Computer says no. Human says yes.

It’s too easy for the answer to be no. That’s why there is real value in finding a way to say yes. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Do you remember that time when Mummy said no, so you then went to Daddy, who then said yes? (And then you got naughty step time from both for successfully finessing the approvals process.) It strikes me that there will always be a need for a service industry to facilitate this behaviour, to override the technology. Let me explain by way of example.

I’m in the process of booking our family holiday in October 2015. (Let’s gloss over the fact that I’m booking 16 months in advance, and why this isn’t necessarily an indication of a burgeoning organising psychosis.) Like with every of my shopping experiences in the last decade, I was fully intending to complete the search, evaluation and purchase steps of the buyer’s journey online. However, it turned out that the family holiday was more complex than the web sites could price up, so I engaged the services of our village travel agent.

That was the first surprise for me: that the travel agent still existed in this digital age. Certain parts of the job have changed: they recycle an order of magnitude more brochures than they give out. These days, they mostly conduct their business by email with travel agents of booking companies – agent to agent.

The service that they offer is that they will organise the holiday for you. They will take the input parameters of your budget, aspirational itinerary, and flexibility work through availabilities and constraints of terms and conditions, present alternative options, to create the best value holiday.

The very best travel agents will give you options that you hadn’t thought of (researched) yourself. And the most savvy travel agents won’t make the whole thing appear too straightforward to you, so that you see the value of their efforts.

It’s taken us three weeks to organise this so far, and we still haven’t completed the booking. Every time we think we’re there, a computer system tells the agent that the combination isn’t possible. But thankfully, every time the computer says no, the agent finds a combination that does work within our expectations. And that’s why humans are sometimes worth persisting with.

Life without my iPad, and the history of iOS.

Living again with my first generation iPad leads me to reminisce on the history of iOS. blog.mindrocketnow.com

DW decided to get a new iPad through her work, so I got to inherit hers, which was actually mine to begin with before she blatantly stole it, the day that I got it. (The reason why I don’t have my iPad is a tale of woe, covered in an earlier post.) It’s 5 years old, and that’s a long time in tech. It shipped with iOS 3.2, and I managed to upgrade it twice so that it now runs iOS 5.1.3. However, that’s where it tops out, so many of the apps that I got used to on my old iPad are not available on this old old iPad.

Thankfully, the app store makes it easy to download old versions of apps that work with legacy versions of iOS, so the majority of apps that I used are still available, albeit with less functionality, and slower. Especially the puzzle game that I’m currently mildly addicted to (let me know if you’d like to join my Marvel Puzzle Quest Alliance). If the process had been only a little harder, I wouldn’t’ve had any software to run, so would’ve junked the iPad. Apple has not enforced hardware obsolescence, and I’ve saved a packet thanks to their largesse.

We gave the DDs DW’s first iPhone a 3GS which shipped with iOS 3, which I haven’t upgraded beyond iOS 4.3.2. Thing is, it perfectly fills its current use case. The DDs just want to listen to stories at bed time, so the iPhone does the job of storing all their audiobooks to play back, with a sleep timer to switch itself off after the DDs have drifted off.

Keeping all this old gear working got me thinking about the evolution of iOS. (Thanks to CultOfMac.com and IBtimes.com for the source of this part of the post.)

iOS 1 came out on 29^th June 2007. It was described by Steve Jobs as a variant of Mac OSX, and developers were encouraged to develop web page applications to run on the phone. There were only a few apps (Mail, iPod, Safari, YouTube, Stocks, Phone…) and crucially, no App Store. The accompanying iPhone 1 was also crucially under-featured, only running on GPRS networks rather than 3G. It was a disappointment, when compared to its competitors in most respects, apart from one: the software and industrial design was so strong, its fundamentals are still market-leading today.

