Samsung gets back to dissing Apple in new ads
Technically Incorrect: It seemed as if Samsung wasn't going to knock Apple anymore. Then came the NBA Finals and new ads for the Galaxy S6 Edge. And boy is that iPhone 6 a bad phone.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
It seems so long since Samsung cocked a snook and thumbed its nose in the direction of Cupertino.
I feared this was the end.
Then came the NBA Finals (what glory that was for my Warriors) and the appearance of two new ads for the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge.
No pussyfooting was there about how lovely this phone was. No, these new ads claim that theiPhone 6 has no edge at all.
In one ad, Samsung lauds the display on the phone's edge. It mocks the fact that the iPhone 6's edge displays nothing but a depressing baldness. Well, save for some buttons. While the Samsung's edge shows colors when your closest friends call. ("It's green! It must be Draymond!" Forgive me. Delirium.)
It even displays the date. Yes, today's date. How clever.
A second ad muses that the S6 Edge comes with built-in wireless charging capability. While the iPhone 6 comes with a gaping, charging void.
And then there's the S6's wider selfies. Everyone knows that a selfie can never be too wide. It's the width that expresses the vast breadth of the person taking the selfie.
Meanwhile, the iPhone severs the head off Nana. Samsung is, indeed, accusing Apple of nanicide.
There's something glorious in the notion that Samsung has decided to fight. It will continue to chip away at the iPhone 6's alleged inadequacies. It will find superiority wherever it can.
There again, aren't our phones supposed to be disappearing into our pockets permanently, as we're all now going to be daft enough to talk to our watches?
Hey, Samsung. Hurry up. We need an ad that mocks the Apple Watch.
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The lost year of Beats Music and how that may not matter for Apple
Apple plans to relaunch Beats Music on Monday after putting the streaming service in a holding pattern for a year. Here's how it can make up for lost time.
Twelve years ago, with the launch of the iTunes music store, Apple changed how we purchase and listen to music. Now it hopes to shake things up again -- despite playing catchup this time around.
Apple is expected to debut a subscription streaming-music service, making it one of the central announcements at the company's annual developers conference next week in San Francisco. Consider it a reboot of the Beats Music streaming service it purchased last year.
Apple shelled out $3 billion to buy headphones maker Beats -- by far its biggest acquisition ever -- and Beats Music, a fledgling subscription music service that gives members all-you-can-eat access to songs for $10 a month, was part of the package. Since the deal closed in August, Beats Music has been in a holding pattern while rivals like Spotify grow rapidly and newcomers, such as Jay Z's Tidal, enter the market. But as Apple has shown before, the game isn't over until the Cupertino, Calif., consumer electronics giant tries to change it.
Apple's music service could once again change up how consumers purchase music by placing a spotlight on the burgeoning trend of music subscriptions. Instead of paying 99 cents a track, consumers pay a monthly fee -- reportedly $10 a month -- for access to virtually any song they want. The company's embrace of subscriptions comes amid shifting patterns in how consumers listen to and purchase music. The question is, can Apple take advantage of the shift?
"It certainly helps to be Apple, but its [service] needs to be better, too," said Russ Crupnick, managing partner at consulting firm MusicWatch. "Which is what they're very good at."
Unlike the moment of its original iTunes revolution, Apple isn't alone in this business. Sweden-based startup Spotify is the global leader in music subscriptions, with 15 million paying members out of its 60 million listeners. Tidal relaunched its service in March under rapper mogul Jay Z with a $19.99-a-month subscription fee. Even the original Beats Music operated under the same model.
In the past few years, revenue from streamed music has overtaken physical sales of tunes and is closing in on digital downloads, all while Apple's arena of single-purchased tracks has begun to decline. But streaming's popularity has been fueled by free, ad-supported options -- not the more lucrative monthly subscriptions that the record industry idealizes as a profits savior.
Apple's advantage: hundreds of millions of consumers are already familiar and comfortable with iTunes. And Apple has their credit card and purchase information already stored.
Apple declined to comment for this story.
Resisting the stream
In January 2001, Apple introduced its iTunes digital jukebox software that let users import songs from CDs and manage their personal music libraries. It wasn't until two years later that it started allowing people to purchase digital songs from the iTunes Music Store for 99 cents apiece. The reasoning behind the offering was to not only make more money but also to get users hooked on iTunes and Apple's iPod music players.
