Apple Should Sell A Viewclix Killer

Viewclix is a popular photo-frame device whose canonical use case is to allow family members to share photos with an older relative who is not up on technology. It also has secondary uses of push teleconferencing (you can initiate the teleconference remotely, without a tech-challenged elder having to do anything), and posting reminders to your loved one ("remember, we will pick you up today at 11:00 for lunch"). 

It does work okay, but the usability, for photos in particular, is very clunky. So clunky I found myself putting off updating the photo rotation, which was the main reason for getting the device. I have since confirmed a much better solution for updating the photo frame functionality: simply deploy a spare TV or monitor, equipped with Chromecast, as a remote Google photos sharing device. Just a few, simple steps:

1. Set up a shared album(s).
2. Invite other family members to be contributors or administrators (depending if you want to let other delete, as well as add, photos) to the shared album.
3. Set Ambient Mode on the Chromecast to show the shared album(s).

Voila!

In addition to the >> UX, you also get a WAY bigger, TV-size screen. However, the roll-your-own with Chromecast does not address the other use cases. Which is why I think this is a great product opportunity for Apple (or Google, or Microsoft, but especially for Apple).

This is probably not an Airpods or Watch-sized market, but it is surely in the millions, in the US alone. Plus it would have strategic value, in strengthening the overall Apple ecosystem value proposition.

Keyless Entry Strategy for iOS or Android

I recently installed a Tailwind iQ3 smart garage door opener. It is very impressive, pretty simple to install, and downright cheap at $60. Just the fact that it will alert you if the door is left open at night, and if desired, will automatically close the door, if probably worth the price.

It also eliminates the need for a keypad. In my experience, keypads are a hassle and a bit of security risk. Because the code is typically very hard to change, people don't change it often, or use the temporary code feature. 

You can open the door remotely, which comes in handy in various situations, such as your neighbor wants to borrow some tool in the garage when you are away on vacation. Even better, you can assign opening privileges to other Tailwind app users. Great for guests, or families with more than 2-3 garage users, who would otherwise need to obtain extra garage door modules for their car.

Which brings me to my main point. While the sharing privileges feature is great, it comes with the substantial friction of each guest user having to install and provision the Tailwind app. It would be SO much better if this were nearly frictionless--i.e., if it were built into the mobile OS.

(Note: I know that a garage-oriented view of home access is a very suburb-centric viewpoint. There is a clear analog with smart door locks, more on that in a moment.)

Apple or Google should acquire Tailwind, and partner with the lock industry, to build keyless entry access-sharing into the OS. 

Apple is probably the more obvious candidate, at least in the US. If this were an Apple-only feature (think iMessage), it provides a distinct source of competitive advantage and lock-in through network-effect. Given that households in the US that have garage doors, and can afford smart locks skews upper-income, this fits well with Apple's customer base. Moreover, Apple's good image regarding security in general should transfer well to this use case.

I think the immediate first step is acquiring Tailwind (who I believe is the market leader, certainly the functional leader), and making it Apple-only going forward. The smart garage door market is new enough that I think that a play for total dominance is realistic.

The door lock market is much more established and fragmented. It also has a heavy decorative dimension. So I am doubtful that a total domination play is viable. Instead, Apple could move quickly, and leverage domination of the smart garage market, to establish its standard, open for adoption by heterogenous door lock manufacturers.  

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NOTES

As a consumer, I would ideally prefer to see an industry standard. But from the perspective of business strategy, it seems like a great opportunity for Apple. Also, I am doubtful about the standards-based approach happening any time soon.

A consumers should never rely solely on anything electrical, let alone "smart", for critical access. I cringe when I talk to someone whose only access to their house if via the garage door opener. So always carry a housekey--that applies to smart locks as well. But for many use cases, you can tolerate the pretty low risk of an electrical outage. E.g., if you have a weekly housecleaner for 10 years, and there is a 25% probability that once over those 10 years, the power will be out, and they won't be able to get in--that doesn't seem like a crisis (unless of course Murphy's Law strikes, and it happens to be the day before you are planning a big house party!).

After 11 years of using Android phones, I decided to try iOS. The hardware is very good, if pricey, but still questioning that decision from a software standpoint. My favorite bridge and crossword apps are unavailable. My favorite keyboard, Swiftkey, is available, but works differently in ways I hate (mainly no symbols available via long-press). Many other things.