iOS 2 was launched on 11^th July 2008, an annual release cycle that Apple has managed to keep up to this day. It added the App Store and the phrase “There’s an app for that” and pioneered a business model that has taken over all technologies that purport to be a “platform”. You can now get apps made by people completely unrelated to the company that made the electronics device, for pretty much any class of technogeekery: TV, watch, NAS, corporate laptop, [Google] glasses…

The iPhone 3GS came out on 19^th June 2009, two days after iOS 3, and that’s where I jumped into the Apple ecosystem. I wasn’t impressed with the earlier GPRS effort. It was only when 3G came and enabled the mobile internet, that it made sense to spend all that money to get an iPhone. And it was expensive: I remember that the phone was around £100 up front with a £30 per month contract, and that was the first time I’d ever bought a phone. And the biggest change that iOS 3 brought? Copy and paste. However, there was a much more significant app release in 2009, which went on to become the biggest selling app of all time: Angry Birds.

iOS 4 came out on 17^th June 2010 and is probably the start of the post-PC era. Now with multitasking, full video integration, eBooks support, and even game centre, there was little that the PC could do, that the iPhone couldn’t. Arguably, you could do more with the iPhone 4, which came out on 24^th June 2010, than a PC. With its A4 chip, 720p video capture and retina display, the iPhone could replace your eBook reader, video camera, stills camera, music player, web browser, sat nav, mobile TV, office file viewer, email client and even your phone. This is the version of iPhone that I’m still using today.

iOS 5 was released on 12^th October 2011 together with the iPhone 4S. It was touted as including over 200 changes, but I remember it as Apple’s attempt to kill off the larger app manufacturers. What’s App was targeted with the introduction of iMessage as an alternative way of avoiding text message charges. Significantly for audiophiles, Apple Lossless Codec was made open source on 27^th October 2011, to put Apple in the middle of the burgeoning digital audiophile market. Istapaper was targeted with the Read Later feature of Safari. This last feature also uses iCloud, the re-branded and amped up MobileMe. The iCloud also powered iTunes Match, launched on 14^th November 2011, enabling users to play their entire personal music collection on any iOS or OSX device. This is the start of Apple’s cloud era, when the iPhone didn’t need to be tethered to the laptop ever again.

iOS 6, announced on 11^th June 2012, is notable for Apple ditching Google. Google search was no longer the only search engine, and Google maps was replaced by Apple maps, which amusingly was not fit-for-purpose and the debacle led to the firing of the iOS chief Scott Forstall. The shopping experience was vastly improved on the app store, iBook store, and the iTunes store. The passbook app was a much more successful attempt than newsstand to aggregate content providers into the same look and feel, but is still underused. Looking back, this is the most underwhelming iOS release. iOS 6.1.6 is the last version that the iPhone 3GS can run, which makes the hardware lifespan of 3 years.

iOS 7 was announced on 10^th June 2013, and was the death of skeumorphism. The whole design language became flatter, whiter, cleaner. However, my favourite feature is one that I don’t have access to. I was hoping that iTunes Radio would finally justify my iTunes Match subscription, enabling me to revive my music tastes that ossified in 2009. It’s yet to come to the UK, presumably due to the labyrinthine licensing deals that need to be negotiated. As a point of reference, the iTunes Store was launched in the US on 28^th April 2008, yet only made it to the UK on 15^th June 2009. The accompanying iPhone 5/5C launch accelerated the hardware obsolescence of earlier devices with the adoption of the lightning port. Once the ecosystem of third party hardware vendors switch allegiance to the new standard, all my current dock connected hardware will eventually turn to scrap.

It’s very likely that iOS 8 will be announced at WWDC next week. Likely features include a Healthbook app to aggregate third party apps in the same way that Passbook tries to. I’m hoping that the Beats acquisition will enable Apple to finally address the audiophile shortcomings of its ecosystem.

Looking back over the last 7 years, it’s clear that (nearly) every iteration of iOS+iPhone has brought a step-change in the market. Industrial design in 2007, app economy in 2008, the post-PC device in 2010, the cloud device in 2011, post-media ownership in 2013, industrial design again in 2014. 2009 and 2012 are notable as fallow years in which Apple merely caught up with the competition.

