“2012 is going to be the year that we double down and make sure we’re winning in that space.”

That was Andy Rubin talking about Android’s tablet strategy at Mobile World Congress, as relayed by The Verge. 

Across all the various OEMs that make Android tablets, 12 million have been sold in total. Ever. For context, Apple sold 15 million iPads last quarter.

Obviously, Google needs to do better in the space. And they should be able to. Quite honestly, it would be hard to do much worse given the interest in the space (thanks mainly to the aforementioned iPad) on both a consumer and OEM level. But Rubin’s excuse as to why the Android tablets are selling so poorly is suspect at best. 

A couple weeks ago, a rant of mine on technology journalism kicked off a firestorm that has yet to fully subside. The talking points have evolved beyond my initial ones and yes, I too have re-fueled the flames a few times. 

I knew the reaction would be strong (for obvious reasons), but I didn’t expect the tech press to get as riled up as they have for this extended period of time. In my 5+ years covering a whole range of topics in technology professionally, I have never gotten as many requests for comments, interviews, etc, as I have about all of this. Which is pretty silly when you think about it.

The tech press, like most everyone else, clearly loves to talk about itself. The difference is that we have a bigger soapbox from which to do so. And the past few weeks have resulted in more mastubatory self-reflection than usual. 

The other day, I got an email from a gentleman named Seth. As a regular reader, he wanted to give me some honest feedback on my writing as of late. I wanted to share a portion of what he wrote:

Earlier today, I broke some news.

I don’t typically do this anymore given my new job. But from time to time this will happen. But if you read The Wall Street Journal, you’d never know. Why’s that? Because they’re fuckheads who don’t credit actual sources of information.

I know, I know. I’m ranting again. But indulge me for a few minutes.

I broke the news that Apple acquired the app search/discovery platform Chomp at 4:01 PM today. At 6:06 PM — over two hours later — WSJ reported the story as well. But oddly, with no mention of my original story. 

This was odd both because, again, I reported the same information two hours earlier. And because it was at the top of Techmeme, which everyone in the industry reads. And every single other publication linked to my story. 

Yesterday, Christopher Mims of MIT’s Technology Review took on the challenge of taking a step back from the screaming to look into what’s really going on behind the latest Bitchmeme. Reading his take, it occurs to me that Mims, and probably many others, are completely missing something very fundamental going on here.

Mims argues that investments make us unreasonably biased and conflicted, yadda yadda. Same argument, different day. He even cites this tweet:

Reporters in Silicon Valley get scoops on the startups THEY HAVE THEIR OWN MONEY IN.It’s hilarious, like if ESPN also owned the Lakers

— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) February 14, 2012

…which is funny because from 1997 until 2005, Disney owned a Major League Baseball team, the Anaheim Angels. Guess who else Disney owned during that time? Yep. ESPN. 

From 1993 until 2005, Disney also owned the National Hockey League team, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Again, they owned ESPN at the time as well. 

If you want one other example (there are many), how about the fact that The New York Times owns a stake in the Boston Red Sox.

Weird, huh? This all must be very hilarious to Downtown Josh Brown. 

Anyway. The very obvious point that Mims and others fail to mention is that no one is forcing anyone to do anything. If you don’t want to read what Michael and I write, don’t.

If you think we’re unreasonably biased and conflicted, do not visit our sites, cite our work, etc. Why would you? 

The real problem our critics have is that an ever-increasing number of people do read what we write. The old guard doesn’t like that one bit because we’re not doing it their way. But they can’t do a damn thing about it besides bitch and moan. Too bad. The readers ultimately decide, not you.

Meanwhile, our conflicted coverage of the Path situation this week included information such as the fact that while there was no question that Path needed to (and did) fix the issue, many others were guilty as well. As was Apple. And we noted that Apple was on the verge of fixing this whole situation.

Sure enough, scanning the news today: Yep. Yep. And yep.

You could have gotten early insight into all of today’s news by reading our posts over the past week. Instead, the cycle turned into a shitstorm of nonsense that ultimately doesn’t matter in the slightest. 

The fact remains: if you want to read, great! If you don’t, great! It’s completely up to you.

Looks like someone woke up from his nap of the last three years and is hungry. Sadly, I don’t have much food for him. I’ll keep this as brief as possible — and I promise this will be the last thing I ever say about Dan Lyons, as he’s clearly done.

Feel free not to read. Or read Michael Arrington’s post on the matter. He takes a higher road than I’m about to. I’m just sick of Lyons’ bullshit.