But the gap that is driving me nuts at the moment is an Alarm Clock app. I have gone though a few on Android, but have always been able to find one that is 90% of what I want. Key features are:

• Gentle alarm (this should be table stakes, but many lack it)
• for extra credit, ability to tune the gentleness of the gentle alarm
• Ability to set an alarm for a specific date, in advance
• Skip Next shortcut option. Very convenient in 2 common use cases, related to recurring alarms:
• Holiday or PTO tomorrow, want to do a one-time skip of recurring alarm (an even better implementation is "Skip Until __").
• Wake up before alarm, want to silence it proactively.

Apple Manufactuing Hype

From Apple's own website: Never before has this degree of fit and finish been applied to a phone. Take the glass inlays on the back of iPhone 5, for instance. During manufacturing, each iPhone 5 aluminum housing is photographed by two high-powered 29MP cameras. A machine then examines the images and compares them against 725 unique inlays to find the most precise match for every single iPhone.


It does sound ingenious (though if they really had their tolerances down, there wouldn't be any upside to painstakingly searching out mating parts with optimally compatible dimensional variation). It also sounds like it might e marketing BS. I bet they did this just to have something to talk about. People always fall for this kind of impressive, great-cocktail-party chatter that they don't necessarily understand, or know the importance of.

It wouldn't surprise me if this has minimal benefit, and Apple quits even doing it, after a decent interval has passed.

Lots of tweets and articles about how Apple's replacement for Google Maps is a self-inflicted fail. While on the subject of dumb Apple decisions--I can't believe they didn't take much flack for making the making the back of the iPhone 4s out of glass. Yeah, sure, let's go out of our way to deliberately make it extremely fragile.

iPhone 5: More Fetishizing "Build Quality"

John Gruber goes on, and on and on:

Is it worth devoting the first 750 or so words of this piece to the iPhone 5’s surface appeal? I don’t know how else to convey the niceness of this thing. This iPhone 5 review unit is the single nicest object in my possession. I own things that cost and remain worth more (e.g. my car). But I own nothing this nice. It sounds hyperbolic to put it that way, but I offer this observation with no exaggeration.

I think this is absolutely ridiculous. It's just a phone, people.

Criticality of Macr Resurgence vs iPod

This point is overlooked a lot in discussions of Apple...I remember what a watershed it was when they moved, seemingly effortlessly, from traditional proprietary, Mac OS base to BSD Unix. It was like I woke up one day and all the geeks who were not interested in the Mac were suddenly in love with it.

And during that decade, almost every such developer I knew switched to the Mac if they weren’t already there, partly because it was better for developing web apps.That’s one of the biggest reasons there was so much pent-up developer interest in the iPhone before the App Store opened: these consumer-product developers were all using Macs already. As the dominant consumer platform shifted from the web to apps over the last four years, most talented consumer-product developers built products for their app platform of choice during that time: the Apple ecosystem.

Phones: Silly, Apple-Inspired Fetish about "Build Material"

I really don't get the fixation so many reviewers and smartphone enthusiasts have on "build materials". It's just a phone, not jewelry, and will likely be replaced in 2 years, max. Subtle aspects of physical appearance are just not that important.

To me, the most important considerations are: 1) reliability--primarily resilience when you drop it; 2) weight; 3) cost. Intangibles about look and feel come a distant fourth, especially since they are largely canceled out when you put your phone in a case of some kind--which is usually still a good idea. A ceramic backplate may help ensure there is no *visible", cosmetic damage when you drop the phone, but I don't think it protects the innards from from the impact, which is the bigger consideration. Nothing protects better than a rubbery coating, and of course that covers up most of the cosmetics related to build materials anyway.

My wife has a Tmo Galaxy S2, the huge one. Yes it is noticeably lighter and thinner than my 4.3" HTC Sensation. Not a deal-breaker difference, but those qualities are more valuable to me than the intangible cosmetics related to build materials.

I "blame" Apple for the obsession with build materials and look and feel.

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Wireless Charging: Apple Is Missing A Lock-In Opportunity

A big component of Apple's strategy is lock-in. Apple's version of lock-in is somewhat subtler than some--the average Apple customer probably doesn't think "damn, I'm locked in", they just think "hmmm, might be interesting to try Google Music/Android Phone, but I've already got this big investment in iTunes/iOS Apps".

So I'm surprised Apple hasn't targeted wireless charging as a high-potential avenue for lock-in. Wireless charging has been around for a few years, it seems like a clear crowd-pleaser to me. There is a consortium trying to create an industry-standard (Qi), but it seems to be moving very slowly.

