The iPhone Phenomenon!

Same day 10 years ago a blockbuster phenomenon called iPhone happened and the phones are never the same. When Steve Jobs introduced iPhone at Macworld, he sucked the attention of the whole world and made everyone second guess whether they can believe what was being showed. That's how iPhone made the phones on sale till then look - Dumb! 

Great things shouldn’t be talked about as less because we are habituated to them. Let’s all time travel 10 years ago and look at the phone market. The phones were ugly, fat, featureless and the software was laggy, poorly made and not given enough thought. When you see a beautifully designed phone, you might not explain why you love it so much but you intuitively know that the people designed this product should be smart. iPhone is just that.

Microsoft had been this big giant that showed the world what licensing the software is and how that simple plan shifts the power centres from hardware manufacturers to software makers. It in the process it also showcased to the world what Network effects are and how you can reap benefits out of it. Windows was so huge that it made Microsoft to become myopic and complacent. 

Computer is one form factor that can easily copied by a large number of commodity hardware manufacturers who can then undercut the original innovators on price using cheaper components and leveraging economies of scale. With iPod, Apple leveraged tight integration to deliver a product with some unique features that were harder to copy, mainly including connectivity with iTunes. Apple had the effective integration of software, hardware, distribution and services that made hard for commodity hardware manufacturers to replicate. This was the eureka moment for Apple that gave it enough confidence to jump into the phone business. 

So in a way this busted the Windows myth of “Licensing is the way to go.”

Despite being slow and limited by modern standards, the iPhone launched in 2007 had far more processing power and RAM than existing smartphones. Apple also covered the hardware limitations through the use of some clever tricks one of them being capturing the image data even before an user clicking the shutter button resulting in the appearance of photo capture faster than the hardware was actually capable of doing. 

With iPhone Apple is in a unique advantage no other smartphone maker is in terms of economies of scale they have achieved, the premium loyal user base they garner and the ability in the quality of products they can make. 

Microsoft thought of licensing Windows for a while to mobiles but gave up on that very quickly realising tight integration as the key. Then they bought Nokia for the hardware and tried the integration route but Android is doing really well and the market didn’t give an opening for a 3rd player. 2 players are good enough said the market and the app developers. Microsoft realised this and they are now cheerleaders for iOS Appstore to distribute their apps and services.

Now lets look at Google and Android. For Android optimists, everything looks great because 9 out of 10 mobiles sold and being sold are Androids and the market share is great. If we put that statistic aside, there are real troubles Google is facing through Android. Unlike Windows which went the licensing way, Google wasn’t really earning from giving away its Android software. Caught in Microsoft’s integration conundrum, Google next copied Microsoft’s Zune strategy of competing against its own licenses by launching its own Nexus-branded phones. When that didn’t work, it copied Microsoft again by buying up a major license. Even Google’s acquisition of Motorola turned out to be the as bad as failed Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia.

Apple made the work of designing new hardware look easy. It wasn’t!

As Google and Microsoft spent billions of dollars to replicate Apple in creating one tightly integrated phone that worked well, Apple quietly invested great amounts of money in chip building and in technologies like touch id and some proprietary technologies. 

To sum up, Microsoft is almost out of Phone business. Samsung is the only maker that sells more phones than Apple does but the average selling price is around $200 many hundreds less than Apple’s $650. As Google is trying the proprietary way through Pixel at the premium end, it makes far less money than Apple as it doesn’t have economies of scale like Apple which sells iPhones 100 times more than Pixel currently. 

After 10 years of defending iPhones from competitive threats, Apple is in the enviable position of ever increasing margins, great proprietary technologies and sharply limited direct competition. Google despite waging an all out war on iPhone is struggling to find reasons to maintain Android as a platform as Android continues to suffer from serious security issues and software update lethargy. 

With 10th year Anniversary iPhone 8 gaining lot of expectations from the industry, we can only guess how big it is going to be!

Happy birthday iPhone!

The Macbook Pro Crisis

By now I got used to the fact that people on Internet will try to prove themselves how much smarter they are than Apple by criticizing every single product Apple introduces only to see Apple make truckloads of money every single quarter on the same products these “smart” people second guessed and dismissed. Though negativity and gasps of people on whatever Apple introduces is quite common and a part of narrative of many bloggers in the current day, the reactions to newly introduced Macbook Pro models surprised me. While there were genuine concerns over the decisions Apple made into making the new Macbook pros, some rants were well, rants so as to say. Let us address them one by one.

16 GB RAM

Let’s address the elephant in the room. This is the feature people were disappointed the most. ‘Throw battery concerns out of the way and make a laptop that has 32GB RAM in it and do all the work arounds a 32GB RAM laptop should have. Make it an half inch thicker and throw in some fans so that at the end of the day I’ll have my 32 GB RAM Macbook’ is what many have been saying. Let’s say Apple obliged and made that variant of that laptop. Just imagine how people would have trolled that? Let’s think about niches and market sizes. If only about 10% of users are likely to have memory issues at 16 GB and that only for specific tasks like 4K video editing and they would face that issue 20% of the time, how many would have bitten the bullet and say, I want a computer with 32 GB RAM anyway? 40% maybe? What are we down to? 4 out of 100? Well a rational person wouldn’t make a laptop to that kind of low odds niche!

