From Politico:

Apple is one of the largest, U.S. taxpayers, if not the largest, cutting a check for nearly $6 billion to the IRS for fiscal year 2012. The company is estimating its U.S. income tax payment for 2013 will be about $7 billion. The tech company has kept its brain trust of employees based in its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters instead of farming out software development and other services to countries like India and China.

“But did you even ask Apple to put the bobble heads… I mean chat heads… on the screen persistently? Or you just didn’t want to go there with them?”

“I think it’s more a discussion about how do we make a great product experience…”

“But did you ask them for the ability?”

“Well, we know what their lead times are so… you only ask for things that have some possibility of landing in a useful way…”

“But do you imagine the possibility they’ll let you have those heads wandering all over their screen?”

“I think it’s a great question for them.”

“I’m asking you. Are you even going to hope for that?”

(wounded) “Am I going to hope for that…?”

Awkward silence.

Lots of interesting commentary from all over the place on Facebook Home. The story seems to be tilting toward “it’s a dud” with a few writers hedging with hope for the future. What’s interesting to my mind is how the Facebook Home disaster has opened up to a wider readership discussions about app and platform design that are usually restricted to the technorati. It’s also interesting how the economic exigencies of the software industry, despite all the mealy-mouthed claims to be free and open swilling around in it, have caused Facebook—the putative killer app of the mobile age—to identify the real killer app as the platform itself. But Facebook’s commitment to delivering a people-oriented mobile experience is quite at odds with its true modus operandi. I’m with Ben Thompson on this one:

It follows, of course, that no successful platform can be built on advertising. Advertising demands eyeballs; platform success demands the ability to fade into the background as said unique experiences take center stage.

I have been thinking that Facebook hasn’t figured out mobile, because even though their party line, as recently stated by CTO Mike Schroepfer, is, “We’re a technology company focused on mobile,” they are really a desktop software company focused on adapting an obsolete business model to an entirely new environment. Home was their attempt to do this. And it looks like a failure. A few commentators have suggested that Facebook employees are simply themselves too iOS-oriented to develop for Android, a possibility I rejected in an earlier post. John Gruber also agrees that the problem did not likely stem from Facebook employees being unfamiliar with Android but, rather, from the product (if not the execution) just being a bad idea. Or, as Marco Arment put it more bluntly: “Facebook Home was flat-out badly designed: it’s designed for optimal input and failed to consider real-world usage.”

Facebook may be correct that the platform is the thing, but wresting control of it from Google, much less Apple, is not going to be straightforward. What Home illustrates is that a single platform solution focused on a single app is not going to cut it on devices that are inherently multi-functional—at least not for the plurality of users Facebook probably needs to maintain its relevance. I could, however, see platforms evolving to suit the increasingly specialized demands of specialized groups of users as the costs of producing the specialized technology required to serve them, and of scaling to accommodate their accompanying social graphs, start to fall. But only for certain groups of users. Most will stick with whatever they pull out of the box. In this scenario, no one platform (or are these “meta-platforms?”) would dominate. Facebook Home may presage a forthcoming “battle for the home screen” in which any remotely “social” service may compete (Twitter House? Tumblr Terrace?), but I think it’s more likely that it marks the high water mark of not only their own dominance over the Internet but also their way of doing business. I foresee very little success for an invasive, top-down approach that requires enough users to opt-in that a niche is magically transformed into a default.

Ryan Tate at Wired, on the other hand, believes that “given some time, this “huge flop” of a software product might just find a devoted audience.” Except that the users of high-end Android devices (who probably have much in common with the people who work at Facebook) are the sort of obsessively micro-managing geeks who don’t want a single app skin papering over their carefully calibrated settings. Facebook’s true target audience—the drooling masses of easy marketing fodder on junky, low-end smart phones—can’t use Home yet. And how long, exactly, does Facebook plan to leave its lunch on the table?Louis Bedigian speculates that “in two years, when virtually all of the modern Android phones contain Home compatibility, Home use should increase exponentially. If it does not, then would it be a true flop and would likely disappear from Google Play.” For this reason, he argues, it is premature to consider Home a flop. That would make sense if the tech sector operated like any other (that is, somewhat rationally). But a bad idea is a bad idea, no matter how many phones it works on, and the wheat tends to get separated pretty quickly from the chaff in the digital world.

