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What Would Jen-Hsun Do?: 2007 January 07, 2007 Alan /.effect Dang |
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Summary: Last year, we asked what Jen-Hsun (NVIDIA's CEO) would do in order to make predictions on NVIDIA's course in 2006. Although a purely speculative article, we made a case on why Matrox would be a target on NVIDIA's acquisition list. Our predictions didn't pan out, but it turns out that we still weren't too far out.
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 4 ) |
In last year’s article, we took a simple approach to make predictions on the market. First, we identified the “big markets” of the industry that NVIDIA was interested in. Then, we identified NVIDIA’s weaknesses in each of these industries. Finally, we looked for acquisitions that would make sense (i.e. both NVIDIA and the other company would benefit).
We accurately identified smartphones/cell phones/and portable media devices as the number one "big market" of the future. Unfortunately, I did not predict acquisitions in this market because I reasoned that NVIDIA had sufficient resources for a solid mobile graphics platform, and it would take time before there was sufficient content available to make these types of projects worthwhile.
Hindsight is 20/20 and the critical gap in the article was realizing that while the GoForce team had produced superior products compared to the competition, it would only be possible to develop something outstanding with company acquisitions.
It’s all about battery life
As everyone knows, usability is king when it comes to portable devices -- that's why the original Palm Pilot and Treo's do so well and why the iPod dominates the portable music player market. The key to optimized battery life on a portable device is integration, and while the GoForce was an efficient mobile graphics processor, there's no way a discrete mobile GPU can compete against a equally well-designed fully integrated solution. "Equally well-designed" is a key point because the GoForce 5500 can decode MP3's at approximately 20mW, while the PP5022 in the iPod Mini has a stated power consumption of 60-80mW while decoding MP3s (The PP5021 in the current 5.5G iPod's is reported to have the same power footprint according to http://investor.portalplayer.com/downloads/2005AR.pdf ).
What did NVIDIA do in 2006?
In 2006, NVIDIA formally acquired Hybrid Graphics (middleware company) and Portal Player (system-on-a-chip; famous for their use in iPods) and of course, rumors that they've hired ex-Intel CPU engineers (Stextar) and of course the NVIDIA Bangalore Team that developed the nForce 680i and has also been actively developing handheld technology for a product that has yet to be announced. Likewise, we’ve always heard rumors of a R&D team at NVIDIA focused on “clockless” or asynchronous CPU/GPUs.
With NVIDIA aggressively pursuing their smart phone and portable media device program during 2006, it is possible that NVIDIA’s next-generation system-on-chip is ready for production. If we assume that this chip is ready though, all we need to ask is WWJD: "What would Jobs do?"
My prediction for 2007: Apple will be using NVIDIA’s next-generation portable technology in their next-generation portable device: a mobile phone.
| What would Jobs do? | Page:: ( 2 / 4 ) |
There’s no question that a full-screen iPod Video or an iPod with an integrated cell phone sounds cool. And there would be a lot of people who would line up to buy one. However, Steve Jobs isn’t in the industry of producing products that simply sound cool, they have to be cool. The iPod was not the first MP3 market to reach the market, but it has market dominance today for one reason alone: it was the first MP3 player with good usability.
Ease of Use
When the iPod was first released, there were still MP3 players using parallel port transfers or USB 1.0 interfaces. By launching with Firewire, the iPod made syncing the iPod a much more pleasant experience. You could carry 5GB of your music library wherever you went, and when you got a new album, the limiting factor wasn’t going to be the transfer speed. The Nomad Jukebox was using USB 1.0…
Apple’s decision to force people to use iTunes to transfer the music (instead of allowing people to simply copy music over) ended up being on of the best decisions they made. While power-users such as you or I may have preferred directory-based navigation, the iTunes system was important because it made navigation on the iPod faster.
Everyone likes to talk about the scroll-wheel and menu based navigation of the iPod as the secret to the iPod’s success. While this would become an iconic feature, the scroll-wheel itself wasn’t what was special. The secret was the efficiency and speed with which you could navigate. At the time, the nearest competitor was Creative Labs’s Nomad Jukebox. Allow me to quote a few key lines from my Nomad Jukebox review from 2001:
“…there is no way to see all the track titles, or all the titles from a particular genre, or artist in a single [playlist]…”
“…I pressed play and then the Jukebox crashed. Two tries later, I decided that my multitude of MP3s was causing the Jukebox to crash and instead I start adding MP3s to my playlist incrementally. It turns out that the Nomad Jukebox is just very slow, and the unit had not actually crashed.”
