Apple | Cheryl Waller

Apple, Google, 5 Others To Be Denied Dismissal Of “No Poach” Conspiracy Case

January 26, 2012 By Josh Constine Leave a Comment

7 of the world’s most powerful tech companies have been accused of forming an antitrust conspiracy to suppress the compensation of their employees by entering into “no poach” agreements. Today, a San Jose judge will heard a motion to dismiss a class action civil lawsuit in which former employees seek damages from defendants Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm.

The damning evidence against the defendants from a 2010 Department of Justice investigation that I first uncovered last week, as well as the plaintiffs’ opposition statement indicate there is more than sufficient evidence for the dismissal to be denied and the case to proceed towards trial. If the defendants lose to or settle, tens of thousands of full-time employees with the companies between 2006 and 2009 could be compensated.

[Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2011: The judge says "This case is moving forward...this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss." That means the defendants' motion to dismiss the case will almost surely be denied when the judge files her official ruling soon. She mentioned "It's hard to make the inference that there was no conspiracy". Read on to find out why and what that means for the companies. More details from the hearing at the end.]

Specifically, the senior executives of the defendants, including Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, are accused of entering into a network of identical, interconnected illegal agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Each agreement by itself may be a violation of antitrust laws including the Sherman Act, the Cartwright Act, and other California laws.

The plaintiffs also claim the agreements constitute an overarching antitrust conspiracy because each was made with knowledge of the other agreements, and relied on the other agreements to achieve a common goal of reducing compensation and mobility for highly sought-after skilled tech employees.

According to the plaintiffs’ statement (PDF), the chronology of some of the agreements is as follows:

January 2005 – Pixar senior executives (which include Steve Jobs) draft written terms for a no-poach agreement and send them to Lucasfilm

May 2005 – Apple and Adobe make agreements

2006 – Apple and Google make agreements shortly after Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board of directors

April 2007 – Apple and Pixar make agreements

June and September 2007 – Google enters into agreements with Intuit and Intel that are identical to the agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, and Apple and Pixar

Additionally, Steve Jobs personally contacted Palm’s CEO Edward T. Colligan to propose an unlawful agreement, writing “We must do whatever we can” to stop competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.” Colligan declined Jobs’ offer, writing “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.”

The plaintiffs request “The Court should deny the motion, lift the stay of discovery, and permit Plaintiffs ‘to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination’ of this action.”

The defendants claim that the agreements were isolated and not interconnected. They claim the agreements were pro-competitive parts of legitimate collaborations between the companies, many of which had executives on each other’s boards or started as the same company as with Pixar and Lucasfilm.

The defendants also claim “The alleged bilateral arrangement provide no support for the overall conspiracy that plaintiffs have alleged in order to name the defendants in a class action”. They motion for continuation of the partial stay of discovery and for the case to be dismissed.

However, my research and sources indicate the defendants’ claims are false, the plaintiffs case is plausible, and so there are no grounds for dismissal. Furthermore, the only reason more evidence about the interconnection between the agreements isn’t available is because they were made so secretively.

The case should be allowed to proceed because the plaintiffs have produced “smoking guns” indicating a deep conspiracy. Specifically, “Do Not Cold Call” lists which defendants used to implement the agreements, and the written terms of Pixar’s agreement with Lucasfilm. These signal that today’s joint motion to dismiss the case should be denied because if discovery is permitted to continue, there’s a reasonable expectation that evidence of illegal activity will be revealed.

Finally, the precedent is that motions to dismiss are “viewed with disfavor and are properly granted only in exceptional cases…A complaint satisfies Twombly [is only eligible for dismissal] if the allegations, taken as a whole, are not ‘facially implausible’” according to the plaintiffs’ statement. Therefore, it would take a very strong presentation by the defense for Judge Lucy Koh to dismiss the case.

If the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case is denied, the case will move towards a trial by jury in June 2013. Rather than leave an assessment of damages to the judge and jury, the defendants may try to settle the case, similar to how they settled with the Department of Justice’s federal case in 2010. In the defendants lose or settle, full-time employees of the defendants could be compensated for the 10-15% of lost wages estimated by the plaintiffs’ law firm Lieff Cabraser.

I’m currently sitting in the courtroom waiting for the hearing to begin. Check back soon for the judge’s decision of whether to dismiss the case.

Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2012: The judge has lifted the stay of discovery, saying “This case is moving forward…this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss.” Though her official statement hasn’t been filed, she’s likely to deny the defendants motion to dismiss the case. She also ordered Google to produce draft emails in addition to sent emails, and designate which are drafts and which were sent.

During the hearing, the judge asked if the plaintiffs would consider breaking up the case to focus on each unlawful agreement separately. The plaintiffs claimed the agreements were all interconnected and that they are confortable with pursuing a joint, overarching antitrust complaint.

On June 28th, the court will convene to hear class certification to define what employees are eligible to be represented by the class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs plan to assess evidence surfaced during discovery and determine if only software engineers, software engineers and scientists, or all of the defendants’ employees will be represented by the class action lawsuit.

