Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, responds to Apple’s announcement of their News app:
We’re clearly onto something at Flipboard. What Apple was showing is something that we actually shipped five years ago. In the world that we live into today, you have to be able to both work with, um, companies, and even when they’re competing with you on certain fronts that doesn’t mean you don’t work with them. There’s still opportunities to work with them. And in doing that, what you can typically find are ways in which you can continue to grow. This is not a winner take all situation. — Mike McCue, Flipboard CEO
Direct link to video here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s News is powered by the new custom-designed Apple News Format which allows publishers to create stories that take advantage of the full power of iOS, including photos, galleries, audio, video, maps and rich interactions such as parallax and animation. When publishers create their stories for News, they can use custom fonts and intuitive Multi-Touch gestures. Apple News Format automatically customizes the layout for each screen size, so News content is perfectly formatted for both iPhone and iPad.
So, obviously, there are significant features that Flipboard not only didn’t ship five years ago, they don’t ship them today.
What else could poor Sherlocked Mike have said instead? His entire statement minus his second sentence would have been pretty much perfect.
Apple’s News app will be available with iOS 9 this fall for iPhone and iPad.
SEE ALSO:
Apple dumps Newsstand, takes on Facebook with Flipboard-like ‘News’ app – June 9, 2015
Sherlock Mike won’t be so cavalier when his app is being replaced by Apple’s built-in News app.
“Sherlocked,” in this context, refers to what happened to a third party app years ago when Apple introduced Sherlock for the Mac. Essentially that app disappeared because Sherlock covered its functionality. After that, the phrase “To be Sherlocked” became standard Mac jargon for that sort of thing.
Are you sure you got that right? The third-party app you’re referring to was called “Watson”, a play on “Sherlock”, This implies Sherlock must have come first. That said, I do remember Watson being abandoned and having to move to Sherlock, but I think it was an improved version of something Apple already released.
(Looked it up on Wikipedia, It was Sherlock 3 that rendered Watson redundant.)
——RM
My memory was a bit hazy. It was a play on Sherlock, which at the time didn’t do anything close to what Watson did. Here’s the story of how it (“sherlocked”) came to mean that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson
It’s not clear that this News App will be successful. Apple tried this with Murdoch in a way with “The Daily”. Highly interactive news in an App. Yes, the articles were wanting. That failed.
This App that aggregates news from multiple sources is a better concept, but still, walled gardens and closed systems have proven not to work in publishing. People just go online and access free content.
There may be a novelty factor to this new News App, and not everyone uses an iOS device. The Financial Times demonstrated that a Web App is the best approach with over 1 million subscribers shortly after it launched several years ago.
Apple is going up against WordPress, Drupal, SquareSpace, and many other CMS’s that own the publishing space. I do not see bloggers and even big media outlets just doing Apple News. Yes, they don’t have to, but the ones that do publish their content to the Apple News App… I see it as just a secondary system that some iOS users use.
In other words, this won’t be ubiqutous. Apple should simply do its own search engine and incorporate news, maps, Siri, etc. online. That to me is a path to success.
If you’ve been paying attention, Apple has been enhancing its search functionality incrementally and steadily. But they are taking a different approach. Rather than being web-based, the search is device-based. In a couple of years, the idea of going to a website (Google) to find things will seem antiquated, because world-wide (and device-wide) search is elegantly built into the device that you are using (OS X, iOS, watchOS).
Why any business feels a sense of entitlement without working hard enough to keep it or be bettered having something somewhat similar attached to a more user friendly ecosystem baffles me. But then no one wants to be slayed by the Paradigmonster.
The “but, but, but” Big But’s keep comin’.
But, but, but, we monetize your privacy!
What’s Flipboard?
Yeah. Right. I tried it. It was meh. Deleted it.
Same here.
flipboard is a great app. we’ll see if apple news is better
Better, simply by being native, and tailored to the IOS ecosystem, environment, and experience.
I had never heard of Flipboard before this week. 😉
Flipboard is it best okay however there is another application called Zite which is much much better. Is it was bought out last year by Flipboard and they are planning on eliminating it. Big mistake.
My thoughts exactly. In a world filled with fast-changing technology, Apple has chosen a path of simplicity. I believe this is deliberate to make the use of Apple devices simple in an ever-increasingly complex world. Who want to remember “Flipboard” when opening up “News” gives you exactly what you want, just like “Mail”, “Contacts”, “Photos, etc.
I seem to remember that Flipboard wouldn’t even exist were it not for Apple and the iPad so let’s just dial it back a bit McCue. You launched your entire product on iPad because that was the only place to do so.
