We don't need roads

Two great posts I read today:

• Cars Kill Cities
• Not The Solution

I recently heard somebody say he didn’t care about crosswalks because cities belong to pedestrians. It made me realize how the two cities I lived in, Paris and New York, are completely planned for cars.

People wonder who between Apple and Google is winning at the smartphone war. Some say Google is, others argue it’s Apple. If you were to build a company, how would you define a success? And what is winning after all?

You can learn in business school that, for a company, winning is maximizing shareholder value. Winning at business is about money.

Apple is making shitloads of money by selling iPhones, iPads and iPods. They sell iOS devices and make money. Google is not making profit in the smartphone market directly by selling devices. When people buy a Samsung Bionic Optimus II X 3D, Samsung gets the money, and Google gets the user.

Google’s strategy is to capture a lot of user information to charge more for ads they serve to the users. The more Android devices are used (not shipped, not sold, not activated: used), the more information Google is going to capture and the more ads they are going to display.

While Apple is silently failing at using the iOS platform to serve iAds, Google wins at being the default search engine in nearly all desktop browsers and mobile devices but Microsoft products. They know what people want, what people say, where people are and want to go. They win at the advertising game.

For people who actually make products, winning is about having people use and love their products. Nobody thinks about customer satisfaction when their only goal is to make more money, but people who actually care about the user experience can be the ones who get the profits. Apple wins at the customer satisfaction game.

Now, you can look at the smartphone market and see the companies sharing the Android profits as one Apple competitor. Then yes, Android is winning. The vendors share the money, but Google gets all the users. If you think about Map and Search, Google even gets iOS users. Yes, two thirds of Google’s mobile search comes from iOS devices, but the remaining third is still for Google.

Or you can look at the market in terms of what I would personally call a success: people loving your products so much that they line up in front of your stores, recommend your products to everybody, and still get you twice as much profit on phones as everybody else combined.

It all depends on what your goal is.

2011 was the year I:

• left Paris for New York
• got my first real job and joined the awesome ChallengePost team
• took evening classes for a master in Information Systems Management
• started the Couch-to-5k program and ran a half–marathon
• attended a Fatboy Slim gig on a beach of Governors Island and saw Pink Martini in Central Park
• went to Asia for the first time when traveling across China

Let’s beat that in 2012. I want to:

• Reboot WatchThis
• Run a marathon
• Learn piano
• Apply for American citizenship

I hope you too set high goals for yourself.

It’s becoming more obvious that specs don’t matter these days, or at least that what really matters is harder to compare. People who need product recommendations will only find experts writing for other experts. Nobody knows what RAM is or what 802.11n means. They care about ease of use, time-to-Facebook and how long will the battery last.

I asked some regular people to tell me about their favorite or least-favorite device and explain me why.

My father on its iPhone 4:

The iPhone is a Swiss army knife that amazes me everyday with its intuitive features.

My sister Sarah on her Sony Xperia mini:

I chose it instead of an iPhone because it’s smaller and thus fits well in my pocket. I don’t know how to start a new paragraph when writing an email but for texting, making calls and Google things, it’s fine. It also takes great pictures.

My sister Sarah on her 7.1 megapixel Olympus camera (that’s actually how she refers to it):

My phone takes better pictures. Don’t buy it.

My sister Sarah on her MacBook Pro:

Just like any other Mac, it doesn’t crash and doesn’t get viruses.

My mom on her iPhone:

I been using it for a few years. It replaced the huge mess in my purse. If you run all day, just get one.

My friend Louis on his Eee PC:

Don’t buy that. After only a month, the battery is dead, it’s extremely slow, event while editing text. Yes, it’s lightweight and pretty cheap, but you should spend a little more to get a laptop that does the bare minimum.

I remember clearly my father recommending the iPad to his sister:

It’s easy to use, you don’t need to charge it very often, it’s light and small and you can do everything with it and it’s always connected to the Internet. Perfect for when you go on vacation.

Now, look how Best Buy describes a top-selling laptop to regular people. Below are the main product features:

VISION Technology by AMD / AMD Quad-Core A8-3500M Accelerated Processor with AMD Radeon HD 6620G discrete-class graphics / 8GB DDR3 SDRAM / Multiformat DVD±RW/CD-RW drive / 15.6” LED high-definition display / 640GB hard drive (5400 rpm) / AMD Radeon HD 6620G graphics / Built-in high-speed wireless LAN (802.11b/g/n) / Built-in 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN

Nobody talks about how how open their operating system is or the lack of Flash support. I’m stating the obvious here, but we’ll get there eventually. People needs tech reviews by people.