The head attorney representing the plaintiffs, Joseph R. Saveri of Lieff Cabraser, gave reporters a conservative calculation of the possible damages that employees could be compensated for. He said software engineers make $100,000 a year (they make more), their compensation was “suppressed between 5 and 10%” and “tens of thousands of employees were affected”. That means for each year an entry-level full-time software engineer worked at one of these companies, they might be entitled to damages of $5,000 to $10,000. Higher paid veteran engineers could be entitled to much more. The total damages could therefore be at least $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Adobe, apple, Blogging, Facebook, Google, intel, no poach, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Damning Evidence Emerges In Google-Apple “No Poach” Antitrust Lawsuit

January 19, 2012 By Josh Constine Leave a Comment

Next week a class-action civil lawsuit will be heard in San Jose to determine if Google, Apple, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Adobe, Intel, and Intuit conspired to eliminate competition for skilled labor. In anticipation of the hearing, TechCrunch has obtained evidence from the Department of Justice’s investigation in 2010 which was made public this evening for the first time. It appears to support the plaintiff’s case that the defendant companies tried to suppress employee compensation by entering into “no poach” agreements.

Previously, only the DOJ was privy to the evidence, so there was no way for the public to know whether the settlement came out the defendants’ fear they would lose. Now we know the C-level management at these companies did enter into anti-competitive agreements.

Below you can see the redacted Exhibit Joint Case Management Conference Statement attained from Pacer.org. Filed today, it contains evidence from the DOJ investigation pertinent to the upcoming civil case.

View this document on Scribd

The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries.

In one particularly juicy piece of evidence from May 2005, Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen emailed Steve Jobs regarding “Recruitment of Apple Employees”. In the message, Adobe’s SVP for human resources writes “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa.”

Additionally, documents state that there is “strong evidence that the companies knew about the other express agreements, patterned their own agreements off of them, and operated them concurrently with the others to accomplish the same objective.”

For example, Lori McAdams of Pixar wrote an internal email to others at Pixar in April 2007 stating, “I just got off the phone with Danielle Lambert [of Apple], and we agreed that effective now, we’ll follow a Gentleman’s agreement with Apple that is similar to our Lucasfilm agreement.”

The defendants ask for the case to be dismissed, stating that the DOJ found “no overarching conspiracy” and that these bilateral agreements were separate. The DOJ announced in September 2010 that it had settled with the companies, establishing that they would cease such illegal hiring practices, even though they never had to admit to wrongdoing. The DOJ currently has the right to check on the companies for compliance.

The plaintiffs seek damages for any salaried employee who worked for one of the defendants during a 4-year period in the late 2000s. That means a lot of Silicon Valley tech workers could receive a payout if the defendants lose or settle the case. The civil case will be heard by Judge Koh in San Jose starting January 26th, 2012, and we’ll have continuing updates on its progress.

[Image Credit: Shutterstock - Bioraven]

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: Adobe, apple, Blogging, Facebook, Google, intel, no poach, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Selling Apple In October Wasn’t The Best Move, But Not Buying Google Was Worse

January 8, 2012 By Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

MG Siegler argues that if you sold your Apple stock last October, right after the company’s Q4 2011 earnings report, you are an idiot and/or a moron. After all, Apple’s stock price closed at $398.62 on October 19, and it closed at $422.4 last Friday (a respectable 6 percent bump).

So selling your Apple stock that day was idiotic, right?
Maybe, maybe not.

Flamebait headlines aside, for all we know you could have been selling Apple stock you acquired back in 2000, in which case I daresay you were a true visionary. Of if you spent the money to buy your kids and spouse some nice Christmas gifts, or treated yourself to that plane ticket to Cambodia or whatever.

Reality is that, yes, Apple stock was staggeringly oversold on October 19, but I’ll be damned if I’m calling anyone an idiot over doing it if I don’t know what you did with the money.

In hindsight, it may have been smarter to hold on to it, but that’s the harsh reality of the volatile stock market for you. If the future could be accurately predicted, we could all make a killing.

Now, a decidedly smart move would have been buying Google the very same day you shouldn’t have sold AAPL. On October 19, 2011, GOOG closed at $580.7. Last Friday, stock price reached $652.73. That’s a 12+ percent bump, or about double the gain Apple saw in the same timeframe.

Now, if you sold your Apple stock in October to stock up on Research In Motion or Nokia instead …

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: apple, Blogging, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Scheming Intentions

January 7, 2012 By Jon Evans Leave a Comment

From Vannevar Bush to PageRank, the World Wide Web was built on hypertext, the notion that any morsel of information can link to any other. But that was always only a dream, and a rapidly-dissipating one of late.

Nowadays even Web links are likely to terminate at warnings, paywalls or registration screens. Anil Dash rages that “Facebook is gaslighting the Web” with its treatment of content outside Facebook. Jon Mitchell and Jamie Zawinski complain that Google Plus will “mess up the Internet” for its treatment of content outside Google+ff (and Zawinski adds “they just ripped off this model from Tumblr.”) Google’s Tim Bray, in turn, is irate about single-page “hash-bang” JavaScript sites breaking the web.

