Every single day you can read a ton of articles from media professional arguing for and against the paywall. Most call them backward looking, saying that they are being slammed in people's faces, and only put in place to save the newspapers' old print business models.
As you might have heard, Google Chrome is now available for the iPhone and iPad, but before you get too excited, you need to realize that it isn't Chrome at all. It's Apple's Safari with a 'chrome' interface. The actual browser, the rendering, and javascript engine is 100% Apple Safari.
It's not the Chrome rendering or JavaScript engines - the App Store rules forbid that. It's the iOS system version of WebKit wrapped in Google's own browser UI.
Google Chrome for iOS is still interesting because you get Chrome synch and other Chrome goodies.
But there is a big problem with third party browser on iOS. Not only does Apple not allow other browsers. It also forces them to use an older version of Safari than the one Apple can use themselves.
Every iOS developer knows this. Seeing a website in Safari is much faster than seeing a website inside an app. This is true for Flipboard, the Facebook app, the Twitter app, and every other app - including the new Chrome for iOS.
The reason is simple. Apple wants control and force people to create native apps, and are thus limiting the performance of web apps in third party apps. There is no reason why the iPhone and iPad comes with two different rendering engines - one for Apple and one for everyone else. This is purely anti-competitor behavior that limits choice and forces people to create native apps.
The limitation is even put in place for native web apps, the ones you see inside Safari itself. As long as you see them in Safari they work great. But the second you save them as a web app to your home screen, they are suddenly forced to use the old Safari engine, and are thus much slower to use.
How big a difference is it? I ran a series of test on my iPad, and as you can see, Chrome on iOS is significantly slower, especially when it comes to the all important javascript rendering (the last two 'Sunspider' tests).
Remember, both Safari and Chrome are using Apple's Safari javascript and rendering engine. The is no difference (in theory) 'underneath', so it should also render at the same speeds.
Back in 2011, John Gruber posted a rather lame explanation of why Safari had to be faster for Apple and slower for everyone else. He claimed it was because of 'security concerns', but that is just bullshit.
There is absolutely no difference between a web app running in Safari and the same web app save to the home screen and then running *in Safari*. It's just a lame excuse because we all know that whenever somebody says "it's because of security", everyone is apparently required to stop thinking and just accept whatever insane explanation we are presented with.
There is no technical reason why a web app using Safari from within an app cannot use exactly the same security and memory protection as the same web app running in Safari. It's only different because Apple has made it different.
Also, every single app on the iOS platform runs inside its own isolated sandbox. There is no way that these apps can gain access to elements outside the box it is in. For that reason, there is also no reason why Apple cannot allow Google and Firefox to build their own browser engines into their apps. They are running as an isolated process.
If you can build immensive games using the Unreal gaming engine inside an iOS game, surely you can also run a few lines of javascript code using the Chrome engine without any problems.
This is yet another scam designed to force developers into creating native only apps, by giving their users (that's you!) a much slower experience every time they have to use the web.
Chrome, using Safari's engine should run exactly as fast as Safari itself. It is the same freaking browser with just a slightly different coat of paint.
It's just like how Apple use ePubs in iBooks is also a scam. It stops people from realizing that they are being seriously limited in what they can do with the web, and forces them into an Apple only world.
I wrote about this back in January in "Lies, Damned Lies, and Ebooks" and earlier today, Jani Patokallio explained it this way:
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Last year, I bought a laptop in Singapore, and brought it with me to Australia. It worked fine for reading the Economist online and what passes for journalism in Singapore, but one day I searched for the Sydney Morning Herald, and there were no hits: it's as if it didn't exist. A little poking around revealed that to be able to view Australian sites, I had to register my browser to be in Australia, which also requires a credit card with a billing address there. What's more, switching countries like this would delete all my bookmarks, terminate my paid subscription to the Economist and stop me from being able to read even single issue of the Singaporean Straits Jacket. And needless to say, the laptop is locked to prevent me from installing another browser that would allow me to get around these limits.
Does this sound ridiculous, a perverse fantasy of some balkanized Web of the dystopian future? Nope: it's all true, except that my "laptop" is actually an iPad and my "browser" is iTunes/iBooks. Since my iTunes account has a Singaporean billing address, the Kindle application does not show up in my search results. If I switch countries, I will lose access to everything I've previously downloaded. And if I do bite the bullet and switch to Australia, a good chunk of apps, music and more on offer will no longer be available on iTunes, iBooks or Amazon, and I'll pay around 50% extra on what remains. But I chose not to, and thus didn't buy 3 or 4 books I wanted to, because their publishers would not sell them to me.
