There are 10 holes in Apple’s future. First let’s go back to the future…

Back in the good old MS-DOS days I used to lug my Mac to work, plug it in and plunder away in the world of a windows GUI while my colleagues toiled with keyboard commands using green font on a black CRT.

I eventually succumbed to MS-DOS since the floppies we used to transfer work on — the 5.25″ ones that really were ‘floppy’ — were lingua franca in the office.

Eventually I enjoyed the fact that I spoke two computer languages – Mac and MS-DOS.
And before that, as a teen I sold all sorts of computers, from Macs to Zenith to Amigas.

I say all this because I was one of the real Mac and PC evangelists from the beginning of the personal computer era, out there on the front lines selling these contraptions when fewer than 1 in 100 homes even had a computer.

Now with the iPad starring in a global tour it’s interesting to see what Apple has done to get to the #1 spot with consumers. Now, computers are “cool”. And basically everyone’s got one of some sort, from a phone to a desktop, laptop, tablet.

Yet with all the fanfare and finesse that has brought Apple to this magical spot, there are still holes in its solutions, in its products for consumers and businesses.

Here they are:

1) NO UNIVERSAL SEARCH

Why it matters: As long as Google owns this piece then Apple cannot deliver a full range of services to its users. Why? People will start with Google and Google will feed them its own solutions.

2) ITUNES DOESN’T STREAM DIRECT

Why it matters: The world of media is moving into the cloud. Apple’s iTunes ‘store’ requires you to purchase and download movies, TV shows, audio, etc. Downloading a movie is not practical unless you want to buy a movie to watch tomorrow. Contrast that with Amazon’s Instant Video solution that streams to multiple devices and allows download if you want. The key is the user has the choice and streaming is a “now” method. Click and watch.

3) APP ECOSYSTEM DOESN’T INTEROPERATE

Why it matters: The Web grew dramatically from the beginning since developers could build a page, process or data and have it interoperate with other Web pages, processes or data. The whole idea of “hypertext markup language (HTML) is to link to each other. Meanwhile, Apple’s apps are self contained and have no interaction with each other or the Web — at least on a level that the Web does. Open an app on your iPhone or iPad and that app is not aware of a world larger than itself. Users have to launch each app one by one.

4) THE MARKETING MAGIC

At some point the idea that everything Apple makes is revolutionary will wear off. iPod, iPhone and iPad are revolutionary. But not each upgrade of these systems is. Upgrades are evolutionary. The problem is the media promotes everything Apple does as revolutionary. This can hurt the company over time. Save the “revolutionary” tag for breakthroughs.

5) DEPLOYMENT TIMES

Apple acquired mobile app maker Siri last Spring and the technology hasn’t yet been mainstreamed into Apple’s mobile solutions. Siri is a revolutionary product that allows users to navigate the world quite well. This could answer point #1 above since Siri is a more natural way to search than Google.

6) CONTROL

Like many other tech companies, Apple wants to funnel the world’s information through its systems. This is what Microsoft, Google, and Sony, among others, are trying to do. If we flip the idea over, having your information on any system ensures user adoption. The analogy is a movie shown in any theater vs. just a few. The challenge is balance. The walled garden of a great experience and then the access to the universe of information and content outside it.

7) STEVE

Steve Jobs makes Apple cool. He did that in 1977 and 1997 and 2007, and today. Without Jobs Apple would be a footnote, the Amiga of its day. The good thing is Steve has imbibed coolness into Apple’s culture. They need to continue to keep design and cool at the forefront. Having lived through the Performa debacle this is no small thing. Steve’s coolness is Apple and it is bigger than Steve now, like a genie out of the bottle. No more Gil Amelios or the Pepsi guy, John Sculley. They were good at other companies but not right for Apple.

TOO COOL TO FAIL

That said, the other side of “cool” is thinking you’re foolproof. That everything you do automatically is bestowed with the mantle of cool. The problem is that that kind of ego eventually backfires. It only takes one lousy product to dampen a lot of coolness.