Meanwhile, six months ago, according to Flurry, time spent using mobile apps surpassed web consumption. You can link out of apps easily enough — clicking on a phone number to open a dialer, or a hyperlink to open a Web page — but it’s hard to reliably link in to an app.

Oh, the infrastructure is there, as Sarah Perez pointed out last week in “A Web Of Apps.” In theory, Android’s Intents, and Apple’s Custom URL Schemes allow apps to open each other and pass information to one another. But it’s still very difficult and frustrating to use them for inter-app communication.

The main reason for this is that neither Apple or Google publishes the URL schemes / intent filters used by any given app. I find this totally bewildering. They already have all the information: it's bundled with every App Store / Android Market app submission, in their Info.plist and AndroidManifest.xml files, respectively. All they would need to do is provide a searchable web interface, or add that info in a "For Developers" tab within the App Store or Android Market.

There's really no reason for them not to do this. Both already maintain app namespaces. Both could easily add “private/public” flags for app developers who don’t want their information published. But they can’t be bothered — so instead we have to rely on haphazard, incomplete, out-of-date third-party sites like Akosma and OneMillionAppSchemes for iOS and OpenIntents for Android. (Bizarrely, Google actually actually chose OpenIntents for their Summer of Code program last year, rather than just publishing the information they already have.)

If we actually had a reliable source of app intent/scheme bindings, then a whole lot of interesting possibilities would arise. Instead of silently failing when an app tries to call up a recipient app that isn’t installed, the OS could request to download and install it. You could have apps rely on other, so that downloading and installing one implies automatically downloading and installing its prerequisite building-block sub-apps.

Most of all, you’d be able to reliably link to and from other apps, almost as if they were web sites. It would be so easy to do — yet Apple and Google have both let this possibility languish untouched for years. I’m on record as predicting that HTML5 apps will take over from native apps in a couple years’ time. The ability to link to and from them — in other words, to partially restore the hypertext dream — isn’t the main reason why, but it’s definitely a contributing factor.

Image credit: Sébastien Gelé, Flickr.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, apple, apps, Blogging, Facebook, Google, iOS, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Freight Train Kept A-Rollin’

December 31, 2011 By Jon Evans Leave a Comment

2011 was the year of Android. A little over a year ago Andy Rubin tweeted that 300,000 Android devices were being activated each day. In January we reported that Android had surpassed iOS in terms of US smartphone market share. In June Android’s activations-per-day reached 500,000; this month they hit 700,000. That’s more than double the rate at which it was spreading when it overtook iOS.

By comparison, UBS estimated in December that Apple would sell 30 million iPhones in 4Q 2011. Sounds like a lot, until you realize that Android devices — almost all of which are phones, as Rubin’s numbers don’t include Kindle Fires or Nooks — are being activated at a rate of five million a week, or 65 million in a quarter. In other words, Android phone sales were probably close to double Apple’s during the quarter in which Apple’s flagship iPhone 4S was released. I expect Apple outsold Android at Christmas, given that they boasted this year’s three most wanted gifts, but Android will make up that difference in a few short weeks.

How did this happen? Certainly not because Android is better. Almost no one disputes that Apple’s user experience is superior. Thanks to Android’s horrific fragmentation problems, the Android version that developers write apps for – 2.2, which was released in May 2010 – is distinctly inferior to iOS 5. The iPhone 4S is a fantastic high-end phone, the 4 a terrific mid-level one, and the 3GS still a respectable player in the free-with-contract market. So why has everyone gone Android?

Partly because America is not the world. The iPhone 4S was a huge hit in the USA and the UK, but not so much in the rest of Europe. It’s probably not a coincidence that prepaid (ie no-contract) mobile service is more popular in Europe than America (though that may slowly be changing) and much more popular, verging on ubiquitous, in the developing world. Right now Android pretty much owns the entire prepaid smartphone market.

But it’s not just the low end of the market, and it’s not just the availability of many different handsets. Samsung alone has sold more than ten million Galaxy S IIs, including mine. I went Android because I disapprove of Apple’s hegemonic, hermetically-sealed approach to technology, even though I think the iPhone 4S is a somewhat better phone, but that’s just me. It seems that many many millions of people genuinely prefer Android’s anarchic, fragmented, and often clumsy UX and ecosystem to Apple’s seamless sleekness. That may seem strange to some, but it has become inarguable.

And it’s just the beginning. I said this time last year, “Android will explode … in the developing world.” Now that’s finally happening. When I was in Kenya earlier this year a new US$100 Huawei Android had just become the phone of choice for Africa’s burgeoning middle class. Android has just started to go hockey-stick in Brazil — an economy that’s now bigger than the UK’s. Place your bets, ladies and gents: how long before Android activations hit a million every single day?

All of which is great news for Google. They may or may not make a pile of money off Android. What’s more important to them is that it’s an increasingly impassable moat. Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital presciently called Android a freight train nine months ago. How right he was. Can Apple stop it? Can anyone? I doubt it, unless it somehow derails, and I just can’t see that happening. It has too much momentum on its side.