Apple is doing everything they can to stop the web. They are limiting web apps from becoming truly functional by making them three times slower in 3rd party apps or saved to the home screen. The same was as they are trying to stop the web with iBooks, the Newsstand and in every other area where the web could shine.
Let me explain the problem by illustrating how our market 'thinking' has changed over the past 10 years.
The traditional way
Back when I was in business school, I learned to look at markets by doing surveys for each one and then conclude that the biggest one is also the one to embrace. For instance, if you are a Scandinavian company and you want to expand into a new market, you would do a survey to see what the likely success rate would be for each country.
For instance in the graph below, UK looks to be the best market to test out your expansion plans.
The reason why this worked is because, in the traditional world, people are not connected with each other. Each market was truly unique. People living in the UK did not know what people did in France - and vice versa.
Most businesses still operate this way. For instance, Pixar's Brave is coming out this weekend in the US, but here in my country I have to wait until the end of August. In the past this didn't matter, because I wasn't connected with people in the US, and I would have no idea what they could see 'over there'.
The connected world
The problem is that in the connected world, people communicate with each other across the old traditional boundaries. I know that Pixar's Brave is coming out this weekend, because I follow Pixar on Facebook and on YouTube.
Pixar has spend months trying to get me to be excited about it only to not deliver on their promise. When people in the other markets cannot engage with your product, they get upset.
This is the worst customer experience you can create. First you spend months building up excitement and momentum, which is further enhanced by the viral effect of people communicating and connecting with each other. Then, when you reach the point where people are so excited about your product that they want to buy it, you slam the door in their face - and you make people feel like some kind of secondary citizen.
You take the best moment in time, the moment when people want to buy from you, and you turn it into the worst possible experience any customer can have. The experience of feeling rejected while all your friends are allowed in.
Why would a brand do this to their customers? The answer, of course, is that they are defining their market as if we still live in a disconnected world. A world that no longer exists.
No longer can you define your market as a region. The connected world has caused us to have a new definition of how we define a market.
If you have a physical product, limited by production and distribution time, you might need to limit who can buy it. But while you, in the past, could limit it to a region, in the connected world you can only limit it to an audience.
One example is that you could limit it to only your early adopters, existing customers, or social followers first. People accept that because it embraces the connection.
Pixar, for instance, could create a 3 stage release plan like this:
This weekend: Early access for all their 13 million followers
Month of July: Invite only access (giving each follower the chance to send out invites to 5 friends)
Month of August: Public release to everyone else
The result of that would be phenomenal, not only because it rewards people for connected with them, but also by using your followers to drive reach to everyone else.
And look at how dramatically it changes how people feel. With a traditional market thinking, brands are alienating their customers and making them angry. Now, even though most people still cannot see it, their expectations and excitement are even higher.
The difference is that the traditional market thinking punishes people when they connect with each other. While the connected approach rewards it.
The mobile market
The real shift, however, is that the traditional market has not just evolved into the connected market. It has actually split into two. The other one is the mobile market.
Mobile is not a thing, and it's not a device. It's you and me. We, as people, have become mobile, meaning that we no longer put ourself into a consumption mode.
Just as we are now global by default (not restricted to a single country), we are now mobile by default as well. We are no longer just using one device we use whatever device that happens to be near us at that moment.
The above study is not mobile. It measures each device in the traditional way, as if people using an iPad is not the same as the ones who use a smartphone. But we all know that's not true. The people who say they are 84% likely to read news on the iPad, also own a smartphone, on which they are 57% likely to read news on as well.
If you only decide to focus on the iPad, you are pissing off people who have both.
People who only own an iPad are happy, because you are delivering an excellent experience. That's great.
At the same time, people who don't own an iPad are angry, because they constantly hear about your products in their social streams but cannot use it (the connected market). That's bad.
But the biggest market is the people who use both an iPad and another device. This is your new primary market. And for them, by only focusing on the iPad, you are forcing them into a consumption mode where they have to think and plan for a single device first, before they can use your product.
The people in the market you leave out is the same as the people in the market that you embrace. It's like making a car that can only be used on highways. The only time it makes sense to make an iPad only news app is when people don't also own a smartphone. But that world doesn't exist.
Another factor is that there is one device that is even more powerful than the iPad or the smartphone. We call it...the laptop. News consumption on laptops is 25% higher than on the iPad and 37% higher than for smartphones.
The above study is the result of the blind fascination the media industry has for the iPad. Instead of looking at the real shift that is happening in our world they put each device into a silo, leave out a big part of the overall market, and measure each as if they are not connected.
The study itself is interesting, despite the glaring omission not to measure laptop use. However, the conclusion that the iPad is bigger is totally wrong. It's a product of wishful thinking, trying to make the new world conform to a traditional market approach.
