What Google can learn from John Sculley | Hacker News Reader

What Google can learn from John Sculley

asymco.com

22 pointsugh27 comments

This is an important article. It isn't about what it is on the surface, though, which is Apple and Google fighting over the <video> tag. It is really about strategic and tactical decisions and where technology infrastructure belongs in those decisions.

As a technologist I often get caught up in those decisions, thinking a lot about the infrastructure involved. What Horace is saying is that those decisions are not as critical to winning the big fights, not as important as partners, marketing and distribution are. This is an old story, right? We usually hear it something like "the best products don't always win." He is putting a slightly different spin on it.

Horace writes some great stuff and knows the mobile market inside and out. Well worth following if you are in the space.

Short version: The H.264 vs WebM battle won't be won or lost on technical merit, but on strategic partnership and market strategy.

Is it just me, or is this article all over the place? John Sculley and Apple and RISC vs. CISC, and in the end jumps briefly to some product I've never heard of (and probably never will again) called Flipboard (it "turns the browser paradigm inside out", apparently, whatever that means) as evidence that Google is making a grave mistake and lacking foresight. I simply don't see any way to take either bit of knowledge as having anything to do with Google's choice on this matter. It seems like reaching in order to come to a conclusion the author likes and back it up with a careful study of historical precedents.

I'm definitely not coming away from this article with a sense of foreboding for Google's future (and the only stock I hold right now is GOOG).

"some product I've never heard of (and probably never will again) called Flipboard"

http://www.flipboard.com

Flipboard is an immersive iPad app that combines your Google Reader, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook accounts to create a personalized magazine. Whenever you see or read something you find interesting, it lets you comment on it or share it from within the app.

It's likely that Flipboard will branch out to other mobile platforms and the web. I'm willing to bet you'll hear more about them here in the coming year, they're funded by Kleiner Perkins.

"I'm willing to bet you'll hear more about them here in the coming year, they're funded by Kleiner Perkins."

Make the timeline five years, and specify this particular product rather than other products and ideas that the team/company may produce in the future, and I'll take that bet.

I'd be absolutely stunned if "an immersive iPad app that combines your Google Reader, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook accounts to create a personalized magazine. Whenever you see or read something you find interesting, it lets you comment on it or share it from within the app" becomes successful beyond a small niche audience. No matter how much money they've raised or who invested in them. Investors, even smart ones, make stupid mistakes all the time (and this may not be a stupid investment if the team is awesome, and flexible enough to evolve their company into producing something of great value).

Pedantic: The quote from Sculley is misleading "So Intel lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them… (but) we went with IBM and Motorola with the PowerPC."

Apple switched from the Motorola 68000 family to the joint IBM / Motorola PowerPC. I am sure Intel lobbied heavily to get Apple to switch to the x86 architecture, but they definitely did not lobby to have Apple stay with them.

To be more fair to Apple's decision, at the time it was made, RISC was the New Hotness[tm] that was suppose to run much faster than CISC.

What they both missed was that the memory subsystem became the bottleneck, not processor clock rates, so the winner became the processor with the biggest and fastest cache. Intel ended up with the edge due to their fab technology.

Also, I think that the Intel processor that was in the running wasn't the 486, but rather the i860 (a relatively clean RISC design). Which, although a flop for general purpose computing, was used in the NeXT Dimension graphics accelerator in later NeXT cubes.

>To be more fair to Apple's decision, at the time it was made, RISC was the New Hotness[tm] that was suppose to run much faster than CISC.

And everybody, including Intel, believed that CISC was doomed. That's why Intel developed the i860, i960, and Itanium, and MS ported NT to Alpha and PowerPC. Against that background, it would've been really strange if Apple had migrated to x86.

Seriously guys, why is it so hard to believe that Google is dropping H.264 for the reasons they've stated?

Why does this have to be some secret conspiracy against Apple?

I'm not sure its against Apple, as long as most Android tablets and phones have only h264 decoding chips too.

I wonder about timing though.

Because their stance will just give more the web more "video wrapped in Flash", which has little to do with open web. As it was said: Google just prefer patents they own.

Seems like a typical short term pain for long term gain situation. What does Google get out of prolonging Flash's dominance?

Because they haven't dropped mp3. They announced it on the same day as Verizon's iPhone announcement. If it was Microsoft and WMV / OpenXML or Oracle and the Java, I would be just as concerned. Group standards seem to work better than a single companies spec.

They announced it on the same day as Verizon's iPhone announcement.