Partly it is intel that has to be blamed here for the reason that its Skylake line currently has no support for low powered RAM. So Apple stuck to 16 GB RAM over battery concerns. Canonlake that might be released next year might support LPDDR4 RAMs. (LP being low powered)

Let’s talk Dongles

Apple removed SD Card slot, USB A type ports, Thunderbolt and Magsafe ports for 4 multifunctional USB type C ports. If one could take a step back and think of the ports they use most of the times, we probably would never have used a port in its life time. I, for example never used the thunderbolt port and SD card slot. All I used were the power and USB ports. So I still pay for half the ports I don’t use. So the issue here is should everyone pay for the ports 10% people use? or should I get an option to customise them? The nice thing is that the multifunctional ports (All the 4 ports can  take power, act as thunderbolt, USB, HDMI or firewire. So its upto you to decide where you plug in the power and where you connect your display) on the Macbook Pro give you the options to have the capabilities you need, not the capabilities Apple thinks someone might need. So its upto you to decide where you plug what. About the adaptors, spending $19 for an adapter for occasional use to complement $1499 Macbook is not that big a deal. Aren’t we spending that much anyway for the accessories when we get a new iPhone? Time for some perspective!

But there will be some people who still aren’t convinced by the argument above and say “Why couldn’t Apple include support for both the ports?” That’s the whole concept. Apple want us to transition to the future as fast as they can. In an alternative parallel world where Apple would have included both USB C and USB A ports, would you be willing to consider USB C port as the interface when you contemplate on purchasing a new hard drive knowing the fact that USB A is still there? (And is inferior?) You wouldn’t because cost and compatibility are always in your mind. 

A lot of this boils down to this concept: We demand Apple innovate, but we insist they don’t change anything.

Side Note: The same thing happened with Adobe Flash in 2010. Apple could have easily included support for Adobe’s flash player in iOS and would have avoided huge controversy and backlash from users and developers. The fact that they encouraged vastly superior HTML 5 and importantly didn’t support flash bought some monumental changes in the industry. Its not the argument: “As HTML 5 is superior we all should transition our content to HTML 5 for better experience” that wins around website owners. Its the argument “Now that iOS doesn’t support flash, we will loose lucrative market if we don’t transition our content to HTML 5 and stop using Adobe Flash” that wins. See the difference? 

This is the same thing Apple had done, has been trying and will continue to do.

Why Headphone Jack?

Now there were some people that poked and made fun on “courage” statement and pointed out why they didn’t remove headphone jack from Macbook Pro too? Phill Schiller had an amazing answer - “The 3.5mm jack is more than just about headphones for the laptops, which makes it different to the iPhone 7 situation. If it was just to plug in headphones, the port wouldn’t be necessary. However, the 3.5mm jack remains in the product as pros have studio monitors, amps and other pro audio gear that do not have wireless solutions."

This explains to me why decisions made by Apple might look outrageous in the short run but make perfect sense in hindsight. It happened with floppy, CD drive, Flash and will happen with Headphone Jack and all the legacy connectors it removed this time.

End of the Dear Headphone Jack?

Look at the port closely. This is the standard for audio from time immemorial. This is the port that Sony and htc tried to kill unsuccessfully. Apple purportedly today is trying to kill it again. If any company has the scale, support and the market power to make a case against this 3.5 mm port, it is Apple. But it’s one of the few places in technology where the ecosystem connects into something much larger than Apple or computers or the tech industry. Its an ecosystem of how we listen to music in general. 

Apple in the past made decisions that seemed crazy but the tradeoffs made gave people enough reasons to forgive the company. When Apple ditched 3 1/2 inch floppy, CD ROM was being widely accepted and the storage, read and write speeds made people forget the floppy fast. When Apple removed Ethernet ports, the convenience and standards allowed people to adjust to WiFi without a complaint. By the time CD ROM slot is removed from MacBook Air, people already started transitioning to USB based drives and in some cases Thunderbolt based storage options. 

Now in the mentioned 3 instances, removal of a legacy port/option is traded off with a great alternative that user perceived as good enough and in some cases backed Apple with their wallets. But Headphone jack is a completely different story. 

This is a port that lots of devices are connect to. There are tons of accessibility devices that plug into the headphone jack. It is great that Apple is reported to be providing the adapter bundled with iPhone but the interface would be a lot messier. 

If we start talking about DRM issue that’s even more complex. Once this analog port is removed in favour of digital Lightning connector, a lot more issues are going to arise. Digitalising the signals has this knock on effects that essentially accrue control to some other entity than being open standard. For example a manufacturer of earphones essentially has to get permission from Apple to make the connector as Apple has the licensing programming for Lightning connector. In addition to this you might have to go and get the permission from some 3rd party DRM vendor to send Spotify through it or Netflix audio through it. This argument might sound insane and pessimistic but this is the history of digital signal change. So Apple should either have an open standard for audio part of lightning connector or at least should promise the manufacturers of equipment that the standards are not going to change in the future. 

