Nostalgia

Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. makes for powerful courtroom drama. Calling it drama, however, is faint praise. It's entertaining and thrilling but the effects are shallow and they don't last.

I have been asked to comment on the trial that just concluded and I find it difficult. The problem for me is that I've seen too many of these dramas. From the United States v. Microsoft to NPD v. RIM and Nokia v. X, Y or Z to make sweeping conclusions. This frustrates the journalist.

The problem is that the process of litigation leads to little satisfaction for any of the parties. There is always the anticipation of catharsis, but it never comes. The expectation is understandable. We are led to believe that the law is decisive, the ultimate adjudicator. The reason it isn't is that the system was established in a different era. A time when technological change was slow, or non-existent. As a result the institutions of law move so slowly that they are nearly futile in administering justice or righting wrongs.

Here are just a few problems I can cite without any research:

1. Legal processes are glacial. They tend to last longer than the lives of the products being litigated. In the case of phones with shelf lives of six months to a year, the trials are unlikely to get underway before the accused infringer is already off the market.
2. The law is ambiguous. IP law varies and is subject to interpretation. What one jury (or judge) finds unanimously infringing another will find non-infringing. This gets even more dramatic when comparing decisions across countries and legal systems and through appeals processes and the influence of political considerations.
3. It's a big world. Even though patents can be internationalized, the way they are enforced varies.
4. The financial penalties or awards are arbitrary. As exposed during the Apple v. Samsung (US) trial, the impact of infringement can be calculated numerous ways, all hypothetical.
5. It is incredibly complex. The technicalities are so onerous that they baffle judges and lawyers and legal experts, not to mention company management and lay jurors.
6. It is costly. Only major companies or those backed by legal hit squads can participate in litigation. This means it sustains incumbents rather than facilitate entry. By necessity, entrants need to "route around IP."

But the most damning thing about the litigation process is that it's assumed to be decisive. Decisive in terms of altering the success (or failure) of companies. That rarely happens. Instead it adds friction to an existing, inevitable outcome. Sometimes it cripples the winner and rewards the loser.

Therefore strategists need to be careful to avoid placing their faith in this system. It's a lottery at best, a time and money sink at worst. Considering the analogy to litigation as drama, I would re-phrase this caution as a warning not to treat litigation as Deus ex Machina. It's not something that will get your business out of a jam or reward you for a violation, perceived or real.

Practically, these exercises in drama are used to signal. Signal to competitors, partners, customers and employees. In other words, they are used to create psychological effects. But we know that psychology can be effectively shaped with other messages. Signals that products themselves give (positioning), or that are shaped by communications via advertising. And these means for signaling are much more effective than using the legal system. So why not use traditional means of signaling?

This is the crutch of Deus ex Machina. That this artifice will help tell a story. That "a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object."

It won't.

Horace, you spent nearly a decade at Nokia, where you worked as a business development manager and industry analyst. Did you foresee their current, increasingly dire situation?

I did not see an explicit downfall. I anticipated difficult times ahead and a deep crisis. My view of what would happen was published as my first Asymco post.

What led you to start Asymco?

I started a consulting company which I hoped would generate leads through a blog. The blog became far more exciting than consulting and it became my primary focus after about one year. I had no ambition to write for a living or to be a “blogger”. I did not anticipate there would be any interest on the topic I wrote [about] beyond a handful of people. In that regard, things played out as they do at most start-ups: what you end up doing is not anywhere near the target you aimed at.

Apple’s clearly one of your favorite topics. What about the company appeals to you?

Business education is predicated on storytelling, also known as the case method. Business management is not a discipline that has “axioms” defining basic truths, or if it does, they change frequently. Therefore business education (i.e. the MBA) is the equivalent of people teaching each other by telling stories around a campfire. The best stories get repeated more often and are better ‘teaching tools’. So it is with Apple. It’s a great medium for story telling because people can see the stories unfolding in real time or at least within their lifetimes. They are not about a distant past or an abstract industry. There is also a lot of passion around the brand, both positive and negative and so it leads to more attention.

Read more here: Exclusive interview with Asymco's Horace Dediu | The Tech Block.

Steve Ballmer July 9th, 2012 on competing with Apple:

We are trying to make absolutely clear:
We are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple
We are not.
No space uncovered that is Apple’s
We have our advantages in productivity
We have our advantages in terms of enterprise management, manageability
We have our advantages in terms of when you plug into server infrastructure in the enterprise.
But we are not going to let any piece of this [go uncontested to Apple]
Not the consumer cloud
Not hardware software innovation
We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself
Not going to happen
Not on our watch.

Steve Ballmer, July 2010 on competing with Apple's iPhone and iPad:

Today, kind of I'd say one of the top issues on my mind, let alone on your minds, one of the top issues on my mind, is, hey, there is a category that we've had Windows on for actually a long time. We've had Windows 7 on, tablets and slate machines now for a number of years, and Apple has done an interesting job of putting together a synthesis and putting a product out, and in which they've -- they sold certainly more than I'd like them to sell, let me just be clear about that.

We think about that. We think about that in competitive sense. And for us, then, the job is to say: Okay, we have a lot of IP, we have a lot of good software in this area, we've done a lot of work on ink and touch and everything else -- we have got to make things happen. Just like we had to make things happen on netbooks, we've got to make things happen with Windows 7 on slates. And we are in the process of doing that as we speak. We're working with our hardware partners, we're tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs that they're bringing them to market. And, yeah, you're going to get a lot of cacophony. There will be people who do things with other operating systems. But we've got the application base, we've got the user familiarity. We've got everything on our side if we do things really right.

So, we think about these devices and I don't think there really is one size that fits all. I don't think everybody wants a slate. I've been to too many meetings with journalists who'd spend the first 10 minutes of the meeting setting up their iPad to look like a laptop...

Laptops actually are well designed for a lot of things. I notice they are all light. In fact, if you look around this room, they all weigh zero pounds, because they're just sitting on the table, you are not holding them and you don't set them up when you want to type, and they prop up -- they have good attributes. But some people are going to want that form factor. Some people are going to want probably a screen that they take with them and maybe they throw it back into the keyboard. Some people are going to want a device that is screen and keyboard that spins around for inking purposes. Some people are going to want things very light or very cheap or very expensive or very powerful. All of those things are going to be important, and we've got a push right now -- right now -- with our hardware partners.

... We're coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows. No -- there's -- let me be unambiguous. A new Windows Phone for screen sizes that, let me just say, are, you know, sort of bigger than three or four inches -- the answer is Windows Phone. We are in the game. We're all in the game today with Intel architecture machines. We've got improvements coming from Intel. We're driving forward. We're unambiguous about that. Now, where we'll go and what's going to matter -- I said also in my remarks that in no way will we allow hardware to be the impediment. We will embrace what we need to embrace over time in terms of hardware evolution.

But you say to me are we going to see slate? Yes. What processor are they going to have? They are going to have an Intel architecture processor at least in any foreseeable future. Are they going to run Windows? Yeah. Will it be tuned? Yes! And we are going to sell like crazy. We are going to market like crazy. We have devices that will run more applications, that have as much content, that have anything you want on the planet.

And we have an ecosystem of developers that know how to write applications for that thing. Believe me, as I think everybody knows, you can buy two PCs for the price of one iPad -- two netbooks today for the price of one iPad. So, people are sitting there over-celebrating BOM costs and blah, blah, blah. We and Intel can get our job done and know how to make money. There's good money for everybody in the ecosystem to go make.

