Posts by Techwriter10

Ad Age reports that Microsoft is ready to spend $80M to try and turn people's attention away from Google, the dominant search market leader, and toward Bing, Microsoft's latest search engine offering. Much like Microsoft's attempts last summer to prop up Vista, trying to turn consumers to a new product from an old company, using advertising is a flawed approach and in my view won't change consumer habits even if it turns out that the new offering is really good.

State of the Market

According to Comscore, Google holds a commanding lead in the search market with 64.2 percent of total searches in April. That was actually up from March. Yahoo! is the next closest with 20.4 percent, down a tick from March, and way back in the pack is Microsoft with a paltry 8.2 percent of the market.

Think about that for a moment. Even if Microsoft bought Yahoo! as was widely discussed last year (and as I wrote about in Microsoft and Yahoo! Attempt to Kiss and Make Up), the combined companies would not even reach a 30 percent share and Google would still have more than double its closest competitor. Right now, its not even that close.

Bada Bing Bada Bang

The newest offering is expected according to several reports to be released in the next week and called Bing. Can Bing help Microsoft gain a substantial share of the consumer web search market? …

Hi Castors:
Thanks for the comment and for reading.

Ron

Hey Dan:
Thanks for the comment. Great to know that great minds think alike. :-)

Took a look at the presentation and it looks like a great one. Excellent slides.

I attended two seemingly unrelated events things this week: I saw the new Star Trek movie and I attended the MIT CIO Conference in Cambridge. At the conference, Tom Malone, who is the Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (think about how much they must have just on that campus) was talking about what it takes to be a successful business. He said it takes more than solving a math problem, it's about being innovative and creative and using the collective intelligence of the organization as well as well as a crowd of people interested in contributing.

That got me thinking about the Star Trek movie where after all Spock represents solving math problems and Kirk represents creativity and innovation. Neither would be as successful without the other and the same goes for business. You need your Spock side to develop the underlying technology you sell, but you need Kirk to make it into a product people want. Business could actually learn a lot by watching the Star Trek movie.

Tension Between Fear and Innovation

Another common theme at the conference was the persistent tension between fear and innovation. Successful companies find a way to innovate, often through experimentation. Unsuccessful ones let fear hold them back. At a key moment in the film, Spock wants to take the conventional route and Kirk wants to try something different. While experimenting was certainly no guarantee of success, doing nothing would …

Blog post says that next iPhone due for July 17th (for what it's worth).

http://www.appleiphoneapps.com/2009/05/source-reveals-specs-and-release-date-of-next-iphone/#

According to multiple sources, the Palm Pre is set to launch on June 6th, which happens to be the 65th anniversary of D-Day invasion. I guess we can call this the Pre-Day invasion. Instead of storming the beaches of Normandy to take on Nazi Germany, Palm will be taking on the mighty, mighty Apple Corp., and its Juggernaut iPhone. At $200 (after $100 rebate with two year agreement), it has a similar price tag to the current 8GB iPhone. But can it really take on the iPhone or even compete with the BlackBerry, which itself has been giving Apple a run for its money?

Is The Cell Phone Market Changing?

Every few months a new phone comes along and we are left wondering if it will be "The One" to take on the iPhone. Interestingly enough, earlier this month, new sales figures from the NPD Group indicated that the BlackBerry Curve outsold the iPhone in the US for the first quarter this year. BlackBerry has long been a business favorite and brought out several new phones recently include the Curve and the Storm.

In fact, BlackBerry occupied three of the top four spots for sales in the list. But the BlackBerry had several things in its favor including being business friendly along with a loyal and large installed base. But Palm can at least take heart that it's possible to get people interested in a phone besides the iPhone.

Hey Castors:
Yes competition can be a positive force. It keeps companies from becoming complacent and it can drive innovation and force down prices. Nothing wrong with it and in this case, it's actually entertaining. :-)

Ron

Thanks for leaving a comment. I'm with you. Been using PCs for 25 years, going back to the DOS days and I've never enjoyed a computer as much as I do my MBP, which I bought 2.5 years ago.

I've never been a big fan of American Idol or reality TV in general, but the tit for tat going on between Microsoft and Apple ads reminds me a bit of a reality TV competition with bloggers acting as Simon and Paula and the gang. We watch. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we sneer, but it's all in good fun right?