The other headache with having standard of your own is that if someone forgets to pack earphones on a trip, he/she can still find decent quality earphones at an affordable price. But that no longer will be the case. You should have packed the connector or the lightning compatible earphones or else you would be spending a lot to buy compatible earphones. Over time, lightning might become the standard and might be available everywhere at affordable prices but again that’s a long journey. So the biggest tradeoff here is the universalness of the jack.

I think the message from the Apple is going to be to go wireless. Bluetooth sucks when it comes to audio quality. There is a saying in the industry that bluetooth should have a slogan: “Bluetooth: It’s gonna be better next year.” So Apple might come up with their own wireless technology that can provide superior sound quality in comparison with bluetooth. And this again is going to rise issues with proprietary vs open standard debate. Now that if Apple has its own wireless technology the side effects of this will be that it might render many wireless bluetooth earphones useless and there can be a warning that says “Device not supported” analogous to the warning “Charger not supported” you get when you connect to lightning connector that didn’t acquire license from Apple. So if it’s going to be wireless Apple has to go open standard - might be Bluetooth 5!

So the only way Apple could pull this off is when the quality is so much better that one couldn’t believe how they spent half their lives listening to inferior quality audio. That’s a high order bit.

The amount of obvious risk Apple is going take by removing headphone jack vs the amount of currently available benefit is way lopsided. I don’t want to be someone to be remembered in the history on the same lines of bloggers who called iPad dumb and iPhone un-exciting. My take on this is – let’s wait and see, I don’t know where it is going to take us. Knowing Apple they might pull up a compelling use case tonight that the removal of the port is completely justified.

One more thing:

The explanation to why they are doing it is that the next year is the 10th anniversary of iPhone and it is rumoured that the plans for next year’s iPhone are grand even by Apple’s standards. The next year’s iPhone is purported to have an edge to edge display which cannot accommodate a headphone jack. They could have removed the headphone jack next year but they might not want people to perceive headphone jack as a tradeoff they need to forego for the beautiful display for the next year's Phone and they are transitioning us there! But as always only time will tell. 

Whatsapp's New Privacy Policy - Things You Need to Know!

Whatsapp started to display a change in its privacy statements a week back and is prompting users to decide for themselves whether they want to share their phone numbers with Facebook or not. Whatsapp after 4 long years for the first time changed its privacy statement. While the previous privacy statement was 2000 words long, the new one is about 7000 words long which in itself states that a lot has changed.

First let us understand what Whatsapp has access to and what it does not. Due to the roll out of new end-to-end encryption in April this year, Whatsapp no longer has access to our images and personal texts but what it has access to is the information about our phone numbers and details of our operating systems. 

Now what is this new privacy policy? According to the new privacy policy Whatsapp can share your profile information with Facebook. Facebook then tries to link your Whatsapp's profile  information with your Facebook account. Facebook says that it is not trying to display your phone number under your profile but they just want to use profile information to show better friend suggestions and help them fight spam accounts. They are also stating that this helps them display relevant ads to users. These are obviously loaded PR words!

Now if you give access to your profile infomation to Facebook, Facebook tries to show you as a friend suggestion to people who have you as a contact in their mobiles. They can also start to display more relevant ads to you. These use cases are okay but what if Facebook decides to do more in the future? Whatsapp says that it is selling your profile information only to Facebook and not to anyone else. That’s fine but what if Facebook wants to leverage that data in the future and sell that to somebody else? The analogy that I can think of is like Whatsapp saying “Hey we are selling guns to a trusted organisation. Its fine!” Now what if that trusted (really?) organisation decides to sell that guns to robbers and psychos? 

Its only logical to think that Facebook should get something from Whatsapp for that they have spent $22 Billion (yes by the time the deal was closed it jumped $3 Billion in value) to acquire it. Now that Facebook had decided to drop subscription model for Whatsapp which used to be a $1 per year this January, the only way Facebook can monetise this platform is to collect some data out of it. 

The voice of this article is a little harsh on Facebook and may look like a rant. But the reason is that, it would have been great for Facebook to take a high moral ground and say users can opt out of sharing their data whenever they want. The caveat here is that you can’t opt out of sharing your data after 30 days of accepting this proposal. 

So before Facebook gives more clarity on the limitations with which they use our data, We suggest you all to uncheck the option of sharing data with Facebook and then accept the new privacy policy. If you have already accepted, you can go to settings and opt out of it within 30 days. To opt out, head to settings -> Account -> Uncheck Share my account info. Breathe! 

Tim Cook and his first 5 Years at Apple!

Tim Cook today completes 5 years of his tenure as the CEO of the most valuable company in the world. When he was handed over the post of the CEO by the board on suggestion of Steve Jobs, Tim Cook believed that Steve Jobs would remain as a chairman of Apple for a long time with Tim Cook being the CEO as Steve Jobs several times bounced back from ill health in the past after a medical leave. But Steve passed away on 5th October less than 2 months after he resigned as the CEO.

According to Tim Cook here are two of various important advices he received from Steve Jobs:

1)”Never enter into product areas where Apple is not the creator of core technology.” If we think of Apple and it’s products, most of the time they are not the ones that come first but they make the best with integration of hardware, software and services. To do this they need to be in the centre of the product and control the primary technology. Music players existed before iPod and phones existed before iPhone but once Apple entered, they were able to change the Music and Phone businesses completely.