Your new primary market is to be connected and mobile. Connected meaning that you use the connection to channel your products. And mobile meaning that you free people from having to decide which device to use. If you sit in your office, mobile means using your laptop. If you sit at home, mobile means using whatever device that happens to be within reach. If you are on the bus, mobile means using what's in your hand.
Some devices will have a higher use than others for certain things, but that is only a plus that you get by embracing the connected world. It's not a market.
Mobile is not a thing It's you! Your market is not a region it's a connection.
This question emerges frequently in my stream, especially during times like these where a lot of people are out of a job. We can all see the trends. In the media world automated news aggregators, which can be managed and developed by a handful of people, are replacing the media's role as 'the bringer of news' - and suddenly hundreds of journalists are out of a job.
That's sad, because while I advocate new media, I really like the publishing industry. I once worked for a small printing press, long before days of digital, and I still think those days as 'magical'. I love the idea that first you had to submerge a metallic plate into a chemical bath to create the print plates. Then you had to use a special marker to fix imperfections, by hand, only to load the print plate into this big cast-iron press, apply the ink manually to the rollers, after carefully mixing it by hand. And then the magic happened ...a piece of paper came out looking odd, because it was only the first of many colors.
All this has been replaced by this - me typing on a wireless keyboard directly into my CMS system and clicking a button. Technology, the internet and, more so, the direct connection has completely eliminated print.
And now, with the new Retina displays in both mobiles, tablets and laptops, the quality of digital exceeds the quality of news print -- and it matches the quality of high-end magazine print.
There simply isn't any reason any longer to print something. At best, you get the same output (a magazine you can hold in your hands and flip through), but with print it just takes a lot longer, requires far more people to do and costs many times more to produce.
It doesn't matter what people think. It's simply a question of efficiency, convenience, and economics. If we look back, I cannot find a single industry that had stayed in the past when a faster, more convenient, and cheaper option was available. In fact, I can name several industries that have disappeared completely because they where no longer needed.
My great-great grandfather, for instance, had a spectacular job. He was a bowling pin raiser. Yep, he was working in a bowling ball alley before all those new fangled machines that exist today. Every time someone knocked down those pins, his job was to put them back up again so that people could continue playing. Isn't that amazing?
My grandmother was a telephone switchboard operator. Her job was to sit in one of those telephone centrals and manually move wires from one slot to another to connect people to whomever they wanted to talk with. Imagine that. In order to call someone, a person was employed to manually move a physical wire from one place to another. She was a professional connecter!
Note: There is a funny story about the invention of the automatic switch board. It was invented by Almon Strowger, because he believed the operators where routing calls to one of his competitors - who also happened to be the husband of one of the operators.
A long time ago, my very first job was as an intern for a fashion company (I wanted to become a fashion designer). This company employed about 60 people. There where 2 sales people, 2 designers, 4 administrative staff, 3 technicians, a janitor, and about 50 seamstresses. During the time I was there, those 50 seamstresses lost their job, because the production was outsourced to Poland (and later China).
The people in Poland could do the same job, at a higher quality, with fewer resources, and much, much cheaper. A company with 60 employees could now be run using only eight - and still make the same product.
In 2004, I was in charge of a project that had to optimize the use of media files in the company I was working for. Before, every single time anyone had to do anything with any media file, they had to get a graphic designer to do it for them. Even a simple thing as resizing an image so that the sales manager could attach it to an email.
We changed all that by creating a fully automated media management system that anyone could use directly. Before, when you wanted to post a campaign to the press center, it involved several days of work. Now, it took 3 seconds because all you needed to do was to push one button.
One day, the graphic designers called a meeting, and they told me "if your project is a success, we will be out of a job!" ...that was an awkward day.
I told them, "No, I'm not. You are all overworked, so I'm helping you by taking away all boring work so you can focus on what you like to do the most - and what you do best." And, I actually believed that at the time.
But as the system became more and more advanced, it also became clear that we no longer needed the same amount of graphic designers. In 2002, before the project started, the company had 7 graphic designers and 2 brands. In 2009, we had 4 brands but only 3 graphic designers. And in 2010, one of the graphic designers was laid off to save cost.
It's a bit weird to think off. The media system was definitely a success and saved the company millions in cost every year, but it was also partly responsible for several people loosing their jobs.
The common element in all these example is that once another solution has emerged, one that is either faster, more convenient, or cheaper (or all of them), the old way of doing things becomes obsolete. And the people working in those fields lose their jobs.
If a business or an industry tries to prevent it, they become obsolete as well and lose their entire business. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster.
