one way Apple could respond to the e-book judgement

Assuming they don't win a reversal of the e-book judgement on appeal, Apple still has options.

One option would be for them to move the preponderance of the code in the iBooks app into iOS and OSX, making it available through a new high-level API, so publishers could easily build their own apps based on the Apple code, providing a relatively uniform experience for users, and an opportunity for Apple to incorporate indexes to the collections in these other apps into its own iBooks app, or into a new utility that treated iBooks as just another instance of the category.

Presumably Amazon would also take advantage of this code to build their own iOS/OSX reader.

As for sales, besides the iBooks Store, Apple could offer to host, for a nominal fee, publisher-specific stores that worked with the apps based on Apple's iBooks code and used Apple's payment system, as well as allowing those apps to work with non-hosted stores.

The advantage to Apple is that it would make it possible for them to make their platforms clearly superior for e-book reading, through API improvements that would improve the behavior of all apps based on that API, including Amazon's, giving publishers an even better reason than they already have to be on Apple's platforms.

Smaller publishers and independent authors would still choose the iBooks Store. Medium-sized publishers might opt for their own stores, hosted by Apple. The largest publishers would most likely prefer to host their own stores in-house, but still take advantage of Apple's e-reader code.

While it's unlikely those opting for publisher-specific stores would agree to Apple's usual 30% cut, Apple could set a lower commission for hosted stores, say 20%, and a still-lower commission for independent stores, say 10%, and continue to garner revenue from the e-book business.

How Apple could monitor sales via independent stores and collect their 10% isn't clear to me, but I'm fairly confident they could find a way of doing so, and by making this their standard approach to the business they could at least put Amazon in the position of having to choose between coughing up 10% of sales or doing without access to the API that enabled a uniform reading experience.

two wrongs don't make a right, but some wrongs are more dangerous than others

Cult of Mac has published a thoughtful piece about the e-book antitrust case against Apple and a collection of publishers with whom Apple was working to build its iBook Store business, in which they link to another thoughtful piece, published by FORTUNE.

The FORTUNE article asks one very poignant question, “Why the Justice Department chose to prosecute the new entrant in the e-book market, and not the monopolist.”

To me it looks like the DoJ chose the safer target. With all of the patent litigation in which it is embroiled, Apple's star is already tarnished. Also, the notion that there might be something illegal about raising prices (conspiring to do so, actually) is likely to play well with the public.

Everything else being equal, lower prices are generally in the public interest. I say 'generally' because there are exceptions. Too low a price on gasoline, for example, would forestall development of alternatives to the internal combustion engine until the last drop of petroleum had been pumped from the ground.

In the case of e-books, the logic is a little different. Let's start by examining the costs involved in publishing books on paper. First there's the compensation to the author, without which many books would never be written. It's not that authors are greedy, but that they need to be able to treat writing as a full-time job to get anything done. They need to be able to live off the proceeds of their writing. Some manage a comfortable living this way; more live on a shoestring.

Then there's the costs to the publisher, which include managerial overhead as well as editing, typography, graphics, and making sure all the legal ducks are lined up. Then come costs for printing, distribution, and publicity, frequently including author tours.

E-books replace the costs of printing and distribution with the negligible cost of a download, making it reasonable that they should be less expensive than the print versions of the same books, but how much less expensive? One could argue that since they seemingly reduce all incremental costs to that of the bandwidth used by downloads, there is no limit to how low the price can go, since the fixed costs can be spread over arbitrarily large sales figures. The flaw in that argument is that one incremental cost remains in the e-book scenario, market saturation, so price reductions will not necessarily result in a proportionally larger market.

The Amazon model is akin to a print distributor which has purchased the right to reproduce and sell some title, for a flat fee plus marginal royalties. The Apple model is like a distributor which charges a percentage of the retail price, paying for printing out of its cut. Neither of these is necessarily better or more appropriate than the other; they're just different.

The problem with Amazon's use of their model is that they have engaged in predatory pricing, sometimes selling e-books below their cost, with the result that they have very little competition.

The problem with Apple's model is that the publishers liked it so much that they wanted to force it on Amazon.

So DoJ hauls Apple into court, and orders it to change its model. Go figure.

Apple should get into the bus manufacturing business (for example)

Okay, maybe not bus manufacturing, but the point here is broader than that.

I've spent about a quarter century in the transit business, 14 years of that as a bus driver. I've driven vintage GMCs, Mercedes, and Carpenters, and new-at-the-time Blue Birds (they used to make transit buses) and Gilligs. That phase, driving, ended in 1997, but since then I've mostly gotten around by bus and bring that experience as a driver to the table in evaluating the buses I've been on as a rider.

To distill that experience into a single observation, it seems to me that bus manufacturers must have a difficult time hanging onto good engineers. (If you're an engineer, working for a bus manufacturer, how many resumes have you sent out in the last year?)