I think Apple could swoop in, and make all their devices wireless-chargeable--using a proprietary approach, of course. The wireless-capable batteries would be standard, the profit would come from the external chargers. With their economies of scale and power to move markets, Apple could make it all more affordable than anyone else. Overnight, the huge iOS ecosystem would be committed to Apple's proprietary charging technology, creating one more barrier to Apple users even trying non-Apple products.

Apple's Re-birth

Post-Steve Jobs death, there have of course been many articles that discuss Apple's comeback. They tend to date it to the introduction of the iMac or the first iPod. I think they are overlooking an important event.

The thing that is amazing to me is that in the last 10 years, the Mac went from being viewed as the sissy computer, to the darling of the geeks. I remember when that happened. It was an overnight phenomenon. It occurred when they introduced OS/X. OS/X was based on the venerable, and venerated, BSD Unix. It was a gigantic, amazing leap. It gave the Mac a terrific technical foundation on which to build all the cool stuff and eye candy. Getting all those thought leaders to embrace Mac was, in my opinion, an essential ingredient in the Apple comeback.

Ironically, even this part of the story does loop back to Steve Jobs. The transition to OS/X was by far the smoothest new OS rollout I can recall. The likely reason? OS/X was created from NextStep, the commercially unsuccessful, but widely praised, OS that had been created at NEXT Computing--where Steve Jobs went after he got booted out of Apple.

The Importance of Profit Margins

Apple sold 17 million mobile handsets [3% of the market] in the first half of 2010, compared with 400 million handsets sold by Nokia (NOK), Samsung and LG. Yet it pulled in 39% of the industry's profit during that period, more than the 32% earned by the world's three largest handset makers combined.[!]

That is a phenomenal achievement. I wrote recently about the importance of profit margins; this is a great example.

What Sets Apple Apart

Excellent article from Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, putting the iPad release and strategy in historical context, based on his involvement in the original Mac project. I have been meaning for a while to write about how preposterous it is that Apple can go, from a standing start, to industry leader with the iPhone. It would be as if Hyundai entered the auto market, and their very first automobile surpassed Toyota for quality and BMW for product experience.It just shouldn't be possible--new entrants always start at the low end and claw their way up.

It is both preposterous, and unfortunate. Apple needs competition (I need.Apple to have competition). They have it in some quarters, from Google thank goodness, But they could use much more. And there is just absolutely nobody even close to their league. They are as much better than the competition as Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, at the top of their game (except more so). Sony used to be thought of as an innovator, but they are on life support, they couldn't eat Apple's crumbs.

So I have been contemplating how this can be. I hadn't come to any satisfying answer. Tog's observations do give some insight:

Probably the strongest character trait of Steve Jobs is his absolute lack of fear. While every other CEO in America, it seems, shakes in his boots at the very thought of not having a good next quarter, my experience in knowing Steve Jobs is that, frankly, he could care less about the next quarter. He’s much more focused on the next five years, rather than the next 90 days. But even more than that, it is his quest to change the world, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish that end even if he risks failure in the process. [my italics]

As any high school coach worth their salt would say--if you are afraid to fail, you will never excel.

Why I Probably Will Never Be An Apple Customer

This article helps explain why I will never be an Apple customer, unless I win the lottery (which I don't play):

Apple has had great success in part because it has convinced customers to turn away from a $1,000 Windows laptop and to buy its $1,600 laptop instead for its stunning displays and ease of use.

$1000? $1600?! You've got to be kidding--$500 is more than I want to spend on a home laptop.

I briefly thought about a Mac. I've heard rave reviews, including "runs Windows better than Windows". I could see paying, oh, say a 30% premium for the Apple experience. But 100-150% premium? I don't think so. Same thing with the iPod--they are double what competitive MP3 players cost. I held out from buying one, and now am using my new cell phone. Definitely not nearly as slick, but one device meets both needs, and anyway, I'm a light user.

Terrifffic Anti-Apple Tirade from Dave Winer

Dave says:

I just don't like the smarmy marketing attitude of Apple, he's kind of like the teacher's pet in music class, pretending that he's a connoisseur -- I see flaws and bugs everywhere. Fix the bugs and STFU about how great the product is. Sorry. I want to use Apple's products the same way I use a Canon camera, as a product I respect, but if they ever start screwing around the way Apple does, I'd switch to a Nikon or whatever. Problem is there is no Nikon or whatever in PCs and iPods. All the other products suck. Hugely. Apple's just suck a bit less. Not a huge accomplishment for an industry, imho.