Visual signaling

Tsay took the actual audition recordings of the top 3 finalists from 10 prestigious international classical music competitions and asked a group of participants to select the winners. One group watched a video audition, the second group listened to an audio recording of the same audition, and a final group watched the video audition with the sound turned off. 

As her study participants were untrained in classical music, Tsay expected them to do no better at choosing a winner than random chance. This proved true for the first two groups, who chose the winner less than 33% of the time. But to everyone’s surprise, the amateurs did significantly better than chance when watching only a silent video. 

Tsay then replicated the experiment with professional musicians and found the same results. Despite their expertise, the musicians also did no better than chance at picking the winner based on audio or video recordings. But when they watched a silent video recording, they too performed dramatically better. 

Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information just as amateurs do.

It's the mythical story about the Kennedy vs Nixon debate results but for classical musicians. Maybe that's why Jascha Heifetz played everything so quickly; his body language was so muted that if he'd played more slowly some might have failed to pick up on his virtuosity.

Whether the Kennedy vs Nixon narrative was a myth or not, I'm not so sure it meant that Nixon wasn't judged fairly by those who watched on TV. Much of being the POTUS is projecting a body language that inspires confidence and respect, so the fact that those watching on TV might have been scoring the candidates on that vector seems fair. 

Apple strategy and disruption

The Businessweek interview with Tim Cook is fascinating because it's not often you get to hear the tech titans talking about each other.  CEO's of most tech companies are fairly guarded when speaking to the press, and most won't address the competition head on, but Cook didn't shirk those subjects.

I think if I bought [an Android tablet] and used it, and I thought that was a tablet experience, I’m not sure I would ever buy another tablet. The responsiveness isn’t there. The basic touch is really off. The app experience is a stretched-out smartphone kind of experience. It’s not an optimized experience. However, that said, I have always said that the tablet market was going to surpass the PC market. I was saying that well before it was viewed to be sane to say that. It’s clear that we’re 24 months away from that.

On Android's market share: 

Has Android’s rise in market share surprised you in the time that it’s happened?

I don’t think of Android as one thing. Most people do. I mean, from a consumer point of view, if you look at what Amazon (AMZN) does with Android, forget the name Android for a minute. If you’re coming down from a different planet and you were going to name it, you wouldn’t name it the same thing as what another company does. If you compared that to what Samsung (005930:KS) does, I’m not sure you would name that the same thing either.

I think that the importance of that is overplayed. The truth is that there are more people using iOS 6 than there is any version of Android. And in days from now, iOS 7 will be the most popular mobile operating system. And so what does it really mean at the end of the day to show these share numbers and combine all of these disparate things as if they’re one thing? I’m not so sure it has a great meaning to it at the end of the day.

So your question, does it surprise me? I don’t look at it in the same way as you might. I think the way a consumer looks at this is different. Does a consumer that’s buying a Kindle think about it being an Android? Probably not. And so I think that’s a bit different than where Microsoft (MSFT) and Windows was.

On Android's OS fragmentation:

What’s your take on Android’s many versions? The “fragmentation” issue.

It’s a growing problem.

From a functional level?

Yes. And it’s just not growing in the—it’s not like a baby that becomes an infant. It’s not like that. It’s an exponential. It’s a compounding problem. And think about all these people that they’re leaving behind from a customer point of view. People do hold on. Most people hold on to their phones a couple of years. They enter a contract and honor that contract and then upgrade after that two-year period. So in essence, by the time they buy the phone, many of these operating systems are old. They’re not the latest ones by the time people buy. And so by the time they exit, they’re using an operating system that’s three or four years old. That would be like me right now having in my pocket iOS 3. I can’t imagine it.

It’s not because it was bad. It’s just because the world has changed and there is so much more. And so anyway, I think it is a growing issue. It will show up in developers. It will show up for people that no longer have access to certain apps. It will show up in security issues, because if you’re not moving your customer base to the latest version, then you have to go back and plug holes in all of this old stuff, and people don’t really do that to a great degree. So they are more susceptible to issues.

It just shows up in—I mean, name it. And that issue grows, and because the population is growing, it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. So we’ll see.

On market share generally:

While these phones represent the high end of the industry, there’s another part of the industry that’s racing toward the bottom. Chinese manufacturers, Indian manufacturers, $100 phones, $150 phones. What do you think about that? What does that mean for Apple?

I think it’s important that we grow, but I don’t measure our success in unit market share. So if there are a lot of $69 tablets sold that you’re just pounding on to get something to work and get some responsiveness, and it’s thick and fat and just a terrible experience, I don’t really weigh that unit of share like I do a different unit of share. I don’t weigh them to be equivalent.

So I think in most markets in consumer electronics, there’s always a large junk part of the market. We’re not in the junk business. We don’t want to make something for that. What we want to do is make a really great product and provide a great experience. And I’m sure we’ll get enough customers that want to buy that. We want to please them.

That other business, it’s not something—we don’t spend our time obsessed of how to make a product for that because that’s just not who we are and what we’re focused on.

The most common questions about Apple: why don't they come out with a lower price iPhone for non-subsidized markets? Why do they leave a price umbrella in phones and tablets? Is Android's growing market share concerning? Cook took them all head on and seems, at least to me, very candid. The next time someone poses these questions again they can just reference this interview.