Truly hoping it is made available to Canadians when iOS is released this fall. Tried FBoard, deleted the same day and been using Zite ever since.
Problem is that zite is now owned by flipboard and they’ve been threatening to shut it down. I love zite, it is far and away the best magazine app out there.
I totally agree I thought zite was the standard. Flipboard is too fragmented in it’s approach fo me so I rarely read it!
Totally agree, been a Zite fan for years.
Flipboard is ok once you get used to the navigation. But it’s a big data hog, and I’m rarely on wifi. Hope they keep Zite around, but I fear it’s days are numbered.
Crap! I did not know this, ihayden4 🙁 Thanks for the heads up and truly hope they leave Zite live.
Come on Apple, up and at it, eh? 😉
I like Flipboard when it first came out. Got tired of it. Apple News looks much more promising.
Can someone give me a link to learn how to set my RSS feeds up in a way to take advantage of the Apple News Format?
Thank you! I tried searching and couldn’t find anything.
You need a developer account. The info is available to developers and there are videos on News.
Thank you.
I NEVER thought Flipboard is like Zite. News is like Zite not like Flipboard. The reason Flipboard bought Zite is because it could never be as good as Zite is.😱😩😨😰
To clarify, I love Zite😍
So would you say that Apple slavishly copied Zite?
I don’t know myself, just askin’.
It looks like that’s exactly what they’re doing. But we’ll have to see News in action to fully compare them. The keynote demo sure looked exactly like Zite.😱💥😳
I installed it, thanks for the recommendation.
I agree, Zite is the BEST news app – by far.
To hear some people here tell it, no company deserves to be in business except Apple.
How many times have I seen people show glee that Apple is hurting a company that really never did anything to them or to Apple? And a lot of the time it’s a company that DID in fact do something BEFORE Apple.
Infantile.
Schadenfreude.
You know that…
So, Mike McCue feels he has the copyright on delivering news stories?
Is that what he said, or is that just a straw man on your part?
It was a valid interpretation of his feelings.
Maybe FlipBoard didn’t do anything to Apple, but if Apple thinks they can do better, so be it.
Besides, Apple has the bigger picture in mind. The growing number of dedicated apps for news reading is appalling. With time, they are often surpassed in features and flexibility by the newspaper website. A common news format with wide support is sorely needed.
He says they did it 5 years ago – well why didn’t he keep innovating clipboard then to say ahead????
A prime example of a cool idea that goes to market and a potential competitor out innovates the original company.
I think he was waiting for Apple to buy Flipboard.
DCW
I use Zite. It’s OK. Here is what I know: no news aggregation service, app, or site will get any of my money. They are just not that great. And quite frankly, I really don’t want to “sign in” with a password to read news. Or listen to music. The “I Heart Radio” app is OK, but there is no reason to make it that you have to have an account for presets. They can be stored locally in a few bytes. A password to listen to music or read the news? Come on.
The login process is necessary to attach a template of your interests and listening or reading history to help the app stay relevant to you.😃
Why do CEOs feel the need to comment on a competitor at all? Time and time again the comments come back to haunt them. Seems like if the question were asked about a competitor, an answer like “we look forward to seeing their new app” or some such would be a simple, non-comment.
I suspect a CEO like McCue gets questioned a lot in a situation like this. His response gets reported. Doubt if he called a press conference to make this statement.
AND, it’s what we’ll stomp you into the gravel with as well… Buh..bye..
I’m sorry, I don’t see anything wrong with what was said. He’s correct that Flipboard was shipped 5 years ago and that it may be the best format for collecting and presenting news and articles from around the web. Replacing Newsstand with News, clearly shows that Apple certainly thinks so.
Apple made an attempt with Newsstand to help publishers with the transition to digital subscriptions – it didn’t work. It’s not Apple’s fault, they did what they could and put it front and center on the home screen.
Like with music and the album, the move to the digital online world left behind the notion of a predefined collection. This is a pick-and-choose-only-what-I-am-interested world. Magazines come with a handful of articles someone might be interested and the rest are just waste. When you’re printing and shipping in a physical medium, then yeah, you put as much in as you can to appeal to the widest audience. In a digital world, that just doesn’t make sense anymore when you can target individual articles with the same amount of effort as an entire magazine of articles.
Strange that he felt the need to tell everyone if it has been around for 5 years. His marketing clearly a little below par it would seem.
If an app is released in a forest and nobody downloads, did it really ship?