Why I want Apple to fail

Dear Apple fanboys. Dear Apple haters. Here's what phone for stupid people looks like:

I'll pause for a moment to let you consider the level of stupidity that has people pay $10k for a phone far worse in just about every possible way than a five year old Blackberry.

But I didn't mention that just to make fun of rich idiots. The entire consumer electronics market consists of pretty much three segments:

• Very expensive and totally shitty things to take advantage of idiots with too much money - like Vertu phones, "audiophile" cables and so on. Everybody with any clue knows to stay away from them.
• Bulk of the market which competes on price alone, with quality usually ranging from shitty to at best mediocre. You can find high quality or innovative stuff here from now and then, but nothing consistent and the next product in the same line will probably revert to the mean.
• Apple. They sure have very high margins, but you actually get premium product for it.

The thing is - Apple didn't get to be $400bln+ company by doing anything amazing. For just about every Apple product you could make a long list of things which are wrong with it, their interoperability record is dismal, and it usually gives you a choice of Apple way or no way. Remember - this is the company which insisted on a one-button mouse. They're making that kind of ridiculous money because nobody bothers to compete with them!

Only this year other phone makers (mostly Samsung) even started bothering with the high end of the market. Due to network effects it can only win in total Android victory (the course we're currently on), destruction of high end Android market (more likely via lawsuits than any real innovation), or iPhones becoming Android-compatible - and knowing Apple's attitude towards interoperability that's about as likely as the Pope converting to Buddhism.

Anyway, on phones and tablets Android is finally putting some real pressure on Apple - not just from the lower end which Apple completely abandoned, but also from the high end. And Apple was never serious about desktops. But one huge area where Apple is still completely without any competition is laptops.

Laptop market today looks just like smartphone market looked like five years ago. There's Apple with their overpriced but pretty decent hardware. There's ton of cheap Windows junk. And of course there's overpriced and underdelivered sector of "gaming laptops" and their likes (less extreme than Vertu shitphones, but still not good value for money).

Other than Apple nobody is seriously trying to target the laptop high end market. One big reasons is Windows, which is about as compatible with anything high end as... well, Windows Phone. The high end market is largely tech people, so anybody with any hope of competing with Apple must do something Unix-y as well. It would most likely need to be Linux, possibly with some custom distro, and reasonable Windows (or OSX) compatibility layer to deal with smaller application ecosystem.

Or it could be licensed OSX, but we all know what's the likelihood of that. Or maybe, just maybe, Microsoft could go in more developer-friendly direction and made their OS tolerable, but that seems even less likely to happen than licensed OSX. Or it could follow Apple's steps with Bootcamp and simply dual boot Linux/Windows, or some kind of virtual machine.

Unfortunately right now nobody is even trying. There's some effort into pushing non-Windows non-Apple laptops, but they are definitely on the low end. Google Chromebook Pixel is sort of trying to go there, but it's still years behind, trying to attack Apple from the low-end, not the high-end. Other than that, nobody even tries... So tech people either stick to desktops, or accept overpriced OSX, with all its problems.

Anyway, I really hope Apple fails. I hope they get some serious competition and fall from their undeserved position as the most valuable company in the world to being just one of many manufacturers of quality consumer electronics. Because the alternative is really horrible for consumers.

Google is the new Yahoo

Over the last couple of years the only times Google bothered spending significant effort at doing anything new was when they felt they existence was threatened. They made Google+ because they were afraid of Facebook, and Android because they were afraid of Apple. In both cases execution was poor to put it mildly. Google's strategy was not even to create great products - it was to make good enough products and to be there when Apple or Facebook screws up somehow.

In Android's case, it might even work since Apple prioritizes profits over market share, so Android was given low and mid end markets without much fight, and other companies like Samsung are doing much better job at competing with Apple at high end than Google ever did.

In case of Google+, the odds look much worse. Not only it is still losing in popularity, it is becoming actively worse for microblogging with each iteration. Even if Facebook ended up screwing up bad enough to cause mass exodus, it's not so clear Google+ would be where the masses would go.

And whenever Google doesn't feel existentially threatened, its mode of operation recently has been forcing horrible UI at users (Google+, Youtube, now Gmail), forcing Google+ integration and its horrible "real name policy" (Youtube), crippling them (Google Reader, Google Talk), or shutting them down outright (Google Reader again).

What was the last time you've heard any good news from Google? It was awesome once. They kept releasing great new things one after another. Now just about any time Google does anything is to make something actively worse.