Bus manufacturers are primarily two things: they actually build the coaches or have them built to spec, possibly starting with a purchased frame, and they act as systems integrators, incorporating major components like engines and transmissions as well as minor components like signage and security systems, delivering it all as a package.

Each of these components may have troubles of its own, but in addition to that there are typically problems with the integration of components, and during the break-in period a good deal of debugging must be done before the buses are really ready for service.

In addition to the above, the underlying technology is on the cusp of change, with electric drive having become a practical, affordable alternative to mechanical drive, and rapid progress in battery and supercapacitor technology, as well as sensors, controllers, and electronics of all types. The list of potential improvements is practically endless, but the pace at which they are actually finding their way into each year's new models is embarrassingly slow.

This is a situation ripe for an Apple-style intervention, much as they intervened in the cellular industry with the iPhone, setting the bar higher for the industry as a whole.

It might be a bigger deviation from their core business than Apple would care to make, and there might be another company better positioned to step in, but that notion of intervention still applies.

For Apple such a move would have a profound effect on their brand, assuming they were to use "Apple" in this context. (Note that they don't with FileMaker, which is much closer to their core business.) Initially it would be incongruous, but over time people would come to think of Apple as an approach rather than as a product range, so it might actually be beneficial. Moreover, it would be bold, and people admire boldness.

With respect to Apple, the real point here is that one shouldn't count out the possibility of them doing something as surprising as getting into bus manufacturing, because it isn't a safe assumption that they won't, and the sluggards in whatever industry they do move into had better sharpen up their game if they don't want to be left in the dust.

society (a.k.a. government) has an obligation to ensure necessary basic research

Society has an obligation to ensure necessary research for which there is no profit motive, or for which the profit motive acts to distort the outcome of the research. Note that I did not say an obligation to fund such research, although that will frequently be the only way to make sure it happens.

In some cases, of course, such as research into MS or cancer, government needn't foot the entire bill, since private donations are significant, but for basic science where it isn't yet known whether any practical application might result, and especially for the investigation of potential collateral effects of developments which have moved into the realm of privately funded applied research, the onus is upon government to take the initiative, in the latter case because companies which stand to profit from the deployment of novel products cannot be trusted to investigate whether that deployment should be allowed.

Take, for instance, the effects of neonicotinoids on bees. How much can you trust studies saying that such concerns are overblown, when those studies have been paid for by the companies which profit from the sale of neonicotinoid-based products.

On the other hand, if the burden for such investigations into collateral effects were to fall entirely on government, that would leave no incentive for the companies involved to constrain their submissions to a likely few. Continuing with the chemical example, they might submit every compound they were able to synthesize and bog down the system to the point that there weren't enough qualified people on the planet to conduct the needed research. So at least some of that cost should be borne by those who stand to profit.

Moreover, it makes sense that the entire cost of determining whether a product should be allowed on the market should be paid for out of profits rather than taxes, so perhaps government should conduct whatever research is needed and then bill the company submitting the provisional product. To take this one step further, perhaps the payment of that bill should take the form of company stock, at market value, so the more often a company proposed a new product, necessitating a new round of research to assure the safety of that product, the more it would become publicly owned. In some cases, of course, the government could end up owning the company, since the cost of conducting the necessary research might exceed the company's market cap.

No doubt this would dramatically slow the introduction of new products to market, particularly in the chemical industry, and, at least in that case, that would be a welcome result. We need to be much more careful than we've been in the past with regard to what we introduce into our bodies and into the environment, taking the time to investigate collateral effects before allowing a new product onto the market.

Perhaps it is only in the chemical industry that such a process might be needed.

Larry Ellison displaying projected grief

Apple once pushed Steve Jobs out, and paid a steep price for doing so. More recently Steve Jobs was forced to resign as CEO by a terminal illness, leaving behind a team that understood and loved him. These situations are only superficially similar.

Larry Ellison, on the other hand, has never had to deal with life without Steve since first making his acquaintance, thirty-some years ago. It is understandable that he would want to attribute the success of Apple entirely to Steve Jobs, but in doing so he discounts the possibility that Steve may actually have managed to make himself unnecessary to that success, something he was clearly aiming for in his last few years.

Apple's continuing success is a tribute to Steve's foresight and understanding of the schlock-intolerant collaborative process, which he endeavored to infuse deeply into the way Apple works.

computing's present as the past's future

Apple innovation not stalled, just reconfiguring

It must be pretty hard to step in behind Steve Jobs and try to pick up where he left off. Try as he did to get his management team to focus on each other instead of on him, and despite his decision to step down from the position of CEO several months before his death, he remained the charismatic leader right up to his last breath, and his death left a large vacuum, an ‘implosion zone’ if you like, because those nearest him had to relearn how to get things done at Apple in his absence.

Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs, doesn't claim to be nor try to be (except maybe for the first year, when on stage), but he's a strong leader in his own right, with a deep understanding of how Apple came to be what it is today, having been there in charge of operations for very nearly the entire time since Jobs returned to the company and through most of the events that resulted in its turn-around. Moreover, he is well suited to the sort of team-building the company desperately needed in the wake of Jobs's death, and continues to need as older managers retire and new ones are promoted, hired, or brought in through acquisition.

