The Bigger Apple
A mouse, or the ship from Flight of the Navigator?
Impressive enough that Apple stock hit an all-time high today. In the middle of a steep recession, Apple continued to grow. Add in contemporaneous moves by competing businesses -- Windows 7 comes out tomorrow, and last week Verizon and Google began advertising for their joint iPhone competitor, Droid -- and the milestone is even more spectacular.
Predicts John Gruber...
I’ll go out on a limb and predict that Apple’s market cap will surpass Microsoft’s by the end of 2010. (Also worth noting: Apple has enough cash on hand — cash — to buy every share of Dell.)
Wow. Frankly, Apple has rarely had a day of announcements similar to yesterday's. Sure, most of the new products weren't ground-breaking, but there were upgrades aplenty and very likely zero misses.
I love that Apple has been developing tech in one line and then re-purposing it in other lines, bringing the innovation to all products. Mac Mini as home server. Unibody to all MacBooks, integrated battery first to all iPods and then to all MacBooks. And now Multi-Touch from the iPhone and iPod Touch screens and MacBook Pro trackpads all the way to the stand-alone mouse. As a bonus, the new Magic Mouse sure is purdy.
Declining a Windows 7 House Party Invitation
eBay user pkx tried (and -- shockingly! -- failed) to throw an install party. Having no further need of the Microsoft-provided house party kit, pkx put it up for sale on eBay. Luckily for us, pkx has witty friends and was kind enough to share the reasons given by his friends for declining the invitation to his, ahem, "party."
Unfortunately nobody showed up, so I'm selling this party pack. I've decided to post all of the evite responses:
Pete: I've got to work the drive-thru that night.
Reid: I'd love to come but I heard there is going to be Windows there.
Colin: Feeling too antisocial to come to a computer party 
AJ: FidoNet relay forgot to pay their modem line's phone bill, evite got delayed
Chris: Found out Windows 7 not available on 5.25" floppy.
Kevin: I'll be over as soon as I shut down my laptop. XP still has 72 updates to go.
Bryan: I was going to come to your party, but then I got high. I still have XP and I know why, yeah yeah, because I got high, because I got high, because I got high.
Andy: Didn't realize you needed to own a computer to use Windows 7.
Mike: I was going to come to your launch party but then a girl called.
Ira: Sorry, my guild has a raid.
Adam: Thunderbird on Ubuntu sent your evite into the spam folder because it said, "windows 7 party."
Amanda: I was going to come to your launch party but then a girl called.
Charles: Bing gave me the wrong directions.
Rich: MS-BOB not compatible with Windows 7. Not interested.
Mark: Needs more than 640k ram, which is more than I was told I would ever need.
Amanda rolling BIG for the win. Your favorite?
Feature v. Perceived Value-addition
My television has a feature I hadn’t seen before on a television before I bought it: Bluetooth. The television has a Bluetooth receiver, and you can send it photos and display them on the screen. That’s it. Anybody who has used Bluetooth for anything more than hands-free will understand why this is ridiculous. Not only is it absurd to view photos by sending them one-by-one to a television over a medium that has throughput that barely rivals 1990’s ISDN lines, but it’s even more ridiculous once you realize the TV has no storage. The picture is gone when you don’t want to look at it anymore.
This is a feature? No: this is perceived value-addition. For people who don’t know any better, this seems like a wonderful solution. But a solution to what? I know I didn’t have the problem that I wanted to look at crappy-quality photos from my phone’s camera on my television’s non-persistent screen.
New Rule For Hollywood
Autobots... roll out!
While watching the Hawks/Heat playoff game tonight, I saw a commercial that immediately got my attention with nothing but a voiceover. All I heard was: "This Summer..." and I immediately looked up at the TV. The speaker? None other than The Man himself, the voice of Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen.
The product? Coors Light.
I understand that Mr. Cullen works for a living and needs to earn a paycheck, but can't we all agree to limit his work to things that are tech related... or at least things that are so absolutely fantastic that they're worthy of his voice. He's Optimus Prime, and for those who grew up with the old cartoon, he always will be Optimus Prime.
Adult Swim, the home for cutting-edge animation? Perfect. Coors Light? Not so much.
