Steve Jobs' effort to pitch Apple as a conduit for content vendors is apparently in high gear, as he's appeared in person to pitch iPad as a delivery platform for historically printed content. The delay between announcement and shipping will allow Apple to capitalize on increased buzz to make content deals that will make the platform more attractive by the time of sale, and to put in place deals that can be pre-announced regarding content and the utility of the platform.
If the iPad has a tool for searching back-issues of newspapers for research, lots of folks in news and academia will be all over it. As argued here before, the rights of users to access and handle the content will have a big impact on the utility – and thus the practical value – of the content.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
ACAS: Why So Sudden A Need To Sell Shares?
Unlike the ECAS deal, in which investors had lots of notice what ACAS was up to when management announced it wanted to "sell" shares below NAV (by exchanging them for ECAS shares that were even more below NAV, thus increasing ACAS' post-transaction NAV), ACAS hasn't educated the public about its latest solicitation of authority to sell shares below NAV.
Why?
(1) ACAS is working on a deal in which it doesn't want competitive suitors, or in which it is working under a nondisclosure agreement. The evidence that ACAS has a specific deal in mind is that ACAS has given a very short time frame in which to solicit the necessary shareholder approval. ACAS' desire to make sure the approval is obtained is underscored by the fact that ACAS had someone call The Jaded Consumer soliciting a recorded proxy vote of shares held by the Jaded Consumer.
(2) ACAS' distressed assets group has a special situations group that looks for distressed-priced businesses that stand to benefit from ACAS' operations expertise. Founded in 2005, the group doubtless has been swamped with exciting opportunities, and is surely clamoring for capital at any price that is less discounted than that needed to enter distressed opportunities with profitable price-adjusted results. By this I mean that ACAS knows that investing a dollar for a $1.10 return is a loss if ACAS has to sell shares at half NAV to raise the $1; ACAS needs to adjust prices to accommodate the cost to ACAS of $1 in shares to assess the viability of investments. An asset's purchase for ACAS shares is still accretive to NAV despite shares being valued at half NAV if the asset itself can be had for $0.10 on the dollar. 5:1 isn't as good as 10:1, but it's awfully good. Why doesn't ACAS wait until share price exceeds NAV? "Speed is a critical component" in the special situations market.
Upshot? Vote your shares "yes" or decide you lack confidence in management and vote with your feet. Voting "no" seems to make no sense.
Why is ACAS plummeting? Apparently, someone thinks ACAS has a liquidity problem despite having hundreds of millions in cash. But think for a minute. By adding high-return assets that are hard to value without either taking on debt (forbidden because of BDC debt ratio limits) or losing cash (likely required to solve issues with outstanding creditors), ACAS both grows its business and de-leverages its balance sheet.
Nice, eh?
Why?
(1) ACAS is working on a deal in which it doesn't want competitive suitors, or in which it is working under a nondisclosure agreement. The evidence that ACAS has a specific deal in mind is that ACAS has given a very short time frame in which to solicit the necessary shareholder approval. ACAS' desire to make sure the approval is obtained is underscored by the fact that ACAS had someone call The Jaded Consumer soliciting a recorded proxy vote of shares held by the Jaded Consumer.
(2) ACAS' distressed assets group has a special situations group that looks for distressed-priced businesses that stand to benefit from ACAS' operations expertise. Founded in 2005, the group doubtless has been swamped with exciting opportunities, and is surely clamoring for capital at any price that is less discounted than that needed to enter distressed opportunities with profitable price-adjusted results. By this I mean that ACAS knows that investing a dollar for a $1.10 return is a loss if ACAS has to sell shares at half NAV to raise the $1; ACAS needs to adjust prices to accommodate the cost to ACAS of $1 in shares to assess the viability of investments. An asset's purchase for ACAS shares is still accretive to NAV despite shares being valued at half NAV if the asset itself can be had for $0.10 on the dollar. 5:1 isn't as good as 10:1, but it's awfully good. Why doesn't ACAS wait until share price exceeds NAV? "Speed is a critical component" in the special situations market.
Upshot? Vote your shares "yes" or decide you lack confidence in management and vote with your feet. Voting "no" seems to make no sense.