Image credit: Trans-Siberian freight train, by yours truly.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, apple, Blogging, Facebook, Google, iOS, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Freight Train Kept A-Rollin’

December 31, 2011 By Jon Evans Leave a Comment

Image credit: Trans-Siberian freight train, by yours truly.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, apple, Blogging, Facebook, Google, iOS, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Why Hasn’t Safari Skyrocketed Like Chrome Has?

December 24, 2011 By MG Siegler Leave a Comment

The past few days, there’s been a lot of talk about web browsers. The report that Google will be paying Mozilla close to one billion dollars over the next three years to ensure that their search engine remains the default for Firefox is fascinating for a few reasons. The biggest is that Google now makes a Firefox competitor, Chrome. And it got me thinking about Safari.

Remember Safari?

While Chrome has skyrocketed from 0 percent market share in August 2008 to over 25 percent last month, Apple’s web browser lingers somewhere between 5 and 8 percent, depending on what numbers you look at. While its growth seemed to stall out in late 2008/early 2009, Safari has been growing again since then. But it has been at a very slow, methodical pace compared to the Google browser.

Given the fact that both browsers are based on WebKit — a layout engine which was born out of Apple — why hasn’t it been Safari that has taken off, instead of Chrome?

The easy answer that most people jump to is Windows. Microsoft’s OS is still by far the dominant one even with record Mac sales quarter after quarter. But while Safari is usually associated with the Mac (since it’s baked into OS X), it has actually been available for Windows quite a bit longer than Chrome has been.

Safari for Windows was unveiled in beta in June 2007. It was formally released in March 2008. Chrome wasn’t unveiled until September of that year. Incidentally, it was Windows-only at the time. But it took Google’s browser just a year to surpass Safari in market share.

So if it wasn’t Windows, what else led to Chrome’s rise?

Another thing people often point to is speed. A number of benchmarks point to Chrome being the fastest browser available in terms of both page rendering and JavaScript performance.

But remember too that when Safari for Windows was announced, several of the same tests showed that it was the fastest browser available for both Macs and PCs (remember, Chrome didn’t exist yet). If this was just about speed, shouldn’t Safari have taken off starting in June 2007 similar to the way that Chrome did in September 2008?

On the flip side, most users throughout the years have complained that Safari for Windows more or less sucks. It’s been a long while since I’ve used it myself, but I recall it being somewhere between Firefox and Internet Explorer in terms of practical performance (that is, how fast it actually feels when using it, tests be damned). But Apple has continued to iterate on it and the latest version, 5.1, is still available on both platforms.

Others point to Google itself as the reason for Chrome’s rise compared to Safari. It’s true that Google does quite a bit of promotion for their browser, including on Google.com every once in a while. But it’s hard to imagine that being a bigger advantage then either IE or Safari which are both baked into Windows and OS X respectively. To get Chrome, a user still has to download something (unless they’re using Chrome OS — but if that’s the case, they’re already probably going to be using Chrome on their other machines). I would imagine that most IE and Safari users don’t download their browser, they use it because it’s the default that comes pre-installed on their machines.

Plus, Safari being bundled by default with iTunes for a time should have helped it gain massive Windows market share. But it would appear that many people downloading it simply weren’t using it.

Maybe it’s extensions that give Chrome the advantage? Maybe, but Safari has had them as well since mid-2010. Sure, Chrome’s extensions are better and much more plentiful, but if that is all that was holding Safari back, developers probably would have stepped up their game there. Plus, Firefox had extensions way before either Chrome or Safari and while they undoubtedly helped grow that browser, it’s also shrinking now in the face of Chrome.

With the launch of OS X Lion, it seemed as if Safari might be poised for a bit of a renaissance. Because the default controls were inverted, third-party software like Chrome was largely broken to begin with on the new OS. Safari also offered features like better multi-touch support and Reading List (which syncs between iOS and OS X Lion) which rivals didn’t match. But with a few months of data in, it looks like the Safari growth is still the same slow and methodical variety, likely rising simply as more Macs are sold.

Given the rise of mobile, it would seem that the massive usage mobile Safari is seeing might help Safari on desktops/laptops too. But again, the numbers don’t really suggest that. Safari is growing, but slowly. Meanwhile Chrome, which isn’t actually a part of Android — not yet, anyway — is skyrocketing without any sort of mobile presence.

Personally, I’m a Chrome user myself. I’ve tried a few times to use Safari as my primary browser (most recently with the OS X Lion upgrade), but I always end up switching back. To me, it’s still about practical performance. Things like: with a dozen or more tabs open, Chrome seems to perform in a way that Safari cannot.

Plus, I can’t live without the URL/Search Omnibox that Chrome offers. And I’m addicted to “pinned” tabs (browser tabs I always have open and are shoved to the left and shrunken down, out of the way from general tabbed web browsing).

It has been nearly 9 years since Safari was first formally introduced on stage by Steve Jobs at Macworld 2003. It has steadily improved and grown market share, but the rise of Chrome in less than half of that time has made Safari look a bit silly.

