This is Violence

Nikon, iPhones, and Disruptive Innovation

I almost never write about it here - but I love taking pictures. I started about a decade ago when I found an abandoned Polaroid right before I left for a long road trip and instantly fell in love. Over the years I’ve amassed a small collection of cameras, from turn of the century relics, to Soviet era medium format SLR’s to early Japanese rangefinders. Each of them is unique and wonderful in it’s own way, but I find I shoot almost entirely with just two: My (relatively) expensive Nikon DSLR, and my (relatively) cheap iPhone 4. In terms of photo quality, these represent, the highest end camera I own and the lowest. Between the two of them, the iPhone is by far the one I use the most. The main reason is simple: it’s the one I have with me most often. But there are a pile of other reasons too, not the least of which is that the Nikon is big and loud and makes people nervous when I point it at them.

More than that though - there is a work flow issue.

When I shoot on my Nikon my photos are, relative to my meager ability, far, far better than what I could ever get out of my iPhone. But in order to get those photos out into the world I have to import the RAW files into Aperture, make any corrections I need to, export each one as a JPEG and then upload it to Flickr. From there, if I want to geocode it I need to do that by hand trying to match up my recollection of where I took the photo to a satellite photo on a Google map. It’s not that it’s not worth it - when I go somewhere, or have something I really want to photograph, it’s a small price to pay - but it’s not what I’d call “effortless”.

On the other hand, when I’m walking around town, or when an unexpected moment arises, or when I want to take pictures of my friends or family without them making their “I’m having my picture taken” face, my iPhone is the superior camera. The baseline quality is more than good enough, and once the picture is taken, I have the ability to do pretty much whatever I want with it right there. I can edit it using any one of the many apps I have installed, it’s always geocoded, and I can immediately upload it to Flickr, or send it out on Twitter. Sure, there are times when I miss having the quality and delicate control my Nikon affords, but those moments are so rare that I nearly never carry my camera with me if I’m not on a trip.

Given all that, I wasn’t at all surprised by this article in the Times or this one on TechCrunch, both about the ascension of cell phone cameras as the new “point-and-shoot” camera. Moreover, I suspect anyone who has used a point-and-shoot in the last 3 years isn’t surprised either. Compared to the clunky, confusing, and antiquated interfaces of a contemporary point-and-shoot, a camera phone is an elegantly simple way to take pictures. In fact, the only people who seem surprised by this trend are the people making the point-and-shoot cameras. I say this only because they continue, year after year, to blindly push out these cameras even as the picture taking public so actively turns away from them.

The gap between these two realities - the reality of the people taking pictures and the reality of people making cameras - I suspect lays in the core cultural motivations of camera companies: companies like Nikon and Canon are at the very forefront of camera making, but they’re lagging way behind in the area of picture taking. As these two articles point out - for most people, the difference between those two concepts is huge.

But the rise of the cell phone camera is far from an anomaly. In fact, it’s actually a textbook example of what Clayton Christensen first coined “disruptive innovation”. The term “disruptive innovation” is a favorite among people in pretty much any industry who want to view themselves as cutting edge. “Be the disruption”, “harness the disruption”, “embrace disruption” all fit pretty neatly into Power Point slides, but in reality disruptive innovation is usually completely misunderstood and often pretty terrible for established organizations.

When most people think about the concept of innovation they generally think of it as something that moves in a continuous path forward, each innovation building off of and enhancing the previous, making things better, stronger, faster, and cheaper. These are what Christensen calls “sustaining innovations” and we see them all the time. They’re the faster processors. The bigger engines. The digital camera with 16 megapixels instead of 12. They’re what you already own - but better.

But there is a second type of innovation: the disruptive kind and it doesn’t work at all like the sustaining variety.

First, disruptive innovations don’t happen in a linear path, instead they might best thought of as a series of S-curves, one stacked on top of another. The gap between these two curves is the disruption. It’s the new technology, or the new way of thinking, or the new philosophy that separates the new paradigm from the old and it’s the gap you need jump to continue to move forward. But before you can jump it - you need to see it, and often that’s the hardest part.

