Category: Silly Pundits

Dear Computerworld's Mike Elgan…

The Macalope looks at – sigh – yet another “Zune spells Doom” piece.

The Macalope read your latest correspondence entitled “Why Microsoft’s Zune scares Apple to the core” and he believes you may have accidentally left out a critical fact. Nowhere in the piece did the Macalope find the names of the employees at Apple you spoke with to back up your claim. Surely this was simply an oversight in editing, so please advise at your earliest convenience who at Apple is so a-scared of the Zune.

The Macalope has some other comments that he will break down as responses to your six points.

1. Microsoft is hatching a consumer media ‘perfect storm’.

…

Apple fans are overconfident in the iPod because Apple once commanded 92 per cent of music player market share, a number that has since fallen to around 70 per cent. About 30 million people own iPods.

Please define “perfect” as used in this instance, as when Paul Thurrott is asking re the Zune “What the heck are these people thinking?”, the Macalope is concerned that you might have the boat/storm metaphor backwards.

As for the market share figures you quote, the Macalope believes you’re comparing apples (no pun intended) and oranges. The 92 percent market share number was the percentage of the U.S. market for digital music players that were hard-drive based. The 70 percent number is the percentage of the U.S. market for hard-drive and flash-based digital music players. Apple’s market share was recalculated with the introduction of the flash-based iPod shuffle.

The Macalope will leave it up to his readers to decide if that error was due to laziness or dishonesty.

Frankly, the Macalope thinks the 92 percent number is a little silly. While he wouldn’t go as far as John Gruber did here (certainly not with the benefit of hindsight), there is little differentiation from a consumer’s perspective between hard-drive and flash-based units.

Also, you may not be aware of it, but the iPod actually works on Windows. And while the Zune ties into the Xbox, Microsoft has sold probably a bit over 25 million of those and Apple has sold over 60 million iPods.

2. The Zune is social and viral

Like a disease!

Think of it as a portable, wireless, hardware version of MySpace.

Ah! Like a venereal disease! One that’s easy to catch that leaves ugly festering sores! Gotcha!

3. Zune may have more programming

…

While Apple launched its movie business with movies from Disney (where Apple CEO Steve Jobs sits on the board), Microsoft has already lined up Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictuers, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Lions Gate Entertainment and MGM.

Which will be available… some time next year. Apple, by your assumption, will only ever have Disney.

4. Zune’s screen is better for movies

True. It is larger, but it’s the same resolution.

5. Zune is actually pretty cool

The Zune is unlike any product Microsoft has ever shipped. It’s actually very nicely designed, surprisingly minimalist and (dare I say it?) ‘cool’. (Zune marketing looks cool, too. The user interface is fluid and appealing – and, again, like MySpace – customisable. Users will be able to personalise the Zune interface with photos, ‘themes’, ‘skins’ and custom colours.

Oh, so they can crap it up. Make it look like a five-dollar whore, just like MySpace. Excellent.

The Macalope should warn you, the minute a 40-year-old says something is “cool” to “tweens, teens and 20-somethings”, it instantly becomes uncool.

Way to go, Mike.

Even if Apple is able to retain its lead, it could still be hurt – badly – by the Zune, which will capture mind share, grab market share and squeeze Apple on pricing.

OK, now you’re just making things up. The cheapest Zune – which, remember, is not on sale yet – is priced 99 cents higher than the second most expensive iPod.

Apple is scared. And for good reason.

Again, who did you talk to at Apple who said they’re scared? Please advise as nowhere do you quote anyone even off the record saying this.

Apple has recently and preemptively lowered the price of iPods, announced an iTV set-top box – which will ship later than Vista – and is probably working feverishly on a bigger-screen, wirelessly enabled iPod.

“Which will ship later than Vista”?

This production of Non-Sequitur Theater will return after a commercial break.