Of course, that could all change rather quickly if devices like the iPad really are the future of general purpose computing. On mobile devices in general, there’s no question in my mind right now that mobile Safari is ahead of what Google is doing. That’s why it’s odd that the opposite is true on more traditional computers.

And it’s not entirely clear why. Some point to Apple neglect — since the App Store has been such a phenomenon, they’re more inclined to throw resources at native work rather than web work, is the basic argument — but again, given the state of mobile Safari versus the other mobile web browsers, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It could simply be that Google’s Chrome team is really good at what they do, and nailed it from the get go. Good things happen to good products.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: apple, apple safari, Blogging, chrome, Facebook, Google, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

HTC And Google Sound Off On The ITC’s Patent Ruling

December 21, 2011 By Chris Velazco Leave a Comment

Though they had until April of next year to figure out a fix for their patent-infringing UI feature, HTC CEO Peter Chou has reaffirmed to the media that the company has already has a solution ready to go at a joint press conference with Google’s Mobile SVP Andy Rubin.

As Jordan mentioned yesterday, the patent in question deals with the ability to tap a phone number or an address within an email to bring up the corresponding application. Chou pledged that the offending UI flourish would be removed from all of their mobile devices “soon,” and Reuters reports that the company is testing their new devices for compliance with the ITC’s ruling.

Rubin also chimed in on the matter, stating that the feature that supposedly infringed Apple’s patents isn’t a core part of how Android works, but rather a “user interface feature” that has been baked into an application. Hopefully this means that Google will be able to work around it as quickly as HTC has, unless they want their other hardware partners to undergo the same legal scrutiny.

For now it looks like things are quieting down on this front, but somehow I don’t expect things to stay that way. Andy Rubin would probably agree: looking forward, Rubin says he is optimistic about the scores of mobile patent squabbles eventually giving way to a “patent peace on the overall platform,” but he expects these sorts of intellectual property battles to drag on for a few more years.

Meanwhile, HTC’s Chou seems a bit more miffed by the goings-on in the mobile space, and by Apple’s legal maneuvers in particular.

“This industry should not allow one company use its powerful weapon to stop other innovation and take it all… this is not fair,” he said.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: apple, Blogging, Facebook, Google, htc, ITC, mobile, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Galaxy Nexus

December 14, 2011 By MG Siegler Leave a Comment

You have to hand it to Google. They know that I prefer Apple products and have been generally critical of many Google moves in the past couple of years. And yet, they’re unafraid to give me their newest products to test out. To be honest, I’m not sure Apple would do the same. But I think this is a smart move on Google’s part. On one hand, they may get a negative review but they know that many will discount the negativity coming from me. On the flip side, if it’s positive: gravy train time.

Thus: my thoughts on the Galaxy Nexus. But before I begin…

Rather than do a full-on review — you’ve probably already seen plenty of those — and given that I now write an Apple-centric column for TechCrunch, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to continue my “An iPhone Lover’s Take…” series. For some background, here are my previous stories from the same angle on the Nexus One, the HTC EVO 4G, the Nexus S, a Windows Phone, and even the iPhone 4.

My colleague Jason Kincaid took a similar approach for a post a few weeks back, but did it from a slightly different angle — call it: An Original iPhone Lover Who Learned To Love Android Until Switching Back To The iPhone… Reviews The Galaxy Nexus. Oddly, he just had just switched back to the iPhone after years of Android use — but he says the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich in particular may get him to switch back yet again. Meanwhile, GigaOm’s Darrell Etherington also looked at the Galaxy Nexus from an iPhone user’s perspective and ultimately decided the iPhone 4S was still the device for him. So I’m here to break the tie.

I’ve been using an iPhone since the day the first one launched in 2007. It is without question my favorite and most-used gadget of all time. Over that same span, I’ve tried about a dozen different Android devices ranging from the G1 to the Nexus S — the results have been decidedly mixed. I pretty much hated the G1, generally liked the Nexus One, thought the EVO 4G was more or less crap, and basically enjoyed the Nexus S. But none, in my mind, could touch the iPhone.

So what about the Galaxy Nexus?

I was given the device shortly before I took off for Europe a couple weeks ago. Given that it’s unlocked and I got a 3G SIM, I’ve been using it a lot — just as much as I’ve used any of the other Android devices listed above. For a few nights, it has been my primary device when I’ve been out and about. Unfortunately, I have not been able to test any sort of 4G network with it, so consider all of this a Galaxy Nexus 3G review.

First and foremost, the Galaxy Nexus is way too big. The 4.65-inch screen is nice when I’m sitting on my couch, but out and about it feels like I’m Zack Morris holding his Gordon Gekko phone. I’d consider myself to have average sized hands for an adult male, and the screen is so large that it killed several one-handed operations for me (especially since many Android apps use a top nav system). I’ll admit that for some apps, like Gmail, having a screen larger than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch variety is very nice. But 4.3-inch may be better. This is just too big.

While the screen is too big, I am happy that Google has finally decided to get rid of hardware menu buttons and go all-in on the screen. Previous Android hardware was always made worse by the decision to include fixed nav buttons along the button. With Ice Cream Sandwich, all these buttons can now be software-based. There isn’t even a home hardware button like the iPhone has anymore — it’s all software.

