Salvatore Iovene

Before the last few years, I don’t recall any­one say­ing they were fans of some com­pany. I could imag­ine peo­ple say­ing “I like Ford cars” and “I pre­fer Ben&Jerry ice cream.”

But being fans? No, I’m pos­i­tive I’ve never heard or read any­thing like that.

Nowa­days I read and hear it on a daily basis. Peo­ple are fans of Google, Apple, Nokia. They lit­er­ally cheer for their favorite com­pany, watch­ing their direct (patent law­suits) and indi­rect (new prod­ucts com­pet­ing each other) bat­tles, and hop­ing that it wins in the end.

Face­book, being extremely unpop­u­lar these days despite me think­ing it’s no big­gie, is indeed risk­ing a damn lot just because of the cost of being uncool.

What does this tell? Is there a pre­cise con­nec­tion between the qual­ity of one’s prod­uct and its per­ceived cool­ness? Or is there a link between the mar­ket­ing and this cool­ness? Per­haps none, per­haps both. A com­pany goes build­ing an image, and it looks like each sin­gle tiny thing that hap­pens plays a part into gen­er­at­ing this pub­lic image.

Apple has seen a tremen­dous explo­sion of pop­u­lar­ity since the iPhone, and that’s helped a lot with build­ing an image. An image that’s really dif­fi­cult to erad­i­cate. Let’s be hon­est: the iPhone’s hard­ware is far from the com­peti­tors’ (see Nokia’s and HTC’s recent devices) and the soft­ware is barely catch­ing up (mul­ti­task­ing? It was about time.) Still, they’re going to con­tinue being cool, no mat­ter how many times they’ll mar­ket thinks like Cut & Paste like the best inven­tion since sliced bread. Why? You know it: because first impres­sions are hard to go.

So what has a com­pany to do, today, to be cool? Where is the line between meet­ing the expec­ta­tions for the sake of not dis­ap­point­ing the user base, and exceed­ing them with the risk of being ahead of the times?

I can iden­tify a few things to keep in mind.

Con­fi­dence. Whether we’re talk­ing about mar­ket­ing, or push­ing for a risky idea, hav­ing con­fi­dence mat­ters a lot. Deal­ing with large user bases comes with two big prob­lems: you can’t make every­one happy and you have to tell your user what they want while allow­ing them to feel that they’re get­ting what they thought they wanted. It is risky, but it’s the only way to lead. If your com­pany lacks the con­fi­dence to do that, it’s in trouble.

Hon­esty. Your users are smart. Maybe not all, but enough of them are smart enough to make noise. Don’t try to fool them. Per­haps you’ll sell a lit­tle more units in the short term, but your pub­lic image will deteriorate.

Integrity. Mak­ing mis­takes is OK, but it doesn’t work if nobody believes you. You need to have a clear set of val­ues, and stick to them.

All in all, it boils down to the DBAA prin­ci­ple, i.e. Don’t Be An Ass. Do that, and make sure you are able to give your users what they want and what they don’t know they want, and peo­ple will cheer for you.

I can read, basi­cally every other day, some web­site going nuts about some iPhone clone. Just few min­utes ago I read about the nVidia GoForce 6100, and googling for “iPhone clone” really con­firms the fuss. Well, the truth is that the iPhone actu­ally is the one com­ing late, pos­si­bly the cloner, rather than the cloned.

I’m not work­ing at Apple Inc., but, being a soft­ware devel­oper and hap­pen­ing to have also worked for a while in the devel­op­ment process of a high tech device, I know, as many oth­ers, that the process that leads to the birth of a com­pli­cated gad­get like the iPhone, takes years.

Digg.com has gone com­pletely crazy about the sub­ject. A Google Search about that sub­ject on Digg, returns 5520 results.

Given that Apple Inc. will release the iPhone only next Fall, and that there are many devices already out there, which have been yelled at as mere “clones” (absolutely dis­re­spect­fully, IMHO), how can you peo­ple abuse the term so much? I’m assum­ing that noth­ing really seri­ous leaked from Apple, so the com­peti­tors didn’t just rush to make their own touch screen phones. The truth is that the tech­nol­ogy started to be ready, and the mar­ket started to be ready too, at the same time. Some peo­ple missed the oppor­tu­nity and couldn’t even accept it, some other real­ized the chance and went for it.