Today they completely screwed Gmail usability for writing email. Now instead of being able to focus on what you write there's extremely distracting visual clutter everywhere. I'm sure some browser extension to hide all that crap is going to come sometimes soon, making Gmail not horrible again.

The problem is not this horrible decision or another. The problem is that every decision Google makes these days is like that.

Google became the new Yahoo. Could someone become the new Google please? Amazon?

Google Everything and some alternatives

Do you feel a bit uncomfortable using countless web services all operated by a single company? I can feel your pain. Here's a list of things I use (or tried but didn't like), and some alternatives if I know any.

Google Search

It used to be the case that Google Search was vastly better than anything else. Not longer so.
Don't believe me? Try the Blind Search - it searches the same term in Google, Yahoo, and Bing, then you can vote for the winner. Most of the time the results are extremely similar, and the scores are Google - 41%, Bing - 31%, Yahoo - 28%. Google still leads but not overwhelmingly.

While with text searches there's no reason to switch away from Google, Bing Images and especially Bing Video is quite significantly better than Google equivalents. Bing is simply a better search engine for porn than Google, they know it, and even advertise this fact:


I recommend we start using the word "to bing" as "to search Internet for video porn", just like "to google" means "to search Internet for textual websites".

Google Mail

I tried plenty of other webmail providers, and plenty of offline email programs. Even some Intranet email solutions like Zimbra and Exchange. Google Mail is so overwhelmingly better than anything else it's not even funny.

Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, which I tried as throwaway spam accounts, are just too painful to use. There are no alternatives, it's Google or pain.

Google Maps

Google Maps was quite revolutionary when it first appeared. Unlike with Google Mail, here the competition did catch up quite successfully. Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, MultiMap, StreetMap (well, that one's UK-only), and probably some others, are all quite usable for directions, and all suck for searching local businesses.

I've heard some drivers having preferences for one or the other, but as a public transport user/occasional cyclist, I'm still waiting for the first to offer decent TFL integration.

YouTube

YouTube annoys me considerably - they don't want to host anything even remotely risky. They limit access to videos by geography, remove those that include some copyrighted music in the background to unrelated funny thing.

On the other hand they have no problem hosting this video of a brutal rape (NSFW).

There are some alternatives, none anywhere near the size of YouTube. Not counting the porn tube of course. I have limited experience with them, so no in-depth comparison here.

Google Chrome

It's nowhere near being the most popular browser. I'm also not sure what's its main selling point, other than tab sandboxing, which Firefox badly needs.

Other than that, Firefox is vastly better. It has countless useful plugins. It has Greasemonkey, and Greasefire. It has Firebug. It has AdBlockPlus. Chrome isn't even close.

Not like I'm complaining, if it can get even one user away from IE, it's a win.

Blogger

Let's face it - Blogger is a pretty crappy blogging platform. But then I haven't heard users of any other being happy about theirs, so perhaps all are equally bad. And effort of moving the blog somewhere else (plus losing the URL) seems too big for me to bother.

In particular the way they handle spam comments is simply atrociously bad. I get a notification of a comment, and then it's about ten clicks to remove it if it's spam, instead of just one or two.

Google Reader

It's basically an online RSS reader. What I hate about most desktop RSS readers is that they tend to push notifications onto you, and don't live inside the most natural place possible - the browser.

With Google Reader Watcher, Firefox tells me how many unread items there are, and which website they're for. Which is exactly as much notification as I need.

I think the only thing left to want is "open every new item in a fresh tab" function, but there's probably some Greasemonkey script for that, or if not it would be pretty simple to write it.

I don't see much need for alternatives.

Google Talk

The main problem with IM programs is that everyone is on a different network, so you need way too many programs to talk with everyone. Adium has most of them. Except Skype. And the most basic functionality only - not webcams, no microphones, not even all the icons.

I don't have particular problems with Google Talk, but I'm going to use this unique opportunity to rant about Skype a bit. OSX version of Skype doesn't seem to have any way of disabling text notifications of contacts becoming available or unavailable. So it constantly spams me with irrelevant garbage. It's not possible to use Skype network from other programs even for IM chats. Many networks try this restriction - and abuse their control over access to other users, but Skype seems to be the only one which did it successfully. Would you be happy if you needed an iPhone to call a person using iPhone, a Nokia phone to call a person using a Nokia phone, and basically 20 different phones to speak with everyone you want to? Me neither, so why are we allowing exactly the same thing in the IM world?

Google News

I don't see Google News as solving any real problem. My main problem with news is that they focus on events of the day, while the important things are usually long ongoing processes, with little need for daily updates. And if you're away for a week or two, there's no easy way to look back at this time and see if anything important happened.