"Consumers don't want to be treated like criminals, and artists don't want their valuable work stolen," Steve Jobs, Apple's then-CEO, said in an April 2003 press release announcing the service. "The iTunes Music Store offers a groundbreaking solution for both."
iTunes ended up making the iPod the best-selling music player in the market and kickstarted Apple's ascent in the electronics industry. A year ago, Apple revealed it had sold 35 billion songs since launching iTunes.
Jobs, known for his love of music, was defiant about a subscription service for years. He called the subscription model "bankrupt" in Rolling Stone in 2003 and told Reuters "people want to own their music" in 2007. But as streaming options grew in popularity, Apple realized it needed to go with the flow. The company in 2013 launched iTunes Radio, a Pandora-like streaming radio service that generates revenue from advertising -- and from sales promoted by a big red and green "buy song" link included on the screen while a tune plays.
The falling demand for song downloads -- and the lukewarm response to iTunes Radio -- is part of the reason Apple decided to purchase Beats. Legendary record producer Jimmy Iovine, rapper Dr. Dre andNine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor all joined Apple through the acquisition, and Beats Music Chief Executive Ian C. Rogers became the head of iTunes Radio.
Until this point, Beats and iTunes have remained separate services, though they've pooled expertise and resources. And so far, Apple has done little publicly with Beats besides pushing its music service with current iTunes customers and promoting its headphones in Apple Stores.
That will change when Apple shows off its revamped service on Monday.
While Apple had pressed the record labels for a lower price, its service will likely cost the industry standard of $10 a month. The Beats Music identity is going away, and Apple also likely will embed the offering into its current Music app, which means it automatically shows up on iPhones and iPads.
The revamped service likely will include many of Beat's features -- such as curated playlists -- but will incorporate a more Apple-like look and feel. The company also has reportedly been pursuing exclusive deals with artists to offer their albums on the new service first, and its offering could give musicians more control over their material, providing them with pages where they can post track samples, videos and concert details.
Apple also is reportedly revitalizing iTunes Radio with channels programmed and hosted by live DJs, including high profile artists like Drake.
Watching other players score
In the year since Apple unveiled its plans to buy Beats, the streaming music service has watched competitors' usage grow while its own held stagnant. Except for Pandora, which is run by a publicly traded company, online music services don't provide regular updates about their listeners. But third-party peeks indicate Beats Music's status dawdled while it sat on the sidelines.
Fewer people in the US visited Beats Music in April than a year earlier, right before Apple unveiled its takeover, making it the only service among the six main competitors in online streaming music to see that traffic fall, according to traffic scorekeeper ComScore. Internet radio service Pandora, on-demand streamer Spotify, user-uploaded audio site SoundCloud, and subscription services Rhapsody and Rdio all had increasing visits to their sites and apps across desktop and mobile between May 2014 and April 2015 -- while Beats' unique visitors slipped to 1.1 million from 1.4 million. By comparison, April saw Pandora rack up 86 million visitors and Spotify reach 38 million.
In fact, Beats was the only service to see its visitors drop below the 1 million mark during the last year. In July, ComScore counted only 941,000 unique visitors.
Beats Music's brand perception struggled as well. Immediately after Apple said it would buy Beats, the subscription service's appeal was modestly positive, based on a "Buzz score" by YouGov BrandIndex. Beats Music scored 3.3, meaning 3.3 percent more people viewed it positively than negatively. One year later, that score slipped to 0.6, and it dipped into negative territory once. While Pandora's favorability also saw ups and downs, its appeal always far outstripped Beats, most recently at about 15.
Playing by Apple's rules
Apple may be coming to the subscription game late, but it benefits from unique advantages.
The world's most valuable company, Apple sits on a huge stockpile of cash ($193.5 billion as of the end of March), especially compared with companies like Spotify and Pandora that are still trying to figure out how to be profitable. Even though Apple typically doesn't enter businesses where it loses money, it could operate a subscription service at a loss as long as it fuels its more profitable hardware sales.
Importantly, Apple already has payment relationships with more than 800 million people worldwide through iTunes. That's a big advantage, said Wei Shi, analyst for Strategy Analytics. "If consumers feel that [Apple's] proposition is more compelling, it's easier for them to pay," he said.
Apple's possession of payment details could be meaningful for the music industry as well, said Tom Silverman, the founder of hip-hop label Tommy Boy Records and organizer of the New Music Seminar yearly conference to discuss shifts in the recording industry.
