Care of SFGate.com.

It’s fair to say that one of the most effective ways to respond to a threatened patent assertion is to be able to assert patents of your own.

- Tim Porter, Google Patent Council

So then the plan is to:

1. Like what the iPhone is doing
2. Do a half-ass implementation of that thing you liked
3. Shit-talk the patent system when the thing you stole gets noticed by who you stole it from
4. Get your hardware partners sued from now to the end of time

At least they don’t have a corner on anything important, like information storage, indexing, searching and presentation.

Shit.

Today Chris Steven posted an essay (or rather, a marketing piece for his book) on the randomization of success rates in the App Store. As a current and former App developer, as well as a long time commercial software developer, I do not like his Casino analogy. As a long time gambler, I also don’t like being reminded that there isn’t a way to “beat the casino”.

Chris has been involved in successful consumer software, and his post can be taken as being “from the horses mouth” in that regard. Successfully making a living via mobile software is a very challenging niche. But to equate success to anything inside of a Casino is just silly, as mobile games don’t provide free drinks. It doesn’t matter if you are selling nails, books, art or video games. Perhaps luck can help you shortcut a path to success. But hard work, intense research and development of your product are fundamental to success.

Rovio. Overnight they became one of the biggest franchises in the world of mobile. Overnight. Of course you must ignore the previous 6 years of experience the company built on. The principals started a path in 2003 together that led to 51 dismal failures. Poor character design, ungainly gameplay and hardware platforms that nobody used all conspired to create repeated failures. Read that again. 51 games that failed to be “huge”. The fortitude to push forward again and try number 52 is what separated them for the other slot machine players in the casino. By the time Angry Birds hit big Rovio already had Platinum Players Club status.

Rovio had to develop an understanding of their market. Indeed they had to develop this understanding while the market was being ripped apart and redesigned by Apple. They honed their personal identity, game concepts and business processes over these repeated failures. They sought and achieved angel funding to keep the lights on while driving forward. Hard work. Long days. Short weekends. Iterate, iterate and iterate some more.

Did this hard work and iteration guarantee success? Hell no it didn’t. Not even close. Did it guarantee that when a little bit of luck did happen that they would be in the right position to turn that into maximum success? Hell yes they did.

This is where the analogy to a casino is flawed. In a casino, you can walk in and hit a jackpot on the very first spin of a slot machine. Drop in your $5 bill and win big. You cannot do that with software. Winning big means you have iterated on a product over and over and over again. You have honed the details, worked with your customers and developed a core following.

When the first time a developer enters the casino (publishes a product), they might get a little win. If they are lucky. That same first-time developer will have a buggy product that is very likely incomplete or short on content. It will be ill marketed and ill supported. It will be bargain-basement priced. They have stacked the deck against themselves by trying to sell a poor product in a poor manner.

The next time a developer enters the market, he will carry the weight of that failure. He will know to have a better tested product. His product will be complete and flushed out. There will be a nice website and support system in place. It will be priced off of the floor level. They have begun to stack the deck in their own favor. A great product requires more than just itself to succeed. It needs all that support surrounding it to stand upright and live.

Even though I don’t like the Casino analogy, I’m still going to read his book. Chris has been on a side of the market (massive success) that I have not been on. Some day I would like to see what he has seen.

Interested? Amazon has it for both kindle and tree.

Not long back John Gruber posted a bit of thinking surrounding the Skeuomorphic UI Textures that Apple has started using and expanding on. This piece was a response to James Higgs criticism of the same. Both Gruber and Higgs are some of the most thoughtful and insightful journalists around, but both can prone to “inside the machine” thinking. By this I mean that some folk (myself included) see design decisions like this as obscure and unneeded. We are entirely right. leather trimmed textures are stoopid. Yes, stoopid. Two O’s and zero You’s.

We don’t have leather trimmed desk blotters. We don’t carry paper and leather day planners or contact lists (didn’t they used to be phone books?). Why should our software have something our “real world” doesn’t?

I am not the target of this design. Higgs and Gruber are not either. For the target audience I must look to my Father-In-Law. 64 years young. Handle bar mustache. 30+ year veteran of the Washington State Department of Corrections, prison guard to the non-con and outsider. Also a well educated man, smart by smarts standard. He reads more in a week than I do in a month.

He won’t touch a computer.

He is afraid of them. Not evil per say, just something he feels is beyond his abilities. He does own a desk blotter and a phone book. Both leather and paper products. He owns an iPad (1st gen) too. He just “gets” the iPad.  Ask him and he will tell you “anyone with half a bean in their noodle would make a computer as simple as an iPad”.

This Skeuomorphic trend (beautiful word, skeuomorphic) is about your Father-In-Law. It is about pushing further distinction between computers and Apple’s. Computers are hard, cruel and beyond the average man. Apple’s are something else entirely. Hell, the iPad is a physical object. You interact directly with it. Zero abstraction between intent and input. A book is much the same, as is a desk blotter.

The “wrapped in leather” look represents the reality that most of the world is still afraid of computing devices. Apple solved this problem without patronizing my Father-In-Law, and without alienating the tech-forward among us.

Shhhhh…  Don’t tell my F.O.S.S. friends, but I have switched to the “dark side”.  After spending a tick over two weeks with my iOS partner I have some odd thoughts on the matter.  Odd because they are not the things I had anticipated, but probably should have.

First, iOS lacks a lot of features that are on some Android devices.  For example, I haven’t had to reboot my iPhone once.  It stays functional, and it stays working.

I’ve never had the dock go MIA on me.  I turn the screen on, and go to work.  Icons are where they should be.  Moving between screens happens without massive redraw showing it’s face.  I liked watching the screen refresh.  I felt like I understood the nature of my machine.  iOS?  I have no clue what it going on in there.  It is just magic, and that scares me a little.

No lag.  None.  My old Android had TONNES of lag.  I kind of miss it.  Without all the wait time I am forced to get things done.  Did I just intend on making a call?  BOOM.  Call happens and I am now required actually conversate with the other party.

Yeah, that was a bit of sarcasm.  I apologize for that.  It started out with good intentions but quickly went sideways.  My very initial thought did concern a lack of features.  Android just packs features in everywhere possible.  Lots and lots of features.

If Android was Windows, all you Stallman fanatics would call that BLOAT.  Since this is Linux based though, we will forgive you your hypocrisy.  Much like Ubuntu, Android is just an over-bloated whale.  Loved by all, useful to nobody.

After two solid weeks though I realized that my iPhone friend packs in a lot of features.  It limits itself to the features that are actually useful though.  Do I want the ability to install additional browsers?  Hell Yes.  Did I EVER use those browsers on any of my old phones?  Nope.  The long story short is this:

What is popular isn’t right.  What is right is INCREDIBLY popular.

I also need to highlight the GET IT DONE attitude my Cupertino companion has.  Everything just moves fast and smooth.  It is so responsive to touch that I feel like it actually reacts to my touch BEFORE I have physically come in contact with the glass.  I never really felt like my last Android device was slow or laggy.  But that was ignorances bliss and not reality.

I guess to summarize, two features jump out and stick with me.  Every single feature on the phone is polished to a beautiful shine.  They work exactly the right way.  And they work FAST.