I talked about power. We've got work we have to do with hardware partners, with Intel. There's certainly some work to be done there. And over time where we go is where we go. But at least in the timeframe that which anybody does these models, for example, let's go. Let's go and we'll be in market as soon as we can with new devices, whether that's, you know, really, really soon or just really pretty soon. I'm going to wait until I have the device that I want to hand you and tell you to go use, or a collection of devices. I think that would be the appropriate time to say it is time. But it ain't a long time from now. Pardon my English...

On the netbook, nor the slate, if it's two weeks one way or the other, or it's a month, I mean, let's not speculate, let's merely say when you get your Windows 7 machine, it will print. Let's just start with that. I mean some people actually like to print every now and then. Ours will print. I'm not trying to say that other guys aren't doing good work. I'm not saying that. We've got to ‑‑ come on, every day. Every day you come to work you have to prove yourself, prove yourself, prove yourself. We'll prove ourselves. ...

I relish the competition. I relish holding up those couple of machines today that I wanted to hand you. It's not today. I'll relish doing it tomorrow. Bring on ‑‑ particularly if with the application base, with the tools that we have, with the user understanding and momentum and everything going on, we can't compete with ‑‑ particularly whatever the weird collection of Android machines is going to look like, shame on us.

Apple is Apple. They're always a little tougher to compete with. They're a really good competitor, and tend to be a really high-priced competitor. People worried a little bit about our bottom costs. They've got a lot of margin in those devices, which creates a lot of room in which to operate. Okay. We've competed with Apple before. I talked about that.

We've been competing with Macs, and I notice in this audience you get one profile for the 93 percent of people almost who agree with us every day about laptops. We're going to have things that should be interesting to them. That doesn't mean it's not going to be exciting. That doesn't mean you're not going to have to pay attention to shareholders. It certainly means we've got to pay attention. But, at the end of the day kind of what makes life kind of interesting, kind of fun, and you're going to see very interesting things.

Steve Ballmer, January 2007 on competing with Apple's iPhone and iPod:

Right now, well let’s take phones first Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months they’ll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace and let’s see. You know what’s so special...? Let’s see how the competition goes.

In the case of music and entertainment players Apple absolutely has the preeminent position We said we want to be in this market. There’s a lot of reasons why. There’s synergy with other things that we’re doing. We’ve got some neat innovations. In particular, what we’re doing with community, with wireless networking. And we came into a market in which they’re very strong and we took, you know, about, by most estimates, I would say we took about twenty, twenty-five percent of the high-end of the market. We weren’t down at some of the lower price points but for devices 249 dollars and over we took, you know, let’s say about twenty percent of the market. So I feel like we’re in the game. We’re driving our innovation hard. Ok, we’re not the incumbent. He’s the incumbent in this game but, uh, at the end of the day he’s gonna have to keep up with an agenda that we’re gonna drive as well.

Here is a video of my presentation at Mobilism 2012 on the story of mobile phone disruption. Thanks to Peter-Paul Koch (aka PPK) for organizing a great event and allowing me to present to such a smart and knowledgeable audience.

Asymmetric competition | Horace Dediu | Mobilism 2012 on Vimeo

Nearly one third of the time is spent in Q&A, which, even if I do say so myself, is the best part.

Also note the exclusive use of a custom iPad app for wireless presentation (pre-release version of the Perspective App.)

This is a transcript of a voice interview conducted April 19th 2012.

The interview is available as an audio file here.

--

Jim Zellmer: I thought we'd start by describing your education from the beginning, Horace.

Horace Dediu: OK, that's good, yeah. I like to say I'm the product of the public school systems. I went to public schools in three different countries, and probably maybe a dozen different schools altogether because we moved a lot, moved over 30 times.

My family emigrated, and we were what you might call political refugees for a while. We were stateless. We didn't have passports. We were officially not citizens of any country. So, for a period of about four or five years, that was the case. I started having regular schooling in Romania, and then moved to Italy and was enrolled in a school, actually, in the city of Verona, which is where "Romeo and Juliet" was originally set.

I was saying...my background. I spent a year in school in Italy, and I went to school in the north of Italy, in Torino. The thing was that I didn't know Italian, so I actually had to learn. But that's a lot easier for children. I was about nine, I think. And so, I learned Italian, was able to have a good school year. But then we moved.

In the summer, we moved again, and we emigrated to the United States. It took about a year to get the paperwork for that--because that was our ultimate goal was to be in the US. I was enrolled in the public schools. First, in Cleveland, where we found someone to help us. I actually went to, I guess, elementary school in the city of Cleveland, where we lived.

And then, later on, for middle school... What happened in Cleveland around that time was that busing started, desegregation. It would have meant, for me, more than one-hour journey across the whole city, from the west end to the east end of Cleveland, and my parents would have none of that. So, we moved to a suburb, immediately adjacent, which is called Lakewood. I went to middle school and high school in Lakewood, Ohio, for three years in high school.

And then, we actually moved yet again, to Boston. My father got a job in the booming tech sector at the time, which was in the early '80s. I ended up in a suburb of Boston called Medford. We didn't know much. Again, we were flying pretty blind here. We weren't familiar with neighborhoods or what were good schools or anything like that--"good schools." Mostly it was a question of, "Can we find affordable housing?"

Medford turned out to be a pretty lucky choice. In one hand, at the time, it was a blue-collar town. It was one of the near suburbs. So the closer to the city, it tends to be the older the immigrant generations are. It was settled mostly by Italian Americans. And so, a lot of the children I met in school were of some ethnic background.

Again, in the Midwest, that was a bit more rare. So East Coast, for me, was a little bit more vibrant in the sense that there were more interesting ethnic backgrounds and people from different histories and so on.

I enjoyed it, but I only had one year at Medford High School. It was actually more enjoyable, that year, I would say, than my years in Ohio. I have friends that I retained from that one year, and I don't have friends I stay in touch with from Ohio.

But it has changed. The city since has become much more, I would say, a lot of those families moved yet again, probably to a further suburb, and has changed character. I think it's more Hispanic now, the city overall. Nothing wrong with that, it just probably would feel different to anyone there now.

I was, again, in Medford. My choice, my next question, was where to go to college. I had been doing OK in school. And that was an interesting puzzle to solve as a kid, because you don't quite know how to fit in, the usual problems. Fortunately, having moved around so much, I had a pretty thick skin, and having had an accent or a strange background just made you a little bit tougher. And so, I was pretty immune to some of the high-school politics.

I focused on studies, and my parents are both educators. My father has a PhD in mathematics, and my mother had a Master's in mathematics and she taught. Actually, her job was as a teacher. They both got certified as teachers in the United States. My father had taught, also, university in Romania, but he ended up teaching high school and other two-year colleges in the US. It's very hard to go into academia from another country.

In any case, the fact that I had such devoted, academically inclined parents helped in focusing me on academics. That also, I think, was my nature. As far as college, my concern, we always had financial concerns, right?

Jim Zellmer: Right.

Horace: So, for me, I wasn't interested in the social aspect of college. For us, really, the decision was, "Can we keep expenses down?" I was accepted at Tufts University and also at Brandeis, which were local. That was important to me, that it would be near to my home and I could actually commute to these places.