9) PAYMENTS

Consumers want easy payments without having to enter laborious and archaic credit card data every time they buy something. Visa and Mastercard have built a business on plastic that’s not needed. PayPal proved them wrong. Amazon did it even better. Today, Amazon has “pay phrase” where you can enter any words you like and pay using your Amazon account. Apple has iTunes with credit card data but it’s not convenient or leading edge. And iTunes has way too many “agreements” when you long on to the app store or iTunes store, agree to 46 pages before you can buy an app? Amazon has never done that. Apple needs to learn from Amazon a few things about payments. PayPal too.

10) DESIGN

The most valuable thing Apple has is design sense.  Its why the iPhone looks and feels “better” than any other smartphone. It’s why a MacBook beats a Dell or HP laptop. It’s why an iPad beats other tablets. One of the most under-rated things in technology is the value of the user experience. A lot of computer companies promote chip speed, graphic chips, etc., but these are only useful if the user experience is superior. A fast chip is wasted with a bad GUI or clumsy interface. Apple needs more ways to get inside its services other than iTunes. Apple should be design-centric and available across a myriad of access methods without having to load software. Bottom line: Apple has to work in a super magical cloud rather than clients like iTunes and iOS.
All this said, Apple is the one to beat. Right now no other company comes close to engaging the imagination of consumers on any level.
—
Your thoughts? send ‘em to:
steve <at> steveharmon.com

If you like tech and geeky stuff read on. If not, pop a cold one and chill out. Otherwise, continue on…

Since the dawn of time there’s been more data than brains. It’s taken human kind umpteen cycles of sun and moon to invent computers and try and filter the peanut butter of life through computers to try and extract meaning.

And we end up with more nuts than butter.

To put this in geek speak we have more data than humans can filter or use. Data about data and data about the data’s data. That’s largely why many of us have given the halo effect to search engines and anything that can take the geyser and make something useful from it.

In Silicon Valley the term for what’s happening is “big data.” The Holy Grail of techdom is to take this effluent and turn it into Fiji water, pure and clean, safe to drink.

For example, with all the personal data shared on social networks and status streams, forums and blogs there’s a lot of data being created every second. Most of it is the banal kind: I like Pepsi. Charlie Sheen sucks (or doesn’t). Etc.

Over half of facebook users log in daily, about 200 million. Most of what they do is share photos and links from the Web. Maybe a personal tidbit. The ether of life.

Over 140 million tweets are sent daily. Voices that want to be heard, followed.

I share, therefore I am.

It is this “digital persona” that’s driving big data, like silkworms on nzt (see the movie ‘limitless’ for the reference).

This big data movement is behind the growth and valuations of the companies that are glueing together our digital lives into something organized and, therefore, meaningful. Facebook valued at $85 billion is an example. Twitter, Zynga and others also command healthy valuations.

There are numerous new startups attacking big data in many ways. Many ways to process and filter: government, military, consumer, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, real estate and more. They are not household names. They probably never will be as larger enterprise giants gobble them up over the next decade.

In a way, the Web itself was born of big data. Netscape, GNN, Architext, Yahoo, Inktomi, eBay, Google, Expedia…and many more. The premise is the same: organize data and make it meaningful.

Analyzing, extracting, finding the gems in the ebb and flow of information. It’s not panning for gold as much as it is turning mined
ore into gold. Or trying to.

In your pocket you may have a “smart phone”. I do. But the truth is, despite that phone having some cool finger controls and nice shiny screen, it’s not smart at all. Insert a GPS chip and it’s still not smart, just location aware.

The challenge for big data is that data itself is mostly old-fashioned data, cro-magnon data. Its structure is wrong for much of what we want to do with data. Data now is sort of like the awkward teen dancing out of rhythm with two left feet and braces.

Data itself has dimension but our tools are flat, 1D. That’s why a general search engine like Google is losing relevancy in every query.
It’s displaying the equivalent of a painting of data but not the data itself.

Let me use another analogy. Paintings in the Middle Ages were without perspective. There was no depth. They were flat, sort of like comic strips are drawn today. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that perspective showed up in paintings, the lines going off into the distance that showed shadow, that reflected life. Photography owes a lot to this, as does architecture and many things today.

