Tag Archives: iPhone

The Mac vs. Windows Rivalry is Dead. Apple Won.

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Whoops. It suddenly occurred to me: the old Mac-Windows rivalry is dead. There goes a bit of industry history. 

It used to be fun, back in the old days, when it mattered. If you’re old enough you’ll remember the famous 1984 Macintosh ad. I was generally forgiven by the Mac zealots for my weakness for Windows, but only because I also used Macs and recognized their superiority. My Mac friends treated my sympathy for Windows systems as a forgivable flaw in my character. 

I used to tell this modified version of an old joke: 

Somebody dies and goes to heaven. On arrival, St. Peter gives him the quick tour of the place. As they go through heaven from place to place, they look at the mall, the school, the park … and they keep seeing a high wall on one side or the other. Finally, the new arrival can’t resist asking: “What’s with the wall?” St. Peter Answers: “That’s where we keep the Mac users. They like to think they’re the only ones here.”

I like Apple. I consulted with Apple from 1982 to 1994. Apple loaned me an Apple II in 1983 and a Macintosh early in 1984. I wrote the first book laid out on an AppleLaserWriter (at least according to me and McGraw-Hill Microtext, the publisher). As a consultant to Apple, I worried as Windows started to effectively imitate the Mac — not that it was as good, but it was good enough to fool a buyer in a store. And it was personally painful to me when the Windows system so dominated business computing, the late 1990s and early 2000s, that we (temporarily) dropped our Mac business plan product. We really had to. By 2000 a Mac product was costing ten times more than Windows to develop, and its market was about ten times less than Windows. Business is business.  

By 2004 my computing was all Windows. And at that point my computing was all Windows. It wasn’t torture. Windows worked. I use a computer to get things done, and Windows did. I may have still preferred Mac, but hey, business is business. 

And then the Mac came back. We saw them first in airports, the MacBooks, silently gaining strength and visibility. Then there was the iPhone, and more MacBooks. And then the gorgeous new iMacs. I taught an entrepreneurship class at the University of Oregon from 1998 through 2009. In the beginning all my students had Windows laptops. By the end, 80% of them were on Macs. 

Once again, being Mac literate is good business. At Palo Alto Software, our LivePlan SaaS app is browser-based, operating system neutral, and developed mostly on Macs. And Mac software, and the Mac software market, are growth markets again. The app store works. Happy ending. 

So now I’m almost all Mac again. I have two iMacs at home, a MacBook air, and iPhone and iPad, and I love it. An old friend. Isn’t computing great? And my Windows 7 desktop, in the office at the company, still works just fine too, thanks. It’s not good and evil, just computing. 

But don’t tell the Linux geeks. 

 

A 2-Second Business Pitch that Worked

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Last Thursday I’d just spoken as a guest to a class in entrepreneurship. As the class ended I was anxious to go because I was late for my grandson. The professor was thanking me and three students waited to talk to me individually. I didn’t want to be rude and I like talking to students, so I didn’t run off immediately.

The first in line was the one student I didn’t want to talk to — the one who had asked if I would listen to a quick business pitch after class. There’s no such thing as a quick business pitch when you’re not in an elevator.

However, instead of a pitch, it was iPhone in hand, showing me, and:

I know you don’t have time for a pitch but can I show you my app? It’s done and it works.

So, at least for me, an old software guy, that pitch worked. I couldn’t resist. Of course I wanted to see the app.

And it looked pretty good too. I’m asking him to show it to somebody I work with.

So there’s an elevator speech replacement that worked. In two seconds.

(Image: bigstockphoto.com) 

About Time: Ebooks Outselling Printed Books

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Last week Jeff Bezos announced that E-books now outsell print books at amazon.com. Computerworld reported:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the e-book threshold arrived sooner than expected. “Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” he said. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly.” Amazon has sold printed books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four.