Please, please, please, for the love of god, please tell the Macalope what could possibly be the relevance of juxtaposing the fact that Microsoft announced an operating system upgrade five years ago and – after gutting feature after feature – is finally shipping it in January (maybe!), and the fact that Apple announced a product in September that it’s shipping in the first quarter of 2007.

Because any possible explanation must – by the laws of logic that govern the universe in which we live – be simply hysterical.

Ultimately, your failure to treat any of the Zune’s numerous shortcomings as such and your failure to even mention others (doesn’t play any currently available DRM-protected songs or videos) at all tend to make the piece seem more like propaganda than analysis.

There seems to be this great determination on the part of a number of silly pundits to get ahead of some imagined curve and be the first to declare the iPod dead.

All analysis must be made on the basis of currently available information, so the Macalope is not saying the Zune will never overtake the iPod. But let’s just say he finds the reports of its death to be greatly exaggerated.

Sadly, being a technology pundit is truly never having to say you’re sorry. You can be wrong for years and never lose your job.

It must be good work if you can get it, so hang on to that gig, Mike.

Sincerely,
The Macalope

Let the parsing begin!

George Ou again. Surprise.

George Ou’s friend David Burke parses the crap out of Lynn Fox’s response.

The thrust of his “great analysis” is that Fox is saying that all Maynor told Apple about was the FreeBSD vulnerability, so why did they repeatedly ask for information on something that doesn’t affect Macs?

Frankly, there are so many ways to deflate Burke’s analysis that it’s hardly worth addressing, but the Macalope will just point out an alternate theory by way of an analogy with the names changed to protect the innocent.

Let’s say the Macalope just bought a 2006 Audi. And someone comes along and says “Hey, you should get a security system because those Audis are really easy to break into.”

And the Macalope is all like “What? What the hell are you talking about? The Macalope just got this car. Get out of here you crazy person. Stop being so crazy.”

But the person – let’s call him “Mavid Daynor” – is insistent, saying he read it in Consumer Reports and he could totally break into the car himself. So, the Macalope says, “OK, send the Macalope some of those articles.” But Daynor’s kind of pissy about it and says “Hey, I’m not just going to give you my Consumer Reports articles for free.”

Now the Macalope is kind of like, well, what the heck are you calling for if you’re just going to try to diss the Macalope’s car and not provide him any information? But he doesn’t say that out loud, just with his inside voice. He tries a couple of more times to get Daynor to send him the Consumer Reports articles but Daynor doesn’t reply.

All of a sudden, this other guy – let’s call him Krian Brebs – after talking to Daynor, publishes this post on his blog that says “Breaking into the Macalope’s car in 60 seconds or less.”

Now the Macalope’s really pissed. So he’s going to find out what these clowns think they’re talking about. He orders the back issues of Consumer Reports and it turns out there was a flaw in the 2005 Volkswagen where you could stick a coat hanger down the window and pop the door open really easily.

Just to be sure, the Macalope takes his car to the dealer and says “Hey, is this thing really easy to break into?” As the dealer’s looking it over, the Macalope sends out a press release saying despite the vague warnings of Mavid Daynor, there’s not evidence that the Macalope’s car is easy to break into.

All of a sudden this other guy – let’s call him… oh, hell, let’s just call him George Ou – who the Macalope doesn’t even know, starts going on in public about how the Macalope has defamed Mavid Daynor and demands he respond to certain questions.

The dealer comes back and says the car can’t be opened with a coat hanger through the window, but he added a security system just to fix some other issues.

So the Macalope sends an email to George Ou stating:

The only vulnerability Daynor mentioned was the Volkswagen one. Despite repeated requests for Consumer Reports back issues, he didn’t supply any.

The Macalope’s not saying this is how it went down. It’s just possible.

But in all likelihood, Apple has its own subscription to Consumer Reports.

Oh, wait, that was an analogy.

UPDATE: A more point-by-point take down of Burke’s “great analysis” is here.

One of these things is not like the other

One of these things just doesn’t belong.