Tufts was slightly better. It was a little bit closer. It was actually in Medford. So, I almost went to the college that was nearest to me. It had a very good program, also, in both engineering and computer science.

The odd thing is now, in college for me, was that - it's almost accidental - but, they had an option for you to take two degrees. The dual degree program was meant for people to study liberal arts and engineering. The idea would be you'd be a well-rounded individual.

The weird thing is that when I went there, which is 1985 to 1989, the School of Liberal Arts included the mathematics department and included the computer science department, which is a spinoff of the math department. So, computer science was a Liberal Arts degree; whereas, engineering was like electrical, mechanical, and so on, the traditional subjects.

I enrolled in the dual degree program with the intention of obtaining a computer science degree from the Liberal Arts School and a computer engineering degree from the School of Engineering. That meant that I would essentially take about 30 percent more courses. I think it was 50 credits versus the standard 30, or so. So, I was going for incrementally more material, but I would end up with two bachelor's degrees.

That's what I did. I actually also did it in an accelerated fashion. I ended up doing that in three and a half years, rather than what they expected it to take, five years.

Jim Zellmer: Wow.

Horace: That involved a lot of summer school. I was actually going through taking some of the requirement courses in the summer. So, I was basically a student 365 days a year and I managed to get the two degrees.

In the third year, there was one of these internship opportunities for research in a lab, GTE Laboratories.

Jim Zellmer: I'm sure.

Horace: GTE Labs was, again, local, which was important to me. They actually put us up in the dorms. So, the only time I spent living in a dorm was during the summer of my internship because it was paid for by the employer.

That was a great time. I loved it. I absolutely adored it. Those years right at... In my third year, which actually was my, I guess, my second year as I was a junior a bit early, I was going through this internship and I was studying, I was going working in the research lab. Then I ended up doing my senior year, my last year, I kept going back there. Somehow they kept me around as a part time employee because the project I had been on turned out to be useful.

It was in the library. I was actually working on indexing, which turned into search, which turned into Google later on, but we didn't know what it was then. We called it information retrieval. The algorithms, so we now do search intuitively when it actually became a commercial product, but it was something we did as research back then.

It was great because I was getting the experience I wanted desperately, loved it, and then I was still in school and I managed to get my degree. I was even earning money while I was doing this. It worked out very well, but it was a very tough period.

I graduated with not the highest scores, but I think I was magna cum laude, or something like that, which is not summa cum laude, but it's pretty good. It's like 3.8 GPA, or something like that. That's it. I don't know if that's what you wanted to hear. Then, of course, I did grad school.

Two years, while I was still employed. I took a full time job at the labs, then essentially I did two years. In '92, I got my Master's in computer engineering. Then I spent about a year or two figuring out what to do next. I went to New York to have a bit of experience. Oh yeah, I remember. I applied to Harvard because I wanted to go to business school. The reason I wanted to go to business school was I didn't understand business.

Jim Zellmer: [laughs] How did that play out? MBA's are often criticized.

Horace: Yeah, I'll tell you how it played out. Well, first thing is this. I'm sitting with my friends. We're all engineers, hackers, if you will. We're like, "We don't understand. We don't understand how we get funded."

Here we are sitting in these nice offices, but how does this company, who's basically a boring utility, how are they going to fund us to do cool stuff? We just compared notes and nobody knew. I realized none of us knew how business worked.

I said, "Well, I better learn about this." To me, I had been so focused in engineering that all this business stuff, the only thing I knew was because I would read the "Wall Street Journal." I didn't have either friends, acquaintances, families. All my friends were nerds. All my family were educators. I knew nobody, literally not one person, who could tell me how the stock market worked.

I would pick up the Wall Street Journal, read it cover to cover, and I wouldn't understand what the heck they were talking about. It sounded very abstract to me. It sounded like I need to learn something that there was something missing in my education.

I felt that the only way to get that training was to go to business school. And so, I applied. I was rejected, and the assumption was, in my mind, that I was too technical, too focused in a very, very narrow niche. Back then, there were headhunters that were trying to headhunt people. So, one headhunter got a hold of me and they said they had an opportunity in New York. I said, "Oh, New York. I know they do business in New York. So I better learn more from going to New York."

And so, I took a job with Chase Manhattan, at the time. It's called something else now, but it was Chase Manhattan. The job was also in IT, but at least it was IT, more pragmatic--corporate technology they call it. But I was there trying to understand more about business. I would still read the "Wall Street Journal" every day, still wouldn't understand it.

I reapplied to business school. I told them what I did. I said, "Look, I took this job because I wanted to learn business." I think I somehow convinced them the second time because I was so mad to do these things.

Jim Zellmer: Persistent.

Horace: Persistent. Somehow, I got accepted. I'll never know how they made that mistake.

Jim Zellmer: [laughs] Yes, of course.

Horace: But, anyway, once I went there, I was like, "OK, teach me." Now, the problem was that you start to learn with the case method, and you realize pretty quickly that there is no real curriculum. This is actually a lot of examples you're being given. It's not even empirical. It's like, "Let's throw a lot of examples and see if something makes sense in a pattern somewhere."

Jim Zellmer: This was Harvard?

Horace: Yeah. So, Harvard Business School. It was the only school I applied to, because I felt I didn't know how to qualify quality in terms of business. It was just a brand name. If you know nothing about phones, you just buy the iPhone because you know it's the best, right? So that was me, very naive. And throughout the school, it wasn't as rigorous.

In many ways, it was easy, because in engineering, engineering is very hard. You have to take test and you have to get answers right. And then in business school, it seemed like you just had to talk and you had to be articulate and you had to somehow be sufficiently smart-sounding to succeed.

Jim Zellmer: The theater, aesthetics.

Horace: Yeah. They drilled that into you. They said, "This is what we're teaching you is how to basically be a leader," and that leadership meant being proactive, not being passive. It meant getting in, if you will, on the discussion. I got that. I got it. It made sense to me because, yeah, in the meeting, if you sit there and say nothing, probably no one pays attention to you. You won't go anywhere in life.

So that was one of lessons. The other ones were about vocabulary. What we're not learning here, however, is that there's axioms. There's no specific rules of business. In fact, if you were to put rules down, there'd be many which would contradict each other. One of the classics is that money now is better than money later. But you need spend money now in order to have money later.

Jim Zellmer: [laughs]

Horace: So these two things are contradictory. There were no rules in business that made any sense as if you were proving a theorem or something like that. I decided all right, let's just go with the flow. I met nice people. I learned more from a lot of people.

The best thing that happened to me is that I had Clay Christensen as a professor. He was the nicest guy. The way he taught, it just resonated with me. He hadn't yet published "The Innovator's Dilemma." He was only teaching us operations, which is a first year course.

It's the only technical course in the sense that you do some process diagrams and you do some analysis. Finance is another analytical course, but the math is pretty straightforward. It's not very conceptual, in a way. Accounting is not either. It's interpretation.

But the professor, Christensen, he had a way of speaking to me that made sense as an engineer. It wasn't just me, there were a lot of people in the class who just felt that this guy was getting to the heart of a lot of the questions that we had. I took him as much as I could. I also had the option to take him in the second year. But, unfortunately, there was change in the dean and I think he had to change courses that he was teaching in the second year.

In any case, we had a good two years there. My question was, what do I do after I graduate? This was 1996. The Internet, at the time, was just emerging. Netscape existed as of 1994 or 1995. There were no Internet business models per se. Certainly, there was a technology industry. But it was pretty much boring and either IBM or commodity PCs and you had a bunch of software companies like Microsoft and Adobe.

It was already getting a little bit tired as an industry. As an MBA, it wasn't really that exciting. Everybody was doing either consulting or investment banking. Those were the typical ways of getting out of school. I had, of course, done something different. I did a startup. And nobody...

In fact when I told people I wanted to do a startup everybody said "You came to the wrong school. No one goes to Harvard to learn how to do a startup. There are specific schools that  train you for entrepreneurship." Like for example, Simmons or something. I forgot the names now. Maybe that's a women's college. I don't remember the names.

But the point is guys were saying "No, when you come out of here, you are either going to become a CEO of a Fortune 500 company or you're going to be a consultant for life or you're going to be in finance, managing other people's money or in private equity." I was like "Oh man. All right, well, whatever."

Jim Zellmer: [laughs]

Horace: I went and did this startup. I did a startup with no VC money. It was done with a partner in California who had raised money from the government using SBIR grants.

We're talking the Department of Defense, and we were doing algorithms research. I went back to my university and recruited an engineer who I worked with in a basement office right off of Massachusetts Avenue. That was in '96. We built a system. We ended up licensing it to Adobe. It was a plugin to Acrobat. We didn't benefit much from it financially. Other people made a lot of money but not us.

But we did learn a lot. So I'm thinking: In business school, I didn't really learn how business works, but I have this degree which gives me credibility. Now, I'm going to do my own business...

Jim Zellmer: It's a ticket horse, yes.

Horace: Yeah, but I did my own business. I threw away the ticket.  It didn't help me at all. What I was realizing, for example ... I didn't know how to do sales. I thought when you're doing your own business, you actually need to know how to do sales, and they don't teach you that at business school. I actually went and took a sales course, like they do in a daylong seminar.

I'm saying there are so many pieces that are missing. I didn't know how VCs, how to handle VCs and how to do pitches and do all these things. And none of that was taught, so I thought, OK, what I'm going to do? I'm going to do on-the-job training. I'm going to figure this out. And [learn from] networking with people in technology.

Eventually, I decided from the learning we had in the first startup to do another one, to do e-books! That was 1999. I'm trying to do an e-book startup in 1999. [So] I get on a standards body. I'm doing something with folks and I'm actually in a standards group that includes people from Microsoft, from Adobe, from a bunch of other startups, and from Nokia.

Actually that's where I met someone from Nokia, who...

At the time--it was 1999--I realized at that moment, with or without Nokia, I said, all computers are going to be handheld devices. This is so obvious. I can't express how obvious it is. I was interested, because Nokia had pretty much at the time the best mobile devices.

Jim Zellmer: Yeah, they were the player, no doubt.

Horace: I was asking myself, look, everybody in the U.S. doesn't get mobile. It's obvious that either it's Japan or Europe. And so, the question in my mind was, do I stay with the technology industry and try to figure out how this mobile computing will play out, or do I go to somebody who really knows mobile and expect that they will actually figure out how to become a computing company?

I chose the latter, partly because they also offered me a job and the dot-com bubble burst, and I wasn't ever going to get funding for my e-book business, which was called Handheld Media by the way. It was a great idea, great business idea, that we would actually help publishers convert books. Because at the time, the publishing workflow didn't include exporting tools. You either went to print or PDF, and we had this tool that would reformat a PDF book into a publishable format, like what e-pub is now.

Jim Zellmer: E-pub, right.

Horace: At the time, it was called OEBF, Open E-Book Format. It was using HTML, a variant. I actually had a workflow I could execute on my own and I could basically produce e-books. I did a couple of dozen, mostly as trials. I remember them even now, actually going through and manually extracting hundreds of pages, fairly quickly though.

But, anyway, that all came crashing down because although e-books were still interesting, there was no more funding in the docket. I had the opportunity to work with Nokia because they were actually very interested in launching something, not necessarily in e-books, but in media distribution. They wanted to sell music. They wanted to sell video. They wanted all those things in 2000. I came to them. Now, I'm playing my ticket, my bus ticket.

[The job] was something about how to do business strategy. They hired me. I had this technical background as well. One year I spent based in Boston. But then I was fairly quickly moved to Finland because that's really where you need to be to have any career opportunities. I was young. I was not married. Finland has its charms.

[I met] another American ex-pat who had moved there before I did and he extolled its virtues. I was pretty sold on that. Even though you pay more taxes, you get less wages, everything I did was economically the wrong thing to do.

Jim Zellmer: [laughs] That's a learning, though, too. You've learned a lot. Looking back on all that, Horace, what might have been better or more effective? When you think about your kids today...?

Horace: I don't know. I'm probably having too long of a chat on this, I mean fooling around this. But yeah, I'm very conscious of education, as I said. I realized pretty much after a year after leaving ... When I started Asymco, it's very weird. Again, you never know when you start down a journey where you're going to end up.

It was purely going to be app development because apps were just starting out. Apps were really almost invisible or there was no development going on in Europe. So my idea was why don't I bring iPhone apps into the land of Nokia, because here it's a green field site.

Jim Zellmer: Yes.

Horace: But it was a tough sell. I got one customer, but it was very, very tough. I wanted to bring apps to small and medium companies. I was going to essentially do apps as marketing material, like apps that are essentially a branding thing.

I was naïve also about the Finnish business culture because I think Finnish businesses are extremely conservative and that wasn't playing out. But the fortunate thing was that I began to blog because I had blogged while I was inside Nokia. I told that story about how I started doing it because I realized I wanted a bigger audience.

Then when I left, people kept saying "Why don't you do that while you're on the outside, just for fun?" I took that year to figure things out. I  went back to writing my blog. Then, literally, everything was happening in 20 minutes. It was like a fire hose. I had to learn everything. I kept asking: OK, how do I do this?

So, I am learning every single thing, because I had done it inside Nokia where it was movable type. It was a completely different system. I didn't have to set up anything. It was very simple. It was done for me.

But on the outside, I am having to do it all myself. I started using actually iWeb, which at that time had a blogging tool. So, I opened an account on MobileMe. I was just putting everything through the desktop tools. They were right under my nose. Then I realized the limitations of that, and I moved to the next thing. I was like, "Oh! Seems like WordPress is something people use. Let's go to that." So, I went to WordPress.

Then I realized, "Oh! Hang on! If they are hosting me, they are going to put ads in my stuff, and I don't know what they put there. So, I better host myself...how do you do that? " I need to find a hosting provider. How do you do that?"

So, every technology, every bit of knowledge I had to have, I obtained strictly on my own. I say that every single character written in Asymco and every single mouse click that made it possible was performed by me.

I had no technical support at all. It helps maybe to have a computer science background, but years had passed. So, I was able to... Here the key to the whole thing is that, every step, I am learning, and it keeps me motivated. I am like, "Oh! I understand how this works."

I had some friends, who were more technical, and I would ask them, and they would say, "Oh! You are wasting your time. You can't get any traffic. This won't work." I would ask: "Tell me about Twitter", and they would say, "Oh! You're better off on Facebook." I was like, "Oh! Man!" Every single thing that I was given as advice turned out to be...

Jim Zellmer: Wrong?

Horace: Yes, doing the opposite would actually be the right thing. And so, I started learn about stats, the numbers game of blogging. So, how does that work? What does it mean to have good traffic?

I didn't expect to get advertising revenue, but I was thinking: what does it mean to be successful? So, I would go to John Gruber's site. John puts up his own rates, and I am like, "Oh wow! Look at the numbers." He actually tells you how much he charges per week, and then he says he is fully booked. So, you know what his income is. And so, from that, I was like wow! That's my goal I said to myself.

If I can get the traffic that Gruber gets, then I can charge these rates. I was trying to figure out how much traffic he was getting. He was getting like four million page views a month. I said, "I don't know if that's a lot or not." It certainly is a lot to get money, but you know, how do I get from zero to four million? So, what happened is that also when I was starting out, I reached out to John by email, directly by email.

Some time before I mailed him and said, "I used to work at Nokia and there's a couple of things you're writing about that I wanted to amplify or I wanted to give you some background." He has great stuff, and he actually used my material in one or two blog posts. I wasn't blogging at that moment.

But once I started blogging I mentioned to him, I said "Remember me? I sent you that info, and now I have my own blog." He didn't say anything. But then I wrote, I think the first piece that I wrote that was provocative. It was why someone at Microsoft had been fired or something like that. He linked to me. Then I saw. Then my eyes were open, because then my traffic... from zero to 12,000 a day.

Jim Zellmer: Yeah.

Horace: 12,000 views, for me, was like infinity. My server crashed and all that. I went back [to him] and I said "Thanks for the traffic. Now what do I do because I need money to be able to get this traffic managed." He said "No, you don't need money." You need to turn on caching." I was like "Oh."

Jim Zellmer: [laughs]

Horace: That solved the problem. But then I was asking him "So where do I go from here? Should I think about putting ads on my site? Is that the right thing," because I was so naïve. And he said "No, no, no."

He gave me one piece of advice. This is the only piece of advice I ever got from and from anybody that was useful. He said "Don't put ads. Just do what you do. Your value is in the future. Just keep doing what you're doing." That's all he said, one line.

I said "OK. If he says that, I believe it. That makes sense. Let's do it." I kept getting better at what I was doing, basically writing as well as I could, getting the feedback from comments and learning every step of the way.

This is still going on. One year on, I learned what Twitter really meant. I didn't know Twitter. The first thing I learned at Asymconf was what a hash tag is good for. [I mean] I knew what they were. But I did not use them. I never used a hash tag before Asymconf because I don't use Twitter that way. I don't use it to look up stuff. I mostly use it as a way to get my word out and get feedback, just like a mini micro blog.

But then I didn't understand the potential of a hash tag. It dawned on me when people were writing about Asymco and using a hash tag and if I searched on that I could find out everything that everybody said about it, a great idea.

But that I learned again just a few days ago. So many things I learned, thousands and thousands of details. So many things that the tables are now turned. Now people expect me to teach them about blogging.

Jim Zellmer: Yeah. [laughs]

Horace: For example, how to get traffic. A lot of people are sending me emails with paragraphs and paragraphs of effusive, "Oh you are so great. Thank you so much. Can you help me with this?" I'm like "Well, you don't need to say any of those thank you things, just tell me what you need."

A 15 year old sent me a request for an online interview. He made it easy. Five questions. So sure, I'll answer five questions. I treat everybody equally. Whether it's the Wall Street Journal or a 15 year old. I give them equal attention. I learn as much from both. The kids will teach you more, actually.

Jim Zellmer: Given all of that, if you were entering college today, what would you study?

Horace: I would still study engineering, absolutely. I am at heart an engineer. My son, I hope he does the same things I do. When I was a kid  I loved building things.

I loved building Lego, although I didn't have money for a lot of them. I loved building model kits, the little plastic model kits, planes, and so on. That's not fashionable anymore, and mostly, it's old men who do it nowadays.

Jim Zellmer: [laughs]

Horace: [But] I'm trying to teach my kid. I actually bought a whole bunch of kits and began to model again so he could see me do it so he would get a passion for it.

I think building things with your hands, learning how things work, being passionate about numbers and about technology and things that are tangible is the only way to really create if your mind works that way. I'm not saying it's for everyone. To me, that's the heart and soul of progress.

By the way, I didn't mention this, but my parents also infused in me a love for the arts, and not "modern music". Being Romanians and of a certain age, they weren't ever part of the Rock and Roll, if you will, generation, although they knew of the Beatles.

So, they listened to classical music. Throughout my life I was exposed. I was taken to the theatre, opera, ballet. I used to sit in these performances since I was five years old. I maybe didn't get it. I wasn't talented. I tried to play the violin. I wasn't good at it, but I understood, after repetition, I understood the value of that.

When I went to that liberal arts college and got my degree, even though it was in computer science, I had a lot of requirements. I had to take English poetry. I had to take Japanese art. I had to take a lot of courses that were basic requirements. At the time, they were a burden, but in retrospect, they actually taught me a great deal. I'm very proud of having that background.

I'm not saying to not have an arts education, but absolutely, if you have the skills and can execute or can perform as an engineering student, do that and do the other things. Do the other things which develop the other half of your brain.

Jim Zellmer: Where did you learn to write, Horace? You write very well. Especially given that English is not your first language, you're able to be succinct and you have a wide ranging command of the language. So, where did you learn that?

Horace: Reading, partly. OK, so I have to give a lot of credit, and I did once on Twitter, give a credit to my English high school teacher. I said if you like the writing I have on Asymco, you should thank her.

Actually I wrote to her. She had seen my work in "The Boston Globe." It had been syndicated from that or something.

Jim Zellmer: [laughs] Wow.

Horace: She wrote me an email saying me an email saying, "I'm so proud to see your work and I sent it to your calculus teacher, as well."

They were both retired. The calculus teacher had seen my work in the financial section, actually. He sent her a note saying, "Check out the. . ." They read the paper. These are from that generation, right?

Jim Zellmer: Yes.

Horace: I've never seen my work in print. I've seen it online, but there it was. I thanked her. What I said is this: What she taught me was to write plainly and write clearly. This was Medford High School, a working class neighborhood, nothing special about it.

The teachers I had in English in Ohio didn't instill in me the same passion. The same books were read. Right? The same classics.

Jim Zellmer: Classics, yeah.

Horace: Twain and Conrad and all those classics, but the teacher in Medford, when I would write an essay, and also, I think, there was positive feedback because I was perhaps a little bit better than average in her class. Better than I was in Ohio. There I was about average, maybe.

I had good grades, but I didn't feel like I was great at it. I was nervous because a lot of the tests were vocabulary, or a lot of the tests were not essays.

This teacher instilled in me the passion for writing good essays. She kept telling me how great my essays were.  I was writing somehow, and I loved reading the books. That's the other thing, the other kids would cheat. They would read the Cliff Notes.

Jim Zellmer: Yes.

Horace: They would copy from each other or do all these things. I was like, "No, no. I want to go home and I really want to read this book. These are really nice books." So, a lot of reading, a lot of passion for reading and I think practicing with essays. Practicing, also, in the writing of work online.

Now, again, when I look back at my early stuff, I cringe. It took me a while to find my voice. I didn't know what a voice was. I figured that out quickly. Then I had this challenge of working in the rigor of data. I realized the way to make my stuff stand out is to avoid opinion, to avoid hyperbole, to avoid all these things which bloggers seem to do.