2)”Never ask yourself - ‘What Steve would have done.’ Just do what’s right.” There was a reason why Steve said this to Tim. When Steve was the board member at Disney, after the death of Walt Disney, the execs would always discuss – “What Disney would have done?” and this question always used to fill void in the room and the thinking that went into making decisions once this question was asked became cluttered and unauthentic. According to Tim Cook, this one single advice cleared a huge weight off his chest and helped him think better.

Tim Cook is criticised several times for not being able to make Apple enter into new product areas. This statement is invalid because innovations happen when the technology is ready and the consumers have a problem that this technology could answer. Even when Steve Jobs was at helm it took 6 years to launch iPhone after the iPod was launched. 

While Apple’s incremental gadgets are doing quite well – iPhones, iPads and Macbooks – Apple watch, only new category of device that was launched under Tim’s leadership is yet to prove its potential as a device consumers can’t live without. 

All the technology perspectives aside, Tim Cook brought some elements into Apple that his  charismatic predecessor couldn’t (or didn't care). One of them is transparency and being more open towards critical issues. When the factories at China are facing a problem with lot of workers committing suicides, Tim visited China and made sure that there are some changes in the process that made the workplace more comfortable and less punishing. And the efforts of Apple on environment are legendary! Apple by 2017 will run on 100% renewable energy and its efforts on recycling are setting benchmarks in the industry! And Tim Cook even presented himself in front of the attorney on Tax evasion claims and debated passionately on the need for changes in taxation policies. 

Tim is a very private person, yet he openly declared himself as gay, and the reason that he stated was – “If foregoing my privacy in this one issue can help people come out of the depression, make them think that being gay is not wrong and make them believe that they too can achieve great heights, I’d happily help!” This statement sums up what he is and what he stands for.

Everything didn't go his way though. There were some instances when he was under immense pressure. There was Apple Maps issue where it was very un-Apple to introduce a product before it was ready and Tim Cook candidly admitted the failure. The biggest crisis he faced (if we could point out at one) is when FBI asked Apple to unlock iPhone of a terrorist. (San Bernardino incident) The way Apple reacted to this got lot of admiration from the industry and triggered a debate on an important topic – Privacy and Security. Wozniak (Co-founder of Apple) said "I very much admire Tim Cook for standing up for the privacy of individuals because my whole life, Apple has meant to me a question of who is more important, the human or the technology." Who is more important human or the technology?

With iPhone growth slowing down and critics’ rant at Apple for not being able to come up with a disruptive innovation, I would say, Tim Cook shouldn’t be judged on his last 5 years but on his next 5 years because innovation takes time to produce and his hints at Apple Car and VR look exciting!

Yahoo, Google and the Industry.

To include Yahoo and Google under one bracket is one risky title to start with considering Verizon’s recent buyout of Yahoo and Google’s passes at Apple to be the most valuable company. There’s a reason to it. Read on to find out why!

“Yahoo won the search engine wars and was poised for greater things,” said a Fortune article in 2000. Yahoo was valued $2.8 billion then and when Microsoft tried to acquire it in 2008, they allegedly offered $50 billion. Fast forward to 2016, Verizon buys yahoo for $4.8 billion. So what has changed in between? Press is full of various theories and takeaways many of which focused on Yahoo’s failure to buy Facebook and Google, or sell to Microsoft. But if I can think of one thing to attribute for Yahoo’s failure it is being on wrong side of major trends. 

If people remember, Yahoo was one of the untouchable companies in 90s and it was the leader till mid 2000s to the point that Yahoo’s CEO got a 10 minute stage time for the historic iPhone launch in 2007 and Steve Jobs projected Yahoo as a force to reckon with. And then 10 years later, Marissa Mayer who was poised to be the only saving grace and had the potential to turnaround the falling corporation failed to revive and finally sold it to Verizon. 

Now let’s look at Google. As of now, Google’s numbers look great! It is beating expectations quarter by quarter and Industry observers are walking away impressed after every earnings call. Google banked on digital advertising big time and are doing great! Google’s brainchild PPC (pay per click) – where advertisers are charged when advertising works – has become industry standards of how people look at the success of an ad. Even revenue streams of various companies are designed around PPC. 

But the trend is changing faster than expected. Google’s focus is still on browsers, website and search which interrupt the user’s attention. These are now being replaced by advertising designed to engage them. Facebook, is on the right side of all these trends. As a result of Google’s focus on serving ads by interrupting user experience has impacted the rise in ad blockers. About 41% of internet users use an ad blocker according to a survey. As a result publishers are against these low-performing ads that clog the pages with takeovers, wrappers and pop-ups that weigh on load times and ruin the user experience. 

Smart publishers have realised that instead of putting user experience at risk, a better way to serve ads is to engage them with sponsored content. The success of sponsored content depends on publishers delivering value and relevance to the readers. Publishers have realised that sponsored content is more effective vehicle for driving deep engagement and influence!

Facebook is built exactly for this. From pages to sponsored posts, Facebook has concentrated its monetization strategy on feed based units than interruptive ads and is more poised than Google for success on this road. Google’s answer for this has been AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) which again are search based rather than discovery. 

