As the year comes to a close, many tech sites are speculating on what 2012 will bring. Of course, Apple is always a big subject of debate, what with Steve Jobs having passed on.

There was one piece in particular that I read (this one from Ryan Lawler at GigaOM) that made the case that Apple would do well to just focus on the user experience of any future ATV device and not attempt to create a new model (e.g. disrupt) the existing television industry.

I totally disagree with this take.

Now, I’m not saying that Apple shouldn’t stress user experience. Of course bringing simplicity and dare I even say, beauty, to the television viewing experience is key. But this is an area that Apple really has already focused on. The interface for ATV is pretty streamlined already.

No, what I think Apple needs to do is exactly what Lawler says they shouldn’t attempt, which is disruption.

If Apple is smart, it won’t set out to disrupt the programming industry by creating a la carte packages of licensed content. Think of it as “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Apple is not going to be able to disrupt the TV industry, so it might as well give the TV industry the tools it needs to improve their offerings for consumers.

This is exactly what Apple did in their music and phone business. People said that they couldn’t offer a la cart packages in music because labels and artists wouldn’t go for their albums being broken up into pieces. People also said Apple could never create a phone that by and large bypassed carrier control.

They did both and consumers are better served as a result of it.

You can already purchase shows on iTunes a la carte and watch those shows on your ATV, just like music or apps. This isn’t a brave new world, it is the current world that we live in.

Here is what Apple should do.

First, ignore people who say they can’t reform the television industry. This is the company of “Think Different” which brought us the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. I’d like to give them a little credibility in disrupting industries.

Second, they absolutely should build a system that is based on a la carte selection of content choices. You mean to tell me HBO or Showtime or FX won’t go for offering up their most popular shows for a premium price and take more of the profit? Personally, I’d pay $50 or more for a season of Dexter just by itself if I could get it the day it airs, in full HD, with supplemental content throughout the week (maybe teasers, behind the scenes content, interviews, etc). To me, paying for shows I want is worth it – paying for a network of content in which I only care about 10% of said content, isn’t.

This is kind of the problem with Netflix isn’t it? The reason I cancelled Netflix wasn’t due to their stripping off of their dvd business, or their price changes. It was because I was paying a monthly bill for a whole lot of old content that for the most part I didn’t care about. I want to pay for content I want, not that I don’t want. Netflix has like 5% of what I want, and 95% filler. I am also noticing the same problem with Spotify to be honest and that makes me sad.

I am all for Apple providing tools for content producers as well. Giving them tools to create cross device experience is something Lawler advocates for and I agree. It would be awesome to be able to watch Dexter starting on my television in the living room, conclude while laying in bed on the iPad and be able to get updates on the show (be it behinds the scenes, interviews, trivia, games) via my phone.

But thats the kind of thing that we can, for the most part, already do with an ATV or a media center (I use Plex and this is all possible). What I really hope to see from Apple is a total disruption with not so much how a television itself functions, but how cable networks function. I want to pay for what I want to consume, not pay for a buffet filled with broccoli and cauliflower (e.g. stuff I don’t eat)

Civil enough Vimeo?

For the second time, I have had my account summarily deleted from Vimeo’s web site – each for stupid reasons. Keep in mind, I was also a paying customer at the time. Also, keep in mind that paying for video hosting when YouTube is readily available, has a much MUCH larger community, where you can earn money for your creations AND upload unlimited amounts of HD video, is basically idiotic in the first place.

So for those who don’t know, Vimeo is a web hosting provider. Back in the day, they were one of the only ones which had HD video upload and embedding. However, you needed a Plus account, which i purchased for not only my own personal use but for business purposes. In fact, when i worked at an advertising agency, i would routinely buy Vimeo Plus accounts for all of our clients. Why? The HD embedding plus player customization (e.g. it didn’t look ugly like YouTube’s).

The thing is, the administrators (or the community, or both) are hypocrites. They flag videos for deletion that every other site on the planet finds perfectly acceptable. For example, I like to record World of Warcraft videos of myself playing. Some of them, include helpful guides for improving your character. Personally, i see no difference in this and people creating guides to do other things, like cooking, or taking better “photos and videos” which are all over Vimeo. Are those removed? Nope.

You can visit Vimeo’s home page and find tons of copyrighted content. Just yesterday a featured video included ripped scenes from almost every natural disaster movie of the last 20 years. The video in question was poking fun at the impeding “rapture” which is “scheduled” for tomorrow.

So, this morning I got an email from Vimeo informing me yet another account of mine was DELETED. Not a warning. Not that the videos I uploaded were removed. That my entire PAID VIMEO ACCOUNT was deleted. In so many words I was told if i wanted to argue this with them I could email them back (by the way this notice came from an anonymous account “rights@vimeo.com” they aren’t even comfortable putting their name behind their actions). They also include a disclaimer that the argument needs to be “civil” which is idiotic coming from a company which just deleted month’s of my work.