The latest ad in Apple's Get a Mac campaign goes straight after the new series of ads from Microsoft. Microsoft has tried a number of approaches, but its new series of Laptop Hunter ads, which goes after Apple's price seems to have hit home and Apple had to strike back. (I wrote about these ads in Microsoft Gives Apple the Full Court Press and Microsoft's Inferiority Complex on Display in New Ads.)

First Came The Bill and Jerry Show

The first series of ads you may recall (unless you've repressed it like a bad memory) featured the odd couple: Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. I knew this was a bad idea from the get-go (as I wrote in Microsoft Seinfeld Strategy to Save Vista is Pathetic). The ads were strange, obtuse and missed the mark completely. If the aim was to change Microsoft's image, they failed miserably and were quickly scrapped.

Next Up: I'm a PC

I know some of the judges liked this one, but this campaign bugged me. I couldn't see the …

In February, 2008 I wrote a blog post called Is Apple Working on an eBook Reader: Does It Matter? Today, I would answer my own question with "Hell yes it maters." If Apple enters the eBook market, you know it would be expensive, but it would be a desirable device, and come on, you know you would want one.

At the time I wrote the original piece, you would have to excuse me if I was a bit cynical. I had been hearing we were one device away from mainstreaming eBooks for years. I had seen the Sony Reader hit the market with great promise and make little impact. I foolishly discounted the power of the Kindle. C'mon, who knew Oprah would be plugging them later in the year?

Black and White and Read All Over

I have to admit I've never laid hands on a Kindle, but the other day Amazon began inviting bloggers to submit their blogs to the Kindle platform. The second I heard about this, I jumped at the chance to have a presence on the Kindle because, well, I think if they just lowered the price, it would really take off. But when I looked at the preview of what my blog looked like in the Kindle after adding my first blog to the system, I was shocked at the terrible quality.

First of all, it was black and white. My blog has pictures and …

You can get a TV Tuner card for each of their PCs, then run the cable to the tuner card. Then you can get software like SnapStream to watch and record TV just like the DVR. It's a thought, and in the long run probably cheaper than the cable company DVR option. But you need some technology chops to install the card and figure out the software.

I was watching an ad the other day for Panasonic where it showed people watching YouTube on a big flat screen TV in the living room. Yet most people don't watch content from the web on TV, probably because it still takes a technical leap that's simply too difficult for mass consumption.

That got me thinking that many of us watch TV on our PC these days. My wife and I regularly watch shows on ABC.com. (I will sorely miss Life on Mars, but check out Better of Ted if you haven't seen it). Hulu, which has a hilarious series of ads called 'an evil plot to destroy the world,' provides easy access to tons of shows. And it seems after years of promise that TV has finally made the transition to PC. But what will it take for the PC to move to the TV?

Which Way is Which?

Several companies have tried to provide the hardware and software so that you can watch content from the Web on your TV, but so far mass adoption remains elusive. Examples include Apple TV, a box that lets you watch content you buy in the iTunes store (which includes TV shows and movies, don't forget) on your TV. It also lets you watch YouTube and other web content. A relative new comer, Boxee, a software solution with plans to release a set top box …

This coming Monday, May 11th, marks the start of the first annual openSUSE Community Week, an event conceived of by openSUSE community members to help mentor folks who want to get involved with the openSUSE open source Linux project, but don't know how to get started.

The virtual conference will be conducted almost entirely in IRC and runs from May 11th through the 17th. I asked Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, the openSUSE Community Manager (whom I interviewed in Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier Discusses openSUSE 11.1) how it came together and what the virtual event entails.

RM: Describe the openSUSE Community Week concept.

JB: It's very straightforward -- contributing to an open source project is easy, in theory, but in practice there's a lot of knowledge that helps contributors to become efficient.

One way to get that knowledge is to go to the project's Web site, read the pages, how-tos, go into the mailing lists, ask questions and sort of poke around to become familiar with the project. This works for lots of people, and that's great. But, we think we can help a lot of people accelerate the process of becoming contributors by having the Community Week and giving tutorials and being available for questions and generally getting experienced contributors together to mentor newer contributors.

We'll also be "recording" sessions so that people who miss the live sessions can go through the tutorials and so forth to benefit from the sessions as well.