A follow-up on the “flop” story by Steve Kovach at Business Insider:

Despite all these negative signals, it doesn’t look like Home is going away. One of our sources close to Facebook said Zuckerberg is still incredibly optimistic about the app and wants it to succeed. Plus, the product isn’t finished. Facebook unveiled some new features this week that will be coming to Home soon in an update like a dock to store your most-used apps and an easier way to switch between the Facebook Home screen and the regular Android Home screen. There are also a few reports that Facebook is in talks to buy the mapping company Waze, further evidence that Facebook is trying to build its own smartphone ecosystem within Android.

Negative signals, indeed! Is it wise for Facebook to stay the course here? Even Facebook employees think Home is a dud. Nicholas Carlson, also at BI, speculates that Facebook’s own software developers are too iOS-oriented to design for the Android platform. Somehow, that theory rings false to me. I think Facebook decided to make a Hail Mary pass for mobile, and, like most Hail Mary passes, they missed. It’s not that their software is poorly designed. It’s that social networks aren’t as important to people as Mark Zuckerberg wishes they were—at least not his social network to the exclusion of all others. Sharing might be, but sharing is now integrated into so many other Internet-based apps and services, a one-stop shop designed ten years ago for the desktop environment isn’t going to fly in a more differentiated, mobile-oriented world. But still, maybe they can save their business with another billion-dollar acquisition.

Here’s more bad news from Zach Epstein at BGR:

Our source at AT&T has confirmed that the HTC First, which is the first smartphone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed, will soon be discontinued and unsold inventory will be returned to HTC. How much unsold inventory is there? We don’t have an exact figure, but things aren’t looking good. According to our source, AT&T sold fewer than 15,000 units nationwide through last week when the phone’s price was slashed to $0.99.

Ouch. Only rumors, but the price drop does smack of desperation/inventory clearance. I think Facebook needs to start worrying about talent retention. Those bright young things in Silicon Valley aren’t going to stick with a loser, and you don’t necessarily get to fail more than once over there.

Not a week goes by without the Internet vomiting out articles purporting to offer advice to history’s most successful consumer electronics company. One analyst, evidently named after a former governor of New Jersey, has argued this past week that Apple should start offering its “better apps” on the Android platform. As a fun exercise, let’s tear this down premise by premise.

For of all, better? Better in the sense of the better apps Apple has made or better in the sense that Apple’s built-in apps are better than Android’s? For the latter case, I don’t think anyone would argue that Apple’s own apps are better than others available on either iOS or Android that perform comparable functions. There are plenty of wish lists for improvements to Apple’s apps that are also published on a weekly basis (and in convenient slideshow format). For the former, the specific examples he cites are iBook [sic], iTunes, Siri, iMessage, iWork, iPhoto, and FaceTime. Working backward: FaceTime wouldn’t work on most hardware running Android and would probably require handset manufacturers to negotiate with carriers for the use of all that extra bandwidth, and anyway there’s Skype; iPhoto is not awesome; iWork is not awesome; iMessage isn’t an app; Siri isn’t an app; iTunes and iBook [sic] I’ll get to in a moment. So which of Apple’s killer apps are going to blast a hole in Android’s market share? Pages? Find Friends? Maps??

In the author’s defense, he is aware that Apple’s business model is different from Google’s. I know this because he says so. What I don’t know is whether or not he is aware that Google does not make phones (not phones that anybody really buys, anyway). What I don’t know also is whether or not he is aware that Android exists in multiple versions across innumerable platforms, few of them having anything to do with Google, and that the cost of translating Numbers and iBook [sic] into versions that will function on all of these devices (and iCloud?) is probably going to outweigh any benefit to Apple. I do know that the author thinks some built-in OS services (Siri, iMessage, arguably FaceTime) are the same thing as apps, and this threatens his credibility as a tech analyst.

Ultimately, the major premise here is that Apple “might be selling itself short by not showing off its software on other devices.” When he says software, however, he obviously means iTunes and not, e.g., Mail or Weather. Google makes money when its software is used on iPhones, he reasons, so why wouldn’t Apple want to rake in all those potential extra billions by porting iTunes to Android (as it once did, reluctantly, to Windows)? I can actually answer this question without using Siri or referencing an iBook [sic]! First, iTunes has always been run at a loss. Its whole purpose is to get people to buy Apple hardware. Recently, it has started to make a profit, but that profit is an absolute meaningless pittance compared to what their mobile devices bring in. Author, you pointed this out yourself! Second, there is statistical evidence that even though more Android devices are being sold than iOS devices, iOS users pay out far more money for apps than Android users. Even if that weren’t the case, what sense does it make for Apple to “show off” its software on other devices? If the whole point of the software is to add value to the hardware, porting it to other devices sort of defeats the purpose. Why would you buy an iPhone or iPad to get access to Apple’s ecosystem if you can just have it on your Android device? Also, if the hardware is not very good, the software is not going to look very good, either. Apple controls its own hardware and can therefore calibrate the performance of its software to match. It also—crucially and uniquely—controls its software updates.