Two things need to happen to make data more valuable to us.

1) data needs to be better made (more descriptive, complete with attributes, context, awareness, commerce, relationships, more like DNA)

2) the way we interact with data needs to evolve beyond read-write, client-server. More like an organism lives and adapts to circumstance.

In this scenario, we wouldn’t have a “search engine” or even a “social network”, we’d have data find us, data work for us, data help us. Data would be connecting and disconnecting all the time by means of its own DNA configured to our taste/need/vocation/activity/life.

Right now we’re doing all the work. Data isn’t.

$10,000 is spent every second in the United States to try and get your attention. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Heck, 8 of those hours you’re sleeping and if they could find a way to interrupt that they would. (Don’t be surprised to find ads on your pillow case soon).

Of that $10,000 spent every second how much actually generates a return on investment to the advertiser? 1/10^th of 1%. A quick tally shows $10 bucks. Just 10. So, for every $10,000 spent trying to convince you to pay attention to an advertisement, only $10 worth actually makes your brain pause.

The rest makes your brain freeze (and not the good kind like a Slurpee). How about a big picture breakdown of the numbers:

I ran a little test to put this experiment in the real world. Both in print and online.  In print I used a large newspaper in Southern California and bought both a display ad (a graphic ad) in the paper and an online ad. The online ad was targeted to one city where the readers/users would recognize the business being advertised.

Results from the newspaper ad? 3 clicks out of at least 12,500 impressions served.

A similar text ad was placed in Google Ad words. In one week Google Ad Words delivered a whopping 16 impressions (and no clicks). Tells me two things 1) Google isn’t as widespread as it appears and 2) Google cannot deliver a hyper-local ad unit effectively.

Of course a lot of the click through and impressions depend on the ad itself. But this experiment is about the general adoption and reaction to an attractive ad.

The experiment confirms my theory that advertising is dead. Beyond dead, petrified.  And the sad part is that so-called “interactive” advertising is not really interactive at all. Just because a banner can be clicked doesn’t make it interactive. Just because the ad expands on mouseover doesn’t make it better.

And a new flavor of ad has appeared: re-targeting. This is where the advertiser places a cookie (a tracker) on your computer and tracks the sites and things you do. It then starts delivering ads based on your clickstream, all without you knowing it’s snooping you. In fact, these aren’t ads, they’re “snoops”.

Another bad idea from the advertising world.

Heaven forbid you stumble into YouTube now and see the overlay ads they show on videos. Yet another old-fashioned idea foisted on the user. How friendly is that? In the rush to monetize they’ve thrown user-friendliness out the door.

Ditto for Twitter. Promoted Tweets.  Just call it an ad. That’s what it is. “Here’s an ad designed to look like a tweet”.  Perhaps a better approach would be to actually offer users something valuable rather than just another ad. There are many other ways to monetize this vs. ads as tweets.

And last week Facebook got into the movie streaming business via a deal with Warner Bros. It’s actually one of the better ways to monetize Facebook vs. showing banner ads or a friend’s photo alongside a jar of Skippy peanut butter.

At its heart Google tries to match search terms with an ad. However, Google Ad Words allows advertisers to include keywords in their ads, even if they don’t have the item. This happened to me on several experimental searches where the sponsored ads included the product name. But, when clicked, the ad took me to the home page of the site. Even after re-typing the product on the site, they didn’t have the item.

So, you see, it doesn’t work. Advertisers are spamming and gaming the system at Google. And Google gives them the tools to do that by allowing search keywords to be included dynamically in the ads. Google could/should crosscheck the terms with landing pages at the sites but they don’t. Again, poor user experience.

The world of spam and carpet-bombing advertisement (which is 100% of it now) is dying. How fast it dies depends on the tolerance level of everyone to endure being spat on with messages nobody wants to hear.

We will have a world where there isn’t any advertising. What will replace it will be something far more effective and relevant to everyone personally.  People are ready for it. Technology is able to do it. It’s the advertisers that aren’t willing, they’re caught in the past.

If it took you 3 minutes or so to read this then another $1.7 million was spent trying to get your attention by the advertisers. What could you have done with that money?