Glenn Fleishman (who the Macalope has the utmost respect for):

[George Ou will] be at Toorcon and offer coverage of that event.

George Ou:

[Exploiting a MacBook Pro right out of the shipping carton is] precisely what I intend to do.

[UPDATE: Upon slow-motion review, it appears George was saying that recording the exploit of an out-of-the-box MacBook Pro was what he intended to do.]

Sounds like Ou will be actively participating in SecureWorks’ demonstration, not covering it.

Apple responds to George Ou

And gives him what for.

Apple’s Lynn Fox – victim of a vicious smear campaign* orchestrated by SecureWorks and George Ou – provides some valuable answers to Ou’s questions.

Most notably, Fox says the only information they got from SecureWorks was not related to Apple products.

Hmm, what’s the Macalope full of again, George?

Ou had previously claimed on several occasions that the supposed flaws in OS X were the same as those in FreeBSD because “it’s all the same code.”

Fox smacks that down:

The only vulnerability mentioned by David Maynor was FreeBSD vulnerability CVE-2006-0226. This does not affect Apple products.

…

The code flaws we addressed with the Wi-Fi security updates we released on September 21 are not based on the same code as the FreeBSD flaw.

Also, this should put to rest Ou’s repeated insinuations that Apple’s failure to respond to his email must mean that SecureWorks was right all along.

This is not the last we’ll hear of this since Maynor and Ellch will be providing “the complete story” (note the Macalope’s use of sarcastic quotes) this weekend and Ou will certainly look for whatever wiggle room there is in Fox’s response, most likely accusing her of “choosing her words carefully” (as if she should do anything else).

But forgive the Macalope if he takes a moment to bask in the schadenfreude.

UPDATE: Ou has already posted this comment:

Please don’t assume anything yet. Like I said, this is getting very interesting. What Apple says now can be refuted with evidence. Just hold off on any judgements for now.

The author of Brian Krebs Watch responds thusly:

And again to my friends at SecureWorks who are reading this: if you’re going to do a demo, just annouce it. Don’t leak it out this way. You are not making any friends. Good PR is about narrative, about telling a story — not about making the most noise.

Indeed.

* The Macalope doesn’t really think Fox is the victim of a smear campaign. He’s just pointing out how silly Ou sounds when he says Maynor and Ellch are Apple’s victims.

Ah, but the Zune could beat the iPod if it had a chain saw!

The Macalope looks at some ill-conceived iPod gloom from SvenOnTech.

SvenOnTech – “The technology resource you can’t resist!” – proves rather resistable today as he Sven Rafferty [the Macalope originally missed the byline and attributed the piece to “Sven” – it’s been corrected throughout] [UPDATE AGAIN – Jon Eilers writes to note that the piece on SvenOnTech was misattributed to him. It was actually written by Sven Rafferty.] takes the “Zune spells ‘doom'” argument for a spin and goes careening off Reality Bluff and into Fantasy Lake.

With Apple’s slipping sales for months in a row…

You mean the months leading up to a widely-expected refresh?  Those months?

First Vic Keegan wants to compare successive quarters, now Rafferty wants to look at successive months. [UPDATE: for those who don’t want to click through the link, the important point is that a serious analysis would have looked at changes year over year to avoid cyclicality predominately based on the iPod’s product cycle. Also, Rafferty’ comment is not supported with any data – we are left to wonder how many months he’s talking about.]

MacNN noted that Piper Jaffrey predicted Apple would come close to 8.6 million in iPod sales for the third calendar quarter, which would be a 33.3 percent increase year over year and a small increase in sales growth from the second quarter.

The Macalope will say it again.  iPod sales growth may have been slowing.  But iPod sales are not “slipping.”  They continue to grow.

…with the iPod and the how-hum [sic] refresh we witnessed at the Showtime event, Steve Jobs best be working on getting that full-screen iPod ready for Macworld or he can start kissing his bread winner goodbye.