The truth is that I pre-responded to Lyons earlier today before he even wrote his post. You could see it coming. What I wrote yesterday directly attacks the way he makes a living. When you do that, people get irrationally upset and write posts like the one Lyons just wrote. Just to reiterate, the line that applies here from the film Moneyball:

The reactions to my rant yesterday have been fascinating. The vast majority have been overwhelmingly positive — except from one sector where it’s more like 50/50. No surprise which sector that is: technology writers/bloggers/journalists. About half thought the post was great/honest/inspiring. The other half think I’m the devil. 

I’m reminded of one of the best parts of last year’s film Moneyball. Red Sox owner John Henry (Arliss Howard) says the following to Billy Beane (Brad Pitt):

It’s the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game. But really what it’s threatening is their livelihoods, it’s threatening their jobs, it’s threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it’s the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They go bat shit crazy.

If everything I said yesterday is true, technology writers, be it short-term or long-term, are fucked. Either they’ve already sold their souls for the pageviews and the subsequent paychecks or they’ll eventually have to make that choice. The best know this and I suspect many of them won’t be in the game in 5 years. But the ones who have been in the game too long to change… the ones holding the reins… well, they’re going bat shit crazy. 

This morning, I woke up and read Nick Bilton’s weekly New York Times’ column. Nick is a friend and one of the best bloggers/writers/journalists out there. But with today’s column, he was way off base. 

Having already said what I wanted to say about the Path situation, I debated if I should weigh in again. Then I read Nick’s column again. There’s a way to say what he wants to say, but he goes about it the complete wrong way. I felt like I had to respond. 

But before I could, my CrunchFund partner Michael Arrington wrote almost exactly what I would have written — but in a more effective way. As a dog owner/lover, Michael thought up a great analogy: “So the belly is shown.”

Gotta love Henry Blodget. About once a week he busts out the caps lock key to draw attention to his latest rant. The best ones include some variation of the wording “don’t mean to be rude” in the title. 

The only problem is that often these missives are misguided, or flat-out wrong.

Back in October, Blodget wrote the following story: ATTENTION APPLE FANS: Samsung Blowing Past Apple To Become The Biggest Smartphone Vendor Is Not Good News. Looking back, on the surface alone, the post looks ridiculous now because — wait for it — Apple actually passed Samsung in sales again last quarter. But the real key is that his entire argument was fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons, which I laid out at the time. 

Anyway.

Yesterday, Jason Kincaid posted damning evidence of VEVO, the online music video entity jointly owned by a few major record labels, committing piracy at their boozy event at Sundance this year.

Watch the video, then read Jason’s full story. It’s worth it.

Today, VEVO’s CEO has responded. Here’s his stance:

A guest of our lounge asked for an NFL game to be aired. We said no. There was a laptop hooked up to VEVO.com that fed into the large TV screens around the bar. Unfortunately, the laptop was easily accessible to the public. That was our mistake for not making sure the laptop was more secure. While VEVO staff was in other areas of the venue, the game was put on – via a website transmitting ESPN’s broadcast of the NFL game – without our permission or knowledge.

Which reads a lot like:

Holy fucking shit. We’re so fucked. Is there anyway on Earth we can spin this so it doesn’t look so bad? … Anyone? … Okay, fuck you all, I’ve got it! We’ll say that we were so grossly negligent at our own event that some some shady, masked criminals — preferably foreigners — illegally took control of our laptops to access the game. It was actually an elaborate terrorist plot, if you must know. We’re investigating — and we’ve hired the same people that O.J. Simpson is using to find the real killers.

As Jason says, it’s probably impossible to prove this dipshit is lying, but come on: common sense and Occam’s razor here. Someone was clearly refreshing the feed over and over again. And it never was taken down the entire time Jason was watching.

Either VEVO employees take extremely long bathroom breaks as a group, or — wait for it — they were the pirates!

These assclowns should be fined out of existence or go to jail for a level of hypocrisy so bad that it makes Newt Gingrich seem like a good husband fully qualified to lecture others on ethics. By the music labels’ own definition, they are now criminals.

This situation perfectly highlights the SOPA/PIPA times we live in. As Jason writes:

Sure, there are some people who will duck the bill when they can — but many of them were never going to buy the content they downloaded in the first place. And a huge swath of ‘pirates’ are driven to their ways because it’s easier to stream or download something via an illegal site, not because they’re averse to paying for content. Stick a bunch of DRM and ads in front of the media they’ve already paid for, and they may opt to go with the path of least resistance next time.