I like this. The iPhone home button wears down over time and it makes noise when you click it. (Of course, the Galaxy Nexus still has a wake/power button of the right side.) I hope Apple does something more inventive with the button if they choose to keep it in future iPhone hardware iterations. Perhaps a multi-touch top on the button that allows you to swipe between open iOS apps would make the continuation of the physical button worth it.

I also like the inclusion of an indicator light on the Galaxy Nexus. Both the Galaxy Nexus and iPhone have options to vibrate or give you audio cues to alert you to new messages, but if the phone isn’t on me, I often miss those. The light allows you to see if you have new message waiting without having to turn the screen on. This is one of the few things BlackBerry got right that Apple for whatever reason hasn’t bothered to mimic.

The rest of the Galaxy Nexus hardware leaves something to be desired. The iPhone feels like a completely and thoughtfully designed object. By comparison, the Galaxy Nexus still feels rather cheap and plastic-y. It’s not awful, but you’d think Samsung could do better at this point. Some people will like having the option to remove to the back to get at the battery, but the method for doing so remains a joke. You essentially have to rip it off. I feel like I’m peeling a nail away from a finger every time I do it — it’s that unpleasant.

The battery life itself on the device is very good. I felt like the Galaxy Nexus was lasting at least as long as the iPhone 4S on a fully charged battery, perhaps even a bit longer if some cases. Again, I didn’t try it on a 4G network, which is known to drain battery quicker. (I also haven’t had the battery discharge issues that some iPhone 4S users have been reporting since the launch.) But fear not, this is not the EVO with its temper-melting 30-minute battery.

The camera on the Galaxy Nexus is definitely worse than the iPhone 4S, both in megapixels (8 vs. 5), and in image quality. But the iPhone 4S is also a ridiculously good camera. The Galaxy Nexus is still a fine point-and-shoot replacement, in my opinion. The camera seems better than any other Android device I’ve used. One nit is that while there is a method to go right into the camera from the lock screen (just like iOS 5 has), it’s too slow if the camera isn’t previously running. You’ll hit the camera button and watch as the Android main screen loads and then the camera apps loads. This feels like more of a macro than a feature.

And let’s talk about Ice Cream Sandwich. The artist also known as Android 4.0 is very solid. There is no question that the software is much improved over previous iterations in terms of speed, but mainly usability. I really like things like the multi-task tray and some of the new widgets.

Unfortunately, the system still lacks much of the fine polish that iOS users enjoy. The majority of Android users will probably think such criticism is bullshit, but that has always been the case. I imagine it’s probably hard for a Mercedes owner to describe to a Honda owner how attention to detail makes their driving experience better when both machines get them from point A to point B. As a Honda owner myself, I’m not sure I would buy it — I’d have to experience it to understand it, I imagine. And most Android lovers are not going to spend enough time with iOS to fully appreciate the differences.

Still, if the Android team ever wants to convert (or at least convince) most iOS users, they still have quite a bit of work to do here. Then again, they probably don’t (or shouldn’t) care too much about converting iOS users over to Android. All the non-smartphone users out there remain the much bigger prize to go after (for both Google and Apple).

Other things that will sound like nits but drove me crazy with ICS included the constant focusing on text fields only to have to click again to get the keyboard to pop up. If I’m in a text field, I clearly want to type something. Why should I have to click again? This doesn’t always happen, but it happens a lot — particularly in third-party apps.

Another: why is there a separate app for Messaging and Google+ Messenger? Apple baked iMessage into their SMS app, why didn’t Google? If they’re worried about anti-competitive concerns, why would they bundle all the Google+ stuff into ICS to begin with? Similarly, why do Gmail and Email continue to be two separate apps? And why on Earth is the web browser not Chrome yet!?

The new People app social unification is nice — I love the big pictures. But my god Google needs help with their duplication/merging detection. One of my friends has four separate entries — one for his phone number, one for his Gmail/Google+, one for Twitter, and one for another email. Several others had three different entries. Most had at least two. Also, Google provides an option to link your Facebook account in Accounts & sync, but it does nothing. I’m sure this is due to the Google/Facebook fracas, but why include something in your OS that is completely broken?

Ice Cream Sandwich’s voice command functionality is a joke compared to Siri — but that may be changing soon, we’ll see.

In his write-up, Jason noted that iOS is still far behind Android when it comes to notifications, I have to disagree. I find Android’s notification tray to be far less useful than it is on iOS. For example, if I get three new emails, with Android, I just see that I have three new emails all grouped together. With iOS I can see at least some of the context. Same with Tweets. The size of the alerts in this tray also isn’t uniform in Android, so Facebook alerts seem more important with their huge logo.

I do like the ability to “clear all” in Android’s notification tray though. The iOS micro clear button remains a joke that badly needs to be fixed.