The bar is set really high for Apple.  If it doesn’t provide a $50 touch-screen iPod with seven days of battery life and free movies, an event is ho-hum.

Point of fact, the event was apparently exactly what investors were expecting, as Apple’s share price saw a modest uptick since Sept. 12th (today showed a substantial jump largely driven by expected increases in the Mac’s market share).

But enter the Zune.

Removing any Microsoft bias, the Zune isn’t that bad.

The Macalope can picture the marketing materials now:  “The Microsoft Zune.  It’s not that bad!”

Rafferty then goes on to list all that’s right with the Zune without listing any of the numerous questions about it.  For, you see, a point has already been chosen and, to support it, the Zune must be rubber and the iPod glue.

The Wi-Fi sharing is great, too, and even though there’s no video support, that will be here soon like a more robust Windows was with 3.11 back in the early 90s.

Yes, Microsoft is slow out of the gate but, remember, it lumbers ever forward!  Apple, apparently, will never update the iPod ever again.

The remarkable assery of this piece is that Rafferty is not even taking the bad data points for the iPod (and you really have to try to find them!) and comparing them to the good ones for the Zune.

He’s taking the current features of the iPod and comparing them to imaginary future features of the Zune – a product you can’t even buy yet.  That’s vapor^2!

Where’s the full-screen Steve? The Wi-Fi? The Bluetooth? The meat?!

Where’s the neural interface?  The time warp feature so you can enjoy tomorrow’s music today?  Where’s the hoozifluffer with the wingjambiddler?!

If the iPod doesn’t bring on a new cool factor (and regurgatating the iPod mini via the nano doesn’t qualify,)…

And the Macalope guesses offering the first wearable digital music player ever and the ability to buy and play movies on an iPod – today! – don’t count either.

…then Apple can once again remember the days of the Macintosh Performa and try to figure out, “How did we lose all the market share…again?”

Wow.  Did the Mac really have 75 percent market share before the Performa came out?  The Macalope sure remembers those days differently.

Frankly, the Macalope prefers such articles the way John Dvorak writes them.  At least Dvorak goes out on a limb and tries to convince you the Zune has already won the battle.  Rafferty would have you believe the iPod’s vast lead is in dire jeopardy because future Zunes will be better than this one, which “isn’t that bad.”  And isn’t out yet.

The worst you can say for the iPod and the best you can say for the Zune right now is that Microsoft has announced a modest offering that they may decide to take a loss on in an attempt to gain market share.  To pretend that only Microsoft can leapfrog features is to ignore reality (Apple and Microsoft also have this whole operating system thing going on if you haven’t noticed) for the sake of tritely playing devil’s advocate.

The Macalope would advise Rafferty to save the “Apple, are you listening?” tone at least until Microsoft actually ship a Zune.

Touché!

George Ou pays the Macalope another visit.

George Ou… uh… responds in comments.

Hey that’s a nice spin. What the hell did you expect Apple to say? You’re all full of shit.

Ah, it does remind one of a young Oscar Wilde, does it not?

And speaking of sneaking in and taking a dump on someone’s desk, Daring Fireball has more.

UPDATE: And more!

It’s not over yet, Mr. Fleishman!

(Oh, dear god, when will it be over?)

Determined to have the last word, Maynor and Ellch will tell “the complete story” next weekend at ToorCon 2006.

Uh… the Macalope’s pretty sure that one side of a two-sided story probably isn’t going to be telling “the complete story.”

[Updated to fix the link and quote Ou’s comment as WordPress doesn’t seem to be letting the Macalope link right to individual comments.]

David Pogue is a pussy

But his post is still worth a read.

David Pogue pens a hilarious walk down memory lane with all those brilliant prognosticators who sagely predicted Apple’s imminent demise in the mid-1990s.

The Macalope’s only complaint: other than Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold , Pogue doesn’t name names.  [Correction:  he also mentions David Winer – so Microsoft and bloggers are fair game, but not journalists… hmm…]

Ah, the privileges of membership in the big media boys and girls club.