Why is ACAS plummeting? Apparently, someone thinks ACAS has a liquidity problem despite having hundreds of millions in cash. But think for a minute. By adding high-return assets that are hard to value without either taking on debt (forbidden because of BDC debt ratio limits) or losing cash (likely required to solve issues with outstanding creditors), ACAS both grows its business and de-leverages its balance sheet.
Nice, eh?
MSFT: Lost In the Woods
In a prior piece, Knowing The Path Isn't Walking The Path, the Jaded Consumer discussed how Microsoft had been unable to solve clearly-identified problems apparently addressed just fine by competitors with fewer resources. In today's op-ed in the New York Times, a former Microsoft executive explains that this is the inevitable result of Microsoft's dysfunctional internal culture.
So instead of leading the world in technology, the world's richest tech company is apparently reduced to making false predictions of doom about its many competitors while milking decades-old software franchises for continued cash flows as long as developer API dependency and file format lock-in supports its business model.
Now, perhaps we understand why Microsoft has failed to deliver on its promises of the future.
So instead of leading the world in technology, the world's richest tech company is apparently reduced to making false predictions of doom about its many competitors while milking decades-old software franchises for continued cash flows as long as developer API dependency and file format lock-in supports its business model.
Now, perhaps we understand why Microsoft has failed to deliver on its promises of the future.
Apple in Mobile
Apple's advance in smartphone market share took a step forward when it announced a 100% y/y increase in iPhone sales. With the Research In Motion Blackberry line increasing its sales 40% over the period – respectable, but not quite Apple's pace – Apple advanced its share from about 11% to 16% while RIM remained nearly flat at about 19.5%. RIM keeps the lead, but that lead is less commanding than previously.
With Apple expanding its mobile devices with the iPad, it's unclear whether the market share measured by those trying to keep track of competition among "converged devices" will eventually become hard to define. However, as initial iPad versions don't show evidence of direct competition with phones, this isn't an issue at launch.
With Apple expanding its mobile devices with the iPad, it's unclear whether the market share measured by those trying to keep track of competition among "converged devices" will eventually become hard to define. However, as initial iPad versions don't show evidence of direct competition with phones, this isn't an issue at launch.
How To Cripple Digital Books With DRM
Late last year, I checked out a book from my local library without leaving home. I got an email that the book I had placed on hold was ready, and I followed the links to check it out. After installing some Adobe software, I was able to download the book and read it on my computer screen.
The prospect of digital access to a whole book was initially very interesting: suppose I lost my place and wanted to find it. Could I search by some quote I remembered? What if I forgot some detail from an earlier chapter – could I search for the appearance of a certain character by name or description? If I wanted to make a block quote for a book review, could I copy and paste without spending time re-typing the text?
Nope. Well, not with Adobe's tool or by respecting Adobe's DRM. Worse, Adobe's DRM doesn't support accessibility tools like screen readers or Braille output any more than it supports the plausible and ordinary uses of academics to copy and quote text under traditional fair use precepts.
Apple is offering not just major publishers' books, but textbooks. Will this do for the iPad what educational offerings on iTunes did for iPhone in education?
As with music, Apple has an opportunity to re-invent digital rights for users. Rather than hard lockdown of content รก la WMA (which is so draconian that instead of getting articles about the limits when you Google for them, you get links about converting files out of WMA or avoiding the format altogether), Apple offered fairly lenient restrictions on music use (all the iPods you cared to sync, and up to five simultaneous computers). Will Apple allow users to search textbooks for the names of theorems, or force you to look in the index then flip – as in a physical book – to the listed page? Some of this is, of course, dependent on what content owners allow Apple to offer ... but Apple has an opportunity to exert leverage. The utility of allowing Spotlight to help you hunt through your library to find all the books that relate to radiography or spectral analysis, or nuclear chemistry, or thorems governing limits would suddenly make all the content one buys more valuable on Apple's store, because it could be accessed faster. Time saved finding quotes in classic works, locating passages from books whose bookmarks were moved by your roommate, and the like is time you can spend polishing your papers into an A. Search, copy, paste, and the like is a huge win for academic users if available.