Conclusion

In Conclusion, unlike Yahoo, Google has been good at identifying trends and getting ahead of the competition. Their brilliant leadership made some strategic decisions to acquire products like Android, Google, AdMob, etc to stay ahead of the competition and it is fair to say that this expertise is bought than being home-grown. 

But the business of digital content is more of curated than computerised. Google doesn’t have this culture in both structure and technology that is poised to take over this trend of curation because Google is always about left-brain comfort zone and computerising the activities than human curation. What Google needs now is a less Google-y approach to problem solving!

Differential Privacy - What the heck is it?

Artificial Intelligence has developed leaps and bounds in recent years. Automation has taken over the world and is doing many things unimagined 10 years ago. Creating auto calendar events, showing your parking location, tracking your packages are just the beginnings of what AI can do.

Tesla when unveiling Model S, introduced a feature where the car on having access to the owner’s calendar, can come out of the garage, switch on the air conditioning and send you a notification that its time to start based on the traffic conditions to the destination. AI is touching everyone’s lives. But at what cost is the question everybody have to ask.

For any artificial intelligence system to get better 2 things are of prime importance. One is having gobs of data and the other is access to high processing power. Cloud takes care of the latter but what about the data? One way or the other, companies should access users’ data to better the AI system on a constant basis. For AI to perform reliably, knowing users’ habits is of utmost importance.

Now comes the different approaches various companies have towards AI. Google, facebook, Amazon and Microsoft openly collect lots of user data for betterment of their AI systems - Google Now, Echo, Cortana, etc.. Apple has a different approach when it comes to collection of users’ data. They are very vocal about protecting users’ privacy. Apple doesn’t collect data as much as its competitors does and for that reason they are atleast 2 steps behind of what competition does. 

Google debuted auto calendar event creation feature by reading your mails 2 years ago. Apple introduced it last year and they have found an approach where the event creation happens locally on the phone unlike Google’s approach where this happens in the cloud. Google photos have great features such as scene recognition, face detection, etc and as expected Apple is late to the game and they have this feature available only now because they are trying to do that locally on the phone. 

This approach by Apple to do everything on the phone has some limitations. Phones do not have as much processing power as the cloud has and the apps might function slow and sluggish as a result of it. The other limitation is that as all the algorithms that detect scene and faces in a photo should reside locally on the device unlike Google’s approach wherein they reside on the cloud, the size of the app in iOS would be significantly higher than that of Android’s.

Apple might do that anyway on the phone now but when it comes to predictions and slang words rise, they have to collect data from the users. The answer for this question is “Differential Privacy” as unveiled by apple at WWDC this year. The tech­nol­ogy works by adding in­cor­rect in­for­ma­tion to the data Apple col­lects. This is done in such a way that Apple’s al­go­rithms can ex­tract use­ful in­sights while mak­ing it very dif­fi­cult for any­one to link ac­cu­rate data back to an in­di­vid­ual user.

Apple’s short-term am­bi­tions for the tech­nol­ogy are lim­ited. The com­pany will use it to keep user data anonymous while an­a­lys­ing how cus­tomers are us­ing emo­jis or new slang ex­pres­sions on the phone, or which search queries should pop up “deep links” to apps rather than web­pages. In the long term, however, differential privacy could help Apple keep up with competitors such as Google that collect user data more aggressively and use it to improve offers such as image and voice recognition programs. 

Its privacy stance that left Apple in something of a bind. The company promises not to touch its user’s data and criticises other tech companies for collecting personal information that is used to target advertising. But that policy has hindered Apple’s ability to develop and improve services for users. In essence, differential privacy is an effort to tap insights about what a group of users is doing without examining any individuals. 

In a race to Artificial intelligence and a moral obligation to protect users’ privacy, the concept of “Differential Privacy” is going to play a key role for Apple.

Internet is a great Equaliser — Cloud as a sidekick

“Google search works same whether you are a professor at Harvard or a kid in a rural India.” This is what Sundar Pichai said after he took over Google as a CEO. Nobody summed up what internet is all about better than this. Internet is a great equaliser!

Fire and wheel are said to be the biggest revolutions of mankind. For me Internet falls on the same league. Internet in one way is really transforming the way we communicate. Cards are not being sent anymore. We are in the world of emoticons and Stickers. While it revolutionised how we communicate, it on the way revolutionised and provided a way on how hardware should look like.

Machines are getting tinier and sleeker day by day. Moore’s law and incremental technology are helping designers achieve such awesome designs but it is internet that has transformed and informed the design process. On one hand, while internet is making everyone equal, in its quest internet is making all devices equal.

I’m saying this because there is a point where nobody brought Mac for the fact that there is no application market present for it. All the apps are designed for Windows and are supposed to be run on Windows. For Obvious reasons, Windows enjoyed network effects and a virtuous cycle - More users brought windows, so more developers built more apps for windows, so more users brought windows. Repeat. So many still are buying windows. If Mac was able to comeback and play a catch up it was only because of internet. 

Now most apps are moved to the cloud. Everything is done on web. Therefore it has become evident that it is not the company that builds better operating system that wins. But it is a company that builds better web browser that wins. Its not the company that builds better hardware that wins. It is the company with better networking that wins. Development of Webkit, design choices and obviously agile movement in figuring out where the next bet should be brought Apple back. Incidentally they are the first major company to implement wireless networking in a Notebook. Had the internet not been come in to existence, Mac would have run out of business.