Each curve starts with the earliest forms of the disruption. This is the time period when the disruption, and the people working within it, are at their most active but least organized. Think of the earliest days of mechanized flight or personal computers - lots people working in lots of different directions but with little institutional backing. It’s at this stage that there is the most to be gained by people involved in the innovation, but it’s also the stage that is the least attractive to established organizations. In his book, The Innovators Dilemma, Christensen points out that, among other things, it’s at this early stage that the new markets a disruption addresses are usually too small to be financially interesting to established organizations, and the cultural changes required to enter those markets are too great given its lack of a certain future. Further, because the disruption is so new, there is no demand for it from the customers of the established organization. All of these factors combine to make the disruption look less like an opportunity and more like a distraction.

In terms of camera phones, the beginning of this curve was about 10 years ago when manufacturers first started putting cheap, poor quality cameras into their phones. At the time, even the most low end point-and-shoot was miles ahead of any cell phone camera and, as a consumer, if you wanted something remotely useable the point-and-shoot is what you bought. This is what Christensen is talking about when he writes that the markets of the disruptive technology are too small to be interesting to the established organizations. If you’re Nikon, and your brand is about high-quality photography, it’s pretty difficult to justify diverting resources towards developing low quality camera systems for cell phones. Especially while point-and-shoots are selling well.

There is another phenomenon at work here too: because technological innovation can so throughly outstrip people’s ability to use it, mature industries often end up trying to differentiate themselves by producing increasingly feature rich versions of existing products instead of either reducing and refining what they have, or moving into the disruption. This is how we end up with VHS/DVD/MP3/CD players in an era of downloadable media. It’s also how we end up with point-and-shoot cameras that shoot in 3D, or have built in projectors. In this way, organizations not only miss the disruption, they miss the curve altogether, believing they’re still on the vertical portion of the innovation curve, the sustaining innovation portion, when in fact they’re at the top, in a mature market.

So where does this leave a company like Nikon? Well - they could do what they’re doing right now: ignore the trend and just keep pushing updated versions of point-and-shoot cameras. Or they could see that they’re at the top of a curve, reduce their product offering and just focus on the very top-end photographers for whom their product is still critical. Or they could embrace the mobile market, the disruption, by creating a camera app of their own, treating it as a real product, and trying to figure out what “Nikon” means in this space.

Of the three, the third option presents their best chance for keeping their brand relevant to average photographers. It would give them access to an entire group of people who would otherwise have no direct experience with their brand. Right now people who take pictures casually - which is to say most people - are working with a whole new group of companies that just a couple years ago didn’t exist. Applications like Hipstamatic and Instagram are defining this photography space and in doing so, also defining much of the future of snap shot photography. If Nikon wants to remain relevant to these people, they’ll need to go to where the people are, not try to bring the people to where Nikon is. Many of these people may never buy a dedicated camera, but many of them will - and when they do, they’ll be more like to pick a Nikon if they’ve already had hand-on experience with its products - even if those products are digital.

But the third option I think has another advantage: it actually could help make even their high-end cameras better.

While most camera companies build their reputations on optics, digital has ushered in an era where the software that controls the camera is, for many people, just as important than the lens it’s shooting through. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the iPhone, where software means any one can easily transform the basic camera into any number of classic or toy cameras, or add more advanced features like special light metering just by downloading a new application.

Compare that to cameras of any type right now, from high-end DSLRs to entry level point-and-shoots and you’ll find a bizarre amalgamation of film camera metaphors and early 1990’s era software that in the best of cases is cumbersome and in the worst is unusable. Systems of cryptic buttons and hierarchical menus lead to settings most people have no idea what to do with. Things like exposure control, aperture settings, ISO selection are in a “worst of all worlds” position: too inaccessible for people who might use them - and too conceptually abstract to be of use to average people. While manufacturers have tried to alleviate this by adding preset configurations for things like low-light shooting, the results often trade bad photos for boring ones with flat lighting and oddly saturated colors. So people are left with two choices: use the factory settings, or dive into the menu systems at your own risk knowing you might never be able to undo the setting you’re about to change.