So, anyway, it took some time. I think there's both a lot of ability, like, Einstein said, "It's 20 percent ability, 80 percent perseverance or perspiration." It's just practice. The other thing is it's like an athlete, right? An athlete gets good because they practice every day.

When I set out I said, "This is so much fun. I want to keep to it. I want to write a story every day. I want to write a blog post every day. I pretty much stuck to that. I was even writing on weekends, but I stopped because time, family. But, I write every day. I think of it as mental athleticism. You've got to go running every day if you want to be an athlete. You've got to write every day if you want to be a writer.

I heard, later on, that Jerry Seinfeld said he wrote every day. That was his key to success. He always tried to write jokes every day. That, to me, is what I learned. You bite your tongue sometimes, you learn how to deal with comments. Through comments, you see exactly how people make mistakes. They make mistakes by getting ahead of their thoughts, or they are too impulsive.

You get this great sense of what makes it good and I thought myself being able to write things. I write email in a good way, crisp in the email. You get a sense for it. For example, if somebody sends me ad copy, like a sponsor, and they send me a copy, I sometimes cringe when I look at it.

Jim Zellmer: I noticed that!

Horace: I can't help myself, I edit their copy, and even though they probably don't want me to, there is no time to go back and do feedback. But it's something you learn as a skill.

Some other people have asked me, "How can I teach my son to write well?" To me, it's not about being able to do more, it's actually being able to cut stuff out, and just go straight to thought. Maybe it takes practice.

Jim Zellmer: Now that you are a parent in Finland, your children are in Finland, so what choices do you have for your kids'?

Horace: We are very conscious of that. So, I like [Finland]. Well, I came for one reason, because, it was a wonderful place to play. But I stayed because it's a wonderful place for families.

What Finland's known for, among other things, is that it has the best scoring students on tests ...So, their educational system is considered absolutely in the top, literally top of the world.

There's a lot of mystery about why that is, and you can't really put your finger on it. A lot of educators from Finland have been on world tours trying to explain what they do, and everybody comes away scratching their heads.

I think this actually goes back to Christiansen theory, because when you study it people want to see a formula or an algorithm, but in fact, what is happening is, is something about whether the system is integrated or modular.

Whether the system is centralized or decentralized. So, it's not a question of process. It's like when he approaches health care, he comes  at it from these two different angles. He says, "It's not about being public or private. It's being modular or integrated."

The assumption in other countries is always that everything is modular, and it cannot be anything else. So, in a sense, you need to question down at the deeper roots of causality.

So, my son, just to give you some perspective. He is now in pre-school.

He is six now or he is in grade zero, as they call it here, and he is going to a French school, meaning that they speak French in class.

Jim Zellmer: An immersion school. Yes.

Horace: There are several language schools like this. We're going to the French one partly because his mother went to a French school, his uncle went to a French school and they have loyalty to it, but also because I'd personally like for him to learn a romance language because I knew one. I still know Romanian. I had learned Italian, and I took French in school myself.

The thing is that it doesn't cost any more to go to that school than any other school. All education is free. Not everybody can get into any school, but it isn't about money. The other thing is that it's a small nation.

There's only about five million people, so all the decision-making can be centralized. There is no local school boards. There's no organization down to the smaller units that you might imagine. It's very simple and it's top down.

If you were to try to do a top down approach for a country as big as the United States it wouldn't work. You can't really transplant this system. People are very wary of centralization and control and the decision-making at the top that is incompetent. I completely understand that.

However, this being a small nation, it works and it's central. There's a question of optimum size. I mean, in some sense five million might be the right, maybe 8, even 10 million maybe works. I don't know  beyond that.

There's also the question of how different the people are in terms of homogeneity. Although Finns are fairly homogeneous, there are minority groups as well and there's been plenty of immigrants. I'm not an expert on any of this, but I'm just pointing out some minor details.

I really like the school system. We actually had a parent teacher meeting this morning. They're very relaxed. Children seem to be much more relaxed. This is one thing that came across from the educators meeting and discussing around the world.

There's no pressure. Even though they're performing exceptionally well, there doesn't seem to be that pressure on testing, on measurement, on all these things that supposedly correlate with performance. In many ways, it's asymmetric, or doesn't make sense to people who are steeped in education theory.

I don't know if that's advisable, though. The problem, again, is that it may only work in this context. It may only work in the Nordic country, but we're very happy with the way it works. It's the same thing, by the way, with healthcare. Healthcare here is also centralized. It is a public resource.

Jim Zellmer: Yeah. What's your sense of the teachers you've encountered? One of the things "The Economist" reported a couple years ago was that Finland requires master's degrees from teachers. Contrasting that with what you experienced in America and Verona and Romania, do you have a sense of differences in the teacher capabilities, or no?

Horace: Because here mostly all degrees are considered Master's, it's essentially, I think, five years of school, of education. There's so many differences I can't even begin.

My wife, for example, she has a master's degree. A bachelor's degree would be more equivalent to like a two year college in perception.

Jim Zellmer: OK.

Horace: So, if you have a technical degree...a lot of people drop out. They get out because it is somewhat  long and tedious and it is also not conducted in the American's style of valuing... It's so hard to explain. I actually would like him to go to university in the U.S., but I'd like him to go to every other school in Europe, or in Finland, more specifically.

I think the U.S. higher education system is better. It's better because it actually doesn't teach you according to a cookbook. It's actually much more open. In a way, that's the opposite in the lower grades.

Jim Zellmer: Yes.

Horace: The lower grades are open and the students are given a lot more freedom, and the teachers are given a lot more freedom. So, it's the opposite.

You'll see this, also, in Japan. Japan's educational system is a bit of a joke because they drill so hard in order to get good scores and get into a good university, but once they get into the university, they do nothing.

The entry is your ticket. After that there's hardly any effort. I've heard from others that the way university programs here are, many students will stay in for 6, even 10 years. It takes a long time because they'll drop in and out. They'll take a couple of courses. They'll do something else.

It isn't rigorous in the sense of, "Hey, the clock is running. This burns a lot of money. You've got to get a job to pay off loans." Because you've got that pressure on you in American universities, I think people actually are faster. It's more efficient. It tends to also draw more talent into it. The professors are more ambitious.

So, there's something I like about the U.S. higher education system, although if you listen to Clay, he'll say that it's also being disrupted, and he's probably right, especially the bigger names are going to be pressured from online education.

Jim Zellmer: Given your steep experience in technology and engineering, what is the role or is there a role for technology in education? Certainly in America and other countries we have all these people who say "Gee, our kids don't have iPads, they're just falling behind," among other things. So what is your perspective on that, Horace?

Horace: Well, technology is useless without the software. Hardware is useless without software. Computers are useless without a job to be done.

Jim Zellmer: Yes.

Horace:  I believe technology will help, but we have to make sure that we solve the job problem with technology, rather than saying that technology itself is this answer. I think the iPad has potential because it enables the content to come through again. What you might learn by using it is focused on the content itself.

In other words, a computer was always hard to use. Most of the time you spent using it was actually learning how to use it. So you have to fight through it to get to the actual content and material was supposed to teach you something. Even the way that it used to be, that there was a computer room or a computer lab and you would go and sit in front of these computers and there were all these things considered.

In other words, it got in the way. I think that what the content needs to do is be more pervasive. You need to give the platform to someone who can build something on top of it, someone who can actually create new content, new material, new ways of teaching.