When it comes to web browsers, arguably the most important feature on any of these devices, there is no question that iOS still has a big edge here. I’ve seen arguments on both sides for why one is faster than the other — most recently, data today favors iOS — but just doing a simple use case test, mobile Safari kicks the ass of Google’s don’t-call-it-Chrome mobile web browser across the board. Some pages still refuse to render correctly on Android’s browser. And the ones that do cannot seem to get the simplest feature right: double-tap to zoom. You do it on Android and there’s a good chance you could end up looking at the middle of a random paragraph.

You’ll also still see a bit of lag in ICS when you do seemingly simple things like this. It’s still not as smooth as it should be. For the most part, ICS fixes many of Android’s performance issues, but there are plenty of times that you’ll still see stutters here and there.

And then there are the apps.

To be fair to Google, Ice Cream Sandwich is currently only on the Galaxy Nexus and it still hasn’t even officially launched in the U.S. But there’s a lot of work to do here. One app that I had on my Nexus S constantly crashes now on the Galaxy Nexus. And rather than quietly closing in the background, I get a nice big Windows-style pop-up that it has stopped running. Many other apps look fairly bad on the larger screen simply because they’re not optimized for it — again, something a wider release of ICS will hopefully fix.

The main problem I have with Android apps on the Galaxy Nexus/ICS remains the ones that are also available on iOS. When the apps exist on both platforms, it’s easy to compare them and the iOS version almost always wins — and often by a landslide. Take the latest version of Twitter, for example. It was just updated to run on both. On iOS it’s smooth, on ICS, there is noticeable stutter when scrolling. It’s much worse on Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself — no big deal, only the biggest app on both platforms.

The reason for the app differences between the two platforms remains a hot topic of debate. Again, all I know is what I see: app to app, iOS still easily beats Android in most cases. One counter-example, which I talked about on stage at LeWeb last week, is SoundTracking. I actually think their app is better on Android. But that has less to do with performance, and more to do with the fact that it can access hooks that iOS doesn’t offer, like background Spotify integration. Android developers should focus more on these benefits of Android and less on making their apps exact ports of their iOS ones. Something always seems to get lost in translation — often badly lost.

Now it just sounds like I’m focusing on the negative. It’s important to emphasize the fact that the Galaxy Nexus is without a doubt the best phone I’ve ever used that’s not an iPhone. And there is no question that it does certain things better than an iPhone — namely all of the Google apps and any third-party background/OS integration beyond Twitter, which is now baked into iOS 5. Google has also managed to just about match Apple in app quantity. This is all good — competition is good.

The next step that Google needs to take (or to help third party developers take) involves around app quality. Put simply: they need to create better tools for developers to use in order to take advantage of the strengths ICS offers. This won’t happen in 6 months, but it can happen if Google works at it.

After that, it’s the intangibles where iOS holds the huge advantage. And just like in sports, it’s not clear how well you can “teach” those. At some point, Google may simply have to acknowledge that iOS looks and feels better than Android because Apple’s entire fabric is woven with design, tight integration, and attention to detail. Google’s strengths are elsewhere; they should embrace that.

Google has done some very nice work here. Both the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich are a new pinnacle of the Android platform. But in the end, it still comes down to something very simple: which device do I want to use day-to-day? Which phone do I reach for when I’m not doing a review? It’s still the iPhone. Without question.

Keep at it, Google.

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: android, apple, Blogging, Facebook, Gadgets, Galaxy Nexus, Google, iphone, iphone 4s, mobile, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Networking, TC

Mark It Down: June 6, 2012

December 8, 2011 By MG Siegler Leave a Comment

“Six months from now you’ll say the opposite. Because ultimately applications vendors are driven by volume. And the volume is favored by the open approach that Google is taking.”

That was Google Chairman Eric Schmidt speaking at LeWeb a couple days ago. Specifically, he was addressing a question from the audience wondering why most big application developers are still choosing to develop for the iOS platform first instead of Android.

First of all, if you haven’t watched Schmidt’s entire talk with Loic Le Meur yet, you really should. They cover a range of topics important to both Google and the broader tech space. Plus, it will avoid the small situation that arose yesterday when Schmidt was misquoted, making him sound much more arrogant about the Android platform than he actually was.

While Schmidt was misquoted, the core of this latest debate around iOS and Android remains very much intact. Schmidt predicted that 6 months from now, most app developers will choose to make their app work on Android before iOS. This statement gives us an actual date that we can mark down to see if he’s right or not: June 6, 2012.

Of course, my stance is going to be that there’s no way he’s going to be right about that. Not a chance.

In fact, I’m not even sure he would say the same thing again if pressed. Because while the way he answered the question may have sounded reasonable, history has already given us plenty of guidance as to why he’ll be wrong.

The audience member who asked the question clearly did so because Android already is the dominant player in the space. And it has been for quite some time now. Schmidt brushes that fact (a fact which he so often states when it’s advantageous to an argument) aside completely and instead implies that the only reason developers aren’t rushing to Android is because the software hasn’t been good enough until now.

Of course, that goes against basically everything Google has been saying for the past couple of years. In that time, it was always been that Android was ahead of iOS when it came to software. Last year at Google I/O, for example, the knives were out for Apple’s platform. At one point, they showed Android 2.2 (Froyo) literally running laps around iOS.