Business creates Technology and scales it. In this case internet has created many businesses. If we can think of great internet successes like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb or any company that has got online presence for that matter is built on a strong foundation called internet. Internet is changing the rules of marketing. It used to be TV and print. Now its all about internet and tapping that user that sees your ad. 

There used to be a time where you have to possess a specific device to run specific program. When whole process is moved to the cloud, you just have a interface front end where you give commands to make things work. We are speaking of big apps being developed in iPads and iPhones. Microsoft recently said most part of the Windows 10 development was done on surface. That’s the world we are in! You previously have to possess a Macbook to develop apps for iPhone and iPad. Now that the programming language on which apps are made — Swift — is made open source, IBM put it in the cloud and all you have to do is open a browser, type in an URL and start developing great apps. You don’t have the headache of configuring the system and configuring the emulators. All you need to concentrate on is what you are good at — developing and coding!

There are three kinds of apps - Completely local, Completely web and hybrid. Apps which are standalone which mostly are games and other reference apps like dictionary are local apps that do not need internet to work. And then there are web apps which are completely web based and run on the browser. The problem with making the app completely web based is that there is a tradeoff with interaction and responsiveness. If the whole app is on the web, it obviously runs slow. Web apps, due to the speed of communications are not responsive as apps that are present in local storage. Today is the world of Hybrid apps where the most UI elements and the presentation patterns are local but the content comes from internet through APIs.

There might come a time where communications speed go to an extent where the apps on the web would be more responsive and provides a leverage to the developer that he need not concentrate on various intricacies involved in each individual Operating Systems. He can write one single program that works across all the devices and all we might need is a browser and various bookmarks. 

Social Networks and the Echo Chamber

Social Networking which never existed 10 years ago has seen the penetration faster than any other service in the world. While there are many advantages to it, let's for a minute be cynical and look at what it does to our cognitive thinking.

It is human tendency to seek out information that validates our view. So we actively look for people whose views match ours. We Selectively read online columns or newspaper articles that appeal to our thinking. We watch youtube videos or television channels that agree with our views. We read opinion pieces and editorials in newspapers and magazines that coincide with our view. This puts us into an “echo chamber” where similar views are repeated and reinforced. The contrary views are brushed aside as frivolous or biased. 

While this might sound bad enough, modern-day social media algorithms has made it worse. All the algorithms facebook or any social network for that matter suggest the pages and ads that we might want to see or might want to like or might want to open. Nobody shows us the reality! Our Facebook feed is filtered based on previous likes. Flipkart suggests items on our pattern of previous purchases. Twitter suggests whose tweets we should follow bases on those we are already following. Social Networks are ensuring that we are fed with more of the same to the point where our brains start confusing opinions for facts. 

There is a debate whether this urge for constant reinforcement makes us more intolerant as a society. That’s a question best left for sociologists and psychologists to answer but this Echo chamber is catastrophic for a business world moving forward.

Before discovery of Australia people were convinced that all Swans are white. It is because they didn’t find a single swan which is black. This is a view based on empirical evidence. But immediately after they found a contrary view that black Swans do exist, they changed a view. But unfortunately we are doing quite the opposite. We first form a view and then look for evidence that endorses our view. That’s the reason we should have a clear line of difference between opinions and facts.

Even in organisations, it often happens that managers prefer views of “yes men.” This is called confirmation bias. Many leaders seek out and take opinions of people who say what the Manager wants to listen but not what is right. They might sometimes be right but when something goes wrong, they will not be able to recognise what went wrong. They don't realise that the data that is sought is completely biased. Research essentially decreases uncertainty in the decisions that a Manager has to take but the person that takes that decision should be unbiased in collecting the data instead of being caught up in an “Echo Chamber.”

A philosopher named Karl Popper famously said “The only way of testing a hypothesis is to form a view and to spend the rest of the day looking for evidence that proves you are wrong, a process known as falsification. Good decision-makers should consciously seek out diverse views that challenge their existing opinions.” This sums up what decision making is all about.

Li-Fi - The next Big thing to look for?

Li-fi (Light Fidelity) is being seen as the next paradigm shift in the field of wireless networks. While there are many upsides of replacing Wi-fi with Li-fi, our technology is not ripe yet. In this blog post we look at what Li-fi is, its upsides and downsides.

What’s Li-fi?

We love internet and the way we access internet these days is Wi-fi. (Wireless Fidelity) Wi-fi uses radio waves which has a smaller spectrum compared to Light or Visible spectrum. Without going into technicalities, I would try to explain what spectrum is and what advantage we get using a larger spectrum which is light spectrum.

Before that let’s first see how Wireless networks work. All the data is digital and is in the form of 1s and 0s. Now let’s take a crude example. Let’s say that if the frequency is low, it is represented as 0 and if frequency is high, it is represented as 1. So, using two levels of frequency, we can send one bit at a time. Now let’s say, we can communicate 4 different  levels of frequencies. Let’s name them low, medium, high and very high. Now these 4 levels of frequencies can represent 00,01,10 and 11 bits. On the whole, you now are able to send 2 bits at a time. Now lets say, you are able to send 8 levels of frequencies. So, you can send three bits at a time. (000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111) So speed of the network depends on how many levels of frequencies you can communicate at a time. 