The real innovations that I've seen have been the Khan Academy or even Ted Talks or something along the lines of video content that is packaged in small pieces that people can take and learn at the rate that they're comfortable with. That makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know how that can be worked to the K-12 system because that is so regimented. But I think kids having iPads seems to be potentially a breakthrough opportunity there for how to really teach.

It's all going to come down to the materials. Is this a platform that teachers can build stuff on? The only thing I have to criticize the system for is that it's still not possible for laymen to create material for it. We need more and better tools that sit on top of the tools we have. So abstract from the hardware so you can create great e-books, you can create... experiments and so on.

Jim Zellmer: Right. Well, that's great. I appreciate your time today, Horace. Perhaps we can continue this again one day on education, which certainly continues to change. Again, good luck with the French school, with your son.

In August 2007, during the HD format wars between HD-DVD and Blu-ray format, Toshiba offered Paramount and Dreamworks $150 million to produce HD versions of their movies exclusively as HD-DVD.[1]

This type of deal is equivalent to an "advance" offered to a book author. The DVD manufacturer pays studios up-front cash for the right to make its DVDs. From an accounting point of view this is treated as an advance that the manufacturer recovers by selling the DVDs back to the studio's video division in the same way a publisher earns back the advance it gives an author.

In this case, the payment was so large and the sales of HD-DVDs so small that Toshiba was unlikely to earn back the entire advance. The way the deal made any sense for Toshiba was that it was exclusive: the studios could not continue to release their movies in Blu-ray. The deal was done explicitly to hobble a competitor and create "critical mass" of content for its own format.

But then in March 2008, Toshiba threw in the towel and abandoned the HD-DVD format. The way the deal worked, the studios got to keep almost all of the $150 million. They then re-released all their movies in the Blu-ray format. The only "cost" to the $150 million windfall was that there was a nine month delay in the eventual release to Blu-ray--a small price to pay for an emergent format without a large install base.[2]

Platform owners go to great lengths to ensure "content" for their platform. They will, essentially, finance an ecosystem when there are barriers to entry or when competing ecosystems are far more lucrative.

This scenario for movies is being played again with Netflix, Hulu and other distributors who need to fill their pipelines. Netflix's content acquisition costs are exploding and putting the whole company's future in doubt.

But this scenario is also being played out with app developers. Most recently, news broke that developers are receiving payments from Microsoft for Windows Phone ports of popular apps. In mobile platforms, apps are the new content and developers are the new studios.  It's also a practice that is not without precedent[3].

This is as it should be. The value of the platform lies mainly in what is built on top of it just like a foundation is not much use without a house on it. However, the practice of "priming the pump" with cash payments for porting is not ideal. Like spiffs, those who receive payments may become used to it and withhold development if there is no payment. Also, those who did not get payment offers may feel shunned and retaliate in kind. Those who receive payment may become cynical about it and may not put in the extra effort (or, more probably, outsource) to make the work spectacular.

Or, like Paramount, they may just take the money and run if/when the platform fails.

---

Notes:

1. Source: The Hollywood Economist 2.0: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies by Edward Jay Epstein.
2. Paramount made $250 million more from three "replication output" deals: $50 million from Toshiba for agreeing to release Titanic on DVD in time for Christmas sales, $150 million from Panasonic for agreeing to allow them to take over video replication from Thompson, and $50 million from the law firm Ziffrin, Brittenham and Circuit City stores for agreeing to support the DIVX format. Paramount got to keep the money even though DIVX never launched.
3. Although it's never been reported that Apple pays developers for building iOS apps, some developers do benefit from promotional placement and visibility during launch events and from early access to devices or SDKs under development.

At last year's iPad 2 launch, I compared the specs of the newly announced iPad with those of a laptop and desktop from five years earlier. This year I am comparing the new iPad with Apple's computers from four years earlier:

The new iPad now exceeds the total display resolution, has similar speed and storage capacity while having twice the battery life of the thinnest laptop of four years ago. It also has very high quality cameras and GPS and cellular network connectivity which have yet to appear on mainstream PCs. It's still a lot smaller and half the price and has a larger selection of available software titles at prices a fraction of its elder cousin.

The only value that a desktop of 2008 has over a new iPad is the size of the screen and a larger hard drive.

The point is not so much that the usurper is a "better" computer but that it has come from non-existence to being a contender in two years. It is also narrowing the gap to its comparable ancestors by one year, every year. Arguably that gap now stands at four years.

My thoughts were expressed 20 months ago in a private email.

I did not get a response.

Last week Horace wrote about the apparent "reasonableness" of analyst Apple estimates. He explained how the consensus for Apple's growth was always deeply pessimistic because its performance could be argued to be anomalous. It was just too good to be true. We reproduce the chart here:

The estimates look like characteristic "tell-tales" of a company running strong into the wind.

This conservatism in the face of rapid growth sounds "reasonable" but is it always practiced? And what about the ability of this conservative strategy to predict dramatic changes in growth? To test, we started to look at the predictions for RIM. RIM has also enjoyed strong growth over a similar time frame as Apple. How did analysts predict its performance? The following chart was prepared using the same technique as the one for Apple[1].

Surprisingly, the "tell-tales" look very different.[2] For every year we looked at the first year estimates were over-optimistic with a decline expected after one or two years. This pattern is remarkably consistent within the RIM data and remarkably inconsistent when compared to Apple.

It's as if there was nothing in common with the methods used. This is perhaps appropriate, but the "quality" of predictions are not much better. With RIM they were too optimistic in the short term and too pessimistic in the medium term. With Apple they were far too pessimistic consistently.

More worrisome, the 2010 forecast did not offer any hint of the dramatic decline which followed only a few months later. And after three quarters of really bad news, the consensus is still higher than what will likely happen (ensuring an uninterrupted string "misses").

The study of these two companies' forecasts is a study in contrasts. We can say that the forecasting is disturbingly consistently inaccurate but we can also say that there seems to have been a bias of pessimism for Apple and optimism for RIM. We can only guess at the cause, but the consistency of bias points to something institutional.

---

Notes:

1. The three year forecast consensus (sourced from Bloomberg) was sampled one month following the end of each fiscal year. This should offer the analyst enough time digest the year passed and deeply contemplate the future.
2. If we may stretch the analogy, these are indicative of an imminent stall.

 

Imagine it's late 2005. Apple's fiscal year just ended and they reported their performance. You're an analyst whose job includes forecasting the company's performance for next year. This is a weighty responsibility.  Your forecast will be blended with those of your peers and used as a "consensus" average. That consensus for the next year will be used to measure the current value of the shares in a ratio called the forward PEG or Price/Earnings/annual earnings Growth. You are supplying the earnings and hence growth forecast while the market offers a price.  As a stock is meant to measure future earnings, your forecast is a crucial and frequently cited figure about whether a stock is priced fairly.

There is some comfort in knowing that there will be many others who will offer such a forecast and your contribution is thus not the only way investors can calibrate the price. However, you should think hard about what you are predicting as it also will reflect your skill in predicting such a visible company.

Apple just had a tremendous two years. 2004 and 2005 saw EPS grow at 274% and 337%. This is largely due to the runaway hit iPod. Given all that is known about the company, what will you put forward? While you're at it can you also forecast two years forward, namely provide a growth forecast for 2006, 2007 and 2008?