If the company can convert a fraction of those iTunes users into people paying a monthly rate, it would tip the number of worldwide music subscribers over the 100 million threshold that Silverman marks as a turning point for streaming music becoming a sustainable business model. "That can change the music business in one year," he said.
But the lesson of iTunes Radio shows how Apple can misfire despite its advantages.
Before launching its Internet radio product in 2013, anticipation was high that Apple could be creating a "Pandora killer." But Pandora's listening stats continued to grow unabated, and iTunes Radio has failed to gain significant traction.
"They came up against Pandora with a water pistol," said Crupnick of MusicWatch. Crupnick's annual music study found iTunes Radio accounts for just 5 percent of the listening hours among the major streaming services, which includes Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio and YouTube. He found that only about 10 percent of the US population on the Internet use iTunes Radio, compared with 16 percent for Spotify -- a much smaller company -- and 35 percent for Pandora.
The challenge in streaming music is less about the company and more about who will change consumer beliefs about paying for music subscriptions, Crupnick said. "What is it that Apple can say to the market that is different than what Spotify has said, or Rdio or Tidal or Rhapsody?"
Being late to the game has never hurt the company in the past. It wasn't the first to make a digital music player, smartphone or tablet, but the iPod, iPhone and iPad dominated their competitors. Analysts believe Apple Watch can make inroads in the wearable market where other pioneers flopped.
And Apple, Crupnick noted, has been superb at teaching consumers the benefits of a new technology, be it the iPod paired with iTunes, the iPhone or the iPad. Streaming music subscriptions haven't yet experienced that "iPhone moment, where consumers go 'That's really cool and worth paying for,'" he said.
But for Apple, that's a familiar tune.
Check out CNET's live blog from WWDC on Monday, as well as full coverage from the event.
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Firefox OS in flux as Mozilla loses technology chief to startup
Andreas Gal, co-founder of Mozilla's mobile OS project, joins others from the project in a startup to link new devices to the Net. It's part of big changes coming to Firefox OS.
Mozilla, best known for its Firefox browser and operating system, has lost the man responsible for the core technologies of both products.
Chief Technology Officer Andreas Gal has left Mozilla after nearly seven years to launch a startup that hopes to provide the computing brains for the Internet of Things -- a broad idea that involves providing everything from traffic signals to door locks with connections to the Internet.
Gal, an expert in the JavaScript language that's central to Web programming, co-founded the Firefox OS effort, and his startup's two co-founders were seminal employees, too. He joined Mozilla in a crucial project to keep Firefox competitive with browsers like Google's Chrome.
His departure is part of major changes Mozilla faces with Firefox OS. While Gal is moving into a new market, a new competitive threat is arriving. Mozilla's former president, Li Gong, is at work on another startup nicknamed Gone Fishing that's building a mobile operating system relying on the same Web-based approach Firefox OS uses, CNET has learned. Gong was the Firefox OS business leader before being promoted to president in 2014; he left Mozilla in April, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Gal is sidestepping a smartphone market dominated by the twin powers of mobile operating systems, Google and Apple. Gong is taking them on directly.
Mozilla joined Microsoft, Samsung and BlackBerry in learning that it's brutally hard to compete successfully. Of the 334 million phones shipped during the first quarter of 2015, Google's Android OS accounted for 78 percent and Apple's iOS 18.3 percent, according to analysis firm IDC. That leaves just 3.7 percent for all other challengers.
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But Gone Fishing offers a chance to replay the Firefox OS game with a different playbook. Mozilla's philosophical commitment to openness, choice and privacy didn't carry the day. By working with partners rather than pushing an agenda, Gone Fishing has a chance to see if pragmatism instead of principles will help loosen Apple's and Google's grip.
Losing longtime executives could unsettle Mozilla's effort to build a more open alternative to Android and iOS. But the project has already been in major flux: Mozilla CEO Chris Beard is trying to retool Firefox OS with a focus on features people will desire, backing away from its earlier push to power supercheap $25 smartphones, which wasn't working. And in a statement to CNET, Beard indicated that it's not a coincidence Gong is pursuing his current plans outside Mozilla.
"In the course of resetting our Firefox OS strategy, we looked at our management team and saw we needed to make a change," Beard said of Gong's departure. Gong declined to comment for this story.
