Alex Muir

I have decided to give myself a longer life for Christmas. So from now on I’ll be up at 6am and I am going to try to write a post every day.

My main inspiration is Fred Wilson. He writes every day at about 5am and what he writes is consistently incisive and to the point. There’s cause and effect there - writing every day for years has improved his writing, and also his mind and understanding. So I’ll be doing that.

I will import my old Wordpress blog into here at some point and those posts will appear earlier. But this is the start

I’m in France. I’ve been off the beaten track a bit - towards the border with Belgium. Today I looked at the rows of tablets for sale in a provincial supermarket. Has ‘tablet’ as in electronic device replaced ‘tablet’ as in pill in our general vocabulary yet?. Anyway, there were at least 12, of various sizes. Samsung and Asus were dominating there. Now of course they were all rounded rectangles with a black surround and usually some kind of metallic bezel. I couldn’t really pick them apart, and I had to look hard to be sure that the iPad wasn’t hidden amongst them. It wasn’t.

Now, I wondered, why would I encounter the biggest selection of tablets I’ve ever seen at a supermarket in Saint Quentin? Obviously they are profitable to sell.

“WHO THE FUCK BUYS THESE?” I raged. They were virtually all priced at €399 or higher. Basically iPad money. But what else are customers going to buy? There’s no iPad to be found. Now of that €399, I reckon €100 is going to the supermarket - maybe more. That’s why they’re giving up valuable baguette space. And so I made the leap from patent-infringing rectangles to distribution channels.

Here’s what I realised - the patent lawsuits aren’t about Apple keeping the Galaxy Tab out of Best Buy in San Francisco. Or PC World in the UK. It’s the vast, vast majority of the world that’s beyond driving distance to an Apple store that they are worried about. The places where Apple don’t ship. The people who don’t shop online. The patents are being used as a weapon because Apple’s direct retail model isn’t delivering the mass-market share that they need.

Don’t forget, the iPhone was sold using network operators. But the iPad doesn’t have much network support - and when you get 100 miles from an Apple store it starts to look mighty tempting to buy that identical looking tablet, even if it’s the same price. And look at what tablets have become - stepping stone devices onto the internet. By default their target market isn’t going to be ordering and comparing prices online.

So what does that mean? Apple are using their patents to try to slow down the sales of competing devices. But this can only ever be a temporary measure. In the long term they need to either: drop prices to prevent Samsung offering €100 margins to retailers, massively expand the Apple stores presence, or start giving giving retailers a similar margin to Samsung.

As a shareholder I don’t like any of these options. As a customer I prefer reduced prices.

There’s talk of bubbles. Of bubbles bursting.

But I feel like we’re in an innovation lull. The dominant themes of the last five years or so have matured and I don’t see an obvious successor for the next few years.

Mobile

Let’s note immediately that I am talking about the developed world here. Smartphones have been heavily adopted, but are still underutilised. By that I mean that most people now have them, but many people are not actually employing smart capabilites. I’d argue that this is partly because many people don’t need those capabilities - they want to use Facebook, send messages, listen to music, take pictures, look at maps and perhaps play the odd casual game. All these are done and done - available on all the brands and virtually perfected on Android and iOS.

It’s what we haven’t seen that alarms me. Mobile games are still casual puzzlers, $0.99 originals or $4.99 ports of existing franchises. Where are the immersive games? The new franchises? So far launching 2D birds across the screen is the best that’s been achieved - in FIVE YEARS.

And on the hardware side, I don’t expect much. A bigger screen, a thinner phone, longer battery life. Dull dull dull. I sat eating my lunch outside an Apple reseller yesterday - the poster in the window said ‘The new iPhone 4S - Dual Core A5 processor, 8M pixel camera’. Well if the best hook it has is some processor gobbledegook then we’re close to flattening out on innovation. I don’t expect the iPhone 5 to be game-changing in any respect.

Social

Facebook’s won for now. Twitter is plodding along. While both have performed phenomenally in terms of user adoption, neither is delivering the sort of financial returns that the markets want. But more worryingly, there’s nothing exciting coming from them. FB apps, credits and the open graph are moderately successful, but again, they are iterations rather than revolutions. The idea of people taking their social network with them across websites has failed to bear fruit - we just aren’t sharing enough.

Cloud

This one has a bit of distance to go. Dropbox has pushed the concept of cloud into the consumer mainstream - and monetized it. Google Docs is increasingly being adopted - despite Google’s lack of any innovation on that product for years. Chrome OS has gone nowhere. The concept of thin-clients hasn’t really worked out.

What's next?

I think mobile and social are complete and fully adopted. Cloud has a good foundation and is now ticking up in terms of usage.

The living room - I’ve said it before and I’ll say it once again… There is a MASSIVE market for a device that bridges a TV, console and media centre. Ouya has proven there’s still the demand for gaming in the living room. Visitors are still blown away by a simple XBMC setup at my house. “Where can we buy that?” they ask, reaching for their wallets. “You can’t, unless you’re a jailbreaking, command-lining fucking ubergimp.”

I’m not sure what else. Education and publishing seem fairly ripe for the pot. And I think Google can be challenged on an enormous number of fronts - I don’t know what the fuck they are doing, but Gmail, Docs, Maps, Local Business - all completely static for multiple years.

This is a list of things that I consider certainties.

• Music will be free to download and listen.  Of all the media, music has the easiest way to transition to the digital landscape. Money from live performances, endorsement and general fame.
• Textbooks are gone. Trashy paperbacks will probably still be around.
• Broadcast TV will effectively cease to exist for all but live events.  All other visual content will be streamed on demand.
• AirBnB is going to morph into every other accommodation brokering site. They will deal with their first tenant/host murder in the coming few years.
• The internet is going to pose a serious threat to the established political system. Politicians whose livelihoods and power are threatened by this will act in their self-interest, but disguised as the national interest.

Wetherspoons is a chain of over 800 pubs in the UK. They are functional pubs - beer on tap, deep patterned carpets, not too brightly lit.

Rather than base myself in the endless coffee shops, I’ll often be working out of a Wetherspoons. I’m usually here in the afternoon, although sometimes arrive as early as 10am.

Some of my most productive times have been at Wetherspoons. I once worked three months of 9-5 shifts in a ‘spoons in Slough. I produced Insolvency News, which I later sold.

Here’s why I love it:

A seat, at a proper table, with little passing traffic

I tuck myself into a corner. I get a normal chair, and an incredibly heavy table. I find that coffee shops are too transitory for me - people come and go in five minutes. The tables are wimpy and tiny. The chairs are not comfortable - and it’s understandable; they don’t actually want people sitting there.

Here in Wetherspoons, people tend to stay for at least an hour.

No kids

No screaming babies, no au pairs on an outing with badly behaved little shits who need a good spanking.

Low risk

Wetherspoons is very much downmarket compared with Starbucks, and most other pub companies.  They have a mix of clientele, but their daytime core is men aged 40+, generally drinking on their own. These are not likely to pick my pocket or snatch my laptop.  These are also big places, full of obstructions and rough and ready men.  I wouldn’t fancy a snatcher’s chance at getting out with my laptop, certainly not compared with the office staff prancing around Pret.

It’s also not a place with rich pickings.  There are dozens of nice laptops and thick wallets in coffee shops - I’m usually the only one in here.  This place is not targeted.

Wi-fi

Free. Reliable. No hassles.

The downsides

• Lonely old boozers who are desperate to talk to anyone about anything.
• People who stink.

Both of the above like to stay near the bar - they don’t seem to make it up stairs very often.