Ms. Mayer went to Washington the other day to defend Google against recent attacks that it is responsible for the ongoing problems of newspapers. Marissa Mayer, who is the Vice President, Search Products and User Experience at Google testified before a Senate sub-committee on 'The Future of Journalism.' Not surprisingly she vigorously countered arguments that Google was siphoning off profits from news organizations, a position taken recently by AP, Forbes and the Newspaper Association of America.

While Google makes a convenient scape goat for the troubles facing print journalism these days, it would be gross over-simplification to suggest if Google didn't exist, newspapers and magazines would be doing just fine. Lots of factors have lead to the current crisis in journalism (as I wrote in The News Business Declined Due to Lack of Vision) and I'm inclined to agree with Mayer's assertion that Google drives traffic to the news web sites. If the news organizations don't know how to exploit that traffic as well as Google, that can hardly be Google's problem can it?

What's Link Love Got To Do With It?

Mayer pointed out that Google is a search engine. Job one is to index information and make it available for people when they conduct searches. If a news organization shows up near the top of the results for any given story, they are going to get traffic. Mayer had this to say specifically about link love:

Together, Google …

Apple caves to pressure, adds Nine Inch Nails app to app store without changes:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/07/nin-app-store-update-approved-by-apple/

I can't really say what DaniWeb's policies are regarding different matters as I don't run the site, and I don't know what the Baby Shaker App was "supposed to do."

Apple can avoid this type of drama if it simply stuck to the simple rule of thumb that I outlined in my post. If it doesn't pass judgment on content, it can't be held responsible for the content. I don't hold Apple responsible for song lyrics, movies or TV shows that happen to be in the iTunes store. If I don't like them, I don't buy them.

Stupid typo department: It is of course *Trent* Reznor, not Troy.

The App Store is a beautiful idea that is wildly successful, but Apple has a big App Store problem. They are trying to control the content in the Apps and they really, really need to just get out of the way and let the market judge the quality of an App.

The only threshold should be: Does it poison the platform or violate an agreement with the carrier selling the phone? If not, then allow it in and let users decide if its good enough.

Nine Inch Nail Trouble

Apple ran into trouble on Monday when it rejected an App by the band Nine Inch Nails because of profanity issues, which is just about the stupidest reason I can think of to reject an App. They let the Baby Shaker app through, but they reject NIN's app because it uses a bad word? It's not Apple's job to be the morality police. It's their job to ensure the integrity of the platform. The sooner they realize that, the better off they (and all of us) will be.

When You Control Content, You're In Trouble

I posted about this issue on Twitter Monday:

Trent Reznor of NIN is angry at Apple and I don't blame him. If there's not bad code, let the market decide. http://bit.ly/NUNwL

I got back this response my fellow technology journalist Dee Ann LeBlanc:

One of …

Hi:
Thanks for the comment, but I don't think you are correct on this. The UMPC became cheaper when less expensive chips became available and it was at the very least the precursor to what became the Netbook.

I do agree with you, however, that too many people look at this as a cheap laptop and are looking for the complete functionality package. These are amazing little machines, but it would be hard for most people I think to use them as a primary machine. I use mine when I'm on the road because it's light weight and easy to transport.

Thanks for the comment.

Thanks for the comments. I've followed Michael for a long time and I don't see him as particularly biased toward any technology, but regardless you'll note I was disagreeing with his assertions. As for return numbers, I don't know what to tell you, but I can only report what I've seen and the numbers seem to suggest that people are returning Linux Netbooks.

I don't think most people are going to load Linux on their Windows machine unless they are inclined to do so in the first place.

As for whether Windows or US users are less savvy than in any other location, I can't say. I only can speak from my experience.

Last week we heard about the first Android-powered Netbook (which I wrote about in First Android Netbook Nothing to Write Home About). Then on Friday, analyst Michael Gartenberg, who is VP of Strategy at Interpret, and who writes frequently about consumer technology sent the following Tweet:

Is Android's future in Netbooks? NO! of course not.

I tweeted back:

@Gartenberg Not exclusively, but I could see Android being a viable Netbook OS.

And Gartenberg replied:

@ron_miller hard to see it. not the right apps and no better than Linux. Linux Netbook return rate is huge.

That got me thinking that ultimately, the OS shouldn't really matter because Netbooks are supposed to be about a light weight OS and easy access to the Web where you spend most of your time. But when it comes down to it consumers are rejecting alternative operating systems, and the question is why?

