The Daydream Blog

Whilst many Mac developers have bemoaned the lack of a “proper” iPhone SDK, it appears that the web developers have wondered what all the fuss was about and just got on with it. Apple has created an online directory of iPhone optimised web apps, which has grown to over 200 hundred entries, in less than a week. Perhaps we Mac developers need to be less afraid of change. We petulantly worried about Carbon vs. Cocoa before realising there was a place for both in the same app. So perhaps we need to accept web development as part of our necessary armoury of tools, for OS X development beyond the Mac.

Presenting web tools as a “proper” iPhone SDK was patronising to developers at WWDC ‘07, and symptomatic of Apple’s “Year of Hubris”. But developers need to accept that this is the reality of the situation. We also need to accept that iPhone updates will delete third party hacks, close loop holes and possibly render the phones inoperable.

The iPhone Elite Team have released a way to unlock “bricked” iPhones, having accepted the reality of the situation. John Gruber has it completely correct when he says that there is a “misguided mindset” in thinking Apple “screwed them over” with the 1.1.1 update.

As a developer, if you want to bring your app to the iPhone, you either need to add web development to your tool-chest or get involved in the hacking process. However, making money out of that app on the iPhone maybe a tricky business model.

My prediction is that, as with iPod games, there will be a coterie of developers who will be allowed to bring Apple sanctioned apps to the iPhone and iPod Touch, delivered through the iTunes Store.

Since the mid-90’s, the prospect of Internet based business has led many to predict the “Death of the Middle Man”. They believe that via the Internet, businesses will be able to reach their end-users directly and will be able to forego distributors, retailers and other “middle men”. By selling directly to consumers, the theory goes, businesses will receive the full price of their products, rather than the just wholesale prices they offer their “middle men” distributors.

The reality of Internet business, as it has developed, is that the Middle Men are doing just fine, thank you very much, albeit in slightly difference guises.

Music

One of the most prominent examples is the Music industry, where it was felt that the Internet would allow artists to reach their audience without signing to one of the much derided music labels. Prince has recently distributed his latest album for “free” with a Sunday newspaper in the UK. Pierre Igot, in his Betalogue, claims that this is shows that the middle men in music are, indeed, slowly but surely dying off. The reality is that the newspaper acted as distributor, in place of conventional record stores. They made money from increased distribution and advertising. Meanwhile, Prince will have received a guaranteed amount from the paper, rather than being subject to the fickle music market. Whilst this is not an Internet example, it demonstrates that even well known artists still need distributors in order to make a living out of their art.

The rise of MySpace as the place to find new bands has been quite spectacular, and many radio DJ’s now regularly scour social networking sites looking for the next big thing. The reality of this “direct” contact is that MySpace is the new middle man in this relationship. There is no way that these bands could reach their fans “directly”. MySpace is, essentially, the promoter for these acts and could become as unpalatable as the big music labels.

Of course the big name in this industry is the iTunes Store, the ultimate music retailer, distributor and middle man. The big labels tried to go it alone but found that customers don’t have any brand loyalty to big labels and want to be able to get their music “under one roof” – a common theme for Internet middle men.

Goods & Services

The success of Internet middle men does not just apply to goods that can be digitally distributed. “The fall of the middle man” discusses the Internet’s effect on newspaper classifieds, charity shops and even the banking sector. Yet the article itself covers the rise of eBay, online classified and online social lending websites. All of these sites are middle men, in the very traditional sense with traditional business models. Despite many companies being able to access markets more easily via the Internet, they still require middle men to grant them that access.

Along with more direct access, however, comes the responsibility to deliver physical products, provide first line customer support and maintain customer relationships. Along with additional warehousing costs, inventory risk and in particular marketing costs, this slight increase in direct access comes at a significant price. As these costs and responsibilities have been passed back to producer, the Middle Man’s fees are often reduced compared to conventional distributors. However the Middle Men are still a necessity to get access to the market in the first place.

Aggregators

The Internet has also created a completely new class of Middle Men – the Aggregator sites such as Confused or MoneySupermarket, along with Froogle, Dealtime and Kelkoo. These are great for the consumers who can easily compare prices for similar products. Certain companies have tried to make a virtue out of avoiding Aggregators. One insurance company, Direct Line, has recently run a TV ad campaign, suggesting that the aggregators don’t give consumers full access to value added services or loyalty discounts. Rather aggregators only cover the lowest common denominator products, the ads complain. The reality is that Internet consumers are very price sensitive and whilst price is the last resort for marketing, it is the reality of Internet marketing. Unfortunately for Direct Line and the RBS stable of insurance companies, foregoing the Middle Men has led to them losing out to their rivals.