I’ve been a believer in the future of ebooks for a long time, beginning back in the 1990s when I first bought a Rocket ebook reader for my book-hungry youngest daughter. I used an early t-mobile PDA, then a kindle, lately my iPhone and iPad.

For those of us with the means to have easy access to technology, the ebook just makes so much sense, on so many levels, that since I first got one I’ve thought this was inevitable.

Funny, Jeff Bezos saying they didn’t think it would happen this quickly. When I first saw that first ebook reader I guessed wrong; I thought it would happen way more quickly than it actually has. On the other hand, by the time the Kindle came out, I was starting to think it would never happen.

I’m glad it did.

iPhone, Luvya and All That, but Couldya Clean This Up?

Software, Technology, ,

It’s not like I don’t know how to read around this, but with all the slickness of the iPhone, iPhone Weatherwhy allow this simple error? The high for the day is 92 degrees when the current temperature is 100 degrees? Isn’t that just sloppy?

There is no computer language that doesn’t have an IF- THEN clause capable of making this look good. Call the high temperature that was there when we started the day H, and the actual temperature A. I don’t program iPhones but whoever does has the ability to do this:

If A > H, then H = A

Which would replace the 92 with the 100. Why not? Wouldn’t that look better? What bothers me is my own in-my-mind related if-clause:

If a logical error like this one, as obvious as this one is, shows up in this obvious a place, what’s going on with the system software in the core?

Software does have its production values, and it’s not like Apple Computer doesn’t have the resources. My guess is they’ve decided to let us keep the predicted high as a reference value, so we can compare it to the actual. Still, is it just me?

Will Your Business Sink in a Technology Ocean?

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Geology is fascinating. If only we could speed up time, we could see mountains rising and being eroded into peaks and valleys, oceans ebbing and flowing, continents breaking up and moving around. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Glaciers. Landscape in action. Great spectacle. Or it would be, if we could speed up time.

How about continental drift? Speed up time. If you click the image here to the right you’ll go through 650 million years in 1 minute 20 seconds.  Watch the continents pull apart. It’s a fun animation.

And technology is just like continental drift, but roughly 25, 50, 100, maybe a million times faster. And accelerating.

For example, mobile technologies. And what if the big blob there on the right were labeled “iPhone,” and other blobs labeled “Android,” “Windows Mobile,” and so on?  That’s a changing technology landscape. And in that case, the splitting of the continents represents maybe a year or two. Right? Call it two years, and that would make it 325 million times faster than continental drift.

The pace of technology’s changing landscapes is speeding up. The technological continental drift in personal computer operating systems common for business use took maybe 10 or 12 years to go through the cycle from CP/M in 1980-1982 or so, followed by the MS-DOS world (we called it PC Compatible), with Mac and then Windows, lately Linux and friends. Or maybe that was 25 years?

We all have to choose platforms. I’ve seen it from a software developer standpoint since 1984, so 26 years now. Then there’s hardware manufacturing, consulting and expertise, and also just plain using the technology. Do you use Windows or Mac or Linus? iPhone or Android or Treo or Blackberry? You’re making choices.

Make the wrong choice and you end up like my polar bear friend here to the left (with apologies for changing the simile abruptly from continental drift to ice sheets breaking up, but it does sort of show it, doesn’t it?) You’re on a shrinking platform. Of course the polar bear can swim long distances. Users can jump platforms, but it costs time and money. Developers and manufacturers can jump platforms too, but it costs more time, and more money.

I’ve seen a lot of businesses rise and fall to the ebb and flow of these technology platforms.

This is tough, but important, strategy management. Businesses get stranded on shrinking platforms all the time. Businesses went down with the ship of CP/M, Apple II, MS-DOS, SONY Betamax, HD vs Blue-Ray… it’s happening all the time. Yahoo Instant Messenger vs. Microsoft Messenger vs. whatever-they-called-it-on-AOL and so on.

Where are you in social media? Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Buzz, somewhere else?