The Cook interview pairs nicely with the Ben Thompson post What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong. Christensen is the intellectual of the moment in technology the past several years with his theories of disruption from his classic text The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruption has proven to have great explanatory power in many sectors of the technology industry. But Christensen has been wrong, repeatedly, about Apple's susceptibility to disruption. Many a time he has predicted Apple will be bitten at the heels, and time after time they've been fine.

Thompson believes he knows why. 

In the case of low-end disruption, the rational buyer considers the superior integrated offering and the inferior (but still good) modular offering, decides the latter is “good enough,” and buys it because it is cheaper. The buyer knows the integrated offering is better, but the buyer is unwilling to pay a premium for features the buyer does not need.

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EVERY ATTRIBUTE THAT MATTERS CAN NOT BE DOCUMENTED AND MEASURED

The attribute most valued by consumers, assuming a product is at least in the general vicinity of a need, is ease-of-use. It’s not the only one – again, doing a job-that-needs-done is most important – but all things being equal, consumers prefer a superior user experience.

What is interesting about this attribute is that it is impossible to overshoot.

Given how often the tech industry rushes to apply Christensen's theories of disruption (as in most walks of life, disruption is the hammer through which the tech industry sees an infinity of naials), Thompson's article is a must read. 

Breaking Up and to the Right

“Breaking Bad” made its debut in 2008 to an underwhelming 1.2 million viewers — which would have caused many programming chiefs to drop it. But the show dodged cancellation and slowly built a following — especially once the old episodes were made available en masse on Netflix.

By mid-2012, about 2.6 million viewers were watching live episodes; now, as the ending approaches, that total has more than doubled to 6 million, which might be small for a network television show but makes “Breaking Bad” one of the biggest phenomena on cable.

From Brian Stelter at the NYTimes.

I wonder if any other show on TV has experienced such a strong and steady growth in viewership across its lifetime. The internet and the availability to stream previous episodes and seasons has not only enabled more complex, linear, multi-episode and multi-season storytelling, but it created an environment in which a show like Breaking Bad could survive long enough to accumulate audience and buzz as it went.

If you aren't caught up and are worried about social media spoiling Breaking Bad's series finale this Sunday, you can use this Netflix-branded spoiler foiler for your Twitter account.  

I'm not even going to take that risk. I'll be turning off all my devices and sitting with a tinfoil hat on my head on Sunday, waiting until I've finished watching the finale in real time before I talk or interact with another human being. 

A cinema of uncertainty

The degree to which Antonioni remained in intellectual vogue in the U.S. during this period fluctuated wildly. The original defenders of L’avventura were mainly literary types like Dwight Macdonald and John Simon, both of whom turned against Eclipse only a year or so later, as did a rising star named Pauline Kael (who had also championed L’avventura). Andrew Sarris, who later came back in force to defend Blowup, was already cracking jokes about “Antoniennui” in the early 60s. Many American critics tended to be scornful of Antonioni’s continuing use of Monica Vitti (in four features in a row) because of her limited technical range as an actress, much as Godard was criticized concurrently for repeatedly using Anna Karina. And the fact that Antonioni’s concentration on the idle rich in L’avventura and La notte coincided with the milieus of such contemporaneous movies as La dolce vita and Last Year at Marienbad was enough to make Kael ignore the radical formal differences between Fellini, Resnais, and Antonioni and link them all together in an otherwise amusing broadside called “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties.”

The problem was, many of these people were already starting to adopt a critical attitude that assumed it was possible to know immediately and without a doubt what was good and bad in a movie the precise moment it appeared — an attitude that Kael’s disciples have subsequently adopted with even more shrillness and impatience. Intricate, melancholic mood pieces like Antonioni’s, which invite and reward — and occasionally even require — weeks of mulling over, could find no place at all within this approach, so fewer and fewer critics wound up dealing with them, seriously or otherwise. Better to come up with a clever quip about them right away than continue to think about them for a week or two, or even revise an opinion about them when the review got reprinted (which Kael has never done about a single movie in any of her 11 books — confidence with a vengeance, and one that necessarily rules out a whole cinema of uncertainty). In a marketplace virtually predicated on planned obsolescence, movies that stick in one’s craw rather than speed through the digestive system are bound to cause trouble.

From the classic "A Cinema of Uncertainty" by Jonathan Rosenbaum, first published in 1993. First time I'd read this specific critique of the Pauline Kael school of criticism, the first person instinctive reaction, never to be repeated. Perhaps there are two modes of criticism, fast and slow, and perhaps those have parallels in movie watching, too.

As much as people lament the future of the mid-budget thinking adult's movie, I'm much more surprised when I go to the symphony or even more so the opera and find a packed house. That seems like an art form whose continued survival is even more of a miracle. I suppose I'll look around and puzzle at how the aged audience will replenish itself until the day I'm one of the elderly and genteel patrons that a few younger audience members will look at as the last of a dying breed.

Need a blueprint for The Blueprint

Over a year ago I preordered a book titled The Blueprint, intrigued by its three accomplished co-authors: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Garry Kasparov.  The subtitle of the book was Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk, and Rescuing the Free Market.

The ship date on Amazon kept pushing back and pushing back, and finally I learned why in an aside in Why We Can't Solve Big Problems:

Levchin, Thiel, and Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, had planned a book, to be titled The Blueprint, that would “explain where the world’s innovation has gone.” Originally intended to be released in March of this year, it has been indefinitely postponed, according to Levchin, because the authors could not agree on a set of prescriptions.