An application like Hipstamatic on the other hand actively encourages experimentation. Wrapping settings in easy to grasp concepts like virtual lens and film changes they provide people an inviting and fun way to try different settings without worrying their going to break their camera. Rather than focus on getting the photos “right” apps like Hipstamatic or Instagram know people would rather have their photos be “interesting”. Under- and over-exposures are added to pictures at random, color shifts run wild and blotches abound. All anathema to the “good” photography of a typical point-and-shoot. Of course, it’s not all picture snapping bliss with these apps, and this is where I think a company like Nikon could really shine. As interesting as the photos produced by apps like Hipstamatic are, they also suffer from certain “sameness” after a while. When everyone’s photos are blurry and underexposed and blue-cast, they can lose the very thing the photographer was going for: uniqueness. The space here is vast, and it’s a place Nikon has decades of experience in. By dumping the conventions of typical camera interfaces, Hipstamatic, Instagram and their ilk have made experimenting with cameras fun again. If Nikon could take that emphasis on fun and simplicity while bringing in a focus less on affectation and more on customization, I think they could capture a huge group of people looking to take more control over their photography without adding a bunch of complexity.

While an iPhone application could provide a great way to engage with people who don’t own cameras - the resulting software, its interfaces, and even the concept of software driven photography itself shouldn’t have to stop at the iPhone. I don’t know a single photographer, at any level, who wouldn’t like a better interface for their camera, the ability to experiment with customization more, or simply the ability to easily add and update software. Diving headfirst into the cell phone disruption wouldn’t just help Nikon on the low end, it could provide a low stakes springboard for a completely new approach to how they think about all their products.

It might be that the era of the point-and-shoot as we know it is fully over. I for one wont miss them. But that doesn’t mean the roll of camera companies in the casual photographer space is through. Every day I see people wanting more out of their photos, and the knowledge and history contained within these companies could be invaluable in helping people do just that. First though, they’ll need to embrace the idea that they’re in the business of making pictures, not cameras.

Ad Agencies and the iAd Promise Land

I saw this today from Ben Malbon:

What Ben is hopeful for is the prospect of relevance for online display advertising discussed in Edward Boches’ article.

You should go read the post, but the basic premiss - as it has been all along with iAds - is that digital advertising is finally going to come into it’s own now that Apple is in the game.

But there is a structural problem to Edward’s argument, and it’s a problem that has been consistent from nearly every ad person I’ve heard speak about the promise of iAds, which is that fundamental problem with online display advertising lays in the creative execution of it.

That’s not true.

“…Apple is hoping that iAds deliver a quantum leap in advertising story telling as they have the potential to combine the cinematic beauty of great TV advertising (visceral imagery, animation, special effects), the interactive nature of the web (games, choices, navigation), the sharing and involvement of social media, and the tactile (digitally speaking) sensation of turning pages.”

That’s Edward’s quote, but the thinking isn’t unique to him. Here is the problem with this line of rationale though: all those things - the “visceral imagery”, the “animation”, the “games, choices, navigation”, the (ugh) “turning pages” - these have all been at our creative disposal for years. There is nothing technically or creatively new with iAds. Once you take that away - what we’re left with is Apple’s moderation of the ads and the minimal novelty of an ad in an application, on your phone.

But more succinctly from Edward

“Display doesn’t work because the creative sucks and the options are limited.

No, it’s not. And no they’re not.

But lets lay that aside for the moment. I think what ad agencies are really hoping for is something, anything, that will let them keep doing and thinking what they’ve always done and thought. And that’s what Apple is selling them.

I’ve written about this so many times even I’m bored with it - but the cultural underpinnings of contemporary advertising are so strongly tied to the concept of broadcast narrative story telling that I don’t believe they can collectively imagine a world where this doesn’t work. This is laid bare in one of Edward’s comments after his post:

“Could iAds be the Super Bowl spots of the digital age?”

And this isn’t to pick on Edward, but just to point out how fully contained within the world of “the copy writer and the AD create a narrative, the customer consumes that narrative” advertising culture is. Even the metaphors are about T.V.

