Month: February 2011

There’s a very poor way to begin a thought
a way to show your iq is nought
if this comes out then you’re just not thinking
or maybe you’ve just spent too long drinking

I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
yes you are
yes you are

I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
oh yes you are you are

If you say love it or leave it, how dare you
tell me this country is just for you few
bigots who can’t tolerate something different
except Chinese takeaways you think are brilliant

I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
yes you are
yes you are

I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
oh yes you are you are

The world is bigger than you and your brain
the diversity of culture is awesome, insane
your culture you think you share with me?
it’s yours alone — mine’s open and free

I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
yes you are
yes you are

I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
oh yes you are you are

Complain all you want about Muslims or Jews
you’re just a bully finding foes to abuse
it doesn’t matter if their skin’s not white
and I’m not going to listen to more of your shite

I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
yes you are
yes you are

I’m not a racist, but
yes you are
oh yes you are you are

…shole.

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution. I would love someone like The Herd or Andrew Hansen to sing this. Maybe all of them together?

A quick followup to my last post about not ignoring minorities. A new policy seems to force third-party content sellers to also sell through Apple’s in-purchase mechanisms if they sell through other means. So, for example, Amazon would have to sell through their app as well as letting you buy through their website.

Without offering any comment on the policy itself, I can see this playing out a couple of ways:

• Sellers continue to sell through their own websites, but add 25-30% on top for sales made through their iOS apps. This will annoy either customers (who will be angry at paying more), Apple (who might protest if app makers vary pricing on their in-app stores) or both.
• Some content providers leave the App store, trying to force Apple to change.
• Some new content providers never come to the App store and try their hand elsewhere.

No matter how it plays out, this is going to be seen as yet another money grab by some techs, bloggers and so on. Some of them are more likely to influence their friends and relatives not to buy an iPad or an iPhone because “Apple is evil/greedy”. Many small policies can — rightly or wrongly — add up to a much larger impression. (It’s been a joke on The IT Crowd: “I’ll be able to get an iPhone without giving any money to Apple: I’ll be living the dream.”)

Salespeople have monetary incentive to sell non-iPhone devices already through a different commission structure. I already know someone who was pushed away from an iPhone to an Android because a salesperson convinced her to, and she’s not alone. If people don’t study technology, they’ll get information from third-party sources: media, friends, salespeople. Maybe they don’t care too much about the salespeople, but the techies? The media? If Apple gets them offside — rightly or wrongly — then that’s a problem.

Several years ago, I created a multimedia product with Director. At the time, nearly everyone had at least an 800×600 pixel screen, so I designed the (freakishly odd) interface to use one. It worked everywhere except on the Mac owned by the guy who had to sign off on the project, who had an ancient 640×480 screen.

That incident taught me that you can’t ignore minorities. If your product is designed only for the majority platform, you will piss some people off, and to some degree, this is inevitable. For example, a mobile-targeted web app is useful to anyone with a smartphone, but if you want more functionality than the web allows, or want to make money by selling it, you’ll likely be making an iPhone app and skipping the Android market.

In desktop computing just a few years ago, the majority of customers were on Windows, so a Mac client was often a second priority. A key fact, though: many bloggers, PR people, geeks and other tech tastemakers were on Macs. No Mac client, no buzz. Here’s a quote from a co-founder of a Dropbox competitor:

Next, we had issues getting the press excited at launch. We built a fantastic Windows client. 3 years ago, everyone was running Windows*. We were so excited to show the press, yet they *all* had Macs. Walt Mossberg wouldn’t write about our product because it was PC only. Months after we hired our PR agency, we found out that they had never even used our product… because they too only had Macs. It’s pretty hard to pitch a service when you haven’t used it.

At the end of the day, you’ll fail to cater for at least some part of your potential market. But if that market contains the people who would make your product popular, you’ve got serious problems.

If you want attention, general consumer market share is not nearly as important as market share among journalists, bloggers and techies.