Why Netbooks Anyway?

The name Netbook evolved from the not very friendly-sounding UMPC or Ultra Mobile PC. The footprint is small and it provides a way to get *online.* with a larger screen than our phones and a smaller footprint than our laptops. If the idea is to get us online, as long as we can find our browser the OS shouldn't matter, right?

I think so, but Gartenberg disagrees citing high return rates of Linux Netbooks.

Does the OS Matter?

Why would you be more …

Ken,
This sounds awesome. I love my new HP Mini, all except for the fact it's running Windows. I'm downloading this immediately and trying it. Sounds well worth the $20. Thanks for taking the time to be the guinea pig on this. Can't wait to try it.

Thank you and thanks for the link. It's an interesting post and adds credence to the rumors that they are up to something in Cupertino, but then aren't they always?

Word emerged this week that Apple was in talks with Verizon and everyone assumed it was it about the iPhone, but buried at the end of a BusinessWeek article, AT&T's iPhone Dilemma, is an interesting nugget:

Apple has also shown Verizon a larger, more computer-like device dubbed by one person as a "media pad."

That Apple is talking to other carriers seems indisputable at this point and has been widely reported, but what they are talking about is unclear. The natural assumption is that they are negotiating iPhone distribution, competition if you will for the current exclusive carrier, AT&T, but what if there is something else in play here?

Exclusivity Has Its Rewards

Since its launch in 2007, AT&T has enjoyed exclusive rights to sell the iPhone, an enviable position for any carrier and the partnership has served them well, but if Apple is looking for new dance partners, what does that mean for AT&T and the iPhone product line and for AT&T?

According to the BusinessWeek article, AT&T has done very well partnering with Apple:

Since the first iPhone came to market in mid-2007, AT&T has signed up more than 7 million subscribers who wanted the device—more than 40% of them from other networks. In the quarter ended on Mar. 30, roughly 70% of AT&T's new wireless subscribers signed up to get an iPhone.

Can Verizon Handle 3G

Since, as the BW article points out, Verizon, and Sprint for that …

The Android is about to take the leap from the cell phone to the netbook, and much like the first Android-powered cell phone, the first iteration is a bit of head-shaker. Instead of a dazzling showcase, it's underpowered and small, and although it has some interesting qualities, cost is going to be a big issue as some reports have said it could be as high as $250.

What's it Got?

The first Android netbook, the Alpha 680, comes from Skytone, a Chinese company mostly known for creating Skype headsets. According to the Skytone web site, the Alpha 680, which is reportedly due to be released in June, sports a paltry 7 inch screen, it has 1 GB of flash memory (1GB!), 128 MB of RAM and an ARM11 533 MHz 32 bit CPU.

On the plus side there are 2 USB ports, and SD slot (a must with so little storage), built-in WiFi, 3G connectivity and an Ethernet connector. It also boasts a rotating screen, a touch panel and touch pad (some nice little extras I must admit). At only 1.5 pounds, it will be smaller than the smallest Asus Eee computer, but at what cost in terms of usability?

I own an Asus Eee 900. It's extremely portable. The Linux OS is easy to use and you can easily access the Internet (most of the time), but the keyboard makes it almost unusable because they had to cut so many corners …

On Friday, a 13 year old named Connor Mulcahey from Weston, Connecticut had the distinct honor of downloading the one billionth app from the iPhone App Store. In order to honor this occasion, I decided to list my five favorite iPhone apps.

Just a word before I do: I'm not a connoisseur by any means. I dip my toe in the App Store from time to time and find ones that serve me. I often find the sheer number of apps overwhelming to be honest, but I have found several that I use constantly. So here goes:

1. Evernote

I love Evernote and I use it constantly in my work as a blogger, gathering interesting links and saving them to my various work notebooks. The iPhone App is an extension of the desktop version that lets you take a picture, say a voice note, or type in a note. I have been in the car, formulated an idea, stopped and entered my idea as a voice note and later written the blog post (as I explained here in Anatomy of a Blog Post). Evernote syncs your iPhone app with your desktop app and the Web version for constant harmonious access to your information wherever you are.

2. Night Camera

I found this one early on when I was at an outdoor event at dusk and I realized without a flash the camera was pretty much useless. This application holds the shutter …

According the BBC report on the matter:

"The world's largest software maker said profit dropped by 32% to $2.98bn (£2bn). Sales slipped to $13.65bn."