So when Schmidt says: “It’s taken us a while to get software that really is capable of delivering on the promise that you’ve just articulated.” to the audience member, you have to wonder why then such a software comparison was a focal point of previous Google I/Os?

That’s not to say Android Ice Cream Sandwich isn’t good (I happen to be testing it out right now, and it is quite good — more on that in another column soon), it’s just that Google has consistently said the newest version of Android is the one that will blow the doors off the iOS house. It just hasn’t happened yet. And I see no reason why we should believe that the situation will be different this time.

Further, Schmidt goes on to imply that another reason why ICS will bring all the developers over to Android is that Google has now gotten better at working with their carrier and OEM partners to ensure the latest software is available to customers. “With the ICS release our core objective as a company is to get all of the hardware vendors onto that platform,” was his actual quote.

Yes, that has been a problem — a huge one. But again, I see no reason why it’s going to be solved here. At Google I/O this past summer, Google went on and on about their new “Android Update Initiative”. It sounded great. Google was going to get all the OEMs and carriers in line and make sure that Android updates came to all in a timely manner. “Over the next few weeks, we’ll figure it all out,” Android chief Android chief Andy Rubin said at the time.

That was seven months ago. Guess how much we’ve heard about the plan since then?

*Crickets*

Worse, just yesterday, Motorola — the hardware company Google is buying, mind you — took to their blog to dampen expectations about when their users may seen ICS on their wide variety of phones. They don’t come out and give a date, but putting two-and-two together, it sure sounds like it’s going to be many months at the earliest. Hell, they aren’t going to even finalize which devices they want to and can update until a month from now.

Here’s my favorite bit:

3. Submit the upgrade to the carriers for certification

This is the point in the process where the carrier’s lab qualifies and tests the upgrade. Each carrier has different requirements for phases 2 and 3. There may be a two-month preparation cycle to enter a carrier lab cycle of one to three months.

I’m starting to wonder if sure any Android device besides the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is going to have ICS by June 6, 2012. That doesn’t bode well for Schmdit’s prediction.

All that aside, let’s just think about what Schmidt is saying for a second. He’s saying that developers are just months — and maybe even weeks — away from changing their current line of thinking. Are there some developers out there that do Android first right now? Sure. Has that number been growing? I think that’s fair to say (though I have no data to point to either way). But it’s also fair to say that the vast majority of the key mobile software developers are still focusing on iOS first. The audience member cited Flipboard, everyone else can probably rattle off a dozen big names.

Again, Android is already the biggest smartphone platform out there. And again, that has been the case for a long time now. So when Schmidt says “ultimately applications vendors are driven by volume”, Android should already be dominating in the race for getting the best apps. But they aren’t.

I’ve spoken to many mobile developers over the years about this issue. There are a few refrains, but they’re all largely the same.

First, many of them still seem to prefer to use iOS as their own primary device. The likelihood is greater that they’re going to develop for a platform they actually know and use.

Second, most developers are still unconvinced that you can make any meaningful amount of money trying to sell an Android app (Schmidt hit on this quickly in his remarks, saying that the Market is now better, but doesn’t really address the issue). Instapaper creator Marco Arment is going to put his money where his mouth is in this regard by offering to split the revenue with any developer who can make a decent Android port of his app and sell it in the Android Market. If he thought it would be a huge money maker, obviously he would do it himself.

Third, the Android Market is still no App Store when it comes to both distribution and discovery. Again, Schmidt sort of alluded to this being fixed, but it’s not yet clear if the changes made are actually working.

Fourth, if volume was all that mattered, everyone would still be developing for Symbian, as Anil Dash pointed out earlier. Or they might even still be focusing on Windows, as John Gruber pointed out yesterday.

Fifth, while eventually Android volume may be a boon to apps largely based around advertising, many app developers don’t want to move in this direction. Most still want to make something and get paid directly for it (imagine that) — see: argument number two.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Android development itself remains a huge pain in the ass. I hear this again, and again, and again — just as much today as I did two years ago. Android has what are widely considered to be vastly inferior development tools when it comes to making apps for Android versus what Apple gives you to make apps for iOS. Many refer to them as a joke. Or a nightmare. Or the bane of their existence. Or all of the above.

And you have to use them to ensure that your app will work on the huge number of devices in the Android ecosystem. Very few developers even bother to actually test on the majority of them, and it’s still a pain. It makes IE6-specific development look like a cakewalk.

I actually brought this up on stage with SoundTracking creator Steve Jang at LeWeb on Wednesday. They were at the conference to launch their Android app after finding some success going iOS first. When asked what the Android development process was like, he admitted it was long and painful. Pretty much every app developer going from iOS to Android will tell you the same thing — and if they don’t happen to be on stage, they’ll use many more expletives.

So you’ll forgive me if I laugh when Eric Schmidt says that by June of 2012, all of this is going to change. Suddenly, the Flipboards, Instapapers, Soundtrackings, Instagrams, etc, are going to launch on Android first. It’s like saying that by the middle of next year, the majority of all TVs are going to be running on the Google TV platform.

Oh, wait.

[image: flickr/LeWeb11]