Our household is now running iOS 4, 5 and 7. Remarkably, we’re all happy with the functionality that we have. Well done Apple, for making products with such longevity.

Unboxing Broadband, part 3: Even more TV, Now!

The breaking point was Game of Thrones. Sky has convinced us to pay for more TV than we can possibly watch. blog.mindrocketnow.com

The breaking point was Game of Thrones season 4. Until that point, we were happy with our thriftily constructed entertainment choices. We had cancelled LoveFilm (£9.99 per month for 2 discs + streaming) and took up the introductory Amzon Instant Video offer (£49.99 for Amazon Prime for first year). We were going to cancel our NowTV movies subscription before the introductory offer expired (£15 for 6 months). We were going to be happy with Freeview for regular TV (£0 per month). Our TV cost was going to be £50 p.a.

But then DW presented the business case that the NowTV entertainment subscription introductory offer of £4.99 per month was cheaper than buying the box sets of Game of Thrones, plus we could watch the new episodes live. And if we’re going to have the entertainment package, we might as well keep the movies package at £8.99 per month, because the children do so love watching the Disney catalogue. (And I admit, I was enjoying watching year-old movies as opposed to “classics”.) So now our annual cost has jumped up 436% to £218 p.a., all because of DW needing to see how the House of Lannister try to dismantle the House of Stark.

The lesson I take away here is that content is still king. Moreover, it’s not any one particular genre of content that is king, but the best of all genres. After all, my family is not interested in the most lucrative content type in the UK, premiership football (especially the way this season has turned out). But Sky still has enough of the best of the rest to make it compelling to our household.

Interestingly, it’s not the channel brand that is king, but the content itself. It is not the Sky Atlantic channel that we value. As far as branding is concerned, BBC is probably the only brand we follow. In other words, if we want a corporate recommendation, we’re more likely to choose something that is broadcast on a BBC channel, than any other branding. If we were to rank all our TV choices, it would go like this:

• 1.     NowTV – either our current series obsession or a new movie
• 2.     Something recorded on our PVR from Freeview
• 3.     BBC iPlayer
• 4.     Amazon Instant Video
• 5.     Blu-ray or DVD or ripped movie from our private collection
• 6.     BBC Four
• 7.     Randomly finding a broadcast programme from the EPG

(As an aside, it’s the expectation of kingly content that makes technical outages all the more frustrating. The season opener of Game of Thrones broke both NowTV in the UK and HBO Go in the US. We were actually quite put out; DW and I had put the children to bed, we had a glass of wine in hand, and dark chocolate to hand, all ready for a quality night in. Instead, DW was on social media complaining and figuring out what was going on, and I was rebooting everything just in case the problem was at our end.)

That kind of stunning ARPU increase (average revenue per user, how the industry measures how successfully it extracts money from its subscribers) isn’t achieved by snapping up content rights alone. The second decision factor is always price. For us, Sky competed with free (Freeview) and still won, because the cost burden seemed a bargain. A monthly subscription of £14 seems cheap when Sky has set the expectation so high with its satellite pricing. To get an equivalent package by satellite would cost us £59 per month.

(Because the NowTV box was so cheap (£9.99), we’ve forgotten the infrastructure investment that we’ve made: STB, fibre broadband (£20 per month), and BT’s “tax” (line rental of £15 per month). Putting it all together brings our entertainment bill to £650 p.a.)

To make us take the plunge, Sky has been very clever and changed the narrative. Through its product positioning, Sky has convinced us that the discussion isn’t about whether we have enough TV through our current (cheap) means, but that we can have better TV with only a little bit more money. And in doing so, we get to feel like we’ve gone from Aldi basics to Waitrose finest. The funny thing for me is, even knowing that we’re being manipulated, doesn’t change the validity of our decision at all.

More in this series: part 2, part 4.