carbon fiber? liquidmetal?), it basically is what it is.
The iPad will continue to grow and evolve over time, but it won't be the external look and feel doing that changing.
The answer is quite simple: a lot like what the iPad 2 looked like. The iPad 2 itself largely looked like the original iPad, with only the only drastic change being the introduction of a white face plate option. Unless more colors come down the pipeline, all future iPads will look roughly alike.
Think about it: the external iPad hardware is just a touchscreen with a home button and a couple of cameras. The models with cellular connectivity have an extra black stripe at the top of the back for the antennas. That's it, and that's all it's really ever going to be.
The iPhone has changed form several times, but it has far more constraints than the iPad does because of its smaller size. It will probably keep evolving over time as the company comes up with new ways to deal with those constraints. The iPad doesn't have those same constraints. Everything crucial can fit inside with plenty of room to spare for an enormous battery.
Other Apple products have hit the design wall, so to speak, in this same way. The iPod Classic hasn't changed since 2007. The fourth and fifth generation iPod Nanos were basically the same thing, and the seventh generation introduced in 2010 wasn't updated for 2011. The Mac Pro's external design basically hasn't changed since it was introduced as the Power Mac G5 in 2003.
The iMac was once the company's big showpiece for design. The original iMac G3 had a bulbous and translucent case. The iMac G4 was the famous sunflower design, a radical change from the G3. The iMac G5 was yet another big change, packing the whole computer behind the screen. The basic form hasn't changed since the G5's introduction 2004, except that it now is made of aluminum and glass instead of plastic and comes in different screen sizes.
While the iPods and Macs took time to hit their end-of-design phase, the iPad basically launched that way. When the product design is "just a big ol' screen", where do you go from there? Until and unless the aluminum backing gets replaced by another material (carbon fiber? liquidmetal?), it basically is what it is.
The iPad will continue to grow and evolve over time, but it won't be the external look and feel doing that changing.
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