EA Forgot To Get Clearance From Legal
Real brass knuckles. I wonder how much this cost to ship.
In-house attorneys are routinely required to act as the bad guys. They get paid the big bucks to keep their company out of trouble, so they're always telling co-workers "no," or "good idea, but you can't do it," or, when they're in less-than-stellar moods "What are you, an idiot? Get out of my office, stop bothering me with your nonsense, and maybe I'll pretend this never happened."
Marketing professionals tend to harbor the most resentment toward their legal brethren. Clean copy ruined by disclaimers, ad impact destroyed when legal removed the controversial punchline... it's almost enough to keep many PR pros from drinking that second martini at lunch.*
Well, let this be a lesson to those who would ignore or seek to avoid clearing campaigns with legal:
Electronic Arts today contacted game writers around the country asking them to return the brass knuckles they were sent as part of a promotion for Godfather II.
. . .
Brass knuckles or metallic knuckles are illegal in many of the states that they were shipped to. They're also illegal in California, where EA is based. [It may even be illegal in California to ship brass knuckles.]
Doh!
As always, The Godfather provides guidance...
I trust these men with my life, Senator. To ask them to leave would be an insult. -- Michael Corleone
* Who am I kidding? Nothing gets in the way of the two-martini lunch.
[Great find by Poole. Image via ArsTechnica.]
Second Circuit Promotes Confusion Regarding Trademark
How much TM protection is too much?
When you use any "free" Google product (search, email, YouTube, etc.) Google displays some sponsored ads -- AdWords -- most notably on the right side of the screen. Other websites (most commonly blogs) also include these text-only ads on their websites.
AdWords is an incredibly successful program. Google's innovation has been to mine anonymous user data to narrowly target the ads, displaying only ads relevant to a user's search or the content of an email or blog post. Both Google and the site owner gain revenue from displaying the ads, the advertiser gains access to the narrow subset of consumers most likely interested in what the advertiser is promoting via the ad.
As an example if you email your friend about coaching little league baseball, and you happen to mention that you live in San Francisco, you'll likely see AdWord ads for the Giants, Major League Baseball, and maybe someone like Easton, a maker of baseball bats. Old news, right? This all makes sense. The baseball emailer isn't stuck skimming ads about perfume or a shoe sale at Neiman Marcus or low-cost flights to London -- those ads would feel irrelevant, and would be a waste of everyone's time and money.
More controversially, Google also made a practice of selling ad space based on the user's input of trademarked terms. So if I did a search for "SF Giants," the official trademark of a professional baseball team, an ad for the Giants' hated rival, the LA Dodgers, or for MLB fans against steroids might show up. Makes sense, right? Why always preach to the converted; sometimes it's most effective to spread a message to those who might be directly opposed.
More importantly, because Google was willing to sell the rights to any term to the highest bidder -- regardless of who owned the trademark -- to anyone who wanted to buy those rights, Google removed the need for them to make any decision about who should or should not be able to advertise to whom. As such, Google refrained from refusing to allow anyone to speak (so long as they were willing to pay for the ad). In so doing, they also refrained from infringing on any person's First Amendment right to speak and express themselves freely.
Problems arise because there is only a limited amount of real estate available for ads on any given web page. As such, company A's competitor, company B could, theoretically, buy up all access to A's available ad space in order to promote B's product. So while a search for A would show A's website as the first search result, all of the ad's next to that link would point to B's products... and there would be nothing that A could do to stop it.
When this started happening, a number of companies in A's situation felt that their opponents were playing dirty. Worse, they felt that Google, in selling their trademarked company or product name, was violating their right to control those words, which they owned. So, of course, they sued Google.
Trademark law, fundamentally, balances the need of a company to develop a brand and the need of consumers to know the source of a product (important when evaluating aspects such as quality or reliability) against constitutionally-protected free speech.
The first court to hear this challenge to Google's practice felt that Google was balancing free speech and trademark rights in an acceptable manner. The plaintiff appealed, and the Second Circuit this week overruled the lower court's decision. In seeking a middle-ground, however, the Second Circuit muddied the waters.