I hope that the abuse of the word “clone” will cease to exist, and that, from now on, every­body will just talk about “another touch screen phone”.

Here’s a photo-list of alleged “iPhone clones” so far.

Samsung’s Ultra Smart F700	Asus Aura
Meizu M8	LG KE850

Thanks to Digg I just found out a cer­tain video on YouTube. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, is asked what he thinks about the iPhone. I won­der how much the MS guys are aware of their image, or con­scious of what they do and say. I’m sorry, I don’t want to be harsh, nor I want to dis­re­spect Mr. Ballmer, whom I don’t know per­son­ally, but his com­ments in that inter­view were out­ra­geously ridicu­lous. Mean­ing that they made me laugh my head off.

First of all, Mr. Ballmer was shout­ing pretty loud, and that’s ter­ri­bly impo­lite. His all line of answer was about mock­ing the com­peti­tor (Apple, in this case) with an eery smile between sar­cas­tic and fright­ened. It’s really an old tech­nique of blab­bers like him: under­min­ing the com­peti­tors’ value, and pre­tend­ing it doesn’t pose a threat at all. He says “That is the most expen­sive phone in the World and doesn’t appeal to busi­ness cus­tomers because it doesn’t have a key­board, which makes it not a very good email machine”. First of all, this is totally and absolutely ques­tion­able. Sec­ondly, the iPhone might be plugged to a blue­tooth key­board. In any case, that doesn’t mat­ter at all. Mr. Ballmer was dar­ing to express his lousy per­sonal opin­ion on the sole obvi­ous pur­pose to under­mine the com­peti­tor. He’s just try­ing to blow smoke in the eyes of the users. I don’t want to start any anti-Microsoft issue here, but it’s def­i­nitely obvi­ous that Ballmer is scared and falling into pathetic attempts to dam­age the competitor.

He then con­tin­ues with “We have our strat­egy, we have great Win­dows Mobile devices in the mar­ket today, you can get a Motorola Q phone now for 99 dol­lars”. He stresses the “99 dol­lars” a lot. Well, if hav­ing low-cost lousy device (which you don’t actu­ally build! It’s a Motorola, isn’t it?) is the only way to keep your share, then be my guest, but I see no sense in mock­ing Apple for the price of the iPhone, and then giv­ing no real argu­ments. It looks like they want to sell their Win­dows Mobile pow­ered (under pow­ered?) devices by the pound. That’s lousy. He con­tin­ues talk­ing about the Motorola Q, say­ing that it’s a very capa­ble machine, it can do music, it can do Inter­net, it can do email, it can do Instant Mes­sag­ing. “So I kinda look at that, and I say I like our strat­egy, I like it a lot”. The orig­i­nal ques­tion he was asked was about the iPhone (which he just mocked for the price) and the Zune (which he didn’t men­tion at all). So the inter­viewer felt about hav­ing to repeat the thing, because it was obvi­ous that Ballmer was kinda afraid of the sub­ject. The inter­viewer asks, talk­ing about the phones mar­ket and the music mar­ket, “How do you com­pete with that?” — and there you can see Ballmer go with a sort of dull expres­sion for a moment — then replies “Let’s start with the phone” (appar­ently he really doesn’t want to go to the Zune) and says that at the moment Microsoft is sell­ing “mil­lions and mil­lions and mil­lions” (how many is that? 3 mil­lions?) of phones, and Apple is sell­ing zero. I’m amused: that was his argu­ment. “How do you com­pete to the iPhone?” — “That’s not a threat”. That was his answer, minus the bull­shit. Then he says again that the Apple iPhone will be the most expen­sive phone “by far” ever in the mar­ket — then smiles — and says “Let’s see”.

Then he finally men­tions the Zune, and says they’ve got 20% of the mar­ket. What mar­ket? The mar­ket of the devices over 249$. That’s not the mar­ket. It’s only a part of it. I don’t know what you peo­ple will think about this, but it gives me the impres­sion that the phones mar­ket is going to shake badly.

By the way, it’s so funny how he goes on and on about the price, when they dare sell­ing a com­pletely bloated Oper­a­tive Sys­tem for 400$ or some­thing, but that’s just my opin­ion.

