Timothy B Lee for Forbes:

I’ve argued before that Apple is good at producing great user interfaces thanks to its top-down, designer-centric product development process. But that approach becomes a liability for building scalable network services. For those kinds of tasks, Google’s bottom-up, engineer-driven organizational structure works better.

Man, I hope that isn’t just a fancy intro for “I don’t understand the difference between profits and marketshare” or I’m going to be really annoyed shortly.

A good way to visualize this is by thinking of a computing platform as a funnel.

A funnel? O… K…

At the narrow end of the funnel is a human user with an extremely limited capacity for absorbing information. At the fat end of the funnel is “the world”—the collection of websites, devices, people, organizations, or other entities with which the user might wish to exchange information. The job of a computing platform is to connect the two—to filter and organize the vast amounts of information at the fat end of the funnel into a form that is digestible by the user at the skinny end.

OK, that actually makes some sort of sense, so don’t ruin it.

Google and Apple like to start from opposite ends of the funnel, and this tendency is reflected in the mobile OSes they’ve built. Apple starts with the skinny end of the funnel, making the user interface as simple and intuitive as possible. They do this by tightly controlling as much of the technology “stack” as possible. Because iPhone, iOS, the iTunes Store, Mac OS X, and iCloud are all made by the same company, they offer unparalleled polish and effortless interoperability.

Apple also starts by inserting its iOS devices into the skinny end of the funnel and sits laughing as MASSIVE PILES OF CASH PROFITS  belch out of the fat end.

Google, in contrast, focuses on the wide end of the funnel. The company has focused on making Android work gracefully with as much of the “real world” as possible.

Unlike Apple, whose devices don’t work gracefully with the… Hang on, what?

When Apple was building its own hardware, Google was cutting deals with numerous hardware manufacturers.

Who gracefully conspired to screw over users by welding tons of crap to the devices that users didn’t want. Great.

While Apple was negotiating an exclusive deal with AT&T that gave Cupertino control over the user experience, Google offered liberal licensing terms in an effort to get all wireless carriers on board.

And, man, that turned out great for everyone. Well, apart from, as already noted, the users. And Google, who lost control of its own platform. Still, the carriers are happy, so who cares, right? (These being the carriers who, by and large, now also stock the iPhone.)

Google is not only has more liberal app store rules, it also allows third parties to develop app stores of their own. As Eric Schmidt put it last year: “If they say no, we say yes.”

‘They’ clearly say: “We say no to screwing up the user experience”.

Lee then admits Google’s approach has disadvantages, in buggering up the user experience and in offering half-baked features. But he argues that’s not as bad as Apple’s problem:

In its quest to avoid ever subjecting an iPhone user to features that feel half baked, Apple insists on maintaining control over the entire technology stack. That produces simple, intuitive user interfaces, but it makes it harder to interoperate with third parties who may not be willing to cede control to Apple. In other words, Apple’s obsessive focus on the narrow end of the funnel limits how wide the wide end of the funnel can be.

This being the wide end of the funnel that’s landing MOAR MONEY on Apple’s cash mountain, remember.

This explains why iOS has been losing ground to Android even though most people agree that the iPhone is the best single smartphone on the market.

These being the figures that of late show Android plateauing? And the ones that show how Android manufacturers are making naff-all profit compared to Apple?

There are tens of millions of people who care most about the narrow end of the funnel. They want the best user interface, and are willing to make compromises on other fronts to get it. Most of these customers will opt for an iPhone. But there are hundreds of millions of customers who care more about some other factor. They want a phone from their favorite carrier, a phone with a physical keyboard or a removable battery, a phone with their choice of app store, a phone they can get for free with a contract, a phone they can get with a pre-paid plan, etc.

Most users actually don’t care about those things. Some think they do, but ultimately many of them don’t. A whole load of people went for Android phones in the US because the iPhone was only on AT&T. But with the exclusivity agreements now gone, that’s no longer the case. And bar the anti-Apple crowd, I can’t think of anyone who went with Android because they wanted a “choice of app store”. The cost aspect is about the only really relevant point here, and, guess what? Low-cost phones are also low-profit ones.

No single phone (wireless carrier, hardware manufacturer, etc) can satisfy all of these diverse customers. Only a platform designed to support many different phones from many different manufacturers on many different networks can cope with this kind of diversity.

“I still believe that Apple should have continued to license Mac OS all those years ago!”

And things will only get more challenging for Apple as the smartphone market globalizes.

True. It’s going to be damn hard to figure out where to store its mountains of cash.