“The Nomad Jukebox does not scroll song titles in either view - it just truncates them.”
Battery Life
The iPod also had tremendous battery life: 10 hours. The Nomad Jukebox could only do a meek 4 hours of play. This was due in large part to Apple’s ambitious 32MB of flash memory, four times as much as the Nomad Jukebox had at the time. While this increased the price of the iPod, it made a significant difference in increasing usability. You didn’t have to remember to sync/recharge your iPod every day and you could spend an whole day studying in the library without worrying about running out of batteries.
Form Factor
Finally, the design for the iPod was market defining. It was small, sturdy, and stylish. While the iPod look is not longer as fresh as it once was, it’s truly a testament of what good product design is all about.
Extending the Lead
As the iPod grew in popularity, Apple did not rest. The most important move that Apple since the original launch of the iPod and the development of the USB 2.0 version was integrating iPod support into all major manufacturers. It truly says something when you can find iPod support in virtually all major automotive manufacturers ranging from Scion to Ferrari. The rest is history.
In its current state, it is unlikely that anyone will be able to dethrone the iPod’s market superiority. Since then, companies have developed products that are better looking, have better sound quality, or even better battery life, but we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns for improvements in MP3 usability, and the ecosystem behind the iPod (car integration and accessories) will never be matched by another competitor unless Apple is forced to open up their platform.
| Jobs (cont’d) | Page:: ( 3 / 4 ) |
Is everything that Steve Jobs does awesome?
Of course not.
The iPod and iMac are tremendous successes, but the G4 Cube and software like Aperture 1.0 are examples. Likewise, the iPod Hi-Fi will never be the dominant speaker system for the iPod because it doesn’t actually offer anything special over the competition. That said, the development costs for a iPod Hi-Fi were miniscule – it doesn’t take a lot to make that a smart business decision.
Launching an Apple-branded phone is different. It’s a hefty investment that requires a lot of careful planning. The first question to ask is what Apple can bring to the existing market.
Apple Famed Interface Design?
I keep reading about how the market is ripe for an Apple entry into the mobile phone market because “mobile phone users often find their interfaces confusing, even within the same brands.” With phones adding more and more features each year, it seems like Apple’s secret sauce to usability would be a key selling point.
Maybe the Apple phone is going to be a PDA and a phone running some sort of MacOSX Mini? What a cool name for an operating system, right? Apple could bring back handwriting recognition, integrate iTunes support, and throw in some of that Apple fit and finish?
Who here has free long distance calling on their cell phone? How about free mobile-to-mobile within the network? And nights and weekends? Who cares about having a phone that has a signal in most places?
Apple will not simply re-badge Cingular or Verizon service as “Apple.” The only way an Apple-branded service provider makes sense is if there is some sort of added functionality. The only innovative solution would be if Apple somehow established a universal roaming agreement where Apple mobile phones would connect to the nearest Cingular or T-Mobile GSM tower. The customer pays Apple a regular fee, and Apple pays Cingular/T-Mobile the appropriate percentage based upon usage. Since Apple is the reseller, they can still take advantage of Cingular/T-Mobile’s subsidies (like your independent mobile phone retailer) to help subsidize the cost of the hardware. From a pure economics stand-point, it works for everyone. The telco’s can benefit from having additional customers, Apple taps into service provider subsidies, and consumers get the added functionality of better cell phone coverage and Apple customer support. In practice, this is unlikely to happen due to the political difficulty of negotiating a deal that gets all three companies to agree to take the “second greediest position.”
The market for an integrated MP3 and mobile phone device exists. It would solve the problem of having to carry two separate devices. The problem is that an integrated phone will only work if it has the same battery life as the separate devices.
Analysts are famous for being horrendously wrong when it comes to technology. Even though this article is based upon reasonable assumptions and publicly available knowledge, this article is still pure speculation. In fact, market analysts are often wrong. Many professional analysts believed that the original Xbox would sell 100 million units. Some choice quotes from professional analysts regarding the original iPod include:
The problem, an “easier to use” mobile phone is virtually worthless. While I agree that mobile phone interfaces are far from perfect, it’s really not that hard to use a modern cell phone. People say that most Hollywood starlets are ditzy, but if they have no trouble using a modern cell phone, why are you having trouble? Well, what about
Bottom line: Apple will not enter the mobile phone market based upon the idea that they’re making it easier to use. An excellent interface is only a side-effect.