And it doesn't stop here. The world is constantly trying to find better, faster, more convenient and cheaper ways to do something. One example is text-to-speech.
Next-gen: Text-to-speech
Text-to-speech, i.e. the ability for a computer to read aloud written text, has been around for a very long time, and it has never been much good. There have been some improvement but at a very slow pace. The reason is that the only people who needed this technology where people with disabilities, and that specific group of people have historically never been that important for business.
But now, Amazon has build text-to-speech into the Kindle, and Apple's Siri use it all the time. Suddenly we have a mass market need to fix this and make text-to-speech a truly remarkable technology. Within the next 10-15 years, text to speech will evolve from the rather crappy speech it is today, and evolve into a computerized speech indistinguishable from real human reading.
The result will of course be a new set of remarkable technologies and services, but at the cost of all the people who are manually reading things aloud today. Voice actors, who take a long time reading each word manually, at a high cost, will be replaced by automatic systems that can turn an ebook into an audiobook in mere seconds.
Suddenly, publishing an audiobook will only require you to push a button, and many books will be converted on demand.
And what about the people who do voice over in commercials, documentaries, and on TV? They too will be replaced by a computer that simply reads it automatically.
But the real trick is in games. Today, gaming companies spend a huge amount money and time hiring voice actors to act out the dialog that you hear when you are playing a game. It is a slow and meticulous process, and it drastically limits what you can do. You are basically confining your 'action' to whatever dialog that you have prerecorded. In games, where there are many similar situations, you often hear the same dialog over and over again, simply because they didn't have the money and the time to record enough voices.
Automated text-to-speech will solve that. All you do is to license the number of voices you need, and then you can add a semi form of artificial intelligence that can literally create whatever dialog you can imagine - on the fly.
All this will happen within the next 10-15 years. The result will be indistinguishable from real human voice acting, and in the process eliminate the manual voice acting industry.
The reason it hasn't taken off yet is simply because these companies haven't realized the opportunities (or the cost savings). And there is a technical hurdle to overcome.
Text-to-speech today sounds like crap because it is based on sound snippets recorded using a monochrome voice (for the greatest amount of flexibility). The result is a very computerized voice that is completely devoid of feeling and emotions - in short, everything that makes it human.
But just as the early days of 3D where merely 2D objects stitched together. 3D today is now rendered on the fly. The same will happen with text-to-speech. It will not be based on stitched together soundbites. It will be fully-rendered speech, which means it can be made to sound like any person, full of emotions, dialects, inflections, etc.
The Food replicator
Last year, in The Future of News And The Replicators, I wrote about what would happen to the food industry once we develop the food replicator. Imagine a world where we can 'print' food, just like we can print 3D objects today. Every farmer would suddenly be out of a job, as well as most of the transportation industry, and the grocery stores.
Not to mention 3D printing itself. Look at all the shops today that exists merely to move one physical object from one place to another.
No jobs in the future?
With all these examples, it is easy to say that technology is bad and if we don't do something we will all be replaced by some automated system that will do everything for us. Journalists, for instance, fear the new advances in automated reporting and data based publishing.
But will that actually happen?
One argument is that we only have to look at the unemployment rate. The graph below, using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, certainly shows a much higher unemployment rate today, and a trend curve pointing to that more and more people will be out of a job (55% higher today than in 1948).
There are, however, two factors we have to consider when looking at this graph. One is that we have also seen a 78% increase in salaries, causing the cost of doing business to increase, and thus putting an added pressure on businesses to do the same work with less people.
The other factor is even more profound. From 1948 and until today, the population of the USA has doubled. With twice as many people, all requiring a job, it's remarkable that the unemployment rate isn't higher. On top of this, the worker productivity rate has dropped as well. In the first quarter of 2012 alone, productivity dropped 0.9%.
Would there be more jobs if we still needed people to place bowling pins and manually move wires every time we wanted to make a phone call? Sure, but only if we also accepted a lower salary.
Technology is not what's causing unemployment. What's causing it is drastically more people demanding bigger pay-checks, and working less. Businesses simply cannot afford it, so they turn to technology to keep the cost at a profitable level.
Of course, people then argue that they have to earn more money, because the products we buy are more expensive every year, which is true. But that is the vicious cycle we are in. Cost goes up, companies increase their prices and lays off people. This results in more expensive goods that cause people to demand higher salaries, causing the cost to go up, causing companies to increase their prices again, and fire even more people.
And this is where the other argument comes into play. The argument is that, without our advances in technology, this vicious cycle would run amok. Without technology, companies would not be capable of cutting cost of manufacturing, and as such would have to increase the price of their products even more. And the numbers certainly supports that theory.