The video codec announcement had zero impact outside of the tech-heavy sphere. In no universe would it have undermined the Verizon announcement. The MP3 diversion is spurious and irrelevant compared to the video issue: You pick your battles.

Video encoding is a lot wider than just the computer industry. One group who has a serious interest is those self-same media reporting on Verizon's event. I would trust their commitment more if they at least put a plan to sunset all patent-encumbered formats.

Because people likes far fetched conspiracy theories more than obvious and simple facts.

It'd be nice if they got the name of the codec in question right. Also, I can't see Google making the WebM decision based on technical details, as it is technically inferior (although just). Rather, I quite believe them when they say they believe in and will fight for an open internet. Whether that's a good decision for them as a company remains to be seen, but it's quite clear they won't hurt themselves as badly as Apple did with PowerPC.

I do wonder if Intel would have built a vector unit if the G4 hadn't existed.

Yes, they did. MMX predates the G4, and SSE came out the same year.

Yup. I remember buying a 200 Mhz Pentium 1 (pro?) w/ MMX back in the day. 3dfx made the improvement in 3d graphics kind of moot, but it was there.

I feel Google's decision with h.264 is more related to its decision to pull out of china than Apple's decision to switch to CISC. Google decided to nix h.264 because it wanted to "do the right thing".

The current internet landscape with its open standards and pretty level playing field is a fertile ground that produced innovations too many to count. Google itself is a result of that ground.

A competitive, good open codec would ensure that the fast innovation we have known in the Net for years spill over into video applications. Think OnLive for retro and amateur games, made by 1 student, taking over the world. Or countless other ideas nobody has yet thought of.

I applaud Google for aligning their decisions with their values. I hope they stand by the decision, and inspire others to follow them.

"So the argument I’ve heard against Google’s decision is that they are using an infrastructural technology decision (a new video codec) to placate or sustain Adobe Flash, at the expense of Apple, a potential or perceived rival."

The "argument" is a baseless conspiracy theory that is the desperate defensive clutching of so many Apple defenders, viciously taking up the fight against mean Google. The rest of the article is full of incorrect beliefs about the history of Apple, RISC, x86, etc, though I can't say that is all too atypical for an Asymco piece.

For all of the "it will just bring back Flash" grousing, note that Firefox will never support h264 without a major change in its licensing. Firefox is a dominant web browser. Nice that Apple, a MPEG LA member, supports h264 though, while simultaneously pushing Quicktime and iTunes junk on the web.

Sidenote -- Just went to view a movie trailer on Apple.com. What's with it trying to foist Quicktime on me? Apple still hasn't given up on that, and they're still licking their wounds about having lost to Flash.

"Firefox is a dominant web browser. Nice that Apple, a MPEG LA member, supports h264 though"

Internet Explorer is the dominant web browser, whether we like it or not. Microsoft is a MPEG-LA member, and IE9 will have support for h.264 in <video> containers. Adobe is a AVC/h.264 licensee, and mostly because of Flash support and Adobe's content creation tools, the majority of video on the web is encoded using h.264.

Chrome, Firefox and Opera have a combined global market share of 46%, IE and Safari have 52% combined, so it can go either way. What's going to be important is if, and how soon all major mobile OSes and GPUs will support WebM. Apple and Microsoft are unlikely to support WebM, so count iOS and Windows Phone out. Google will surely try to make it work on Android, even though most phones won't have hardware accelaration for it. RIM and Nokia remain wildcards, but most of their informed smartphone users use Opera anyways, which I imagine will support WebM.

It's amazing how a single error in the article (or typo? "H.265") immediately turned me off to the rest of it.

It's because no one familiar with the technology would make that mistake (in other words, the author doesn't know what he's talking about). There are other H.26X codecs and they're quite different. It'd be like someone writing a review of Windows 6... oops typo meant 7.

The author either made a dumb mistake, or is being extra clever. H.265 is the in-development successor to H.264. It's probably true that, in the future, WebM's competition will be H.265, and his whole point is that you should make strategic choices based on future expectations, not just present state of the technology. I am not sure if he meant to make this point in an overly subtle way, or just got the name wrong.

Edit: looks like he fixed the post, so he was sloppy, not clever.

I can't understand why there is all this fuss over H.264.

Simply put H.264 looks like nothing more than a replacement for Adobes offering. While I agree H.264 is superior it doesn't solve the long term problem. So instead of Flash being the dominant video delivery mechanism it is handed to some other company.

Now please excuse me while I check my realplayer messages, install my adobe flash updates, update windows media player and why is quicktime flashing?

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