Independent Developers

One industry that has successfully used the Internet to access their market directly is the Mac Independent Software market. Mac developers can deliver their products digitally, directly from their websites. However even they are not immune from the Middle Men. All Mac developers need to use Software Directory sites, like Version Tracker, Mac Update and Downloads.com as part of their product promotion. Many also outsource purchasing and/or software registration to Kagi, PayPal or RegSoft. Some have even gone as far as to sign traditional distribution deals.

There’s no Replacement for Search

One failing of the Web, that was highlighted early on, is how difficult it is to find good quality content. There is no universal directory for the Internet. There is no way to browse content by topic. Knowing a company’s name and product provides no guarantees as to what their web-site address actually is. Yahoo!, Google and other search engines are, quite frankly, poor solutions. Without links from Middle Men sites or an AdWords campaign, there is little hope of improving your company’s page rank within the search sites. The hard reality for small businesses, unsigned bands and individuals is that without partnering with the Internet’s new age of Middle Men, it is close to impossible to be reach your market directly via the Internet.

Middle Men are the Heineken of the Internet Age – they deliver the customers your web site cannot reach.

My father has been a computer user since the early 1980’s and a Mac user for about 2 years. Recently he sent me the following support email:

How to access CDROM ?

Yesterday one disc automatically came out – I pushed it back and it seems to have dropped deep inside the computer 

My father uses an iMac G5 with a slot loading CD drive. My initial reaction was amazement that he had gone 2 years without hitting this problem before. It reminded my of a number of issues that he has had over the years that have always been quite fascinating to resolve. My father is an intelligent 75 year old man who can do things with Excel that make my head hurt. Yet there are things that I find easy, “intuitive”, that he has problems with. 

PEBKAC

When IT people handle support requests, a lot of the issues are put down to PEBKAC – Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. In other words it is too easy to assume users are not computer literate or are just plain stupid. Once, our brightest user phoned up saying he could not log in to our system and it turned out he had left the CAPS LOCK on. If our most intelligent users can fall prey to such simple mistakes, PEBKAC cannot be the issue. Apple and Microsoft have both tackled the Caps Lock key issue, which shows how these issues can actually be resolved by better user interaction design.

At Apple’s developer conference, John Geleynse, Apple’s User Experience Evangelist, always gives a talk on user interface design. Year after year he presses home the need to understand the user’s “Mental Model”. But this issue goes beyond even the topics John covers in his annual sessions.

My father mentioned that he was used to a physical eject key on the CD-ROM drive. I realised that the Mac’s solution is pretty poor as both the software button in the Finder and the button on the keyboard, whilst easy to access, are both located quite far away from the actual drive. This is a failure to apply the Proximity principle of good design. Of course the current method is still far more sensible than dragging the disk to the Trash.

He also complained that his address labels were no longer printing out correctly and in this case he had in fact been using different sized labels. What was fascinating was the Excel spreadsheet that he used to print his labels. He had adjusted row heights and column widths to represent each label and surrounded each label cell with narrow cells as margins. It was clearly a painstaking effort on his part. I was about to adjust his spreadsheet for the labels he was now using, when he opened up another one that worked perfectly. I considered telling him about Word Label Printing in combination with Mail Merge but concluded he would be more comfortable with the solution he was familiar with.

Again I have often come across intelligent users who have come up with cunning, but fragile, solutions where full solutions already exist. They were unaware of these solutions, that may well have been intuitive and easy to use, but their actual existence was not obvious.

Conclusion

These issues highlight that the problem is not stupid users but stupid user interaction design. All too often as developers we marvel at how users do not understand how the application works. Yet the issue is that we are too familiar with the application to appreciate what it feels like to be inexperienced with it. It is precisely those support issues that strike us a stupid that we should examine the most closely for opportunities to improve the user interaction of our applications. The problems do indeed exist between the keyboard and chair but not those of the users but of the developers.

In their recent joint interview at D5 (video, transcript), Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both asked what they had learnt from the other. Bill said that he wished he had Jobs’s taste – to much laughter. It is not clear from the video whether he realised that he was mirroring Jobs’s 1996 criticism that Microsoft “has no taste”. Whereas Steve, in the background, and the audience clearly did.

Jobs’s answer was more interesting. He stated that Apple’s original strategy was to “build the whole banana”, and as a result there was not much scope for partnering with other companies. Microsoft, he felt, was excellent at this. Ironically he felt, quite correctly, that the one company Apple has successfully partnered with throughout its history is Microsoft itself.

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