If not available, it's a crucial loss. The iPad won't run applications side-by-side, so your prospect of reading from one application and typing into another, as with a wide-screened iMac, is nil. Either you can copy and paste, or you can't make verbatim quotes without printing to paper or developing photographic memory. Hey, maybe MacMillan expects you to have two iPads when referring to its texts while writing a paper.
We don't yet know the digital rights limits users will face, but their extent will be a crucial feature that will impact the value of the content sold for Apple's device. Adobe blew it, and won't ever sell me a book (though I might check non-reference "fun" fiction out for free). Here's hoping Apple manages to offer better.
If Apple makes textbooks easier to carry, easier to search, and easier to quote and cite in students' papers, Apple will have a hands-down winner on its hands – a platform to which content producers will fight to offer works because it's so highly in demand by users. Imagine carrying a whole semester's books in the same 1.5lb package you use for email. It could be a winner.
The prospect of digital access to a whole book was initially very interesting: suppose I lost my place and wanted to find it. Could I search by some quote I remembered? What if I forgot some detail from an earlier chapter – could I search for the appearance of a certain character by name or description? If I wanted to make a block quote for a book review, could I copy and paste without spending time re-typing the text?
Nope. Well, not with Adobe's tool or by respecting Adobe's DRM. Worse, Adobe's DRM doesn't support accessibility tools like screen readers or Braille output any more than it supports the plausible and ordinary uses of academics to copy and quote text under traditional fair use precepts.
Apple is offering not just major publishers' books, but textbooks. Will this do for the iPad what educational offerings on iTunes did for iPhone in education?
As with music, Apple has an opportunity to re-invent digital rights for users. Rather than hard lockdown of content รก la WMA (which is so draconian that instead of getting articles about the limits when you Google for them, you get links about converting files out of WMA or avoiding the format altogether), Apple offered fairly lenient restrictions on music use (all the iPods you cared to sync, and up to five simultaneous computers). Will Apple allow users to search textbooks for the names of theorems, or force you to look in the index then flip – as in a physical book – to the listed page? Some of this is, of course, dependent on what content owners allow Apple to offer ... but Apple has an opportunity to exert leverage. The utility of allowing Spotlight to help you hunt through your library to find all the books that relate to radiography or spectral analysis, or nuclear chemistry, or thorems governing limits would suddenly make all the content one buys more valuable on Apple's store, because it could be accessed faster. Time saved finding quotes in classic works, locating passages from books whose bookmarks were moved by your roommate, and the like is time you can spend polishing your papers into an A. Search, copy, paste, and the like is a huge win for academic users if available.
If not available, it's a crucial loss. The iPad won't run applications side-by-side, so your prospect of reading from one application and typing into another, as with a wide-screened iMac, is nil. Either you can copy and paste, or you can't make verbatim quotes without printing to paper or developing photographic memory. Hey, maybe MacMillan expects you to have two iPads when referring to its texts while writing a paper.
We don't yet know the digital rights limits users will face, but their extent will be a crucial feature that will impact the value of the content sold for Apple's device. Adobe blew it, and won't ever sell me a book (though I might check non-reference "fun" fiction out for free). Here's hoping Apple manages to offer better.
If Apple makes textbooks easier to carry, easier to search, and easier to quote and cite in students' papers, Apple will have a hands-down winner on its hands – a platform to which content producers will fight to offer works because it's so highly in demand by users. Imagine carrying a whole semester's books in the same 1.5lb package you use for email. It could be a winner.
HTML v Flash
Religious war brewing?
Although Flash certainly is the feature-rich favorite for immediate deployment of complex video/graphical interface content to the web – and due in part to Microsoft's current non-support of HTML5 is the only alternative for truly broad video playback capability – this is the present and not the future.
Microsoft's Explorer team now participates in efforts to improve developing HTML5 standards (since it can't rely on Silverlight to beat Flash, and would prefer HTML5 to another vendor stealing developers to a competing platform). Presumably Microsoft's IE9 improvements will include an effort to rejoin the lead echelon of modern browser experience in offering standards that, not incidentally, will reduce developers' dependence on competing proprietary development tools like Adobe's Creative Suite.
Meanwhile, HTML5 promises to allow vector graphics, video rendering, and all kinds of other things Flash used to be required to do – all without plug-ins.
Adobe arguably can get this developer business, too ... but my own experience with Adobe products poisons me on the idea. Years ago, I hand-coded a page full of resources for people doing research in a specialized professional field and included numerous places one could get information – different government agencies, universities, etc. – and with these provided everything one wanted from links to the online resources available there to links to maps for getting to the physical locations for examining paper-only resources, links to hours and campus maps for finding buildings once one was present, and institutional logos so users could quickly spot the institution they wanted if they already knew what they were hunting for. All this was provided in a table that made it easy to tell what type of content you wold get from a clicked link, based on the horizontal location of the link. Some "web designer" at the institution for which I created this little gem was in the habit of examining contents of the various folders on the server she ran by double-clicking the files – an act that, on her computer, opened the page in an Adobe HTML editor. Then, she would fool with it. Not much – she'd try to move a column in the table, for example, then see it didn't help and put it back – and sometimes not at all; yet, she was in the habit of always saving every document before closing it.
My page – which had been carefully tested to be usable on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the MacOS 9 browser iCab, Opera, the Firefox predecessor Netscape Navigator, and every other browser I could get my hands on – was continuously broken. Every time she saved it with her Adobe HTML-editing tool, something happened to the page based on her preferences in her editor (e.g., the color changed unaccountably) or based on some little tweak Adobe didn't bother to code to work across browsers, or simply because Adobe's editor wasn't designed to work everywhere, just on browsers Adobe engineers used. No matter how often I replaced the page with an undestroyed version, she managed to screw it up with her Adobe tool for no reason at all. Moreover, she was utterly oblivious to the fact she broke it: "I didn't change a thing," she would say. Yet as soon as I replaced it with my version, it would work everyplace. This circumstance just never lasted.
Eventually I tired of the Sisyphean task of pushing the page back into cross-browser utility, and when I left the institution nobody bothered to maintain it. Why should they? Any browser they used to open it invariably revealed a horribly broken mess of which users could make no sense. Why waste time with tripe like that? It disappeared shortly after the institution "lost" the web designer who broke it; her replacement (justifiably) discarded it as unmaintained, broken garbage.
So, what's the future of Adobe? Who cares!
The future of HTML5 looks solid, as all the major browser manufacturers are working together to make an unambiguous standard that will allow write-once development for any compatible browser. The range of issues to be addressed by HTML5 and other incoming standards seem fairly broad: video playback, 2D animation (WhatWG's work on Canvas), scalable vector graphics, mathematical markup, user-side database storage, 3D (e.g. WebGL), and a host of things that Flash might have been used to accomplish in the past but can be handled more elegantly, and in a way better matched to the rest of a given system's user interface, by careful implementation of standards-based content interpreters on the platform of a user's choice.
Adobe promises to update Flash, to make it a moving target. Of course, if it moves too fast its developers may not be able to follow.
Let's hear it for the future, and open standards.
Although Flash certainly is the feature-rich favorite for immediate deployment of complex video/graphical interface content to the web – and due in part to Microsoft's current non-support of HTML5 is the only alternative for truly broad video playback capability – this is the present and not the future.
Microsoft's Explorer team now participates in efforts to improve developing HTML5 standards (since it can't rely on Silverlight to beat Flash, and would prefer HTML5 to another vendor stealing developers to a competing platform). Presumably Microsoft's IE9 improvements will include an effort to rejoin the lead echelon of modern browser experience in offering standards that, not incidentally, will reduce developers' dependence on competing proprietary development tools like Adobe's Creative Suite.
Meanwhile, HTML5 promises to allow vector graphics, video rendering, and all kinds of other things Flash used to be required to do – all without plug-ins.
Adobe arguably can get this developer business, too ... but my own experience with Adobe products poisons me on the idea. Years ago, I hand-coded a page full of resources for people doing research in a specialized professional field and included numerous places one could get information – different government agencies, universities, etc. – and with these provided everything one wanted from links to the online resources available there to links to maps for getting to the physical locations for examining paper-only resources, links to hours and campus maps for finding buildings once one was present, and institutional logos so users could quickly spot the institution they wanted if they already knew what they were hunting for. All this was provided in a table that made it easy to tell what type of content you wold get from a clicked link, based on the horizontal location of the link. Some "web designer" at the institution for which I created this little gem was in the habit of examining contents of the various folders on the server she ran by double-clicking the files – an act that, on her computer, opened the page in an Adobe HTML editor. Then, she would fool with it. Not much – she'd try to move a column in the table, for example, then see it didn't help and put it back – and sometimes not at all; yet, she was in the habit of always saving every document before closing it.
My page – which had been carefully tested to be usable on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the MacOS 9 browser iCab, Opera, the Firefox predecessor Netscape Navigator, and every other browser I could get my hands on – was continuously broken. Every time she saved it with her Adobe HTML-editing tool, something happened to the page based on her preferences in her editor (e.g., the color changed unaccountably) or based on some little tweak Adobe didn't bother to code to work across browsers, or simply because Adobe's editor wasn't designed to work everywhere, just on browsers Adobe engineers used. No matter how often I replaced the page with an undestroyed version, she managed to screw it up with her Adobe tool for no reason at all. Moreover, she was utterly oblivious to the fact she broke it: "I didn't change a thing," she would say. Yet as soon as I replaced it with my version, it would work everyplace. This circumstance just never lasted.
Eventually I tired of the Sisyphean task of pushing the page back into cross-browser utility, and when I left the institution nobody bothered to maintain it. Why should they? Any browser they used to open it invariably revealed a horribly broken mess of which users could make no sense. Why waste time with tripe like that? It disappeared shortly after the institution "lost" the web designer who broke it; her replacement (justifiably) discarded it as unmaintained, broken garbage.
So, what's the future of Adobe? Who cares!
The future of HTML5 looks solid, as all the major browser manufacturers are working together to make an unambiguous standard that will allow write-once development for any compatible browser. The range of issues to be addressed by HTML5 and other incoming standards seem fairly broad: video playback, 2D animation (WhatWG's work on Canvas), scalable vector graphics, mathematical markup, user-side database storage, 3D (e.g. WebGL), and a host of things that Flash might have been used to accomplish in the past but can be handled more elegantly, and in a way better matched to the rest of a given system's user interface, by careful implementation of standards-based content interpreters on the platform of a user's choice.
Adobe promises to update Flash, to make it a moving target. Of course, if it moves too fast its developers may not be able to follow.
Let's hear it for the future, and open standards.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Why Vapid Soundbites Beat Analysis
This article paints a pessimistic view of the worried world's likelihood to embrace reason when the alternative rhymes.
The good news? People who are comfortable and unafraid may be fully capable of seeking out and enduring unfamiliar experiences, thoughts, and mental exercises – even if just for fun.
Does progress depend on happy people? The pessimists – who claim, if you ask, to be the only ones capable of seeing the truth – would revolt at the thought. But then, are pessimists about progress, or about merely avoiding regress? Pessimists have a valuable place in society – warning us against mass-suicide, for example – but theirs is not the job of building the future.
The future belongs, perhaps, to those who refuse to accept that "easy = true" and are willing to suffer to learn what is true. The question is whether anyone will be willing to join them in this future, or if these few, this band of brothers, will be left alone in the land into which they venture.
The good news? People who are comfortable and unafraid may be fully capable of seeking out and enduring unfamiliar experiences, thoughts, and mental exercises – even if just for fun.
Does progress depend on happy people? The pessimists – who claim, if you ask, to be the only ones capable of seeing the truth – would revolt at the thought. But then, are pessimists about progress, or about merely avoiding regress? Pessimists have a valuable place in society – warning us against mass-suicide, for example – but theirs is not the job of building the future.
The future belongs, perhaps, to those who refuse to accept that "easy = true" and are willing to suffer to learn what is true. The question is whether anyone will be willing to join them in this future, or if these few, this band of brothers, will be left alone in the land into which they venture.
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