Too many commentators on the Internet discuss Apple without any inkling whereof they speak. Informed opinions I can either agree or disagree with are one thing, but this sort of writing is as dangerous as the ignorance that spawned it. Apple may have problems, as any large organization tends to, but it’s hardly the Titanic, and Android is hardly an iceberg.

A front page with an illustration of the Earth from space and a demand that I sign-in using (in order of preference?) Facebook, Google, or Twitter. I’m already excited. I’m glad Jesus Christ has finally returned to reveal the truth about this sort of garbage.

Yeah, Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.

A future iPhone may sport invisible buttons, says the Times of India, because Apple filed a patent for a disappearing button or slider. I wonder what other incredible technologies Apple has patented that they may or may not someday use. How about making the iPhone itself invisible?

They wrote it, and I clicked on it. Mission accomplished.

It seems like only a month ago that the gods of silicon granted me an opportunity to cynically slam Facebook Home, the social networking giant’s attempt to seize control of the mobile platform. While the idea seemed sensible from their point of view, it has turned out to be less so for all other people. Andrew Leonard at Salon uses the word “disaster.” Here are some synonyms for disaster: catastrophe, calamity, débâcle, dud, flop, megaflop, and Zuckerberg (as in, we tried our hardest to gain market share in an increasingly competitive space, but unfortunately we just Zuckerberged it). Users of Facebook, known in the teen parlance I just invented as “zuckers,” love sharing tedious minutia with their friends, family, and advertisers, but apparently do not want shrunken heads floating around their smart phone home screens. Go figure.

Still, I am surprised by how quickly this verdict came in. One month later, and it’s already deemed a failure? It looks like the benchmark of success these days is immediate, rapacious adoption. Anything short of that, and you’re doomed. And considering the recent fate of Windows 8, not even record rates of adoption are enough. You need staggering rates of adoption! And you need them on mobile. I haven’t seen too many “Facebook is doomed”-style headlines, but the failure of such a high profile project that the company was clearly depending on to maintain its dominance surely warrants them. Many click-snatchers are saying Apple is doomed because their year-over-year iPhone sales grew by only 7 percent this year (in Apple-land, decline means a decline in growth, not anything like actual decline). In Facebook’s case, I guess there isn’t any decline, because there wasn’t any growth to begin with. Few people are downloading the Home app and even fewer are purchasing the HTC One with Home preinstalled. I think we may have reached the high water mark with Facebook and with Zuck’s tenure as the boy king of Silicon Valley. Another sign the winds may be shifting against him: his political action committee, also founded a month ago, is already shedding high-profile members. Facebook at least has one thing going for it, however: it isn’t run by this guy.

That’s an ironic question mark in the headline, by the way.

I’m following this on The Verge right now, so thanks to them for live-blogging yet another tech-vangelism gathering. Essentially, they want to make your phone “about people” instead of about apps. They will accomplish this by making your phone about Facebook apps but hide the functionality of those apps (i.e. the icons) behind a layer of live updates that will make you feel warm and connected while they use even more of your mobile activity to expand their data-mining/data-selling business. That’s the magic of openness, folks!

All this could be forgiven if the thing is useful. Whatever this thing is. It’s neither a phone nor an OS. It’s, I don’t know, a distraction skin?

Brian White , who will believe anything people in China tell him, is reporting that Apple’s forthcoming (and heretofore unannounced) iTV device features a power ring that will both function as a remote control and give its wearer mastery of Middle Earth. Sorry, mixed reference there, but hard to miss out on all the possible “ring” analogies. Personally, I think this is a ploy by Apple to force husbands to choose the company over their wives. In their hearts, many have already done so. But now they must choose which ring to wear, too. Imagine people walking around with these things. Nightmare scenario: iRing vs. Google Glass. Prepare for the 2014 tech culture wars. It’s all about wearable. Groan.