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Oops. Looks like Amazon didn't bother with the lawyers.

> The report cited a source “close to the discussions” between Amazon and the music labels as saying that “music labels were alerted of the plans last week,” and that Amazon only addressed “the issue of negotiating licenses” after the fact. > > Amazon’s move was described as “somewhat stunning,” leaving some media industry members to view the service as illegal. > > “I’ve never seen a company of their size make an announcement, launch a service and simultaneously say they’re trying to get licenses,” the source said, who was described as a music executive requesting anonymity. > > Amazon appears to have [jumped](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/29/amazon_preempts_apple_with_cloud_based_music_service_for_web_and_android.html) the gun in a bid to get ahead of Apple. > >   > >  
via [appleinsider.com](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/29/amazons_cloud_drive_faces_music_industry_backlash.html)
Soooooo, maybe it was Amazon rushing the product to market, rather than Apple. (See my [earlier article](http://jcieplinski.posterous.com/about-amazons-new-cloudplayer-and-clouddrive) from today.) I never would have guessed that Amazon would go ahead with this without cutting a deal first. Maybe they figure they’ll win in the court of public opinion.

Rumor: Apple's next iPhone 5 will give you eternal life (Eternal happiness will come with iPhone 6)

> Several rumors popped up this week suggesting that Apple might push the release of both the next iPhone hardware and the next major iOS update from its usual summer release [to the fall](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/03/wwdc-2011-may-be-all-software-signaling-change-in-iphone-strategy.ars). In the wake of those rumors, which claim the announcement will coincide with a new cloud-based iTunes “locker,” it’s possible that Apple may use the extra time to integrate newer technologies, including Siri’s AI-based, voice-controlled searching, improved mapping, and possibly LTE compatibility into next-generation iOS and iPhone hardware.
via [arstechnica.com](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/03/rumor-voice-controlled-cloud-streaming-lte-iphone-this-fall.ars?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+Featured+Content%29)
You have to hand it to Apple. One sentence in an ad for the upcoming WWDC conference (Join us for a preview of the future of iOS and Mac OS X.) and the entire blogosphere implodes upon itself with new rumors, speculation, conspiracy theories, and other batshit craziness.

Just when the cycle of new Apple announcements seems fairly predictable and risks becoming downright boring, Apple throws a monkey wrench in the works and generates a free press frenzy. Brilliant.

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. Apple is both downplaying expectations and letting people’s imaginations run wild at the same time.

For the record, I personally don’t think that mere sentence suggested ANYTHING, other than that we surely weren’t going to be getting a preview of iOS 5 in April this year. It makes logical sense, then, to assume that without a new iOS 5 to be released in June, a new iPhone 5 at WWDC would be less likely, too.

But taking that and extrapolating it into “iPhone 5 coming this fall with LTE 4G, a cloud-based OS, artificial intelligence that can read your mind, and a built-in swiss army knife” is exactly the sort of thing that sets people up for self-disappointment. Last week, everyone was assuming that the iPhone 5 would be a 3GS-kind of upgrade; a minor bump to a faster processor, maybe more RAM. That sort of thing. But at the rate we’re going now, by the time it gets announced, it’ll be rumored to be able to launch spacecraft.

But that’s the genius of Apple marketing. Because no matter what people speculate, the beauty of it is that they’re speculating. Keep them guessing. Keep the intrigue going. So the story that otherwise would have been “Apple falls behind on its expected delivery of a minor upgrade to the iPhone” (which would have been an unreasonable but not unexpected reaction from the press) turned into “The phone Apple ships this fall will be groundbreaking, spectacular, and mind-blowing. And never mind that it won’t be here in the summer, like usual.”

Personally, I think Apple just needed to finish up on Lion before letting that release slip too much further, and so the iOS team is busy helping the Lion team (which share many of the same people). And so the entire product cycle is being shifted slightly to accommodate. No big deal.

You can only get so many hours out of a small group of engineers.

This goes back to why Apple stopped doing conferences like Macworld in the first place. Release on your own schedule, rather than catering to someone else’s, right? What good does that do you if you’re just as rigid with your own release schedule as the third parties you were catering to before were?

About Amazon's new CloudPlayer and CloudDrive

> The CloudPlayer works through any web browser that supports Adobe Air.
via [ihnatko.com](http://ihnatko.com/2011/03/29/amazon-to-apple-oh-it-is-sooo-on/)
Okay, you lost me on Adobe Air. Bad choice, Amazon. Write a native app, for crying out loud. It’s not that hard.

I do think this new service is a very wise play from Amazon. Reminds me of when Apple was reluctant to expand iTunes beyond music into video, and some other companies beat them to the punch, which forced Apple’s hand.

Apple likes to wait until conditions are just right for a new product. They waited a LONG time to get into cell phones and tablets. They probably want to wait for better infrastructure and 4G speeds for true “cloud” music services. But the problem is that they already OWN music, so they have to defend their territory.

When you force Apple to release products before they are quite ready, you end up with an Apple TV kind of situation, where the first two or three iterations are sort of cool, but not quite there yet. The availability of content is sparse; pricing is confusing. You get a so-so user experience. It’s the sort of thing where you can tell Steve would have preferred to spend a few more years on it, but he didn’t have a choice. The same thing happened to iWork.com. It looked like that space was going to be important, so Apple got involved in a half-assed sort of way. Really atypical, but it does happen once in a while.

