Apple – free as in speech; Google – free as in beer

by DeusXFlorida

Google’s Android is not about creating a great mobile platform or devices
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Google is building Android not so they can make great mobile devices and sell them to consumers,” Kyle Baxter writes for TightWind. “Rather, they are making them for these two simple reasons: (1) to disrupt Apple’s growing dominance of mobile devices, both so Google doesn’t have to rely on Apple for access to their users and to eliminate their paid-for application model; and (2) so Google can control the mobile industry and thus secure advertising from it.”

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More on the report I discussed earlier. Google wants everything to be free and only supported by ads. That is how it makes its money. So it will create environments where ads are the ONLY way for developers to make money. They have little or no say over the worth of their product – Google gets to set the rates and determine what the apps are ‘worth.’ To recoup development costs, software engineers will be totally beholden to Google’s rates for ads.

That is where Google’s ‘free’ approach is moving towards.

Google’s approach neither services their users nor developers in ways that provide much freedom for either. Users get software for free but have to put up with ads. The developers then have no choice but to use ads to support their work but not in a way that really allows them to use a free market to determine price. They are stuck with whatever Google decides to pay for ad-cicks. They will not be able to lower prices to increase sales. The only way to increase revenue is to get Google to raise ad rates.

Google maintains complete control over all transactions that are allowed to occur.

On the iOS store, the developers are free to determine price and the user is free to decide how much they want to pay. There are free, light versions of software that may be ad-driven. There are also versions that cost money but have added benefits, such as no ads. The developers are free to have sales, where they lower prices and are able to judge where to set the price. They can increase sales by lowering the price.

The market place eventually finds the proper place based on interactions between the seller and the buyer. It is a true bazaar where Apple only takes a cut of the transaction but really does not care how the transaction is made. It acts simply as a broker, not as an integral part of the course of the transactions.

In Google’s world, they want to control all of the transactions, driving them all through its ads filter so it can make money. Direct interaction between seller and buyer is increasingly discouraged.

This explains why Google is fine with getting in bed with big media to cripple net neutrality. It really does not care about open access. It cares about eyeballs and if Verizon or Comcast can deliver more eyeballs, that is the direction it will try and head. It needs controlled access through its ad-prism in order to survive. As long as it controls the eyeballs, it makes money.

There is irony in the fact that the walled community Apple has created may be a more open market that better services both developer and customer than Google’s community built on more open standards. It demonstrates that Open Software does require that the resulting marketplaces are free – free as in freedom, not beer. Libre vs. Gratis.

Google gives us free software (gratis) but with restrictions that both users and developers have little control over. Apple gives us software that we are free (libre) to buy or not, without outside restrictions on the transactions.

The world is more complex than many people want it to be. I would rather live in a world where the market place is free (libre) hosted by a broker who simply gets paid based upon the transactions that freely occur than where the market place is free (gratis) but controlled by an organization with its own, divergent needs.

Goggle uses the same basic model as TV and newsprint – eyeballs

by Maggiejumps

All About the Ads
[Via Daring Fireball]

Kyle Baxter on Google’s motivations for Android:

Google isn’t a web application company—they’re an advertising company. That’s what they do best, and that’s what drives their company. Of Google’s $23.6 billion of revenue in 2009, all but $760 million of it was derived from advertising, and nearly 70 percent of it was from Google’s own websites.

Everything Google does must be understood within this context.

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It is all about eyeballs. The customers of broadcast TV or news media are not those that peruse the content. Their customers are the organizations that advertise on those media. Those are the ones they service and the service is eyeballs for the ads.

Anything that drives eyeballs is what will be used, even if it does not serve the purposes of the users.

Now Google has done a better job of trying to keep the needs of the consumers and the needs of advertisers congruent but if they diverge, as they often do with other media, then Google will have to follow the path of the advertisers. That is where the money is.

So, if the advertisers, say book publishers, demand access to your email etc. in order to allow Google to sell books, Google may just have to do that. I’m sure they will ut up a fight but eventually, the need to service their real customers will create a conflict with those using their devices.

This is one reason so many media outlets are having problems – their need for capital now outweighs any real duty to the readers. Simply doing things that drive eyeballs is what they all attempt to do these days. At least those beholden to ads.

In contrast, the only people Apple really needs to service are those that buy their wares. There are really no other groups acting to push Apple away from that path.

Why some science reports should be taken with a grain of salt

The new phrenology [Pharyngula]
[Via Pharyngula]

Morphological variation is important, it’s interesting…and it’s also common. It’s one of my major scientific interests — I’m actually beginning a new research project this spring with a student and I doing some pilot experiments to evaluate variation in wild populations here in western Minnesota, so I’m even putting my research time where my mouth is in this case. There has been some wonderful prior work in this area: I’ll just mention a paper by Shubin, Wake, and Crawford from 1995 that examined limb skeletal morphology in a population of newts, and found notable variation in the wrist elements — only about 70% had the canonical organization of limb bones.

I’ve also mentioned the fascinating variation in the morphology of the human aorta. Anatomy textbooks lay out the most common patterns, but anyone who has taught the subject knows that once you start dissecting, you always find surprises, and that’s OK: variation is the raw material of evolution, so it’s what we expect.