Here is what you and your cohorts publish as a consensus:

You go with a 13% growth for 2006,  15% for 2007 and 5% for 2008. The chances are, you reason, that the iPod will not carry the company's growth much longer. The competition is sprouting all over and Microsoft is rumored to be launching its own music player.

It makes sense to be conservative and offer a modest growth of 13%. At the same time you can rate the stock a buy as it is still growing. The stock just doubled in the last 12 months and the law of large numbers says that growth cannot last at the same rate as we've just seen.

 

 

It's now late 2006. Apple just closed out another big year. Contrary to your forecast last year, the company grew at a rate of 46%, more than three times faster than you expected.

It turns out the iPod still has some legs and the company's Mac business seems to be growing. Looking forward you take your 15% growth for 2007 and increase it to 20% and suggest 16% for 2008 and 32% for 2009.

There are rumors of Apple getting into the phone business.

 

It's now late 2007. Apple just launched the iPhone and even though it was available in limited numbers on one carrier for one full quarter, the company still turned in an amazing 73%. Again more than three times faster growth than you forecast. What do you do about 2008?

It might make sense to increase the previous 16% estimate to 17% but since there is a real estate bubble brewing, the 32% growth for 2009 should come down to 22% and defer that growth out to 2010, dialing in 27%.

It's now late 2008. Apple closed out another huge year. 73% growth was once again more than triple your forecast of 17% growth. It's clear that the iPhone is a huge hit.

However, there is a credit crunch and talk of a huge recession, even depression looming. Apple is a luxury/premium brand and it is unlikely that those expensive products will sell well into these "macro headwinds". You predict a decline in the earnings of 13% in 2009, inline with many other tech stocks. You are optimistic however that 2010 will be a year of recovery and predict 18% increase from recession lows followed by a more reasonable 11% growth in 2011.

It's now late 2009. To everyone's surprise, Apple grew through the credit crisis. It turned in 34% growth (vs. your predicted 13% decline). The success is hard to believe but the iPhone had a lot to do with that. There are new competitors coming and the recession has proven resilient. With unemployment still high you predict 2010 will still be a tough year. You go with -14% growth for 2010 and postpone recovery out to 2011 with 24% "bounce". Longer term you see 2012 as a flat year, with Apple earnings shrinking slightly by 1%.

2010 ends with Apple achieving 67% growth. Shocking relative to a -14% growth forecast. But then again, Apple launched the iPad and who could have thought that was a hit? Apple achieved growth throughout the recession and it looks like it might keep going. Your 2011 forecast of 24% looks weak so you increase it to 25%. The 2012 decline thesis is abandoned in favor of 16% growth and, given the likely competition in smartphones, you tone down growth in 2013 to 6%.

It's November 2011. The company turned in 83% growth. It's  more than three times faster than your forecast. Some people are suggesting that Apple may have a lot of headroom with the iPhone and iPad but the law of large numbers is what it is. The company became the largest by market cap in the world and Android is gaining huge market share. However, in deference to their strong recent performance you increase the 2012 forecast from 16% growth to 24% growth. 2013 goes from 6% to more than double: 13% and 2014 is when growth begins to slacken, though still a healthy 8%.

As the following chart shows, look ahead one year accuracy has not been all that great, but you are at least consistent. In any case, everything you based your decisions on showed remarkable consistency with consensus. You're just reflecting common sense.

Note:

• Though the numbers are all real, the narrative is fictitious. I suspect however that the truth is actually stranger than this fiction.

Guessing the next Apple product has become the parlor game of choice for a whole generation of technology journalists and analysts. The premise of the game is that given a track record of breakthrough products, there is always another one just around the corner. Being the one to predict this next breakthrough product creates credibility and demonstrates the domain knowledge of the predictor. If the prediction fails to materialize there is consolation in dismissing the actual announced product as disappointing, unsophisticated or, worst of all, uninteresting.

Most often, these guesses are as much a reflection of the analyst as they are an analysis of the company. Too many predictions are designed to impress or demonstrate the imagination or knowledge of the predictor. They typically anticipate a giant leap of functionality, power or market re-structuring. They envision revolution not evolution; a cutting of the Gordian knot not a polishing of ugly rocks.

Yet nearly all of Apple's launches have been sustaining improvements in existing products, technologies or platforms. To name just a few:

• The iPad is an evolution of the iPod touch
• The iPod touch is an evolution of the iPhone
• The iPhone uses OS X and Objective C from the Mac
• OS X came from NeXT
• The app store market model came out of the iTunes store
• The iTunes store came from iTunes which came first to the Mac as a media sync tool for the iPod
• etc.

John Gruber explained the process last spring as it relates to many of Apple's launches. Although the iPhone did introduce a new user input method and experience that takes consumption in a new direction, its building blocks were there for all to see for many years. The iPhone is a natural evolution of the computer with a handy little "Phone" app.

Likewise, the iPod came seemingly out of nowhere but by watching the original launch you see it as part of a "media hub" strategy that envisions the Mac as a personal server. The very products which ended up disrupting the Mac/PC began as extensions of their victims.

You can trace the DNA of almost all of Apple's products to previous products. If Apple did not have these foundations, the slow-motion revolutions would not have happened. Rather than a deliberate big bang, Apple's disruptions are the result of a discovery process. A test, iterate and improve loop. This is why they seem obvious after the launch but also why they seem to be such an anti-climax.

Therefore, the challenge of predicting Apple's next product should be tackled not only through an act of imagination but by carefully projecting the current products and understanding where they can evolve.

So it is that I approach the question of Apple's TV disruption. My working assumption about the next Apple TV is that it already exists. It's none other than the existing Apple TV, improved.

Here are the clues or hints I noted:

• It uses iOS and the hardware from the devices that run it. It originally ran a PC architecture and shared a kernel with Macs.
• It has been integrated with iTunes media stores (with the notable exception of the iTunes app store)
• It has begun to introduce channels other than downloads (ESPN, Wall Street Journal) thus establishing its own distribution for traditional content
• It is a global product, depending only on the Internet protocols and independent of the balkanized cable standards
• Through AirPlay it is integrated with Macs and Apple devices.
• Through display mirroring, iOS devices can use the TV as an external monitor and can even change their own behavior when doing so

This last point is intriguing. I have not seen discussion of this feature, but if using an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S with iOS 5 and an Apple TV with the latest software updates it's possible to have an iOS device become a controller for TV-based game experiences. Developers are already using the API. When using a pinball game with screen mirroring, the device becomes a controller while the action takes place on the big screen. Switching display mirroring off bring the action and control back onto the small screen. There are still problems with lag and the processors are over-taxed on high frame rates, but the APIs are already there for developers. (I could also mention the potential of new a Bluetooth standard for better wireless response).

What these signals point to is Apple defining the TV as an iOS portfolio product. This means integration with iTunes, including an app store. This, in turn, means unleashing developer/creative talent through new monetization opportunities. This means new user experiences in discovery. This means FaceTime-like communication through the TV. This means many other things but mostly it means that the TV will be a platform product.

The only challenge is a (currently lacking) smooth interface. Perhaps that's where voice comes into the picture. But whether that is built-in at the next rev of the product or not is not the story. The story is going to be the sustaining improvement in the original Apple TV. A wonderfully asymmetric product begging to be ignored. A product that because of its apparent lack of success, effectively hides all its secrets in plain sight.