Today's ruling does not say that buying or selling a trademark as a search keyword necessarily infringes the trademark. The trademark owner still must prove that consumers are confused. The Second Circuit seemed to think that was shield enough for the likes of Google.
But this ignores the financial realities of litigation, and how those realities condition the business decisions of intermediaries. Google and advertisers who participate in the AdWords program have been targeted nationwide in a large number of lawsuits. The Second Circuit's ruling today makes it difficult for these defendants to get rid of these cases on purely legal grounds. Litigating a trademark case past this point, to summary judgement or trial, requires a substantial financial investment that most companies simply won’t want to make, even if they are confident they will win in the end. (Witness Blockshopper’s decision last month to settle with Jones Day after BlockShopper lost its motion to dismiss Jones Day’s trademark suit, even though the case was was widely ridiculed as preposterous.)
Fox Removes "Always Sunny" From Hulu
Fox to fans: "I'll eat your babies, bitch!"
After a brilliant musical finale to Season 3, Fox, in their infinite wisdom, has said screw you to the die hard fans who have supported Always Sunny and have ordered all three seasons removed from Hulu.
This is a show that got it's start when its stars/creators filmed a pilot with their home camera (for the cost of the videotapes) and got them to the head of fledgling cable network FX, who took a chance on the young comedic-genuses.
Hulu originally took the videos down asap and without warning to users. Below is their apology. Still, however, they say nothing about why Fox removed the show.
Can't Fox just say "we want to force fans to overpay for dvds" and be done with it? I'd even be fine with this policy if I thought The Gang was getting a big slice of the pie (as Frank would say) ... but I'm pretty sure that any extra coin is headed straight to the pockets of Fox execs. Bastards.
Hulu's apology:
The Sidekick Was First
Don't be distracted by the sparkle -- it's the user interface that makes the device shine.
During my 3L year in law school I worked as a legal intern at Danger, maker of the Sidekick. I knew of the Sidekick -- a friend at school had one, and I'd seen lots of celebrities with them in magazines. I thought of the Sidekick as the Blackberry for the club crowd. Still, I'd never actually played with one myself.
When I did finally get to fiddle with one, I was shocked. The UI was elegant and easy to use. The keyboard was smooth, the screen was gorgeous, and the Internet connection was snappy. All in all, a great device.
The iPhone was released, and the Sidekick was all but forgotten. Surprisingly, none of the reviews declaring the iPhone the greatest invention since sliced bread even mentioned the Sidekick -- only the Blackberry was discussed as competition.
I get it. The iPhone does feel like the Future. The simplicity of the iPhone -- hold the 2001-esque obelisk in the palm of your hand and the whole Internet is yours -- is the key physical innovation over from earlier devices. iTunes, the iTunes Store and Safari are perfectly integrated with the device. By contrast, the Sidekick, with it's flip-out screen, feels cool to use but looks infintely more complicated than the iPhone's power button.
Still, the complaints I've heard from friends, first about the EDGE and then regarding the 3G iPhone -- trouble typing, no cut-and-paste, impossible-to-use SMS -- are irrelevant when using the Sidekick; Danger eliminated those problems in 2006!
From the very first demo of the iPhone, it was obvious it was a knockoff of the Sidekick. The UI demo Steve Jobs did -- calling two people and then merging the calls -- is the exact same demo I'd given to all my friends to show off the incredible UI polish and attention to detail by the Sidekick developers. Sure, there were some differences -- most notably that Apple's artists had prettied up the iPhone UI as compared to the 8-bit basement wackos who drew up the Sidekick's -- but it was clear that this was an evolutionary change, not the revolutionary leap everyone made it out to be.
So what's holding the Sidekick back? One writer argues that The Man is to blame:
But it wasn't as if the Sidekick was unheard of. As soon as I wandered out of the land of white folks in suits-and-ties, black and latino kids would rush up to me and gab about the Sidekick. During one trip, a latina middle-schooler stopped me on the sidewalk and asked if I'd gotten the latest firmware update yet. "It has JavaScript support!" she enthused. Browsing the Sidekick user forums bore this out -- it was all black and latino schoolchildren.
...
But, of course, neither minorities nor schoolchildren rule the world, so the Sidekick has been written out of history. 2007 was the first time anyone had thought to give a smartphone a decent UI, or a web browser, or an over-the-air application store. Well, at least it was the first time anyone thought to tell white people.