But the internet, and the way people want to use it, is showing us that it’s a non-narrative, product based system. People install applications, or go to websites because it provides some value to them. How many millions of web sites are there? And there are already what, 250,000 application just on the iPhone? Yet, all I have is 24 hours each day to split between everything have to do and everything I want to. And every day, there is another site, and another application, but the same 24 hours.

My question - given that, why would I spend even one second watching a banner ad, let alone minutes interacting with it? If I want entertainment on my phone, I’ll watch a movie on Netflix, or I’ll play a video game. If I need to accomplish something - the last thing I want to see is your advertisement.

So here is my advice - if you’re working for a brand right now, doing something on the internet, make something that is useful for their customers. Make something that makes them relevant online. Make something that, when their customers give you 1 or 5 or 10 minutes out of their 24 hours, leaves them better off.

Don’t make them turn digital pages to watch your T.V. ad.

Toast Indeed

“For marketers … this is actually turning out, in my view, to be an ad-serving machine”
- Kostas Mallios, Microsoft’s general manager for Strategy and Business Development

Back in April, when Apple announced iAd as one of it’s “tent poles” of iOS4, I was pretty ready to just hold for Windows Mobile 7 and see how that looked. I’d had some time to mess with my sisters Zune HD and between that experience, and some of the Win 7 demos I’d seen, I was thinking maybe it was time to make a switch.

Not so much.

Of all the ways Microsoft could have gone after the iPhone - the hardware, the ecosystem, any of it - they pick iAd? The new platform is going by the name Toast for now and the goal is, as stated above, to turn their phones into “an ad-serving machine.” Good lord.

Like Apple, Microsoft is trying to spin this as a feature:

“For consumers, what this means is basically seamless experiences, seamless social connectivity”

Uh, what? On what planet is advertising a seamless, social experience? Advertising by its nature is about disrupting the users experience. It’s about taking them out of whatever they’re doing and saying “hey! look over here!”

What really takes this platform over the top for me is that while iAd is limited to applications, Toast runs in the main OS, serving ads right to the home screen of your phone.

I’m a bit a stuck record on this, but since we’re all here I’ll say it again: display advertising is an artifact of the print and broadcast worlds. It ignores all the best aspects of the web in exchange for showcasing its most boring. Worse, its left huge sections of the digital content economy in shambles, resulting stupid pagination schemes, and user hostile page layouts all designed to squeeze in one more ad. It’s bizarre to me that here on the cusp what should be the next wave of connected systems two companies that should be leading the charge are playing last decades game. I was genuinely hoping Microsoft would come into the mobile space with Win 7 and give Apple something to think about. But if this is how they’re going to do it, what’s the point?

Things I Liked #2

Virgin Air Apps
I loved Virgins first app Flying Without Fear so much I used it as an example of a brand getting mobile app development right when I spoke at PSU’s Internet Marketing Conference back in December.

They’ve followed up with another one I like - Jet Lag Fighter

In both cases, I like that Virgin is looking at the totality of a customers experience with them. In the case of Flying Without Fear, they’re targeting people with a predisposition to not liking Virgins core product offering and trying to address it. The interface is dead simple and because the application is mostly audio, it means the user doesn’t have to spend their time interfacing with the app to get what they need out of it. Jet Lag Fighter is much the same. It takes a key negative experience of traveling and attempts to remedy it. Because Jet Lag Fighter is something you’d use specifically when you’re not interfacing with Virgin’s main product, makes it a great brand play too.

Overall, two great examples of a brand understanding their ecosystem, their customer, their brand, and their technology.

Media Diet
It takes me about 45 minutes after I turn my computer on in the morning to catch up with all the sites I read everyday, twitter, and a list of RSS feeds that I work diligently to keep trim. That said, I can’t help but wonder if I’m spending my time reading the best things I can.

What I Read is The Atlantic Wire’s regular series asking people of all stripes what they’re reading. While it’s not just online reading, it does slant heavily that way, so it’s pretty easy to sample the recommendations for your own use.

I love this site for two reasons: First, I like being able to see what smart people reading. From the most recent entry - Clay Shirky, to Terry Gross, to Ezra Klein it’s pretty fun to see where there is reassuring overlap and where I might be able to pick up some new stuff. (Side note: Shirly doesn’t read tech blogs, which makes me think I should’t read tech blogs, but if tech blogs are wrong…)

The site also fills a non-trivial need I have to know what famous/smart people do in their free time. Do with that what you will.