The current pause in the stream of new products follows Jobs's last few months by two years, approximately one development cycle, so it shouldn't be a surprise, nor particularly disturbing given that all observers were then aware that the company was going through a very hard time.

If you take the date of Scott Forstall's removal from the equation as an indication of how long it took to get a new groove going, it's been about a year, and, again invoking the very rough two-year development cycle, we should begin to see the fruit of that in about another year. Projects that reach market before then will, most likely, have already been in the pipeline at the time that Tim Cook took over as CEO.

Phil Schiller's "can't innovate anymore, my ass!" comment right after showing off the new Mac Pro design at WWDC, should be taken not only as pride in that product but also as an expression of confidence that Apple's management team has found a new groove and that the new Mac Pro is just a hint of things to come.

Apple doesn't need a new charismatic leader to try (and inevitably fail) to take Steve Jobs's place; the memory of him is still too fresh and vivid for that. It needs a steady hand at the helm as it continues to reinvent itself and weather the various distractions and disruptions that have been strewn in its path. Tim Cook is the right man for the job. If you think you could do better, you're fooling yourself.

w/o FRAND, standards essential patents = license to steal

When an industry goes with a standard, all players in that industry are under heavy pressure to comply with it.

As the effort to settle on an important standard nears its conclusion, there'll frequently be a race among those in a position to do so to stake out claims to the technologies that are necessary to the implementation of that standard, combined with lobbying of the committee charged with shaping the standard to go with a version that makes use of their patented technologies essential.

This isn't supposed to be a windfall, nor a club that companies can use to beat down competitors through high royalties. On a per piece basis, the income a company has a right to expect from royalties on standards-essential patents is modest. It is only as that income is multiplied by millions of pieces that it amounts to something significant.

When companies forget that their patents were made valuable by the decision of a committee, choosing to use their technology instead of someone else's, they endanger the ability of companies in general to agree upon standards, and the royalties they demand amount to blackmail.

“Don't worry, we know what we're doing.”

Frankly, this assurance, the claim on the part of "experts" (those who are in the business) that they know what they're doing, is more often false than true, at least insofar as the implication is that they know all there is to know about the consequences of their beliefs, choices, and actions.

Which "experts" you ask. What business? It's an observation about people and the nature of knowledge, so it hardly matters, except as the stakes may be higher in some cases than in others. One such case is the set of practices collectively known as modern agriculture, which includes the use of GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, and concentrated fertilizers, and which, because it is applied over such a large area, can fairly be characterized as an experiment being conducted on the planet – the only planet we have.

In an article published on the Scientific American website, Professor Nina Fedoroff of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and Pennsylvania State University, states the following:

Most early alarms about new technologies fade away as research accumulates without turning up evidence of deleterious effects. This should be happening now because scientists have amassed more than three decades of research on GM biosafety, none of which has surfaced credible evidence that modifying plants by molecular techniques is dangerous.

On this point, Professor Fedoroff is clearly speaking from expertise, but notice that the issue she addresses is whether the process of modifying plants by molecular techniques is inherently dangerous, not whether specific modifications might be so. In the same paragraph, Fedoroff goes on to fume somewhat recklessly:

One scare story based on a bogus study suggesting a bad effect of eating GMOs readily trumps myriad studies that show that GM foods are just like non-GM foods.

Further on she states:

Herbicide-tolerant crops have made a major contribution to decreasing topsoil loss by facilitating no-till farming. This farming method reduces CO2 emissions from plowing and improves soil quality.

At this point I must express gratitude, for her having mentioned the advantages of no-till farming, but there are better ways to manage it than through the application of herbicides. There's the matter of reduction in yields when herbicides are applied and the plants must invest energy in resisting them. Also one must wonder how much attention has been given to the question of whether the genetic modification which provides plants with resistance might itself be problematic, perhaps resulting in byproducts which are toxic to animals and humans. Returning for a moment to an earlier passage, Fedoroff claims:

We can now use these methods to make precise improvements by adding just a gene (or two or a few) that codes for proteins whose function we know with precision.

This is blatant conceit. The proteins genes code for commonly have more than a single function in the development and/or physiology of an organism, and may also have collateral effects that wouldn't be termed "functions". To say that one knows the function of a protein "with precision" is to claim to to know all potential effects of that protein under all conceivable conditions. In her conclusion Fedoroff displays almost childlike naiveté regarding corporate veracity and commerce:

If the popular mythology about farmer suicides, tumors and toxicity had an ounce of truth to it, these companies would long since have gone out of business. Instead, they’re taking more market share every year. There's a mismatch between mythology and reality.

I do not suspect Professor Fedoroff of being a complicit apologist for industry, but I do suspect her of habitually misplaced trust.

John Searle at TEDxCERN: Consciousness