No of bits you can send at a time=  log2 (No of levels of frequencies you can send)

${\log }_a\mathrm{<br>}$

Though theoretically, you can communicate unlimited levels of frequency at a time but for the receiver to be able to discern between several frequency levels after the addition of noise, you can only communicate limited levels of frequencies. (ie., you can send 2.3 Mhz signal, 2.31 Mhz, 2.311 Mhz, 2.3111 Mhz, etc.. but for receiver to discern these frequencies you cannot just send whichever level you want.)

Here comes the difference between Wi-fi and Li-fi. Wi-fi is based on radio waves and the bandwidth (Roughly speaking, bandwidth is the difference between highest and lowest level of frequencies) of radio waves is much lower than visible light on which Li-fi is based on. So higher the bandwidth, high are the no of frequency levels you can transmit. So high are the no of frequency levels, high are the no of bits you can send at a time. Therefore, high are the no of bits you can send at a time, faster is the network. So, achieving 1Gbps has been an easy task for Li-fi.

How does the Li-fi Work?

We have modems in our home which transmit wi-fi signals for use. In Li-fi, we use the lights to transmit Li-fi signals. So as explained above in a crude way, if light is on it is 1 and if light is off it is 0. So if light is able to glow in different brightness levels, we can send many bits at a time. Normal lights will not be able to do it. So we use LEDs in place of normal incandescent lights for two advantages: 

1) LEDs can glow in different brightness levels.

2) They can switch to these different levels very fast.

All our mobiles have an ambient light sensor on top of the screen, generally near the ear speaker to detect the ambient light conditions and change the brightness of the screen accordingly. A similar sensor but a much more sensitive one will be placed in the receivers to receive this Li-fi signals. This is how Li-fi works

Now many people are jumping on it as the next paradigm shift in internet communications but it should be taken with a pinch of salt. Here are some reasons why we are many years away from seeing Li-fi replacing Wi-fi.

1) It is true that Li-fi gives you 1Gbps of speed, but is there a optical fibre network (which is an input to Li-fi modem which is LED light) that provides you 1Gbps of speed? Our current modems, based on technology they are operating on can give upto 400-700 Mbps but current optical fiber links are unable to catch up with even that speed. So what's the need to jump to even more powerful modems? Its like having a larger tap connected to a narrow pipe.

"Its like having a larger tap connected to a narrow pipe."

2) Downlink is okay but to transmit data from your device to the router, you still need to use Wi-fi or infrared unless you install an LED on your mobile or laptop to transmit data in the same way as Li-fi does.

3) Li-fi cannot work in bright sunlight for the fact that sunlight dominates any LED light.

4) Li-fi cannot be used in different rooms across a home because light cannot traverse through the walls which is essential for Li-fi to work.

5)Light should be on all the times. Though the scientist behind Li-fi, Mr. Harald Haas explained that light's brightness can be brought down so much that a naked eye can't determine whether the light is on or off and can still send the data, it has to be proven yet.

So before you jump into Li-fi bandwagon, remember that there are still some limitations left unanswered!

If you don't understand Tradeoffs, You can't understand Apple!

Its about deciding between having higher mega pixel lens with a smaller pixel size or a lower mega pixel with a larger pixel size that lets more light inside giving you better low light performance.

Its about deciding between having many cores with meagre performance or having lesser cores with greater single core performance. (Though you have 8 cores, if there is a process with only 2 threads, other 6 cores are useless!)

Its about deciding between having an L3 cache or sacrificing it for higher performance bandwidth.

Its about deciding between screen having more pixels per inch or having just enough number of pixels with true colour representation and wider viewing angles.

Its about deciding between having an open source operating system and dealing with all sorts of viruses and inconsistencies or to go with a curated appstore approach.

Its about deciding to have a higher processor clock speed or a lower clock speed with optimised performance and sustained throughput. (Phones with higher clock speeds slows down once the phone gets heated to compensate the temperature)

Its about deciding between going with a bigger storage options of conventional hard drive or to go with costlier flash storage that has a greater overall performance.

Its about deciding between having a more powerful RAM or to have just enough RAM and optimising the performance conserving the battery life.

There are mobile cameras that give you better low light performance than iPhone, better quality in sunlight than iPhone and better color representation than iPhone but there is not a single mobile camera that beats iPhone in overall performance.

There are mobiles with better screens than iPhone, better viewing angles than iPhone, better saturation than iPhone. But there is not a single mobile screen that is better than iPhone’s mobile screen in overall quality.

There are mobiles having processors with higher clock speeds, higher no of cores and higher bytes of RAM but there is no single phone that is better than iPhone in real world performance.

While many companies are “Why not?” companies, Apple is the ultimate “Why?” company. Every new feature faces a harsh spotlight of inquiry. No feature in iPhone is done because it can be done. It is done because it really adds up to what iPhone is. That’s the reason, “New is easy, right is hard!”

The only thing Apple hates to make trade off with is Cost and that’s the only reason you have to pay a higher price for an Apple’s product!

Down below is a great video that explains what Apple is all about.

There are thousand "No"s to a single "YES!"

Happy birthday Windows!