Another Firefox OS executive is going from Mozilla to Gone Fishing, too: James Ho, Mozilla's senior director of mobile devices, according to both sources. Ho didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Goodbye phones, hello Internet of Things
Gal's startup, meanwhile, appears to be in a market mostly adjacent to Firefox OS.
The company will repurpose the hardware and lower-level software from the smartphone world into the foundational layers of Internet of Things products, Gal said in an interview. "We feel we have a lot of experience building technology stacks," he said.
Gal has co-founded his startup with two other Firefox OS alums. First is Chris Jones, who co-founded Firefox OS with Gal. Second is Michael Vines, the former senior director of technology at Qualcomm and the first Qualcomm engineer to work on Firefox OS.
Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich hired Gal in 2007 as part of a project to accelerate Firefox's performance running JavaScript programs -- a crucial part of Firefox and later Firefox OS's viability. In 2014, Eich moved into the CEO role and promoted Gal to his former CTO post, but Eich left Mozilla soon thereafter amid a political firestorm around a 2008 contribution he'd made to an anti-gay-marriage cause.
The startup's technology will use "the fundamental building blocks of smartphones [and] the fundamental building blocks Firefox OS is built on as well," Gal said. Firefox OS's most basic level is a project called Gonk derived from Google's Android version of the Linux operating system.
Unlike with Apple, Google and smartphones, the foundational technology for the Internet of Things is open to new players. "There's almost nothing there yet," Gal said.
Gal said he's open to working with Gone Fishing, too. Gong is a "great leader," he said, "one of the invisible co-founders of Firefox OS."
The Gone Fishing plan
Gone Fishing is working on a Web-based operating system for phones, wearable computing devices, and connected devices like smart TVs, sources said -- basically, anything that's not a personal computer. That vision is close to Firefox OS, which today powers phones and a Panasonic TV.
The startup's idea is to fulfill demand from phone makers and carriers for an alternative to Android that's more of a departure than Microsoft's Windows Mobile. Building an OS with Web technology offers new ways to differentiate -- for example by skipping app stores like Google Play or the App Store used to distribute software.
Mozilla's mission is to keep the Internet's technology open so that users have control over their online lives -- they can switch browsers, operating systems or online services without being locked into one company's corporate agenda. That drives Mozilla's priorities, like fighting against digital rights management (DRM) copy-protection technology and the patent-encumbered H.264 video compression standard.
But phone and TV makers working with content distributors aren't necessarily so opposed to H.264 and DRM, and Gone Fishing could more easily work with them.
It's less clear how Gone Fishing will actually make money. One source said Gone Fishing could charge companies with online services for a place in its ecosystem, such as, for example, Google Maps for navigation, Baidu for search or Line for text messaging. Another part of the company's strategy will be pursuing customers in China, a massive market, another source said.
Gone Fishing has some time to figure things out. It's raised venture funding -- at least $50 million, sources said.
Like Gal's startup, the company can repurpose existing open-source software, so it can release an initial operating system this year, but it's not yet clear what technology foundations it'll use. The obvious option is Firefox OS itself, but other choices include Google's mobile version of Chrome for Androidand Apple's core browser technology called WebKit.
Peculiarly, the open nature of Web programming means Gone Fishing's operating system actually could help Firefox OS as well as compete with it. That's because a modern Web app -- in principle at least -- can run on any browser supporting modern Web technology standards. One of Firefox's biggest challenges is attracting app support, and a competitive new Web-based OS could help convince developers to bring programs like Facebook's WhatsApp to the mobile Web.
An OS alternative
One way or another, having an alternative mobile operating system could be important. Customers today seem happy with Android and iOS, but if Google or Apple takes a turn for the worse, people will have a hard time switching to something else, because today's developers tailor their software and services for those two operating systems.
Mozilla also has had a chance to learn from its mistakes and try a new playbook, too. The organization isn't abandoning its principles, but it's got new leadership and is trying to build a product that people want to use because of its features and abilities.
To try anew, it's going back to the way it got Firefox to catch on a decade ago when the competitor was Microsoft's Internet Explorer: "We will provide direct distribution of Ignite [the next Firefox OS version] builds to early adopters with existing unlocked Android devices as part of our new development model to build community and influence," Beard said in an email sent to Mozilla community members in May.
And Mozilla isn't backing off, Beard said: "We will aggressively invest in the Firefox OS opportunity."
Correction, 5 p.m. PT: Clarifies the relationship between Gal's startup and Gong's startup. Gal said he is open to a partnership, but he didn't confirm there is one.
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