So it’ll be interesting if this development from Amazon forces Apple’s hand on bringing online storage to the iTunes universe before it’s really ready. I think Amazon is smart to go after Apple in this space, considering that unlike every other company on earth, Amazon actually has a depth of retail presence and experience that rivals—if not exceeds—Apple’s own.

Or maybe Apple was smart enough to see this coming, and is already ready with a great service of its own. We’ll find out soon enough.

A company like Amazon can be more nimble with a service like this, because it is the underdog. The music labels are more than happy to grant Amazon online rights that it won’t grant to Apple, precisely because they want to see Steve Jobs knocked down a few pegs. So I imagine the lawyers involved in this are billing a lot of hours.

If this new Amazon service catches Apple off guard and becomes popular, it could also save Android from almost certain long-term obscurity. Unless Amazon is smart and makes its services available on more than just Android. (Hint: I think Bezos is smart enough to spread the love around to every platform imaginable. The Android exclusivity won’t last long.)

Make this a NATIVE Mac app, get it onto iOS (which will be tricky, but they’ll get it there eventually), and you’ll maybe even get MY attention. So long as Apple doesn’t come up with something better in the next few months, that is.

Firefox Mobile: Flash isn't ready yet

> One thing Firefox mobile doesn’t have is support for Flash, even though Android has a big partnership with Adobe to make Flash work on mobile. I spoke with some folks from Mozilla yesterday about this topic. Eventually, Firefox mobile will support Flash, but it is just not there yet in terms of responsiveness. The focus right now is on HTML5 and CSS. It is amazing some of the 3D effects, animations, video, and other in-browser graphics you can now get with HTML5. Check out some of the [demos here](https://demos.mozilla.org/en-US/) after you download Firefox to your phone.
via [techcrunch.com](http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/29/mobile-firefox-flash-html5/)
And to think, there are still people in the world who think that Apple is just being spiteful not allowing Flash on the iPhone.

Maybe when Jobs said that he was open to the idea of Flash on the iPhone originally, but Adobe just hadn’t shown him any running version of Flash that was up to the task yet, he was being completely sincere. After all, here we are more than FOUR YEARS after the original iPhone, and there still isn’t a version of Flash that isn’t a piece of crap yet.

Four years, people. That’s a century in tech time.

Clearly, Adobe had its head so far up its own ass that it missed the mobile revolution entirely. Flash was clearly never developed with lower-power mobile devices in mind. So they keep trying to shoehorn it down to make it passible. But there’s a point where you’re better off starting clean with a system designed for your needs from the ground up.

But that’s never been Adobe’s way.

And so Firefox mobilea joins the club of “Flash support coming soon.”

On the lockdown of Android Honeycomb

During a keynote presentation at Google’s IO developer conference last year, Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra proclaimed that the search giant created Android in order to bring freedom to the masses and avoid a “draconian future” in which one company controlled the mobile industry. Looking past the self-congratulatory rhetoric, Android’s poor track record on openness is becoming harder to ignore.

The company revealed Thursday that it will delay publication of the Android 3.0 source code for the foreseeable future—possibly for months. It’s not clear when (or if) the source code will be made available. The decision puts Android on a path towards a “draconian future” of its own, in which it is controlled by a single vendor—Google.

via [ars technica](http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/03/android-openness-withering-as-google-withhold-honeycomb-code.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss)
I think the mistake everyone is making here is assuming that this is some sort of change in Google’s intentions. Google is only “headed toward” a less open platform if you think that they ever intended the platform to be open in the first place.

For-profit companies are only open when it suits them to be open. Apple, for instance used the open AAC format in iTunes because it knew a proprietary format would never be able to compete with the open MP3. It gave away Webkit as an open platform, because it knew no one would adapt web sites to suit the Safari browser if it used a proprietary engine. The same goes for adopting USB, DVI, Display Port, and Thunderbolt. Apple could use open standards in these cases because it makes its money elsewhere.

Open is what you do when you’re the underdog and you need to get your product into as many hands as possible. And when using the open standard doesn’t interfere with your ability to profit from your own intellectual property. There’s nothing wrong with that, in practice, as long as you are clear when you are being open vs. when you are not.

What Google has done is dupe the open zealots into cheerleading the platform by making elaborate speeches about the free exchange of ideas, the need for standards, etc. All the while keeping its own search algorithms, Gmail, etc. locked up tight. The whole thing is a ruse. A sham.

And the open fanboys fall for it every time.

“Don’t be evil is marking bullshit.” Right as usual, Steve. He wasn’t criticizing, so much as pointing out the obvious.

Now that hardware manufacturers are taking advantage of the “open” Android by adding their own user interface tweaks, and more offensively, cutting deals with Microsoft to add Bing search instead of Google search, Google is clamping down Android 3.0. Suddenly the pure numbers game isn’t working out so well. After all, a world full of Android devices that make more money for Microsoft than for Google doesn’t help Google much.

So this move should not be surprising at all, if you’ve been paying any attention. Google will open anything so long as that openness helps it make money. Otherwise, it’s closed, closed, closed. And that’s no different from Apple, or Microsoft, or RIM, or anyone else. So I’m not even knocking Google for that.

Being a hypocrite, though. Well for that, I’m happy to knock Google quite a bit.