Put This On
I had a chance a few years ago to move to New York permanently. I had a great job offer with a great company in a city I’ve loved my whole life. In the end though, as much as I love NYC, I just couldn’t leave Portland. Portland is a easy city to live in, maybe that makes me soft, I don’t know, but I like it.

What I don’t like though is that it’s one of the few cities I know of where there is such a thing as “my nice running shoes.” These are the shoes people wear when they want to be “fancy.” Portland is also home of the “nice hoodie”, “nice parka”, and “nice hat with ears”. Mostly this is fine, but some times it’s nice to see people going out without looking like their camping.

Since I started Fight, I’ve to make a conscious effort to try and dress more like a grown-up, and this is why I like Put This On. Men’s style can go so wrong so easy, and more often than not these days it seems to trend between “childish” and “douche-y.” PTO is all about how to take things that used to be basics and bring them back. Pant’s that fit, a nice tie, nice shoes. Things your grandfather wore every day and looked awesome.

Meet the Facts
I love politics. I grew up in a fairly political family where debating issues remains a pretty standard way to pass time. What I don’t like anymore are political talk shows.

Meet The Press is a Sunday morning stalwart, broadcast continuously since the late 40’s. Like most political shows though, recently it’s become more a place for politicians and business leaders to get some free airtime than a place of even moderate debate.

Enter Meet the Facts. Another example of the asymmetrical nature of the web, MTF was launched after numerous pleas for the show to simply fact check its own guests. Started by a couple college students, the site has gained the attention of people like NYU professor Jay Rosen, an early critic of the state of political journalism on T.V., as well as NPR and the Huffington Post.

My favorite part of the whole program is that the creators have offered to give the entire site to Meet The Press if they will just start fact checking.

“If NBC News and the staff of Meet the Press agree to permanently institute a public fact-checking system for everything guests say on the air, we think they should absolutely name that feature “Meet the Facts” and we will gladly transfer over the domain name, Twitter username, and Facebook page username for their use, and at no cost.”

If It Was My Home
I feel weird putting this here as something I “liked”. Maybe “appreciate” is a better word? At any rate, among the many great and important projects people have done in response to the gulf oil spill, this one really drove home for me the massiveness of it geographically.

Sitting here in Northeast Portland and recognizing that there is oil coving an area that would reach well out west into the Pacific and and far enough east to pass Mt. Hood is staggering. Combining that with utterly heart wrenching photos (caution, these are disturbing) from The Big Picture of the devastated wildlife in the spill begins to make concrete to someone sitting 2,000 miles away the level of tragedy taking place. If you have the means, and you’d like - you can donate here.

Things I Liked #1

To attempt to balance the ratio of time I spend here talking about things I don’t like to those I do, I’m going to try an experiment: “Things I Liked” will be a weekly list of 5 things I enjoyed that week. We’ll see.

BPGlobalPR
Sometimes people ask me about the name of this site. The answer is projects like BPGlobalPR. BPGlobalPR is a perfect example of the asymetrical nature of competition on the web.

In a time when corporations seem able to actively limit journalism, BPGlobalPR may be one of the few points of commentary on the matter generating any large scale response. I’ve read that it was the images of dead sea animals and destroyed landscapes that fueled a national boycott of Exxon after the Valdez. Absent that, this may be the best we can do. Without a press free to report on the actual situation, this stands as a small beacon of hope that multi-national corporations and their PR firms don’t control everything just yet.

Lost
Yeah, okay, so I just yesterday wrote a post about Lost as a cautionary tale for designers. I stand by that - as a product, Lost ended up being pretty terrible. But there was a reason I watched it for 6 years - aspects of the show were also pretty amazing. So much has been said, it seems silly to write more, but I can’t think of a program that has done more to layout a map for what narrative television could be in a post-internet world than Lost. Whether it was their consistent usage of DVR easter eggs, ARG’s; their direct response to conversations with fans written into the show, or their usage of other non-connected mediums to tell the meta-story (how many books were referenced in the show?); Lost stands a milestone in post-modern T.V. narrative.