As far as I can tell, it's equally true for all alternatives. If you know a good way to follow important news, tell me about it in comments.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a pretty cool webapp for editing documents together. I have irrational hatred towards WYSIWYGs, especially web WYSIWYGs, so don't ask me about fancy advanced features, but it solves the basic need well enough, and I don't see what could be the big selling point for its alternatives.

Google Code

Google Code is a nice hosting service for Open Source projects. It supports Subversion (obviously), and Mercurial, but not git.

Some of the alternatives are SourceForge (both Subversion, and git, also some other VCSs I don't care about), github (only git, duh). I'm not sure how bad github's limitation of 300MB per open source repository is - my personal code repository's .git is easily bigger than that, but then I freely store binaries and stuff in it (like font files for jrpg).

Overall I don't really see any major advantage for Google Code over it's countless competitors, and it's not even particularly big.

Google Analytics

I'm going to be pretty clueless about it, as Google Analytics is the only one I tried.

Good things - it gives you pretty decent overview of traffic, and is really easy to install.

Bad things - no decent API (screen scrapping possible but quite painful), no access to raw data, I'm not a big fan of their interface, which seems to be focused on all the wrong things.

If I started a website these days, I would definitely try something else, if only to see if it's any better. Switching an existing site would probably not be worth the effort, as all historical data would get lost.

Summary

These are just some of Google services and programs I tried. It's scary in two ways. First, a single company has way too much control over the Internet, and over people's often private data. Google has been relatively well-behaved as far as huge soulless corporations go.

Second, and perhaps more important problem is - what the fuck is the entire competition doing? The only reason people use Google Absolutely Everything is because most of everything else sucks so much. Google didn't succeed just once or twice, it had long stream of spectacular successes where everyone else failed (search, maps), and often even failed to catch up years later (webmail, text ads). Seriously, how difficult is it to innovate a bit online? Difficult enough that a single company does most of it? Hardly anything good on the web ever came from Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and countless other huge Internet companies in ages. The only other major company that seems to be doing anything interesting is Amazon. A damn bookstore. A damn bookstore is doing more web innovation than all the software and web giants put together.

Yes, there are still startups doing the cool stuff, but most of them stop as soon as they get bought. Like del.icio.us, which was revolutionary, but then got bought by Yahoo, and is stagnant ever since.

PageRank - a new addition to your Data Processing Toolkit

Back when I was at Universität des Saarlandes we had a great seminar at MPII. It was called "Data Processing Tips and Tricks" and covered some important data processing techniques. These techniques varied a lot. What they had in common was their universality - you could throw pretty much any data at them and extract something. And by preprocessing your data differently, and postprocessing the results differently, you could get loads of interesting things without inventing any new algorithms.

Here's a partial list of the classic universal data processing methods, in no particular order:

• Bayesian statistics
• EM algorithm
• Wavelets
• Levenberg-Marquardt optimization
• Lloyd clustering
• Karhunen-Loeve Transform (aka Principal Component Analysis)
• Singular Value Decomposition
• multi-dimensional scaling
• Algebraic reconstruction technique
• Support Vector Machines
• Graph Cut Optimization
• Level-Set Methods
• RANSAC
• Neural Networks
• Hidden Markov Models
• Regular expressions

By simply being aware of their existence you greatly increase your chances of solving really big problems you'll be facing. For example naive Bayesian statistics was famously used for fighting spam, and in spite of its striking simplicity is much more effective than all the custom and complicated methods that preceded it.

In the last few years the data processing toolkit got one a new tool - PageRank. Pretty much everybody knows how it works for scoring websites, but the algorithm is capable of much more than that. One great example is extracting keywords from documents. It has nothing to do with the original problem of website scoring, but if you treat words as nodes (websites), create links between words that occur close to each other, and run PageRank on such a graph, you get very decent keywords. Of course you might want to add some pre- and post-processing to improve keyword quality (obviously removing HTML tags, also stemming, removing stopwords, weighting words by part of speech or whatever you feel like doing), but so does Google in determining pages' scores. And I bet you expected keyword extractors to either actually understand what's written (not possible yet) or to simply count number of occurences (really horrible results).

You can use PageRank to asses importance of countries in international trade, importance of people in organization's communication flow, and many other problems. Or you could simply throw arbitrary graphs at PageRank, look at the results and simply guess what they mean. Perhaps that will be enough to solve the problem you've been thinking about for such a long time. If not, you still have two dozen of other universally applicable techniques to choose from.