C’mon, Pogue! Bwaaak-buck-buck-buck-bwaaaaa!

That’s a chicken sound, in case you can’t tell.

A Note About Corrections

Some comments on how the Macalope rolls.

The Macalope’s still getting his feet wet in this whole blogging thing, but he’s a little confused by the varying standards for corrections.

Two polar opposites seem to be George Ou and Victor Keegan (or, rather, the Guardian).

Say what you want to about Ou (the Macalope certainly does), but he notes corrections in situ (like a man!), which is the policy the Macalope intends to follow.

And there’s good precedent for it. In an email, John Gruber notes:

if it’s a correction, or a significant addition, or somehow changes the meaning, then I call it out somehow. My rule of thumb is — if it’s a change that I would like people who have already read the article before to notice if they happen to skim it again, I’ll call it out.

To the Macalope, that’s the most sensible policy and it was rather startling to him that when Victor Keegan corrected the two mistakes in the online version of his column, the mistakes were “disappeared.” 86-ed. Flushed down the memory hole. Anyone reading the article now would never know there was were any errors. Anyone reading pissy blog posts about the errors (cough) might wonder what they were talking about.

In fairness to Keegan, it’s probably the Guardian’s policy that online content be corrected in this manner rather than his and it’s not at all unusual for the big media companies. It is a little schizophrenic, though. Print journalists have traditionally been brow-beaten over corrections, which are often used as a metric in annual reviews. But while journalists may still get dinged for them, many of the papers have thrown the transparency out the window in moving to online media. Just because you can magically correct something doesn’t mean you should.

Further, using the number of corrections as a basis for performance seems overly draconian.  It’s not that the Macalope doesn’t think sloppy reporters should be held accountable – they should. But people make mistakes and it’s likely that some reporters are going to get called on them more often than others. A simple counting system doesn’t work.

A political reporter – for example – is going to get heated calls more often than someone covering the local flower show (“Those were dahlias, god damn it! DAHLIAS!”).  Likewise complex tax regulations or the nuts and bolts of technology are going to be easier to make a mistake on than coverage of the county fair. And if readers don’t complain, reporters have zero incentive to correct a story if it’s going to pop up on their annual review.

The papers have made a decision to try to reduce the number of corrections instead of trying to increase overall accuracy.

Anyway, all of this is a long way of saying that the Macalope will be providing corrections where the errors appeared – sometimes right next to the error and sometimes at the end of a post, depending on how it affects readability and whether or not the error is isolated or throughout.

Also, on the advice of Gruber, the Macalope won’t be calling out spelling corrections anymore. There’s a fine line between diligent and being pedantic. No one cares if the Macalope has a problem with homonyms, they just care if the information is wrong or misleading.

This has been a public service announcement. We now return you to Mac news, rumors and silly pundit take-downs.

Silly report prompts silly conclusions

Jupiter Research report draws some specious conclusions.

Perhaps some of the Macalope’s readers from across the pond can tell him, is there something in the water over there? Or did Jonathan Ive do something really, really horrible that everyone in the UK hates him for and then have to flee to the U.S. and we just don’t know about it because we refuse to read the British press because of our fervent belief that Zed is a sodomist who is dead and not the last letter of the alphabet?

Via MacSurfer, the Macalope read Personal Computer World’s Clive Akass’ latest post on the iPod. Clive links to a PCW story on a recently released report by Jupiter Research that shows that just five percent of iPod tracks were purchased through the iTunes Store.

Now, before the Macalope goes off on Clive, it seems possible that the story Clive links to was subsequently changed because it’s very clear to the Macalope at least that what Jupiter is talking about is the total percentage of tracks on an iPod’s hard drive, not purchases.

From the story:

A survey by Jupiter Research has discovered that an average of just 20 tracks on an iPod are bought from iTunes – about five per cent.