The Texas Tribune
You could be forgiven for believing there are just two sides to the problem of journalism and the web - pay wall, and no pay wall.

The fundamental question these two sides actually seek to answer, though it’s rarely stated as such, is: “How do you maintain exactly the same business model you’ve always enjoyed in technologically and culturally changed landscape?”

The answer is becoming increasing clear to a lot of people: you don’t.

Enter the The Texas Tribune an online, non-prift news site started about 6 months ago to try a different path. This is from their About page:

“Because the Trib’s focus is exclusively public policy, politics, and government, there’s nothing to distract us from the task at hand. Because we’re non-profit, we don’t have to sacrifice our mission at the altar of commercial considerations. Because we’re nonpartisan, we’ll give you the straight skinny—the facts—without an agenda or bias. Because we work for you, the people of Texas, not shareholders or other corporate overlords, we’ll never get our priorities out of whack.”

The Texas Tribune I think makes clear a needed distinction in the conversation about the future of journalism: are we fighting to save journalism, or fighting to save profits? Looking the Tribune, I’d say journalism is alive and well.

The Tribunes 6 month report card

AfriGadget
This morning I’ve seen a bunch of tweets about a rumored update to Apple TV. Google just announced their version, Google TV. In a couple weeks we’ll all be seeing the next iPhone. For many of us, innovation can add new levels of convenience, new ways of creating, or new ways of communicating. Working in marketing, innovation can quickly become something viewed in terms of new “brand opportunities.”

The AfriGadget blog reminds me on an almost daily basis that for a lot of people, innovation is a matter of life and death. This isn’t capacitive touchscreens, or 1000fps cameras, its car batteries, broken mirrors, and old bikes, each of which is having profound impacts on peoples lives.

Okay - so that’s only 4 things, but it’s my first try. 5 next week for sure.

Punch the Monkey

The nice thing about dictatorships is that they get things done. There is no “in between” with a dictatorship like there is with a democracy, no compromise. In a way, this is what makes Apple great. Under Jobs, the direction of the brand has had a singular focus on producing his vision of great experiences for their customers. If it was an experience you liked, you could fill your life with perfectly designed, high-functioning, well integrated products. If you didn’t, you could move to something more democratic, say, Microsoft or Google, Sony or IBM.

The bad thing about a dictatorship is that once the leader looses it, the whole thing starts to come undone. And they always lose it. There’s always something, some person, some event, that starts to place seeds of doubt and in the end, that single point of vision becomes a tyrannical mess of paranoia and irrational behavior. It’s clear Jobs hates Google. Not in a competitive way, but in some deep, personal and increasingly irrational way. For a guy who seems to have never made much of a bad decision, this target fixation has seemed over the last months to begin to take him off his game.

iAd is, for me, the first real manifestation of this unraveling.

Thursday morning, I tried to get out of the house early so I could stop by Voodoo doughnuts on my way into the office. One of the advantages of having your own agency is that you can declare any day that Steve Jobs is on stage as a company holiday. I had made it known early in the week that we’d be taking the morning off and taking over the conference room to project various tech blogs, eat doughnuts, and talk about Apple magic as it happened. For most of the presentation, for 6 “tent poles”, thats exactly what we did. Then came tent pole 7, iAd.

Here is my fundamental problem with iAd: It’s make no sense from a brand strategy point of view. It’s irrational, and philosophically counter to nearly every previous decision Apple has made under Jobs. To be clear, it’s not crazy in the way that most people will ever notice, after all, most of us have spent the last 15 years being trained to expect display advertising as just a way of life. But advertising is fundamentally user hostile. That’s the core nature of it, it’s why it works. It makes you stop whatever you were doing and look at something else that you didnt choose to. While it probably seems histrionic to take something so seemingly small and blow it up to this size, I do believe this marks a fundamental change in motivation for Jobs and Apple.