Without the advances in technology, our increase in population, salary growth, and productivity decrease, would simply not be sustainable.
But there is also another factor at play. Technology is allowing us to expand the scope of what each one of us can engage with. This is nothing new. Before the industrial age, people bought few products at a low rate. You didn't buy new clothes, shoes, apps, or games every other week. But the industrial revolution completely changed that. After the industrial revolution, the number of different products people sold and the frequency at which they bought them at, exploded.
And this is exactly what is happening again with the connected world. In the past, people purchased one or two newspapers. Now people use even more money, on a much greater variety of content and at a much higher frequency than ever before.
This fundamentally changes how we do business and causes an explosion in new opportunities and jobs. While the industrial revolution put a lot of people out of a job, this expansion of the market into many new fields caused the unemployment numbers to stay largely the same - even as the population numbers doubled.
The shift that we are seeing today is extremely short term. The newspapers are struggling because they operate without the efficiency of the new world - just like old businesses could not compete with the industrialized businesses in the 1800s.
It causes a lot of jobs to disappear, and entire industries are becoming obsolete. But in the long term, the trends that we see today will cause a new explosion in new industries, new services, and new products.
But the biggest trend of them all is that we are removing the middlemen. We removed the people who manually placed bowling pins, and we removed the people who manually connected our phones.
As we become ever more efficient, in a directly connected world, we will shift towards a world of creators buying and selling directly from each other.
Too many brands buy online advertising the same way that they did with print. They buy it based on level of exposure instead of real things like how many products are likely to sell. In the past, this was measured against the number of times an ad was exposed to the readers. Today, we do something very similar, we just measure impressions and click-throughs.
One of the things that really amazes me about the new media world is the shift from format to stories. In the past, the format always came first. You would write a book, write an article for a newspaper, and create a show for TV etc.
The shift is turning this whole thing upside down. The format first approach doesn't work in a digital world where any format can be mixed with anything. An article is no longer just text. A TV show is no longer something that just happens on TV. A book is no longer a collection of pages.
We are now putting the story first, and only then do we ask, "what format or formats would help me to tell this story in the best and most engaging way possible?"
One brilliant example is the children's book 'The Story of Flewn'. It's a Kickstarter project (that I'm backing) made by Gabriel Smetzer.
The story is quite interesting. It follows an old whale crossing a continent on stilts made of driftwood in search of a new ocean for himself and the sea creatures he carries on his back. As he grows a beard and a weary heart he meets a frog on a unicycopter and a rabbit with wings. Together the three characters must use their creativity and courage to find a new ocean and confront the reason their world is falling apart around them.
But this is not a traditional book, or even an ebook. As a children's book you have to ask, "what is the best format for this story?" Gabriel thought that it would work best this way:
The Story of Flewn combines interactive game mechanics with cinematic storytelling set in a richly illustrated world. Traditionally a reader would turn pages of a book or sit passively watching a film to discover a story. In Flewn the player must keep the main characters (Frog and Rabbit) well fed and flying across beautifully illustrated landscapes in order to progress the story.
I'm not saying that every book should be like this. The point is that you put the story first, and only then do you figure out what format to use. In this case, it's hard to even define the format. It's not really anything while at the same time it's everything. It's not a book, not a video, not a game, and it's not an illustration. It's all of them.
I'm very excited by this shift from format to stories, because it brings a completely new level of unlimited story telling. For instance, if you want to write a book about Social ROI, why do it just in text? Would it not be better to create a nonlinear collection of topics told using text, illustrations and a 10-episode podcast each 20 minutes long?
The shift is also going to change our education system (although that will take another 10 years before they catch up). Today, your education is based on the format. A journalist is taught to be a writer. A photojournalist to be a photographer, and a graphic journalist to be a graphic artist. The act of story telling is just a minor addition to that.
But in the future, your education must be centered around being a storyteller first. Storytelling, as a real education and title, is going to replace many of those format-first educations.
We still need the niche experts, the animators, the designers, and the other experts. But everyone needs to have that basic education as a story teller.
You are not an author you are a storyteller.
You are not a journalist you are a storyteller.
You are not a director you are a storyteller.
You are not a photographer you are a storyteller.
You are not a graphic designer you are a storyteller.
I don't know if Gabriel's "The Story of Flewn" is going to be any good. It certainly looks interesting, and that's why I'm backing it (and it is already fully funded).
But what excites me is that it's the story of Flewn. Not the book, not the game, nor the movie ...It's the story.
There is an increasing hype in the social world about engagement, or rather that more and more people and social services focus more on engagement than the actual conversion rates.
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