Ideally you want to jump to the next continent in time to ride with it as it grows. But damn, it’s hard to guess right all the time. You’ve seen what happens. You’ve seen some businesses try to mitigate the risk by developing into multiple platforms, then lose focus and fall apart. You’ve seen businesses stick to dwindling platforms and eventually fade away.

What are you doing about this?

(Image credit: Jan Martin Will/Shutterstock)

Shock and Awe Reminder

Technology, True Stories, ,

Sometimes you have to step back and just plain enjoy the wonder of it. For me, shortly after my 62nd birthday, it’s been amazing, wondrous, and so much fun. Every so often I have to pause and reflect. The computers, the phones, the media options … it’s all amazing.

Most of you have grown up assuming cell phones, transportable video, and computers are everywhere. Can you imagine that when I was growing up we had three channels on the television, in black and white? We were already in our thirties before we had videotapes so we could watch movies at home. To see a specific TV show we had to plan our evenings and be ready at the television when it started. And we all watched the commercials together.

It seems like you have to be almost my age to be able to remember when we used typewriters and Wite-Out regularly.

In college we had to write papers on the typewriter. More than once I rigged the sentences to replace a page in the middle of the paper so it would start in context with the page before it, and then end in context with the page that followed, while the rest of the page itself changed.

In my first real job, as a wire service correspondent in Mexico, we’d have multiple typewriters on wheels. When a new story came in, we could leave the story we were working on in place in one typewriter, and then start the new story with another typewriter. And to change paragraph placement, we literally cut and pasted; with scissors cutting the paper, and real paste, to paste it back together. That happened all the time.

I think my favorite part of all this is remembering back in the early 1980s, as personal computers started to spread. We had the Apple II, the IBM PC, Radio Shack, and others. I was in Creative Strategies, doing market research for high-tech clients including IBM and Apple. We were paid to sit around and imagine what might come in the 1990s and beyond. We got good money for it. And we had no idea. We were so far off, it’s fun to try to think back to how low the horizons of our visions were.

Oh, and there’s this: in the middle 1980s I traveled a lot in Latin America, doing market research and planning consulting for computer companies, carrying the 34-pound original Compaq computer. And as bad as that sounds, it was a huge step forward. Later,  in early 1991, I traveled back and forth to Japan about once a month, using the first Macintosh Powerbook: monochrome only, it weighed eight pounds if I remember correctly. But there too, it was another huge step forward.

The capabilities of the iPhone, the Droid, the netbook? Absolutely amazing. The first computer I worked on, a 1979 AM-Jacquard minicomputer, cost about $129,000. It occupied a room of its own, took up the space of a walk-in freezer, and had a huge disc drive system involving 10-pound metal platters that each had capacity of 5 megabytes. And that was huge. It was hard to imagine using that much storage space up, ever. My iPhone has 64,000 times more storage space.

I could go on all day with comparisons like that. I love new technology. I love gadgets. I love the Web and social media. And it helps me enjoy it all when I remember how far we’ve come. It’s all amazing.

Standards vs. Competition

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It’s been a back and forth problem since personal computing started in the late 1970s. Some technical standards make things easier for everybody; but they also dampen competition, creativity, and innovation.

Standardizing operating systems in personal computers made a better market for software developers and software users. When MS-DOS took over in the middle 1980s, and became a standard, suddenly “PC Compatible” meant something. There were more programs, more options, more tools for developers. When Apple brought out the early Macintosh, it also brought out a new standard, and a problem for developers. Do we move to the new operating system?

Nowadays we have the Mac, Windows, and Linux. We have the iPhone, and windows mobile, and Palm, and now Android. We have Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Chrome … the Wii, PlayStation, etc. Software developers have to choose. Consumers have to choose. There are different mini markets. Guess wrong, and your business is out of luck.

Sometimes I like it. Competition keeps everybody sharp. And then there’s something available for what I don’t have, that isn’t available for what I do have. And all kinds of cables and power chords and plug-ins left over. What do you think: best of all possible worlds? Competition over all? Or standards and compatibility? Seems like it’s one or the other, but never both.