What Id like to do is agree with people like John Gruber that Apples motivations are to preserve the overall user experience of the iPhone, and honestly up until iPhone 4, that has always been what I believed. But iAd negates that premise on fundamental level. This is the first time I can think of Apple has chosen to make money at the direct expense of it’s customers product experience. People can, and have, argued for a long time that those of us supporting Apple and its draconian control of it’s platforms we’re just begging for this to happen. But I think it’s critical to consider that until iAd, the goal was to create a specific notion of quality user experience. For many of people, it wasn’t the experience they wanted, but that it was customer focused is hard to deny.

Of course there are already ads in applications so it could be argued that iAd doesn’t really change much. Or, to Jobs’ point in the presentation, this is a chance to make those ads better. This line of reasoning doesn’t seem to hold water though either. For a company allegedly so focused on preservation of good user experience that they’re willing to through Adobe under a bus, why would they invest so heavily in making intrinsic to the iPhone experience a system that would invite what is arguably the worst aspect of user experience on the web into their device? I can’t think of a reason. But the real difference here is that with iAd, Apple has actual financial motivation to have the iPhone/App UX degraded. Previously, Apple could take no position on in App advertising, but now, with a 30% cut of each ad, the more ads that go out, the better Apple does.

One could argue that Apple introducing iAd is better for their customers in that it allows more developers more opportunity to create applications and make a living off them. And this is true. But if Apples motivation were bring more developers into the fold, why on the same day they announce iAd would they choose to proactively lock out Flash as a development platform. Gruber’s take on this, as it has been from the start, is the Flash is simply not capable of producing a user experience at a level Apple feels is on par with the overall device. Fair enough. But if UX is the central issue, it’s hard argue that in app advertising, ads Apple will not be vetting, produce any better UX than Flash. After all, iAd gives huge amounts of iPhone user experience control to ad agencies, people with no track record of being able to produce anything other than bad UX and no motivation, monetarily or otherwise, to do anything other than throw away work.

Rather than spending their time and resources to update the App Store, something thats been asked for from nearly day one, iAd seems to be an investment by Apple in a race to the bottom. Tying application developers’ livelihood to the same display ad system that has left huge parts of the content creation industry on the web in shambles. Why not instead invest in making structural updates to the actual purchasing process to help elevate the developers doing the best work, and then help them find a way to actually charge a living wage for their work? Why not take the same, revolutionary approach Apple always has and find a way to free developers from having to find ad real-estate in their applications so they can focus on continuing to make their, and Apple’s, products even better?

The only logical answer is clear: To beat Google.

But given that a company whose name has always been tied to changing the game, such an investment in playing someone else’s game leaves me wondering: does Apple have the cultural and organizational underpinnings to manage a system that is both open to outside development and the clear frontrunner in a category, while maintaining their history of a clear focus on user experience? If iAd is any indication, the answer is no.

With Mac, Apple has always been able to be the contrarian second place. Making huge profits while catering to a smaller, but vastly more loyal base of fans. The iPod on the other hand is clearly the industry leading platform, but it’s closed. Apple has always had top to bottom control of everything that goes it save for the music. iPhone is something different though. It’s neither the plucky niche product of Mac, nor the highly controlled iPod.

In Apple’s seemingly desperate effort to control this rapidly expanding system, the strains on the dictatorial system are becoming evident, and it’s not clear Apple has the systems in place to stay sane. In fact, it would seem this new found position has resulted in increased paranoia and a fixation on beating specific competitors in specific ways rather than making revolutionary advancements. That they would try to lump iAd in with other user focused features is either completely disingenuous, or evidence of increasing detachment from reality. For whatever reason, Jobs has decided his mission now is to beat Google first, beat Adobe second, everything else comes third, including Apple user experience.

This isn’t to say that Apple will stop making good products, they’ll likely continue to for a long while. But as a post-Jobs Apple moves nearer, the questions of what drives the company without him become more important. iAd is a strong signifier of the kind of brand confusion that I think is beginning to emerge, and without Jobs in place, the “do what it takes to make money” path is now just viable as the “make great products” one. We’ve all seen “money at any cost” Apple of the 90’s, and it wasn’t pretty.

The good news is this: if you do manage to punch the monkey, you’ll win an iPad.