Android’s relatively liberal licensing model will make it much easier for overseas partners to customize Google’s software to the needs of local markets, while Apple’s “my way or the highway” licensing model rubs potential partners the wrong way.

Unlike Google, who announced way back in March (Business Insider) that it was to tighten its grip on Android?

This is especially true in Asia, which has the majority of the world’s population, and where lower average incomes make consumers price-sensitive.

So, we’re essentially back to “I don’t understand the difference between profits and marketshare”? JOURNO SMASH!

Via Daring Fireball, Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core:

That’s right, Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of our app! At this point, we had a few seconds of excitement as well, had we mis-read the email and really earned $54,800 in one day? We would have done if our public agreement was in place, but we can now confirm that thanks to Amazon’s secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day. That’s right, over 100,000 apps given away, $0 made. Did the exposure count for much in the days afterwards? That’s also a big no, the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day. In fact Amazon decided to rub salt in the wounds a little further by discounting our app to 99 cents for a few days after the free promotion.

Classy. Apple has got a lot of things wrong with its App Store and how it treats devs, but it never pulls shit like this.

I wrote a piece about IE6 for .net, interviewing Remy Sharp. Sharp argues people should stop banging on about ditching IE6:

We all know IE6 should die. Microsoft knows IE6 should die. Heck, even IE6 knows it needs to die. It’s been walking around like a fucking zombie for years.

He says either don’t support the browser (and potentially lose clients) or just offer support as a separate charge. I agree with this (as might be apparent from the article itself), and it seems most of those commenting do too. My favourite is ‘leegriffin’ with:

You don’t see mechanics saying they simply won’t service that old 1990 Ford Fiesta because it can be a pain in the backside, they just charge appropriately.

Exactly.

Debt deal: anger and deceit has led the US into a billionaires’ coup by George Monbiot starkly highlights the ongoing bizarre nature of US politics and voting, mostly with regards to the latest political spat surrounding the debt bill.

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor.

Monibiot says there are exceptions to these rules, but they’re largely solid. In the US, like most countries, there’s absolutely no balance between rich and poor:

As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

In fact, in the US, as in other countries, even the middle classes are now finding costs spiralling. Logically, then, the vast majority should demand over the short term to make the super-rich pay more tax, in order to rebalance society and not have everyone but billionaires screwed over. But in the US, the reverse happens, because the super-rich control the media and have a sneaky plan:

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

Thus, you have poor, jobless people and even the reasonably well off fighting tooth-and-nail against tax rises that wouldn’t affect them but that would potentially make their lives better, and demanding breaks for people who already have more money than they know what to do with. As Monbiot says, many people in the USA therefore

mobilise against their own welfare.

It’s a depressing state of affairs, but the UK’s getting sucked into this way of thinking. Rather than looking east (or north-east) at the genuine big societies of Scandinavia, where there’s a high-tax but also high-support and high quality of life agenda, we have people begging for taxes to be slashed, while the Tory-led government argues for a Big Society that means “deal with everything yourselves, but we won’t support you and, in some cases, we’ll demand you don’t do what you want to, if we decide you shouldn’t be doing it”. Marvellous.

I’m really not sure what the solution is. UK politics will in 2015 take a depressingly huge swing towards partisanship again, when the Liberal Democrats return a dozen or fewer seats. We’ll again see the Tories and Labour trading blows, trying to win an election by using policies to seduce a few important seats, probably in part by pledging to keep taxes low, even for people earning millions. (Scotland will be a partial exception, since the SNP will remain strong, although that party’s tax plans appear to be in almost constant disarray.)

I don’t want to see a return to the kind of Wilson-era supertax, which inspired George Harrison to write Taxman. I don’t think a 95% tax on the super-rich is sensible, and it would almost certainly be detrimental. You’d end up with a ton of tax exiles, more tax cheats, and a lack of willingness in the entrepreneurial space. But the Tories seem determined to scrap the 50% tax band (applied only to earnings over £150,000—about seven times the skewed national average), which doesn’t seem a particularly sensible move. And when you look at the compromises in the USA—slashing benefits for the poor, in order to ensure the rich don’t have to pay an extra penny in taxes—arguing for a low-tax society seems like precisely the opposite of what civilised nations should be doing.

Via Ben Brooks, a nice email from Bill Gates (PDF) that showcases his frustration at using Microsoft.com in 2003. The interesting thing isn’t that Microsoft’s site sucked back then, nor that it had usability issues, but that Gates’s email shows his thinking wasn’t in fact a million miles away from Steve Jobs’s. So why he’s still firmly behind Ballmer as CEO of the shaken giant is baffling.