Last Friday marks 30 years of existence for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft is the first software company. Bill Gates envisioned long ago how a software company should be like before anyone knew what software actually is. Microsoft has been the face of computing for many long years and it still is in a very tangible way. There are many ups and downs for a huge company as Microsoft where the former clearly dominated the latter, it wasn’t always a cakewalk for Microsoft to protect its identity. Software is funny. You clearly dominate the industry, become myopic and then you are irrelevant. We have seen recently this week on how Rdio filed for bankruptcy after being a super hit just 4 years ago. Similarly we have seen many instances in the past where companies faltered not knowing where their next bet should be and going bankrupt.

This was Microsoft's first logo

Microsoft was started in 1974 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. When Paul saw the future in Altair 8800 (A Micro processor) he persuaded Bill Gates that the time was ripe and they have to jump into the world of programming. Then Bill Gates and Paul Allen somehow convinced Altair manufacturers and started to write programming immediately. After spending many sleepless nights, they finally were succeeded in delivering the program. 

1980s

These were the days of IBM Personal computers which took public by storm. Microsoft wrote the program of MS DOS for IBM. The biggest mistake IBM did was allowing Microsoft retain the licensing rights on MS DOS. When Bill Gates and his team at Microsoft were developing MS DOS for IBM, they were not at all confident of getting the licensing rights as IBM being market leader was ruthless. But the management of IBM thought that nobody in the industry could replicate their success in hardware manufacturing and thought that they will remain market leaders in the foreseeable future. Bill Gates from the inception is a software guy. He when came to know that the management of IBM is not at all interested in retaining the licensing of MS DOS, he was shocked and said to his close friends how big this mistake is and also added that IBM is going to repent on this Historical mistake. He was right. Many manufacturers came around figuring how to do hardware and started to approach Microsoft for the software. Microsoft suddenly replaced IBM as face of computing.

Microsoft also licensed their ‘Basic’ programming for Macintosh and wrote office software for Mac. Bill Gates worked closely with Steve Jobs in creating Macintosh’s software. Bill Gates was a little apprehensive on Mac’s success as he thought the Macintosh that was launched in 1984 was way ahead of its times and may not succeed. Turns out, he was right and Macintosh’s failure lead Steve Jobs step out of the company. But people started to look at Macintosh’s GUI as a game changer. 

Then the whole industry started to believe that Graphical User Interface is the future of the computing and the huge debate of Text based interface vs Graphics based interface soon turned into a intuitive common sense. It is clear - GUI is the future.

1990s

Windows came up with Windows 95 and it was the first windows operating system that supported GUI and it became an instant hit. Apple immediately filed a lawsuit that Microsoft copied their Macintosh’s interface and the competition became intense. Microsoft finally relented and agreed to purchase $350 million worth Apple shares in ‘out of court’ settlement when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. While Apple pursued an integrated approach from the start where Hardware, Software and Services are provided by a single company, Bill Gates’ vision was different. He thought consumer should be given a choice of different hardware manufacturers and he pursued an open approach where different components are designed by different companies. In hindsight, we have to say that the industry immensely benefitted from Microsoft’s open systems approach. Competition intensified among the manufacturers which turned into a Zero sum game which triggered price wars. In the end, consumer benefitted. 

Microsofts push to Enterprise is also a commendable effort suited to its open approach. Microsoft allowed OS customisation and tweaking according to the needs of the enterprises and they came up with a server operating system that was and still is immensely popular. Even food chains like KFC use Microsoft’s enterprise Operating system. Here instead of whole Operating system a lite version of Windows is deployed on a low cost hardware that saved lot of costs and was easier to use. 

2000s

Many say that this decade is a ‘lost decade’ for Microsoft. Steve Ballmer when took over Microsoft, it is a giant. Microsoft lost focus and ventured into many irrelevant spaces in the fear of being Myopic. They ventured into robotics, phones without a vision and did many irrelevant innovations that didn’t help its desktop operating system in any sort. In 2004 they debuted a Windows based tablet which is a complete failure. Windows Vista’s failure didn’t help Microsoft. On the other hand Apple and Google are driving ahead leaving Microsoft behind. In a desperate attempt to attract attention, Microsoft even ventured in to search space through Bing. The abbreviation of Bing is ‘Bing is not Google.’ If you name your product after your competitor, it says how terrified and desperate you are. After losing ground to Apple and Google on mobile front and Amazon on server front, Microsoft really need a restructuring. 

Present

Steve Ballmer was sacked as CEO by the board and Satya Nadella who overlooked Enterprise Mobility division and cloud platform Azure was made the CEO. Satya Nadella when made the CEO stressed the importance of Mobile first approach and started conscious efforts to bring back Microsoft as an enterprise leader. 

Its too early to judge Satya Nadella as a CEO but innovations of Microsoft recently on Surface tablets, Surface books, Windows Mobile, Azure, Microsoft Band, Xbox, Holo lens, and Windows 10 looks promising. Satya has a clear head unlike the chaotic personality that represents Steve Ballmer. Below is a video explaining his vision for Microsoft after a recent product launch.

Microsoft indeed brought us a long way. Let’s hope Microsoft takes us to even more heights we could never have imagined. Happy 30th Anniversary Windows!