Besides, Mr. Ballmer prob­a­bly is not aware that when every­thing will set­tle up in one year or so, this video is going to get back at him, and be extremely hilar­i­ous. Good job, Microsoft. On the other hand, what else can you say about this man?

Dear Mr. Jobs,

Although I’m just a spo­radic Apple user (used to have an iBook — but even­tu­ally sold it -, I have an iPod Nano), and although I’m not using any of your soft­ware (used Linux on the iBook and use Linux again on the iPod), I truly appre­ci­ate the prod­ucts of Apple Inc., soft­ware included. I like OS X very much and I’ve been very keen in fol­low­ing Apple’s events even not being a great user myself.

I heard about the iPhone, saw the pic­tures and heard the rumors. At first glance, fol­low­ing the offi­cial pre­sen­ta­tion through Engadget’s web­site, I was stunned and greatly sur­prised, in a very good way. The iPhone looked exactly like every­thing I’ve always wanted. All the ideas in there, all what that kind of gad­get rep­re­sents, have been uncon­sciously float­ing in the back­yard of my mind for some time, and sud­denly all was true.

After a few days, though, some rumors said that the user won’t be allowed to install 3rd party appli­ca­tions. That shocked me again: the first thing I thought, when I saw the iPhone, was “Oh gee, this is the ulti­mate geek tool, must have it!”. In the line of Apple’s gor­geous designs, with a great soft­ware load, and fun­da­men­tally a BSD sys­tem where I could load any­thing I wanted. I was already dream­ing of port­ing my favorite appli­ca­tions to the iPhone. Then the rumor. I’m no well known mar­keter, but some­thing has been bug­ging me. In my hum­ble opin­ion, the iPhone is (or should be) basi­cally two great things, that rep­re­sent great inno­va­tion if merged in the same device. One is the sim­plic­ity of use, which Apple is famous for. The clean and neat usabil­ity, I loved it in OS X, loved it in the iPod soft­ware. That fea­ture, as usual, hits the great­est share of the mar­ket. Mil­lions of peo­ple who want some­thing that just works, and is easy to under­stand. Apple is always been great with that. The sec­ond thing is that such a gad­get undoubt­edly attracts the power user: a sin­gle device which is a beau­ti­ful phone and has the capa­bil­i­ties of get­ting to the net through WIFI. I think I’m not the only one, out there, who wished for such device. The Nokia 770 was a good start, but it wasn’t a phone. Now, there is some­thing that we power users, or geeks, if you pre­fer (I don’t mind), like to do: that is tweak, cus­tomize. Hav­ing such a pos­si­bil­ity with the iPhone would, in my opin­ion, gain an extra share of the mar­ket, i.e. those power users that don’t like the idea of being con­strained in any way.

I surely under­stand that Apple’s design­ers and engi­neers know what they are doing, and there are very good rea­sons not to open the iPhone to exter­nal appli­ca­tions. A lot has been said, around, about the risks of releas­ing a devel­op­ment plat­form, or the threats that this would bring to the mobile oper­a­tors (like Cin­gu­lar), even though, I must admit, none of the arti­cles got tech­ni­cal enough to con­vince me. And I’ll be up to take all of this as true, of course. There is, though, some­thing which I, and a lot of other peo­ple, would really appre­ci­ate in a device like the iPhone. That is a Ter­mi­nal pro­gram with an SSH client. Imag­ine the poten­tial­i­ties: I do most of my things through an SSH con­nec­tion to my machine at the office. I work from home or from any­where else in the World, that way. I use IRC that way, I read my Usenet mes­sages that way. I read my emails that way. What’s the advan­tage of all this? I like to have a cen­tral and safe place where I can keep an orga­nized and, above all, cen­tral­ized way of man­ag­ing my resources. I don’t need to con­fig­ure email clients every­where I go. I don’t need sev­eral web­mail sys­tems to check all my email addresses. I keep my Usenet arti­cle orga­nized and syn­chro­nized on one sin­gle machine. I keep all my IRC logs on one machine, and so on. With an SSH client in the iPhone, I could do all this even from a bus, now that in my city wire­less con­nec­tions are becom­ing avail­able on some buses.

I’m sure there are lots of more uses of such a thing, and lit­er­ally tens of thou­sands, if not more, of power users like me will love it. I really hope that you will con­sider this issue, and give us power user an SSH client for the iPhone, or the pos­si­bil­ity of installing cus­tom software.