From Clive’s post:

Figures from Jupiter Research indicating that iPod owners buy only five percent of their tracks from Apple’s ITunes online store…

The difference between “bought” and “buy” is rather important in this instance.

It seems rather unstartling to the Macalope that in the 3+ years of the iTunes Store’s existence that it hasn’t surpassed the 20 years of the CD or the orgy of downloading that took place during Napster’s heyday.

What would have been meaningful is a representation of overall music purchases, not music ownership, and the trend of online buying.

Even with the questionable meaningfulness of the statistic that drives the Jupiter report, there are some really odd conslusions they draw from it.

The report warns that the ‘free’ concept is still very important to most digital music users and advises that newer services should look into offering ad-supported ‘free’ services, like the forthcoming Spiral Frog service.

There are few problems with that. First, people’s time is not free. In fact, to many, it’s their most precious commodity. Second, another conclusion you could draw from the continued prevalance of music ripped from CDs is that people like to own their music and ad-supported services give you zero ownership. “Free” to digital music pirates also means “free to play anyway and anywhere I want.” Plus, the Macalope can’t help but wonder how that question was phrased.

“Hey, kids! Who likes free music?!”

“I do! I do!”

So, the report concludes that people prefer CDs (the most expensive option but it lets you do what you want with the music) and pirating (the least expensive option which also lets you do what you want with the music) to iTunes downloads.

It then recommends the most restrictive type of service currently imaginable, short of having to pay a dollar and watch an ad every time you want to listen to a song.

And get a punch in the gut.

People pay for this research?

But let’s get back to Clive because the Macalope knows you want to see how silly the rest of his post is.

Trust the Macalope. It’s very, very silly.

Neither will the iPod work with any online music store other than Itunes, which is rather like a CD player being restricted to playing disks only from the device’s manufacturer.

Clive could not have picked a worse analogy as the iPod actually will play music ripped from anyone’s CDs (with the possible exception of a smattering of DRM-ed CDs).

But, like it or not, in Apple’s business model, the iTunes Store is the handle and the iPods are the razor blades. Apple gets you in the door with that neat iPod all the kids are talking about and then wants to lock you in by getting you to buy your music off of iTunes.

Even so, it’s a rather velvety lock. You can always burn your songs to CDs and re-rip them.

The Macalope finds it odd that the people who complain about how restrictive the iTunes Store and the iPod are don’t complain at all about subscription models.  Or, for that matter, the Zune, which apparently doesn’t play PlaysForSure (antler tip to Daring Fireball).

The iPod bonanza, which has seen Apple sell 1.5 billion tracks online, is not going to last forever.

Hmm, yes, well that’s certainly setting the bar a little high. But the Macalope seems to remember this other company that’s held a lock on the PC operating system market for over fifteen years. No, that’s not an eternity, it just seems like it.

There are countless rival players that do not carry the same restrictions, and Apple has been slow to bring a portable video player or musical phone to market.

Uh, Apple release a portable video player almost a year ago. Called the iPod. Don’t let that whole thing about it not being the “true” video iPod fool you. It was, in fact, a video iPod.

And Apple is widely expected to release a music phone in 2007. As for that being “slow”, the Macalope remembers similar statements when Apple first released the iPod. But just like the MP3 player market in 2001, no one owns the music phone market right now.

The company could come badly unstuck if it tries to lock people into its video downloads when there are plenty of other sources available.

Yes, it would be a shame if Apple uses the same highly successful model with video that it uses with music.

If it starts to be perceived generally as being guilty of anti-competitive practices, it could lose some of the momentum it has gained over the past five years.

Ah, yes, the Macalope remembers when that happened to Microsoft and people took their copies of Windows to the ocean and threw them in to show their…

Wait a minute…

The Macalope is just a little uncertain why so many people think that what made Microsoft so successful will make Apple a failure. But they sure do think that a lot.

The silly cherry on top of this silly post is when Clive closes by commenting how fun it would be if Apple licensed OS X.

Fun for you, maybe…