Sounds like a case for Undercover Brother.
I now think of the Sidekick as the Scion to the Blackberry's Lexus -- similar machines aimed at very different crowds. True, the Sidekick is made by Danger and the Blackberry is made by RIM, (while both the Scion and the Lexus are made by Toyota), but otherwise the comparison holds.
Both offer a great screen, Internet connectivity, a keyboard and a well-designed interface.
Like the Lexus, the Blackberry has a mature, understated, sophistocated look and is aimed at the business professional. The Scion and Sidekick, on the other hand, are highly customizeable, flashy, and offer features aimed at the young -- sweet rims and a bangin' stereo in the Scion, and video games, MySpace and great IM options on the Sidekick.
The Sidekick is a great device and hasn't gotten the respect it deserves. Critics have been treating the Sidekick as a dead platform, but I say long live the Sidekick!
[Note: Article via Daring Fireball, image via Slashphone.]
Favorite Brand Names On The Wire
One of my favorite things about The Wire is how it's tied in so completely to contemporary Baltimore and then to the rest of the wider world. Over the course of the show's five seasons, the hoppers on the corners updated the brand name to fit with recent world events. The more ferocious the name, the more potent the drug. Just cause kids drop outta school and deal doesn't mean they're dumb. My favorites:
- WMD
- Pandemic
- Bird Flu
- Greenhouse Gas
- Mistletoe
- Sheed Wallace
- Brokeback
- Bin Laden
For more, read a discussion about Blue Tops at The Wire's forums. Even better, dealers in Philly have a brand of heroin called The Wire.
Did I miss any good ones? Let me know...
JD = no guarantee
According to an excellent report by the Wall Street Journal, law school graduates who are not in the top 10% of their class at all but the elite schools are having an increasingly difficult time finding work. Work that is found (outside of the big firms, of course) offers starting salaries more modest than in the past.
Evidence of a squeezed market among the majority of private lawyers in the U.S., who work as sole practitioners or at small firms, is growing. A survey of about 650 Chicago lawyers published in the 2005 book "Urban Lawyers" found that between 1975 and 1995 the inflation-adjusted average income of the top 25% of earners, generally big-firm lawyers, grew by 22% -- while income for the other 75% actually dropped.
To which I say cry me a river. The vast majority of law school graduates are still going to find quality work and earn a more-than-comfortable salary. What really caught my eye were these paragraphs:
[D]ebate is intensifying among law-school academics over the integrity of law schools' marketing campaigns. Defenders argue that the legal profession always has been openly and proudly a meritocracy: Top entrance-exam scores help win admittance to top schools where top students win jobs at top firms. Even the system that is used to issue law-school grades -- a curve that pits student against student -- reflects the law profession's competitiveness. . . . [The Dean of second-tier Loyola Law School] says it is problematic that big firms only interview the top of the class, "but that's the nature of the employment market; it's never been different."
. . .
"Prospective students need solid comparative data on employment outcomes, [but] very few law schools provide such data," adds Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Illinois who has studied the market for new lawyers.
Students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences. Tulane University, for example, reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes.
It often feels that my school has forgetten that Law School is a professional school. It's an investment, and our goal, as students, is to be prepared for and to land a job after we graduate. As an example, On Campus Interviews (OCI) are taking place right now, and the application process began in early August. Unbeknown to the majority of students, however, was the fact that our Office of Career Planning (OCP) is not as we left it in the Spring. Our entire staff (of 3, for 750 students) resigned, was released, or is on sabbatical. Upon returning this Fall, we found one new OCP attorney, with her Director not arriving until mid-September, long after OCI applications were due.
I'm sure there's an interesting back story here, and while we do seem to have upgraded our OCP staff, leaving students high and dry for OCI was a horrible means to that end. Some students at my school have lost out on interviews, quality internships, and possibly even jobs because Career Planning has not been enough of a priority for our administration. I can only hope that the positive reports I've heard and the positive acts I've seen from the newly hired staff marks a change in attitude at my law school.
For a larger discussion on the WSJ piece, see the WSJ Law Blog »