May 17, 2024

s18e10: Sure, Fine, Crushed It; Smarts

0.0 Context Setting

Friday, 17 May in Portland, Oregon, where the sky is mostly blue, the temperature is pleasant, and we don’t have to stay inside because of dangerously bad wildfire smoke. A good day!

I am not going to the Code for America Summit, but I am going to be jealously guarding a table at the second floor bar in the Oakland Marriott at exactly the same time as the Code for America Summit is happening, on Thursday 30 May. Which is two weeks yesterday! What a coincidence! If you’re in the area, come and say hi.

I’m going to be a participant in Mike Monteiro’s Presenting with Confidence workshop next week and it’s probably full by now. That means you should go to the one after that, on Thursday June 6.

0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord

Hallway Track is still on hiatus.

Pulling the Cord, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement is gearing up for its first non-test session, likely in May.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Sure, Fine, Crushed It

Sure, yes, the Apple iPad Pro hashtag-crushed-it ad and the subsequent apology¹ caught my attention and like everyone else I have thoughts about it.

Apple has always been good at brand advertising. Its product advertising has always done double duty as brand advertising. I mean, this is stating the obvious.

The iPad Pro ad was product marketing, the whole point was the thinness. Look at all the stuff that’s crammed in here! And it was in typical Apple fashion pretty flawless execution of the message that this incredibly thin thing could now do all of this stuff.

It feels redundant at this point to think out loud about all the of-the-moment concerns and zeitgeist of the commoditization of creativity and art, so I’ll just set all of that to the side.

There was the whole thing about running the ad in reverse: take this thin thing, and then look at the multitudes it contains! Sure, not realizing that was a big miss. But to jump on the Oh No, Apple Is Doomed bandwagon, the easy thing to say would be that Apple’s lost its way (again), is doomed (again), and that it’s gotten its head up its ass about weirdly and finally confusing product marketing with brand marketing and just completely missed the mark on this one. It doesn’t help -- and again, this feels obvious -- that Apple is so big and so influential now.

If you were to treat Apple like a person, which it isn’t, then you could say something like it’s been formed by early traumatic events like nearly dying and as a result made lots of decisions about needing to be independent. (Apple isn’t a person, but it’s certainly led by people). That self-sufficiency is intertwined with its independent streak (duh, think different), so it’s always going to be the underdog, even when it isn’t. It’s always going to believe it knows better and has an alternative approach because it always has! That’s what sets them apart. And it clearly isn’t the underdog now. But the other attributes are still true: it’s still an opinionated approach, but there’s a qualitatively difference when the opinionated alternative approach is coming from the player with <10% market share with minimal influence than to one that while it may have minimal share certainly has outsize net profit, valuation, and shedloads of cash to throw around.

The other thing that’s floating around after the most recent iPad Pro launch and caught my attention was this: that now Apple sells a $3,000 computing device that comes in two formats, where they have more in common than they have different, if you use a particular lens.

One of them has an optional pen input device and keyboard, the other one doesn’t have an optional pen input device, but does have a keyboard. They have similar amounts of RAM and compute. But after many, many years of “but the iPad could do more if Apple let it”, the only excuse right now is that “sure, but Apple don’t actually want to let the iPad be more like a computer”. Some of these “be more like a computer” things do genuinely seem like artificial limitations of iPad OS like more background processes (one example was being able to do exports without having the app be foregrounded), and better file management. Apple would -- will, and does -- say that look most people who have iPad also have Macs, and at that point you’re like okay sure fine, it works out well for you that I buy two devices. But... they’re also quite close to each other? Sure there’s segmentation, but they’re not sufficiently well segmented?

1.2 Smarts

Two things caught my attention:

1. Google’s opening up its smart home API²
2. Some xooglers have launched a smart mini-split heat pump system³

On the first, here’s an excerpt from The Verge’s piece quoting Google Home’s engineering director:

Matt Van Der Staay, engineering director at Google Home, said the Home APIs could be used to connect smart home devices to fitness or delivery apps. “You can build a complex app to manage any aspect of a smart home, or simply integrate with a smart device to solve pain points — like turning on the lights automatically before the food delivery driver arrives.”²

I get this is a soundbite. I am going to assume that there are product people at Google who think about things like a failure mode like this, and that it’s a failure mode in the first place. But, consider!

1. For whatever reason, I want to get food delivered
2. The food delivery app (let’s say Postmates by Uber) asks for permission to access my smart home so that, like Der Staay says, my outdoor lights can turn on automatically before the food delivery driver arrives “for your safety and the driver’s safety” (I’m making that up)
3. At some point (yes, citation needed), the incentives for granting smart home permissions outweigh any concerns about privacy. For example: you turn on notifications from your food delivery app because you want to know when your food is going to arrive, but that means you can’t turn off marketing notifications
4. So who would make the decision to stop using food delivery apps if they now come with a strong incentive to grant smart home permissions? I bet: hardly anyone. The convenience of food delivery massively outweighs the potential harm or loss of data based on giving a food delivery app access to your smart home. Even if it’s just an outside light.

I am going to assume that there are mitigations here. They’d be something like this:

1. Apps aren’t allowed to read any data about your smart home
2. Apps only have access if users explicitly grant it
3. That access must be periodically renewed
4. Apps have to have privacy policies in place (which people won’t read)
5. “the marketplace” will self correct if apps try to do bad things
6. Failure to adhere to rules will result in delisting from app marketplaces

I mean that last one is hilarious because who’s going to delist one of the major food delivery apps? I mean really? Practically speaking?

I can imagine one alternative path where some sort of paternalistic government just decides, because it turns out that governments can actually just decide that actually, certain apps just can’t have access to smart home systems. Just, no. Because the market will fuck it up, the way it always does. Is that OK? Who knows! Maybe someone should find out! I mean, are food delivery apps going to suddenly stop serving those markets if they’re not allowed access to smart home platforms? Probably not?

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How are you doing? I’m doing OK, I guess.

Hey, did you know I sell stickers now? You should buy some, they’re great. They’re all about dealing with Reply Guys. People are even putting them on things.

Best,

Dan

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