The music business more screwed itself than Apple screwed it. The music business refused to embrace internet technology when it first was introduced just as they first tried to fight and stop CDs, just as they used to fight and try to stop home taping, all of which was known to spread it. So now you have an ironic situation where music is more ubiquitous than ever — everybody in the world has access to everything — my kids can listen to the Beatles because they don’t have to pay $15 to buy an album, they can either get it free or buy a Beatles song for a buck if they want.

So it’s the music business’s fault more than anything else. And then their failure to develop what Apple did develop, which was a good convenient easy delivery system. They fell on their own sword, you know?

I think Apple’s within its rights to do what they decided to do. They wanted to control pricing. The music business failed to do those things.

Read the complete interview on Ad Age

Next up is video of a blindfolded guy running around pavements with a camera on top of his head like in an MMOG.

[Vimeo http://vimeo.com/10595371]

I really hope the IPAD does well because it introduces a completely new category in computing devices. It does not replace your netbook, smart phone or even your e-book reader. A lot of users do not use computers beyond checking email or going to a few service based sites and are not comfortable with using their phones for surfing. What’s exciting for me is that devices like the IPAD can get this audience online and introduce new ways in which we can access and share information. You might say that the joys of tinkering with your computer is lost with such devices but thats what makes it great for the real user.

Am not sure if the IPAD will save the publishing industry the way we know it (that’s a different post) but hopefully it will give boost to subscription based services which i think is very important. We need to quickly get out of this bullshit page views game.

I believe that users should move from personal computers to task oriented smart appliances and if any company can do this, its Apple. Microsoft is not known for innovations, but they are great at improving and using the ecosystem to push technologies. If rumours are true, microsoft courier is the right appliance to further this category. And it looks better than IPAD. Really. Check this Engadget video posted on 5th March.

Unfortunately, the Indian market story is completely different. Although its reasonably priced (around Rs.27,000 for 16GB), the biggest hurdle is that the device is completely wi-fi based and we dont have good wi-fi connectivity or a credible 3G network yet. Also, its not easy to convince the price conscious Indian user to buy a tablet which requires a different SIM and a data plan. You can’t use your phone SIM as IPAD uses a micro SIM of different dimension. If IPhone sales in India is anything to by, IPAD will be restricted to just geeks and apple fanboys in India for now.

In the last decade, Adobe has been extremely successful in spreading the Flash platform which is used by programmers and developers to add interactivity to web pages. Flash is also used for streaming web videos and develop Ad banners and casual games.

Now, Steve Jobs wants the world to drop flash completely in favour of HTML5. According to him, flash is buggy, heavy and chews your device battery. This is the reason, Apple does not support Flash on Iphone or Ipad. If more such mainline computing devices follow apple’s footsteps, your website would be unusable on these devices if it’s done in Flash.

What can HTML5 do
The internet is written in HTML. The new standard will have a big impact on way you will surf the web. Though a lot of changes will not be apparent to the common user, there are some exciting front end functionalities like

- Ease and flexibility in rendering graphics and images that can be used to create graphs, photoshop like applications and interactive graphics.
- Drag and Drop functionality
- Like Google gears, you can store and access data offline
- Video/Audio will use less computing resources and you can easily embed them without having to rely on third party plug-ins
- Geo Location

Also, HTML5 is an open source standard unlike flash which is a proprietary vendor plug-in. Hence, there would be much faster development on HTML5 than flash.

So what does it mean for developers and site owners?
HTML5 is the future and the companies involved have good intentions and a common goal. In fact, I think this is the only thing they seem to be collaborating on. They are suing each other on everything else. But, there is still time for users and developers to shift.

First of all, HTML5 is still a working draft and not even an official standard yet. Only few browsers (Mozilla 3.6, Chrome, Opera and soon to be launched IE9) currently support HTML5 whereas the flash plug-in is already installed on 98% computers and 1.2 billion phones and it works on all browsers. For flash developers, there is nothing to worry about. Adobe believes that by 2012, more than 50% smartphones will use Flash. Many phones and tablets this year will support Flash 10.1.

I have never been such a fan of creating flash elements for interactivity on website (like navigation or heavy showcases) because it makes your site heavy and is unfriendly to search and accessibility. So be careful while using flash just to show your creativity. Advertising agencies and creative studios do it because most awards are picked up by flash based sites.

For video, there is still a debate on which codec would be used on HTML5 (OGG, Theora or H.264). A standard for video without a plug-in will take some years. Also, recent studies show that though there is a considerable difference in computing resources required to run HTML5 videos on safari and to some extent on Mozilla, there isn’t much difference in performance on Chrome. Furthermore, how DRM would be handled is yet not known.

If you are yet to see HTML5 in action, download Mozilla 3.6 and check these applications.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/html5
Graphics: http://htmlfive.appspot.com/static/draw.html, http://devfiles.myopera.com/articles/649/example5.html
Drag and Drop: http://html5demos.com/drag
Geo-location: http://htmlfive.appspot.com/static/whereami.html

UPDATE:
just read some pro-flash reactions from publishers, on gawker.com. Also, Jon Gruber makes an interesting point.

There’s a real need for a high-level IDE that does for HTML5 (canvas, JavaScript, video, audio, databases) what Flash’s dev tools do for Flash Player. Imagine the joy if it were Adobe that made it.

Re-discovering websites with stars seems like a great idea. (Google – Just don’t assume I want to share it with all my contacts). Stars in search will be available for signed-in users globally in the next couple of days according to the post on their official Blog.