The interesting part is trying to figure out what causes these differences in populations. We can sort explanations into three major categories.

1. Genetic variation. It may be the the reason different morphs are found is that they carry different alleles for traits that influence the developmental processes that build features of the organism. Consider family resemblances, for instance: your nose or chin might be a recognizable family trait that you’ve inherited from one of your parents, and may pass on to your children.

2. Environmental variation. The specific pattern of expression of some features may be modified by environmental factors. In larval zebrafish, for instance, the final number of somites varies to a small degree, and can be biased by the temperature at which they are raised. They’re also susceptible to heat shock, which can generate segmentation abnormalities.

3. Developmental noise. Sometimes, maybe often, the specific details of formation of a structure may not be precisely determined — they wobble a bit. The limb variation Shubin and others saw, for example, was almost entirely asymmetric, so it’s not likely to have been either genetic or environmental. They were just a consequence of common micro-accidents that almost certainly had no significant effect on limb function.

When I see variation, the first question that pops into my head is which of the above three categories it falls into. The second question is usually whether the variation does anything — while some may have consequences on physiology or movement or sexual attractiveness, for instance, others may really be entirely neutral, representing equivalent functional alternatives. Those are the interesting questions that begin inquiry; observing variation is just a starting point for asking good questions about causes and effects, if any.

I bring up this subject as a roundabout introduction to why I find myself extremely peeved by a recent bit of nonsense in the press: the claim that liberal and conservative brains have a different organization, with conservatives having larger amygdalas (“associated with anxiety and emotions”) and liberals having a larger anterior cingulate (“associated with courage and looking on the bright side of life”).

Gag.

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This leads into a wonderful examination detailing why this report not only does not really answer any interesting questions but also has many aspects that make any scientist skeptical of the reported results. I wrote about some of these aspects yesterday but this report has several that are more worrisome.

The paper has not even come out and no one knows which journal it will be in. You can almost bet that any science research that is reported by press release and the media before it has been seen by other scientists will be hyped to an extreme. Just look to the recent ‘arsenic-life form’ discussion. Lots of scientists spent a lot of time debunking much of the media reports of that work.

And that was for a paper that had been published in a prestigious journal. Here we have a report that has not seen the light of day, that no one has seen any real data for and that could simply be an outlier that will disappear when examined in greater detail.

As an example, scientists say something is statistically significant if there is less than a 1 in 20 chance it could happen by random. But, if you look at 30 different things – fishing for a difference – then even a 1 in 20 chance becomes possible, purely through random chance. Here is an easy way to visualize it.

Say a lottery has a 1 in 7 million chance of winning. This is because there are 7 million possible number combinations. Very small odds. But if you bought 7 million tickets – that is, you go fishing – you will definitely find a winning ticket. That does not mean anything. It is still random. You just looked long enough and did enough fishing to find some thing.

This may be what is going on here. We don;t really know because we have not seen the data.

So, do not trust this yet because the paper has not been published, we have only seen media reports and there has not been the necessary vetting of the work. Finally, publishing this sort of ‘data’ without any sort of understanding of why, except for some sort of handwaving, means that it should be taken with very little salt.

Data without an underpinning model that can be examined further does us little good in understanding the world around us. And, as often happens, that data becomes worthless under further scrutiny. Give us data and a model that permits greater exploration, vetting and possible destruction. That is what scientists do.

Publicity hounds publish data in the media before publishing it in a journal.

In just 2 days, a paradigm shift in computer applications

by Micky.!

Mac App Store developers aim for low prices, high volume
[Via AppleInsider]

With Apple’s Mac App Store scheduled to open in just two days, developers are reporting enthusiasm and cautious optimism, hoping to repeat the success of the iOS app market for iPhone and iPad.

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When the Mac App Store opens we will see something unique – computer programs developed independently in two different computing ecosystems competing against one another in the same ecosystem. In one, years may have been spent corralling 10s of developers to create monolithic software that sells for $50-$100.

In the other, a handful of developers have spent months creating a simple, focussed app that sells for less than $5.

One has update and new release timelines of years. The other updates almost monthly.

Bad for some company’s business plans but a wonderful opportunity for others. Whole new economies can be developed in weeks. The makers of large, expensive software suites may be in for a real shakeup.

It will be a wonderful time for the customer who gets to see just what competition creates in the software business. This is where the entrepreneurial spirit hits the innovative home runs.

The dinosaurs will be routed and only those that can adapt will survive.

And no other computing environment can do this, not Microsoft nor Google. Each has developed operating systems that keep these two ecosystems separate, going on their own paths. Fragmentation means that Windows on a laptop uses different software than Windows on a phone or tablet. Same with Google.

Only Apple will have App stores based on relatively similar OSes that permit developers for mobile devices to also sell the same software for laptops, with less than a month’s work.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Google have not delineated any path for developers to create apps for the phone that can also be sold for tablets, laptops and desktops. Each is still a separate ecosystem for them. So any innovation in one ecosystem is not easily transferable to any other.

Meanwhile we may shortly see something like Angry Birds available for any type of computer Apple makes. Or maybe a single presentation program across all the different devices that seamlessly moves content between them.

It will be as big a paradigm shift for software applications as the original App store for the iPhone was for mobile apps. Ansd I do not see Microsoft or Google getting anything similar soon.