(Image: David Lee/Shutterstock)

Pricing IQ Test You’re Sure to Fail

Marketing, Productivity Software, , , , ,

I admit it. Pricing is often baffling to me. Test your pricing IQ by answering these 10 simple questions.

1. Why is an iPhone application expensive at $4.99 but a magazine can sell for $6.95, and a no-frills 20-ounce cup of coffee for $2.50 without anyone getting up in arms?

2. Why is a gallon of gas expensive at $3.00 when a gallon of bottled water costing $4.00 isn’t an outrage ?

3. Why is a Sunday newspaper just fine at $1.00 and up but a news website way too expensive at $2.99 per month?

4-5. Why are great applications like Google Earth or Evernote free? My generation was taught to mistrust the man in the trench coat offering free candy. Should we worry?

6. Why do we accept advertising without question in newspapers and magazines and most television, but not in an iPhone app we paid $2.99 for?

7-10. Why do we assume email is free? Why do we pay hundreds of dollars for one productivity suite, or nothing for another? Why do we assume content has no value, and why do content providers give it away? Why do we assume anything we can copy has no value, or that copying isn’t stealing?

Pricing is magic. And baffling. And to score this test, make something up. I have no idea.

Apple Computer Role Reversal as Big Brother

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What delicious irony. The champion of the little guy has become big brother.

Remember the groundbreaking first Macintosh television commercial, in 1984, with the young woman throwing a hammer into the giant video screen on an evil big brother, smashing it into bits? There’s a role reversal going on.

Apple Computer has taken the establishment role in the booming new iPhone application market. First the iPhone, then well-publicized stories of trivial iPhone apps making thousands of dollars daily, and then the application review process got swamped. And now there’s Apple Computer, the gatekeeper, protector of the establishment, standing between all those developers with stars in their eyes, on one had, and admission into the app store, on the other.

The original idea of review was a combination of protecting the software from crashing, and protecting the Apple store from embarrassment. Ever since the stories of iPhone application fortunes first broke — I fear it was with a fart app making $10,000 a day — the software developers are flocking to iPhone apps. Of course I have no special knowledge, but from the outside looking in, it would seem like the crush of applicants makes long waits, unfair rejections, and inconsistencies inevitable. I’m guessing Apple’s private-sector resources to manage the tidal wave are completely overwhelmed. Mobclix, which tracks iPhone applications with analytics, is reporting that there are more than 85,000 applications approved by Apple so far, and the wait has gone from days to weeks, and is rising.

On a Mobclix blog about the iPhone applications market, iPhone app developer Max Zamkow says:

iPhone developers live in constant fear of receiving an email from Apple with what can only be termed the ‘Death Sentence’: “We’ve reviewed your application and we have determined that this application…will not be appropriate for the App Store.”

He’s developed an app called FruitShoot Lite that lets unhappy iPhone developers (or anybody else) vent their anger by mock shooting at mock apples on their iPhones. But the default fruit target is a banana. And it passed the review.

It’s a couple of months ago now that Jason Calacanis, celebrity entrepreneur and blogger with a known taste for controversy, lashed out against Apple in The Case Against Apple–in Five Parts, in which he complained not just about the “draconian policies” of the iPhone app review, but also four other sins including “anti-competitive” practices with MP3 players, “monopolistic” dealings with telecommunications (a reference to AT&T’s lock on the US iPhone), “hypocrisy” of blocking competing browsers on the iPhone, and blocking Google voice on the iPhone.

TechCrunch highlighted a dumb-but-approved “upskirt” app last week, mocking the glaring inconsistencies:

Let me just get this straight: A hilarious satirical app made by the Someecards guys cannot get approved because it contains cards that, for example, mock Hitler. But an upskirt app is just fine? That is so ridiculous.