Return of the Newton?
This is also unlikely. PDA’s aren’t as popular as they were once thought to be. There’s no point in keeping a separate contacts list when it’s already on your cell phone. Physicians don’t need mobile access to reference texts because the move to electronic medical records means that dozens of desktop workstations can be found on any floor of a hospital.
The Treo and Blackberry are great phone/PDA’s – they both use a keyboard based navigation. Could Apple design an PDA email client superior to the one in the Blackberry? Sure. But the people who need constant email access and are willing to pay for it don’t find it difficult to use. The problem with a keyboard interface, of course, is that you lose the iPod advantage in having a good interface for listening to music. A virtual keyboard would preserve the scroll wheel functionality, but you’d lose the tactile advantage of a true keyboard like the Treo and Blackberry.
Some crazy WiMax/VOIP style network?
VOIP is an important technological feature of the 21st century, but it doesn’t address a real problem with mobile phones right now. As bad as you think your cell phone reception is, a pure wireless internet-based network is going to be even worse. A decade from now, this will probably change, but right now, there’s no way Apple is going to break off the traditional mobile phone spectrum. Companies like Microsoft are ambitious about going for long-term technology investments and sticking with a project even though it may be a money loser. Apple has never done that – they’ve built their success on identifying usability problems and addressing them as soon as the technology allows them to do that.
Apple Branded Service Provider?
Apple phone speculationPage:: ( 4 / 4 )
The answer is always driven by usability.
How many of you have a MP3 player? Okay. How many of you also carry a phone? Exactly.
Right now, you have to carry two devices if you want the best MP3 player on the market and the best phone the market. Even though your phone may be capable of playing MP3s, very few people use their phone as a dedicated music player also. There are usability issues such as having to use a dongle for headphones, playlist or format compatibility issues, and most importantly, battery life. The LG Chocolate VX8500 from Verizon is one of the first MP3/cellphones that has had some success in the market. It looks nice, works well as a phone, and has a reasonably well thought out music player and an integrated Verizon VCAST music store. It does a lot of things correctly, but it’s still marred by requiring an optional USB cable to synchronize the music, an external dongle for using headphones, and most importantly, a 4 hour battery life when listening to music.
The Apple mobile phone
Although we liked to think that technology moves quickly, battery technology has not seen the same types of innovations that semiconductors have. In order to provide a dual-use mobile device, the solution will have to come from more-efficient silicon as opposed to fancier batteries. Likewise, this is why the dual battery rumor going around is false. The dual battery has been proposed as a way Apple will ensure that battery life isn’t affected by integration – you have a dedicated iPod battery and a dedicated phone battery. The problem is that if you’re iPod battery is completely gone, and you still have a full charge on the “phone” battery, and you know you only need another hour of playback before you get home, wouldn’t it make sense to be able to use some of that capacity?
In essence, the limiting factor of the Apple mobile phone has nothing to do with interface design, or about doing a VOIP design. Apple is a problem focused company, and there is zero doubt in my mind or Steve Job’s mind that merging the phone and MP3 player makes sense eventually. The issue is strictly a technical one. Can you integrate the two devices while preserving the usability of having two discrete devices?
The solution is in hardware, and NVIDIA’s next-generation portable system-on-a-chip is at the top of my short-list on the products that will actually have the efficiency to make it happen. If you have the hardware, the rest will fall into place.
Expect a phone with market leading battery life where music and communications are the primary focus. It’s not about some sort of newfangled technology – it’s about making things easier by letting consumers carry own portable device instead of two. Expect robust PIM support (contacts, calendar, etc.) but don’t expect it to be a “PDA” in the traditional sense.
Closing Thoughts
"I question the company's ability to sell into a tight consumer market right now at the iPod's current price."
” Apple lacks the richness of Sony's product offering. And introducing new consumer products right now is risky, especially if they cannot be priced attractively”
“the iPod will likely stand out for its large storage capacity but [the iPod] may have trouble digging out a niche in the market.“
So what will we see at Macworld this week? I have no idea. It’s all dependent on whether or not NVIDIA has their next-generation mobile system-on-a-chip device ready. Or maybe Apple internal engineers have developed their own system-on-a-chip incorporating an optimized AMULET core that’ll offer the power efficiency needed for such a project. Here’s a summary: