The Digital Lumberjack

No matter how much you hate it or love it (or both), Apple is one of the most amazing companies out there. Even most amazing still is how its greatest achievements are completely ignored. Of course they are the ones selling iPhones, iPads, MacBooks and making megabucks out of them, but it is not the most amazing thing they have made.

The first and foremost complaint about its products is how overpriced they are. Many people keep away from them as a strategy to preserve their sanity and reproach Apple fanboys of being victims of some form of Stockholm Syndrome. Actually they are absolutely right, for that price Apple hardware is awfully overpriced, but why is everybody so obsessed with the belief that they are paying for hardware?

Most people have doubts about this world sanity whenever they look at the price of an iPhone and grasp a minimum understanding of its current market share. Most of my engineer pals are complaining all the time that a camera, a chip, a gps and a touchscreen packed together is not that much money at all. They are also completely right.

Out there many companies such as Nokia mocked Apple. "Are they crazy? Do they believe they can make phones now?". That was their reaction for a long time. Most likely they also thought something like: "I am going to pack this super camera, this super processor, this supper screen... and beat the hell out of Apple" and that is exactly what Nokia and others did. What could possible have gone wrong? Are the consumers becoming idiots? What is wrong with them?

There are many reasons to explain what happened. From a sociological point of view, one of our greatest human needs is the feeling of identity. For many centuries that was the feeling of patriotism and religion. Now people find that boring, they might not even be religious because being atheist is more fashion. Today brand loyalty, fashion and sport teams cover that deep desire of belonging to something. They have proven also to be much more profitable than religion for a wider margin of individuals. Except for satanical sects, there is already a long established monopoly of religions.

There is however one recurring mistake from an engineering point of view that many big companies still make. It is something that was defined almost one century ago. It is only happening now, but is so recent and new that there is no concious awareness of it. I am talking about ignoring the effects of ephemeralization.

In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software (...) The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force.

Paul Graham in Tablets

Most people have an old conception of engineering products. They expect products to evolve in a physical way. Something you can touch, feel and measure. A car for example, is expected to evolve with a more efficient engine, having lighter but more resistant materials, being faster... but just like many other engineering products, there is a limit after which physical evolution does not affect usability that much.

I personally do not own a car, maybe some people smarter than I am might favor some brands, but the most important thing I would value from a car is having a GPS navigator. That is exactly a functional feature. For me and probably most people, any car cover the minimum material and physical qualities I demand.

Now imagine that all GPS devices can only work when placed inside one specific car brand. How do you think the streets of your city would look like? It sounds like an stupid idea, but something similar is happening now with that software patent mess going around, specially the tablets industry.

Still today the reaction of most Apple competitors is trying to release cheaper and more powerful products. Indeed Nokia and Samsung do have far more capable hardware. Their struggle for surviving proves the ephemeralization of cell phones. People already have the minimum hardware they need from any company. Their choice is made now on what they can do with it, and that is mostly provided by software.

So far most people using computers cared most for raw power. They wanted a solution that could open their word processor or web browser and not waiting for the cursor to move. Hardware during this time was quite expensive and what many people wanted could cost very well more than two months of salary. That was not a time when you cared that much for software. Hence everybody have this strong hardware-price connection in their minds.

All this time Apple has been more of a luxury product. There is something called software that they do really well, and doing it well is not only expensive, it also decides the overall user experience. It is hard to convince people of this when you have a market hungry for RAM, CPU speed, graphics card and all that hardware... until now.

People find awfully difficult the idea of paying big money for something you cannot touch. Apple marketing strategy was so far building amazing software and packing it into an expensive brand and overpriced hardware. Did you ever wonder why Apple tried so hard to bind their software to their hardware? That way the could transfer huge amounts of money to their software department and deceive the world as a hardware selling company.

During most of its life, Apple was more successful with professionals who benefited the most with the productivity increase, such as musicians and graphics designers. It was easier to lure this people with a lovely design and a standardised set of tools for their activities. Now that hardware is so cheap, Apple is testing their biggest deception strategy with a broader consumer market, and indeed, many high-end users are feeling that their Macs do not show that huge gap they had before. Obviously, it is far more profitable selling to the masses than to a reduced set of people.

No matter how much I admire Jonathan Ive for his designs, I do believe that the software will be the main engine of our products during many years. Maybe this was already obvious, but with the arrival of tablets the ephemeralization of many things will speed up. Your car might need already more than 100 million lines of code, that navigator is going to be integrated into your phone, and so many other devices. I as a software engineer, for sure will enjoy the ride.

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