Why would VEVO pirate content? Because it was easier than getting it legally. This is the actual root cause of piracy online. It’s not shady, masked individuals at swanky events commandeering computers to pirate for the hell of it. It’s VEVO employees. It’s everyone. 

Fred Wilson took some time this morning to go off against email. Clearly annoyed, he writes:

I write these posts occasionally to let people know. The result is hundreds of comments about how I can make email work better for me. Please don’t leave those comments. I don’t want to make email work better for me. I don’t want to hire an assistant to do email for me. I don’t want to try some new magical app that will make email better for me.

Amen.

I complain often about email as well and everyone comes out of the woodwork with some idea for how to fix my problem. The reality is that there is no fix. Trying something else is an even bigger waste of time.

Wilson says he devotes about three hours a day to email and he still can’t nearly get through it all. I’m in roughly the same boat; some days more, some days less. It’s also a boat I put myself in when I left my job as a writer (tons of email) to become a VC (shit tons of email). 

The only real “solution” is to change the way people think about email. It needs to be considered more of a stream than an inbox. That is, it needs to be more like Twitter and less like a to-do list.

Based on one story from The Globe And Mail, there are a lot of interesting new thoughts about the supposed Apple Television today. The big question: will Apple partner with any of the cable companies for the product?

Based on everything we’ve seen in the space the past several years, I think they have to. The question is: will it be more like the initial iPhone partnerships (exclusive to one carrier in the U.S.) or the early iPad partnerships (multiple carrier options or the option to do no carrier at all)?

As I wrote back in April of last year:

The only real problem for Apple in getting into the game would be the cable companies’ monopolies on the local level. Unlike the carriers, which are nationwide, the cable companies dominate their regions and there’s often little competition (which is, of course, bullshit and the government are cowards for allowing this to continue). 

Let’s say Apple teamed up with one of the cable companies, like Comcast. They would likely have to do an exclusive deal with them to get them to bend to some of their demands (like getting rid of their shitty cable boxes in favor of a built-in Apple control guide). This is why Apple was exclusively with AT&T all that time. But not everyone can get Comcast. So the market would be limited. 

My title is literal, figurative, and facetious all in one. I just hope Google has a good sense of humor about it — because they have a good product on their hands.

First of all, yes, Chrome for Android is here. Second, it’s only compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich which is currently on — wait for it — 1% of Android devices. But in an attempt to add some silver-lining to the 1% joke, I will say that Chrome for Android is of a much higher class than the previous Android browser, the aptly-named and horribly icon’d: Browser.

Browser is dead. Long live Chrome.

The Chrome/Android question is as old as the two products themselves. Both products were initally launched in September 2008 (though there was an Android beta before that). But even though Google made its own browser in Chrome. And Android shipped with its own browser — it was not Chrome. When asked why this was, Google had a wide variety of reasons throughout the years. 

But when the question was asked during a Chrome panel at Google I/O last year, the response changed a bit. “It’s not something we’re talking about right now.” And: “I don’t know how to answer that.” The reason for the odd responses? Work had begun on Chrome for Android.

In fact, the browser is a year in the making Google SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai says. But as I laid out last May, it wasn’t as easy and simply porting some code over to Android, it required a lot of thought to do it right.

The good news is that the end result is mostly right. The better news is that the product launching today is still in “beta”, so I’m sure it will get even more polish before it formally launches in a few months and becomes the default browser for Google’s flavor of Android.

Given my interest in the topic over the years, Google gave me an early look at the browser and I’ve been using it for the past few days. There are a number of things that are noticeably better than the browser I consider to gold standard of mobile web browsing: mobile Safari for iOS. And there are a few things it still does worse. But I have no doubt that like the original version of Chrome, Chrome for Android is going to push all browsers forward.

“Chrome is still all about speed,” Pichai says. But speed on a mobile device is different than speed on a desktop. The processor is weaker, for one thing. Click zones are much smaller on the smaller screens. And a concept like tabs has to be re-thought. 

Chrome for Android is designed around the concept of “a stack of webpages in your hand”, I’m told. And the methaphor works well when you play with the software. Simply put: the Chrome team has done an excellent job turning the concept of multiple tabs into a beautiful and responsive interface for browsing on a phone. 