Here was my response:

“Refund please. You guys are terrible. Civil enough?”

Seriously, if you are a content creator/producer I “implore” you to stay as far away from Vimeo as humanly possible. First, they have a horrible community there, it is small, they have absurdly small upload limits even for PAID customers (Vimeo Plus), and they will not even hesitate to delete all of your content without even so much as a warning.

If you care at all about people seeing your stuff, you are so much better using YouTube. You can upload as much as you like, the processing of your upload isn’t slow (unlike Vimeo, again, even for paid Vimeo Plus customers), your content, even if it is in violation of some rule (a rule which isn’t “you can’t upload a video about a video game”) gets flagged but not deleted and YouTube actually allows you a chance to change the content to make it work with their network, unlike Vimeo.

In closure – it pains me to have to bad mouth a company, but Vimeo certainly deserves it. Seriously, how this company has any customers is amazing.

I actually have more than one book but iBooks doesn't know it

Despite being a huge Apple fanboy, even I have to admit that there are certain things that Apple doesn’t do well at. I’ve got serious questions about the quality of several products that Apple has launched, anything from the Apple TV to Mobile Me. Even have a few gripes about little things like the Apple Remote that comes with your mac.

But the one product I feel like Apple has failed miserably at is iBooks.

Apple’s modus operandi is to look at the market for something and substantially revolutionize or improve it. They did it with laptops, with music, with phones and now with tablets. They tried to do it with selling and reading books online but have fallen way short of their primary competition, Amazon.

I’m not even talking about the device to read books, because I think the iPad is superior to the Kindle in about 1000 ways. No, my biggest complaint is the iBooks application and the iBooks store.

The biggest problem with iBooks is just the selection. I have about a 20% success rate so far of even finding the books I really want to spend money on while looking through the iBooks store. They simply aren’t there.

Secondarily is the way the bookstore syncs. I recently lost about 4 books from my virtual ‘bookshelf’ when i moved my iTunes library from one mac to another. No idea where they went. I suppose I could troubleshoot this a bit and get them again, but its very distressing to go to read something and find out you can’t (far more so than wanting to listen to a podcast or a song that has vanished, there is a much greater personal investment in reading a book in my opinion).

The Amazon kindle app, which runs great on the iPhone, iPad and even over the web, has worked well for me without a hitch. It is fast to buy books (if far less integrated than the iBooks process) and there is a great selection. I believe that titles on the Amazon store also are cheaper, at least in the few circumstances where I have been able to find the same book on both stores.

I just feel like iBooks is inferior to Amazon in every way, and it pains me to say because I really like the vast majority of Apple’s stuff. I guess they can’t be great at everything.

Today was a historic day for fat blowhards. That’s right, Michael Arrington sold his blog Techcrunch to AOL. My immediate (and present) reaction to this news was that I really hope AOL spent less than a million to buy the site, because Techcrunch is (and always has been) a pretty mediocre site for news.

My biggest problem with Techcrunch is just that the site is barely functional in the Safari browser on a Mac. My second biggest problem though is that the writing there is horrid. I mean, I wouldn’t try to pass myself off as a professional writer on this site. Nor would I claim to be a journalist or anything of the sort. Yet, I am pretty damned sure I am as good a writer as either Arrington or MG Siegler.

Techcrunch is pretty much a site for people who care about startup companies and their funding. Surely it isn’t worth the reported $25 million it was sold for, I can’t believe there are that many people out there who fit into this demo. When it was the only source for this kind of information that would have been one thing, but now with Mashable eating their lunch (in regards to quality) I just don’t see how this makes much sense for AOL.

But really, AOL? AOL has been kind of a joke for the better part of a decade now. These guys just want to buy big blogs – they are starting to remind me of Yahoo a bit. AOL is about everything EXCEPT what people know them for, because what they are known for is really second rate internet hosting.

Not so much competition for my dollars, personally, but competition among tablet computers for non-Apple fanboys.

Blackberry’s Playbook looks like a pretty snazzy new entry into the tablet market. It is still aways off from being released, but it is sufficiently different that i think it could make a splash with the kinds of folks who are always tethered to their crackberry’s.

And this is the place where Apple is vulnerable – enterprise computing. I always hear folks inside of large companies (including my own) talk about how the iPad will never be a supported “business device” even though our company does support both iPhones and Blackberry’s. I guess the iPad and iPhone are just not seen as being corporate. But Blackberry’s certainly are, and the fact that you will be able to do most of the things on the Playbook that you can also do on the iPad will make this a relatively dangerous product. I also appreciate that Blackberry did not completely rip off the iOS ui and went with something that to me at least seems more original.

Company A (lets just call them Apple computer) designs a totally cool device or service (lets call it a phone, or an app store or a tablet computer). They have success with all of these products, and they all seem to play together nicely within an ecosystem of devices and services that are all integrated with each other.

Look like any other products you've seen before?

Then, Company B, C, D – Z all decide that they too must have the same totally cool device or service. These companies create clones of Company A’s device or service, going so far as to replicate almost exactly the same form factor and functionality. Some of these companies, not known for other products that fall into the category of phones, computers or application stores, even create their own second rate variations. They don’t belong to any ecosystem of other products, nor do these companies even attempt to create one. Further, the products are priced low and/or given away free in order to establish some type of market share dominance.

Basically, I am describing Apple and “everyone else” which right now seems to include Google, LG, Samsung, Acer, HP, Microsoft and probably 2 dozen other less known companies.

Have you seen some of the knock offs out there of the iPad? They look nearly identical to Apple’s tablet, but run a crappy version of either Windows or Android.

Although I love Apple, it would be nice to see some real competition for them in terms of innovation. Ripping off ui and form factor from Apple doesn’t really move technology forward. Come on people, be a little original?

IKEA doesn’t believe in that for some reason. Only retailer I have run across that had an extensive online catalog and ecommerce site which does not allow you to see the status of your order online. For that matter, they don’t appear to send you receipts of transactions to email either.

I hit up their online support which is nothing more than an AIM style bot. I did get a funny response from it, though.

My disillusion with Google has been years in the making. I know I’ve written about it before on my blog so i won’t go into a deep dive on those thoughts. Maybe, just maybe my related posts plugin will find it so i don’t have to go searching through hundreds of posts.

But, the latest straw with my now hate/loathe relationship with Google is over their stance on net neutrality. Put simply, before Google got into the cellphone market, they were all for keeping the net open for everyone, and rejected having different tiers of service and cost for entry to the web. Now, they have Android and want to buddy up with Verizon to make even more money with their cellphone operating system and their content sites.

There has been a ton of outrage to this stance, which of course is welcomed (and a bit surprising with how much tech sites cater to Android and Google) but what is really needed is a mass exodus from Google sites and services.

One small problem though – where would people turn to in lieu of using Google for search and email?

Bing is still a pretty crappy site. The ui isn’t horrible, but the results are suspect and because hardly anyone uses it (comparatively speaking of course) it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me as a search engine marketer to stop using Google.

For email, I use Mobile Me and Gmail. It would be really hard for me to ditch Gmail completely because although Mobile Me has made some improvements to their service, its problem is that it is slow as hell. It also doesn’t have some of the organizational flexibility in managing messages and contacts that Gmail does. If it does, well i haven’t found those options.

My thoughts on the keynote this morning and the new iPhone, all rapid fire like.

There are a lot of people out there saying that the announcement of the new phone isn’t enough. I suspect that because a certain blog bought a stolen prototype and splayed it on their site for the world to see that some of the excitement behind the reveal was lost. This unveiling though was a hell of a lot more impactful than the 3GS reveal.

I can’t wait to see what is done with the gyroscope. No one is talking about that now but i think it will end up being huge.

All reports indicate a ridiculously thin phone, which is always cool.

Love that you can now shoot AND edit your video on the phone and that from all appearances it is easy to do.

The forward camera is made much cooler, obviously, with the new video chat feature (face time). Pretty awesome how you can swap from forward to rear camera on the fly.

Lots of people complaining that the video chat only works under Wifi. Don’t think it is that big of a deal, have you ever tried to make a call with 3G? That doesn’t even always work

I probably won’t upgrade for a while, not for lack of desire but because my work pays my iPhone bill now and i just got the 3GS. I also kind of want to see which of these new technologies (retina display especially) get rolled into the iPad.

So i finally have my iPad and am actually using it to write this blog post. I have a lot of thoughts and theories about it, some of which i have not really seen written about before. Of course, i also have the obligatory “omfg this thing is awesome” commentary too but i I’ll refrain from wasting time saying what has already been said before.

My theory on the iPad is simple:

This is a device that is first and foremost for early adopters. It is also for people who, if given the choice, would rather read news, visit sites or play games on their phones than their laptop. If you enjoy your iPhone and like touching things as opposed to moving around with a mouse, and if you like self contained applications as opposed to web browsers, then odds are you would like the iPad.

Over the past few months, i have been shunning my mac book pro in lieu of reading news sites on my iPhone, especially when at home. I just enjoy having quick access to well designed applications that were stripped down and simplified, that i could navigate with my thumb or forefinger only. Apps like the iPhone Facebook one for example, or CNN or digg.

It is a somewhat accurate comparison that the iPad is a giant iPod touch. I can can only say that while it is larger version, it doesn’t lose anything by merely being bigger. It actually gains a lot from more real estate and like i said, if you like the iPhone you will also love the iPad. Does that mean you should buy one? I don’t know. I do know however that i will probably use this more than my laptop when not doing work related functions.