Last week the Echo Nest got bought by Spotify, the largest music service outside of iTunes while at the same time Apple launched "CarPlay" to support replacing the mess of antiquated electronics integrated into most cars with one that supposedly widens the moat competitors of iOS will have to cross in order to be relevant. I doubt it will really work, and not only because of how few CarPlay enabled cars there will be over the next 2-5 years compared to the numbers that are relevant in the smartphone platforms (only about 10M new cars in total are shipped world wide each year compared to close to 1 billion smartphones) but because attempts such as these to widen the moats of post PC operating systems are being nullified by the type of success Spotify and other best of breed cross platform apps represent.

Just as there is no doubt that there was a time when the iTunes music experience represented a huge platform advantage, it has since been rendered irrelevant by a number of competitors like Spotify. These experiences are so far superior to that of creakily purchasing songs and the associated pseudo-streaming offering that the iTunes app often ends of buried in a folder on a back page labeled something like "Apple Junk."

And this pattern is not unique to music: Dropbox has replaced iCloud, Evernote the main Notes app, and others have eaten away at the calendar, the address book, the maps, etc. In fact for almost any first party app, there are a number of quite credible alternatives. And in the most lethal of cases (when it comes to the aforementioned platform moat), these alternatives have achieved cross platform parity with their Android versions and deliver most of their value through a cloud service which holds the canonical copy of a user's data on servers not operated by the platform owner.

Combined with Bluetooth 4.0, Wifi and other hardware independent means of connectivity, I find that today's leading platforms appear much less "sticky" than those in the PC era were and all of this talk of ecosystems and lock-in feels somewhat anachronistic. Back to CarPlay: connecting to cars, televisions, or health tracking devices may provide some of this in the short-term but I suspect just as the software/service vendors emerged with best of breed solutions and a cross platform mandate, new device makers without a dog in the iOS/Android race will do the same over time. Samsung may not make its Galaxy Gear or televisions for iOS (and even that is in doubt) but LG will as will Sony and a host of other competitors.

And the guys with the real lock-in over this next phase? The cloud-backed service providers who have fought with a better user experience for that first-screen real estate (Evernote, Dropbox, Spotify), a business model (freemium) which supports an independent path, and enough scale to matter on their own.

And this is a good thing for startups overall.

Over the years, I've tried all sorts of ways to get my kids into programming: from the watered down artificial environments with loads of pedagogical pedigree to over-hyped tiger mom summer camps. And until this past week they've all resulted in blank looks from the kids who wonder why I think it is so important for them to learn to master giving instructions to a machine. Even when the programming exercise involves their beloved Minecraft (I will have a blog post on that adventure coming).

This week I found a project that seemed to work though, at least for this pair of 11 and 8 year old boys: a programmable Christmas tree. As of becoming semi sentient, it knows when to turn on an off based on the time of day but also warns us of impending snow by blinking rapidly for 30 seconds every 30 minutes. The project, implemented with a Raspberry Pi, a relay, a small amount of Python and two little boys has been a smashing success in the sheer amount of delight elicited. I've been thinking about it, especially in the context of our last attempt to write a LOVE-based video game earlier this year, and I think its success has to do with the following reasons: - it is physical in nature. Programming the world is a lot more interesting than building software that ends up looking crappier than what they can get on the AppStore for free - it feels like magic to see something in the real world react to inputs without human intervention. The tree has only blinked one for impending snow but one would have thought Santa came shooting out our fireplace with his ass on fire based on their reaction - it provided just the right level of abstraction for an 11-year old. Web scraping on one side and calling a REST interface on the other. And to boot, having permissions to stick wires in outlets is an 8 year old's fantasy!

Finally, I've done hardware projects with them before but it turns out that the key was doing one which could become a permanent part of the house infrastructure as crappy robots tend to suffer the same fate in the face of real toys that beginner games do with AppStore high gloss alternatives.

This was also my first foray into the Raspberry Pi which is a wonderful device (admittedly still suffering from production/yield problems) due to the fact that it is a full computer in a small little box with just enough input/output to control the physical world. Am looking forward to more of these.

Go check it out— the RPi infused programmable Christmas tree.

Postscript: I owe Avi Flombaum a big thanks for being the inspiration for this project. He not only gave me the idea of making webscraping a core part of the curriculum but opened my eyes to how much of what gets put in front of kids in the name of programming pedagogy is abstractly condescending at counterproductive when it comes to sparking the flame for this stuff.

Today is the second anniversary of Steve Jobs's death and while I am not planning on joining the Apple has Lost Its Way chorus, it is somewhat sobering to look back at my favorite piece of technology speaking ever, a 1997 pre-heyday WWDC Jobs Q&A where he is not only amazingly lucid about the strategy he would go on to implement for the next 14 years, but where he is incredibly straight forward and direct in his communication style.

If you are a student of superb public speaking, go and check it out. Compared to the ridiculously over-emphasized style of Cook and the other Apple execs of today (all of which are weirdly trying to channel a cargo cult version of the Steve keynotes), it is a particularly stark reminder of what the company lost two years ago.

The posts about Android's overwhelming marketshare miss the greater story that Tim Cook tried to highlight during the iPhone 5S launch around about usage versus unit volume. We used to live this at HP, and especially in the printer buisness where most of the economics were not in the "placement of the socket" but instead in the number of pages printed after the "install" (and therefore the amount of ink consumed). It is why HP smoked Lexmark and has held the lion's share of the economics despite pressure from Epson and Canon in inkjet printing. Whereas analysts worry about socket marketshare as a leading indicator, the real battle is in utilization.

Today we are hardly at the same place with mobile platform ecosystems because most of the gross margin is being made up front with the sale of the devices (well at least for Apple and Samsung) and with a complex value chain that relies on carrier subsidies in a lot of their core markets. But increasingly as it becomes harder to differentiate on hardware alone and software/user experience takes front stage, the bulk of the economics will shift to the services. Most people think of this shift as represented by the paid downloads in the AppStore and Market respectively but I don't believe that this is durable over time (as this blog post) argues and will shift to in-app payments and services that make recurring gross margin completely outside of the app stores but totally enabled by the mobile platform.

Just like the momentum story for app developers is going to shift from app install to app engagement over the next couple of years, the momentum story for the platform owners is going to shift from installed base to usage in a way that may expose some fairly naked swimmers in the receeding tide of large numbers.