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Impartial Observations on Technology and the Social Web Skip to content Home Personal Blog Disclosure About ← Older posts “Hey Siri”, Think Different by Mahendra Palsule Posted on September 10, 2015 At Apple’s “Hey Siri” event yesterday, a lot of new devices were introduced . As usual, a section of the tech observers were underwhelmed by the slew of announcements and Apple’s stock fell after the event as a matter of routine. I too, expressed my disappointment on Twitter, but I want to clarify why I was disappointed. True visionaries who innovate often do things that make us go, “Huh?”, because we are not even on the plane of their thinking to figure out why they’re doing so, or because we think that is incongruous with what they’ve been doing so far. Facebook buys WhatsApp for $19 Billion. Huh? Google launches Project Loon. Huh? Amazon wants to test drone delivery. Huh? Microsoft reveals Hololens. Huh? Nothing Apple has introduced in the last five years has made me go, huh? Everything they’ve launched is an improvisation of what they had. Steve Jobs was a visionary. Not because he conceived the iPhone or the iPad, but because he conceived iTunes and the App Store, which revolutionized how music and software were sold. Innovation requires technical risk (will it work?) and market risk (will it sell?). Failure is an essential ingredient of innovation. Google Glass is generally considered a failure. Microsoft Kinect too. Facebook has had many small failures. Amazon tried something new but failed with the Fire phone. Apple has been playing it safe on both fronts and making tons of profits. Apple has not failed at anything in the past few years and it will continue making tons of profits for the foreseeable future. I am not predicting any downturn or demise of Apple, I am reasonably confident it will continue to be a powerhouse for many years to come. But Apple is not innovating. That is what disappoints me. Once upon a time, Apple distinguished itself by its slogan “Think Different”. Apple is now thinking Thinner, Better, Larger, Easier, Smaller, Longer, Lighter, but not Different. Posted in Skeptic Dope | Tagged Apple , innovation | Comments Off on “Hey Siri”, Think Different The fashionably insignificant phone call by Mahendra Palsule Posted on June 13, 2015 Read blogs, Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, or Twitter feeds of technology gurus and geeks, and you will find a recurrent declaration: “The phone app is the least used app on my smartphone.” This statement is made with a certain pride, as how the apps are the only things these geeks use; with a certain snobbishness, as how only old fashioned folks still resort to phone calls; with a certain fanboi presumptuousness, as how Apple redefined usage of a smartphone with the app store. Ask them when was the last time you actually talked with a human being, and they need to scratch their heads to recollect. Over the last two years, I have observed the consequences of this phenomenon. Most friends don’t meet in person, nobody talks to each other on the phone anymore. Everyone just “follows” their friends on online social networks, and like, comment, and share each other’s posts. In January 2014, I invited many friends to my 10th wedding anniversary and a housewarming party for our new dream home. I sent personally handcrafted invites to over 100s of friends. But the interesting story is what happened when I called them up individually to invite them. Each and every phone call resulted in a conversation that was either: Intellectually enriching in terms of technology/startup/media trends Emotionally fulfilling in many different ways Both of the above, resulting in promises to each other that “we should do this often” I learned a lesson through that experience. Since then, I have been trying to expand online interactions with offline meetings and conversations on phone or Skype. The results are startling. I have learned that online-only interactions can never be a substitute for real life face-to-face meetings and conversations, and phone calls where you listen to each others’ voice and actually speak instead of just type and share photos. I suggest you do an experiment. When you are not busy on weekends, call up or meet your friends instead of checking FB/Instagram/Twitter/etc. Try it for a few weeks, give me your feedback in the comments. I am not anti-technology in any way. I just think that the ease of interaction through mobile apps with hundreds of truly insignificant people has endangered human voice and personal communication with the few significant people in our lives. P.S. Many of the friends we invited to our anniversary and housewarming still recollect it as being the last time they met so many of their friends. What does that say? Posted in Personal | Tagged social networks; mobile; personal | Comments Off on The fashionably insignificant phone call The Unbundling of Social Networks by Mahendra Palsule Posted on September 13, 2014 In recent months, there has been much talk about the unbundling of Facebook and other networks. In the desktop world, Facebook had almost become a monopoly of social networking. When it filed for its IPO, it’s ambitions were not ambiguous: Zuck's vision starts from Facebook taking advantage of the Internet and ends with turning the Internet into Facebook. — Mahendra Palsule (@ScepticGeek) February 2, 2012 Throughout its history, Facebook’s ambitions have been explicitly obvious – it wanted to be the one and only service for everything in the online universe. Like a despot military conqueror in a game of Civilization, it went after everything – email, messaging, images, music, news, deals, location, games, and anything else it observed was a success for any other tech company or startup . It succeeded in some but failed in most. It is now attempting to go after video. Email was its most spectacular failure . Instagram became the hippest place to share pictures. WhatsApp and its various cousins became the hub of all messaging with different apps gaining dominance in different geographical regions. Twitter remains the go to place for news. As mobile usage exploded, Facebook’s social dominance eroded. New mobile social apps came up with dozens of ideas that Facebook not only had never imagined, but that were antithetical to its core philosophy. Identity and eternal archiving of data, ideas that were at the core of Facebook for its long term dominance and monetization were abruptly challenged by anonymity and ephemerality. Secret, Whisper and their cousins sprang up to capitalize on anonymity, while Snapchat and others became popular for their ephemeral sharing. Facebook was being out-innovated and its response was to acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion, Oculus for $2 billion, while its attempts to acquire Snapchat received a cold shoulder. Can Facebook ever achieve the holy grail of the online social universe? At the time, I had wondered: We do not even know whether this holy grail exists, or can ever exist, as one and only one network – it may very well exist as a multiplicity of networks. I think the mobile app-driven ecosystem has given us the answer: no one tech company can ever find the holy grail of the online social universe. Even if Facebook continues to gobble up each and every popular upstart in the mobile social space to retain its dominance, there will continue to be newer startups that innovate outside its sphere. Facebook was once a monolithic desktop website that dominated all online social interactions. It is now strategically unbundling itself to adapt to the mobile era. The underlying truth behind this is that there are always going to be a multiplicity of social networks via mobile apps that keep innovating beyond Facebook. The challenge Facebook faces in its quest of online domination is whether and how to incorporate ideas that are antithetical to its core. Will it ever accept anonymity as a genuine need? Will it ever accept ephemerality as a human need...