Yes, ironic indeed. On first glance, I look at the rising tide of complaints and I think they’re all delusional: Apple is a business, not a public service, and it owns the iTunes store, so it can do what it likes. Developers waiting weeks to get into the market, living in fear of rejection after all that work? It’s Apple’s clubhouse, so Apple can admit whoever it wants. However, as the whole thing starts to sink in, I have to add that Apple Computer has made this bed for itself, so it deserves to lie in it.

Not that I don’t like Apple. I’ve been a serious Mac user twice, first for about 10 years from the beginning in 1984 until the middle 90s, and again for the last two years. I like the Mac, love the iPhone, love Apple’s products in general. However, I’ve never quite accepted the odd phenomenon of Macintosh and Apple as crusade. The whole phenomenon of some connection between operating systems and good (Apple) or evil (Windows) has always seemed a bit creepy to me. After all, they’re just products for sale. Apple, IBM, Microsoft … they are all big companies.

Apple Computer, however, has actively catered to this odd canonization of brand throughout its history. It wasn’t for nothing that the Macintosh anti-big-brother image is part of our cultural heritage. It wasn’t for nothing that IBM became “big blue” and Microsoft “the dark side” … Apple spent a lot of thinking time, effort, and money on building that anti-establishment tinge to its brand. And it’s not totally crazy to suggest that Apple managed to change brand to aura, or halo.

Live by the anti-establishment brand, die by the anti-establishment brand. What we’re seeing, I think, with the rising protest of developers against Apple, is something akin to a jilted lover, or the famous Shakespeare epithet about a woman scorned. It seems like the backlash is whipped to a frenzy with Apple in a way that it might not be if it were some other big company, or, say, the US Patent and Trademark Office. Companies move slowly, government agencies move slowly, but not Apple Computer. The woman with the hammer in that 1984 commercial, crashing big brother and all. Say it isn’t so. Disillusion.

(Photo credit:wikipedia)

Gee, You Had to Pay $2, Once, to Get News?

Journalism, Web/Tech, , ,

Interesting juxtaposition: while much of the world worries about where we get real news, and particularly investigative reporting, iPhone users are up in arms about CNN charging less than $2, once, for an iPhone app that includes ads.

Journalism MournedMegan Berry posted Do You Get What You Pay For? yesterday on the Huffington Post:

CNN’s new iPhone app is creating quite a stir. First of all, they’re the first major news site to have a paid app ($1.99). Secondly, they’ve included ads in it. Users are in quite an uproar over this. They wouldn’t pay for something with ads in it!

There’s no doubt that the iPhone world is new and strange. I have an iPhone myself, and I love it; but how did $1.99 for an application end up as expensive? In what world? Maybe I’ve been in software for too long. Megan (disclosure: she’s my daughter) adds:

Yet, what about newspapers, magazines, television, and increasingly games? We constantly pay for media that includes ads, and we don’t even think twice about it.

Meanwhile there’s a lot of real worry about what’s happening to journalism, and especially investigative journalism, as newspapers and magazines fade. Within a click or two of that same CNN-iPhone-related post on Huffington, there’s this post in which Arianna Huffington frets over the debate over online news, another about whether the New York Times should charge for news, and yet another titled What Google Can Do for Journalism. I posted about that here just a couple of months ago.

On The Huffington Post, meanwhile, they took a Quick Poll on how people feel about paying for an iPhone application with advertising in it. Almost half the respondents said no: “If I pay for an app, I shouldn’t have to put up with advertising.”

I’m not saying that iPhone users shouldn’t worry about a couple of dollars, but … no, wait a minute, maybe that is what I’m saying. Skip a cup of coffee, once. Not that I even like CNN, but if nobody can figure out how to pay the reporters, we’re not going to have Journalism. I can imagine a world without newspapers, but a world without Journalism would be a lot worse than that. If saving Journalism (note: not newspapers necessarily, but investigative reporting) takes some ads, I can deal with ads.

So I just bought the CNN application for my iPhone.

(Photo credit: cen/Shutterstock.)