"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones."

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

There was a time when I worked for Apple, but I was too busy learning about product information and interacting with customers to pay much attention to pundits. After all, writers who were friends of Apple were quoted and welcomed with a smile when we had a spare minute. Anyone who criticized Apple must not have all the facts or be biased in a peculiar way.

Since becoming an editor for The Mac Observer, I have read thousands of articles and posted hundreds of news stories of my own. The process involves living inside an RSS reader, assessing articles, and extracting what's important. In the process, I see a lot of writers who write about Apple and its prospects for success with one product or another.

What I've noticed is that there is hardly a single writer, including myself, who has complete insight into Apple's reasoning and design decision for a product.

If the goal is to be amused by a writer, and some are all too willing to amuse or outrage us, that's fine. If the goal is to gain insight, then there are only a few writers who can do that by virtue of their industry experience combined with the fortunate opportunity to write about it.

Why has all this come up? It all started when I read some recent articles about how the Apple TV has too many limitations to really achieve broad success. And that's what I want to explore.

The Apple TV Failure Prognosis

The Apple TV is a very limited box in that it will only connect to an HDTV and will only access and play content in your iTunes library. Now that doesn't mean you had to purchase content. MPEG files can be dragged into iTunes. However, in general, this limitation appears to drive some analysts crazy, and they predict a dire future for the Apple TV.

Regarding the overall technical issues, I won't repeat them. I wrote at length about all that in a previous HD on February 14th. Instead, I want to explore some of the thinking that probably went into the design of the Apple TV and what analysts are neglecting.

1. Engineering Design. What analysts prefer to overlook is that Apple has real engineers on board. Those engineers understand things like HDMI protocols, de-interlacing, telecine 3-2 pulldown, and log color spaces. They understand the hardware, and they understand the likely HDTV hardware expected to be found in the home. Their managers also understand trade-offs between hardware capabilities, pending standards, and production costs. So when someone complains that the Apple TV is only capable of 720p output, it's not a matter of preference. It's a matter of customer awareness, engineering and cost tradeoff. Wishing the Apple TV has 1080i output or an expensive $500 scaler or HDMI 1.3 (it's actually 1.2) doesn't make for instructive reading.

2. System Wide Analysis. Not many writers have the opportunity to sit down with hardware and conduct extensive tests. For example, given a software MPEG decoder in Mac OS X and an 802.11g AirPort base station in a noisy environment, what is the expected user experience transmitting a 720p video from a three year old iMac to an Apple TV? It's probably not a pretty sight. On the other hand, I'm guessing that 90% of the households in the U.S. have a DVD player with a hardware MPEG decoder directly attached to their TV. Should Apple try to duplicate that experience considering the expected hardware in the customer's hands?

Think about trying to do a demo for Steve Jobs in the lab for your prototype system. Then think about what would happen if there were MPEG dropouts and stuttering.

3. Competitive Analysis. Anytime Apple plans a product, they not only have to look at the engineering and user interface, they also have to look at ways that the competition can block them. A good example is the current Open IPTV situation. The following members have gotten together to promote an open standard for IPTV, that is, using the IP protocol on the Internet to deliver TV:

AT&T Inc., France Telecom SA, Telecom Italia, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. (Panasonic), Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV, Samsung Electronics Co., Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG and Sony Corp.

Who's not on the list? Microsoft. Why? Microsoft is promoting their own initiative called Microsoft TV IPTV Edition. It very likely suits their corporate agenda, and Microsoft sees no point in enlisting in a protocol that they have no control over and which can't be used to harm the competition.

What Apple has to ask themselves is what if they develop a product that depends on a technology or standard that could come under the control of Microsoft? That's not a great idea. As a result, Apple TV depends only on the Macintosh technology they control and the standard TCP/IP protocol of the Internet -- which Microsoft will never control. Products that embrace truly open standards have been a mantra of Apple and a key to their recent success.

4. Grow with the Market. Apple, if you haven't yet noticed, always starts out a new product with modest expectations. That just makes business sense. Why pour enormous resources into a gadget that does everything before the customers and the market place have weighed in. Besides, technology changes too fast to fall into the creeping features syndrome.

Rather, design a simple product that does something well and see where it goes. It's no sin that the Apple TV can only draw content from the iTunes library. Will that be true in three years? I doubt it.

Remember, great artists ship.

5. Smart People in One Room. Writers are solitary people. They have the propensity to sit alone and ponder. If writing is what they do for a living, they're compelled to write. Sometimes on a deadline. If they aren't deep in technology, then chances are their inspiration comes from their emotions and preferences. Hence the quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn above.

However, when you get a lot of smart people together in an Apple conference room, and let them fight it out, good things happen. One person will invariably have insight and hindsight that's lacking in the others. By the time the dust clears, and a lot of scribbling has been done on the white board, a pretty good solution will have been worked out. Gotchas will be discovered and diagnosed. Experience with the customer, intimate knowledge of Mac OS X internals, and next generation technologies coming down the road will lead to sound engineering judgment from the group.

Emotion, petty preferences, illusions, and misperceptions about the market place (and what Mr. Jobs will consider acceptable) are quickly dismissed in favor of a product that can be reliably manufactured, easily used, widely accepted, and make money for the corporation.

Some analysts know this in some obscure way, but all too often, it doesn't keep them from writing an inflammatory headline. After all, the mortgage payment looms.

William Shatner says, "Get a Life"

The net result of the above is that, thanks to the unique culture and organization of Apple, no one writer can possibly take Apple to task for product design decisions, especially on the first day the product ships.

The only purpose of such criticism is to generate headlines for the publication. However, sooner or later, the author loses street cred with his or her audience, and, having cried wolf once too often, they become categorized as agitators. Fool me once...

On the other hand, there are writers who, week after week, crank out considerable insight that leaves us all gasping for air. You know who they are. Your have your list, and I have mine.

Just remember, no matter how experienced any one writer is, they can seldom outthink a corporation as good as Apple. That's probably why a great many people who use Macs productively have no interest in the Mac Websites or opinions about Apple at the financial publications -- except to read an occasional juicy rumor or two.

These customers are, I suspect, too busy to pay much attention to the opinions and "insights" of a single writer.

That includes me.

<P><em>John Martellaro is the Senior Editor, Analysis & Reviews for </em>The Mac Observer <em>and a freelance writer. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple Computer, where he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager for Science and Technology, Federal Account Executive, and High Performance Computing Manager. His interests, in addition to all things Apple, include alpine skiing, science fiction, astronomy and Perl. John lives in Denver, Colorado.</em></p>