Each website is a card (not unlike webOS cards) and you can flip through them side to side, or through a stacked overview interface. Flipping through side-by-side actually reminds me a lot of four-finger multi-touch app switching in iOS 5 on the iPad. The stacked tabs overview page is a brilliant way to manage dozens of tabs open at once (I’m told there is no limit to the number of tabs you can have open, but that something “interesting” happens if you go past 99).

Something else Chrome for Android brings: Incognito Mode. Yes, just like the PC version, you can now “safely” browse the web without worrying about cleaning up your trail later.

Also along for the ride: Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, GPU acceleration, web page pre-rendering, and yes, the Omnibox! These are all a big part of the Chrome team bringing what they call a “fully equipped browser” to the mobile experience. 

Having said that, there is a notable absense in Chrome for Android: Flash. This probably shouldn’t be too surprising considering that Adobe themselves are talking about ending mobile support. But still, to the dismay of many of us, Google has insisted on baking Flash into Chrome for years now.

But the real killer feature of Chrome is sync. Because the newer versions of the browser for PCs allow you to sign in with your Google account, it can remember not only passwords and bookmarks, but open tabs as well. And those open tabs transfer to the mobile version via the “Other devices” area.

Say I have 5 tabs open in Chrome on my iMac and I get up to leave my home. I can see all 5 in Chrome for Android. And if I have 3 other tabs open on my MacBook Air, I can see those as well, all labeled and separated. 

If you close Chrome, you’ll lose these (since no tabs would be open any more), but if you just do something like close your MacBook lid, you’ll still be able to see them. And the craziest part is that you can load one and hit the back button and go to the page that took you to your current page no matter where you were doing the browsing. Sync handles it all. 

Back to the bad news: some of the more advanced features of Chrome for Android require APIs found only in Ice Cream Sandwich, so the team made the call to make it only available for Android 4.0 and beyond. Again, this means only 1% of current Android users out there can actually get and use the browser right now.

One would hope that the 1% number will rise quickly, but as we’re all well aware, that’s mainly in the carriers/OEMs hands now.

But Chrome for Android will work on Ice Cream Sandwich tablets as well — and the UI is slightly different to accomodate the larger screens. One example: you can see mutliple tabs in a row along the top of the browser similar to the current Android Browser and Chrome for PCs.

While many of the UI elements of Chrome for Android are fantastic (and smooth!), unfortunately, browsing still leaves a bit to be desired. Pages load fast (roughly as fast as Safari on iOS 5 — some faster, some slower), but zooming in and out of web pages is still stuttery. When pinching to zoom out, this is particularly noticeable. 

Likewise, scrolling down longer pages often leads to little stutters here and there. None of that is a deal-breaker by any means, but it’s still not iOS-smooth. 

But again, the plan is to iterate quickly, just as Google does with other versions of Chrome. There will be the same 6-week release cycle for new versions, Pinchai says. Though he does note that it will take them a little bit of time to catch up with the more mature PC/Mac/Linux versions of the browser. Chrome Beta for Android will technically be version 16 at launch, I’m told. Chrome Beta for Mac is already on version 17.

When I ask Pichai if Chrome coming to Android changes the Chrome OS strategy, he says it “takes nothing away” from their work on that OS. And he says that there will be more to share on Chrome OS later this year. 

As for the whole web vs. native app debate, Pichai notes that Chrome for Android links to the Android Market whenever possible — meaning there isn’t a dedicated web app area like there is on the PC version of Chrome. Also not coming along for the ride yet: extensions (but they’re thinking about how best to do them on mobile).

One other bit of intrigue: Chrome for Android will be a part of the Google Apps package. This means that once Chrome fully replaces Browser on Android, there will no longer be a browser that’s a part of the open source Android. In other words, if vendors like Amazon want to include a browser on the Kindle Fire, they’re going to have to build their own — which they did. Still, interesting. (Update: And Google wants to make it clear that Chromium, the open source browser on which Chrome is based, is still open source, so developers can work from there — it just won’t be bundled.)

If you happen to be one of the few out there with Ice Cream Sandwich, Chrome for Android is a must-download right now. Again, it’s beta, but it’s already pretty slick — particularly the UI elements (swipe up on a stack of tabs a few times to see what I mean). If you don’t have Ice Cream Sandwich yet. Well, cross your fingers and pray that Google figures out how to get their carrier and OEM partners in line one of these days. Maybe the demand for this browser will push everyone into action. Maybe.

One more thing: Now, What About Chrome For iOS?