Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

When Apple debuted the iTunes Music Store in 2003, I enthusiastically signed up and downloaded music. I had a check card with a US billing address that I made gleeful use of. I loved the store. And yet, something didn’t feel right. It took me a while to articulate what.

I was no longer in the US at that time and my checking account was rapidly depleting. Apple wouldn’t accept an international card. Their licensing terms with the music labels only allowed selling music within the US, they said. Fair enough, but something still nagged.

Apple made (and still does make) excellent computers and iPods, but selling music was a different game. It was no longer a one-time transaction for the hardware, but a regular, sustained interaction for your content fix. And US only. iTunes updates now came thick and fast, but my new Indian billing address was no longer welcome. I could only sit by and watch what I could have had access to. Meanwhile, the rest of the iLife suite and Mac OS X felt ignored while all attention went to iTunes.

I knew what was bothering me then. Apple was seeking a tighter and more direct, long-term relationship with their customers, but in the process ignoring anyone in a market where it was too much effort to set up a relationship. This wasn’t how it was with a Mac. Apple’s computers were severely marked-up in India at the time, but you could get one abroad or pay extra and get it locally. Beyond the barrier of price, you would get the exact same Mac experience as anyone else anywhere in the world. All the software there was for the Mac was available to you too.

This would have been a trivial ’plaint about music licensing, but 2007 rolled around and with it the iPhone, sold locked with a carrier contract, US only. Apple once again not just selling a fantastic device, but making the business deals that ensured a great user experience. Where they had no deals, you got no device.

As of Jan 2010, you still can’t buy music from the iTunes Store or buy an iPhone 3G S in India. Apple can’t work out suitable deals, so you as a customer are irrelevant to them. Meanwhile, you can still buy a Mac at a price that is now nearly the same as in the US, and all the apps you want for it are still available. It seems like Apple will have you as a customer only if (a) they can guarantee the quality of the all-round experience, or (b) are willing to abdicate that responsibility. There’s no middle ground.

And this is the crux of it. As Indians, we’re used to technology that isn’t quite right for us, whether it’s the address book that insists you split your initials into “first name, last name”, the app that wants dates in MM/DD/YYYY format despite your locale settings asking for DD/MM/YYYY, or in general software that is overpriced in US dollars, compelling everyone to use a pirated copy. It isn’t for us, but we use it anyway and step around the quirks. We’re cool with that. Now here’s an entity that essentially says, “this is very cool, but it’s not for you and we don’t know when it will be, so you’re not getting any of it.” That’s plain arrogance.

Apple has spectacularly bungled the iTunes Store and iPhone’s presence in India. Everyone agrees that they are due to launch a tablet later this month that will be more of the same, with the device’s experience tightly bound to content distribution. I bet they will bungle this too in India.

If there’s a weak spot in Apple’s business model for a competitor to take a stab at, this is it. But Nokia, that elephant in the room, has lost its mojo. If only Google regarded Android as anything more than an engineering wet dream…

Supriya Thanawala of the Hindustan Times wrote in asking if I had noticed how online community spaces over the years have grown to discourage pseudo-anonymous identities. I responded noting several trend lines:

1. Internet adoption is growing, making governments increasingly more conscious that this is a new space they ought to be governing. That’s where the cyber cells and ISP IP logging come from.

2. Any medium where an individual can be reached with little effort will be misused. Postal mail has junk marketing, telephones have telemarketers, email has spam, each cheaper than the previous. As the medium grows and becomes a worthwhile channel for junk messages, service providers come under increasing pressure to keep it usable for normal users. They do this by either requiring some real life id (such as by your ISP) or by limiting your use of the service (such as mailing list providers that limit the number of people you can directly add to your new list).

3. The web is a public medium. Anybody can see anything posted there. The web is also very large, so resource discovery, and not access, becomes of primary importance. Blogging became popular because of this curious nature of the web. A blog was both private because nobody would find it until they got referred to it somehow, and public because you could always share the link. Online spaces felt like intimate communities in the early days because there were so few people online and you either knew who they were, or guessing that became an interesting game. As that count grew, partitioning spaces becomes important. Today’s Facebook is more or less private. You decide who your friends are and only they can see what you write. The rest of the web can’t.

4. Early blog+social networking spaces like LiveJournal and Friendster have been grappling with anonymity and fake identities for long. Here’s something I wrote a few years ago. Some have attempted banning them outright, while others have tolerated them but ended up with mixed results (see this for a particularly entertaining example – those profiles originated in a very non-funny flamefest elsewhere, after which their makers decided to keep them going for a while). Facebook has taken the more pragmatic approach, allowing for the creation of “pages” distinct from profiles that users can interact with.

5. Facebook arrives at a time when the web is increasingly seen as having little direct revenue value. Money is made via advertising, not from users paying up (in contrast, LiveJournal was profitable for several years because users paid for accounts with extra features; Flickr runs on the same model). The Pages feature on Facebook is largely seen as a marketing vehicle for a film or a product that users pay for off the web. This brings in marketing language, sanitised humour when there is any (notice that TV sitcoms are never as funny as the spontaneous writing of the Aaj Sholay community), and a referral to everything by a real world name in a manner that respects trademarks and copyrights.

So where is all the anonymity and creativity going now? It exists as always; it’s just out seeking new corners for itself away from the public eye.

(I suspect some of this isn’t quite true anymore, but I haven’t been thinking about it. Your thoughts?)

After paying my utility bills this morning, I pulled out my phone, half-expecting an SMS alert confirming the transaction. None arrived. Of course, I told myself, I had paid in cash. There was nothing correlating the cash to my phone number. The bills were for a rented apartment; not in my name.

And yet, it was a bit disconcerting. Transaction alerts for card transactions, ATM withdrawals and mobile bill payments/top-ups are so commonplace now that it feels incomplete to not receive one.

Why is this so? After I had handed over cash at the payment centre, I had waited to collect a paper receipt. The receipt represented several things:

1. Confirmation that the cash was going to the utility company and not the cashier’s pocket;
2. To a younger, adolescent self, confirmation to parent that I had completed the assigned task;
3. A record for my accounts and for applicable reimbursements; and
4. The sense that if a piece of paper with some numbers printed on it could be acceptable to all parties, then all is normal.

The SMS alert meets all but the third and adds an additional representation:

• Confirmation that the transaction loop is complete, that the payment has gone into the authoritative record, not just the cashier’s computer.

Something to think about when designing for user experience.