But you're right. They did report a profit, so I probably should have chosen my words more carefully. It was the first time they failed to report growth from the previous year's figures, which is different than no profit all.

My basic premise is correct, however, that while Google and Apple gained in their year over year figures, Microsoft lost ground.

The quarterly numbers are in the books for Google, Apple and Microsoft , and while Apple and Google made money, Microsoft failed to report a profit for the first time in 23 years as a public company.

Crazy Times, Crazy Results

It seems unfathomable that Apple continued to do well in this recession, but as I wrote on Thursday in Apple Earnings Continue to Defy Logic, while Apple's computer sales dipped, and iPod revenue (as opposed to sales) remained flat, the iPhone and the App Store carried the day. Meanwhile, the National Business Review reports that at a recent earnings call Google reported a very respectable 8.9 percent increase in profits.

Microsoft on the other hand had a devastatingly bad quarter compared to its biggest rivals. Microsoft's reported 32 percent profit plunge was all the more shocking since they had never reported a loss as a public company. Microsoft hopes to rebound with the release of Windows 7, which could be out soon, but a Microsoft blog post on Friday indicated that Win7 would include a way to run in XP mode, which makes make wonder why I would buy a new OS to run in a mode like my old OS. Meanwhile Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the economy as an excuse, but if his big rivals were making money, it begs the question, why was Microsoft doing so poorly?

How Low Can it Go?

Apple came out with its earnings report yesterday, and while all wasn't rosy for the Cupertino technology company, bottom line is they made money as earnings increased an impressive an impressive 8.7 percent in year over year earnings with net profits up 15 percent (as reported in the Guardian). All this in the middle of what the IMF recently called, the worst economic climate since the Great Depression.

Computer Sales Down

As has been widely reported Mac sales have been off. People are buying fewer Apple computers and in fact Mac shipments were off significantly last quarter according to this Cnet article:

Mac shipments fell 3 percent compared to last year. It's the first time Mac shipments have fallen year over year, but some had expected worse. Desktop shipments fell 4 percent, and portable shipments fell 2 percent, but revenue was way off: 22 percent in desktops, and 12 percent in portables.

iPods and iPhones Continue to Lead the Way

What has saved Apple's economic butt is that while people may be buying fewer of their high end products like Mac desktops and Mac Books, it didn't stop them from buying iPods and iPhones in huge quantities. In fact, iPod Touch sales doubled from last year, but even with these numbers iPod revenues were off.

According to this chart (provided by Cnet) the big winner this quarter was the iPhone and related products and services (which I …

I'm not sure I agree with either of your statements. File sharing is often stealing somebody else's property. Fair use is when you use something as part of something else, me quoting from an article for instance. If I use the whole article without permission, that's plagiarism unless there is a Creative Commons license on the material to share (usually with attribution). As Lessig has written a reasonable copyright law protects artists and encourages them to produce and distribute work. Without it, anyone could slap their name on something that took years to write or make and there would be no legal recourse. Where it starts to get ugly is when the government becomes more concerned with protecting the rights of the likes of Disney (which has no problem using public domain stories like Aladin for profit making ventures) and large record companies and leaves the creatives in the dust. We need to find a middle ground between a wild west and the current situation that stifles creativity and sharing.

And in this case when you throw in the political angle plus the parody, it's even harder than typical copyright matters.

A California Senate candidate is using a Don Henley song in a campaign video on YouTube, and when Henley sued for copyright violation, the candidate fired back that it was his first amendment rights to use the song. It seems he failed to understand the nuances of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Maybe he should be complaining to the RIAA instead.

Some Background

CNN reports that Henley got his feathers ruffled when he heard that California Republican Senate candidate Charles DeVore used two of his songs, "The Boys of Summer" and "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" without permission. DeVore, according to a CNet article who is a Republican, sees it as quote "liberal goon tactics" unquote and a violation of his first amendment rights.

Where Do You Draw the Line

This case did force me to think about where you draw the line on copyright ownership, and a candidate using a campaign ad is a grey area. I think we all can agree that if you are using a song for commercial purposes, you have to pay the owner. Where the debate comes in is when you are dealing with situations where there is no money changing hands or you are using pieces of the song in a remix fashion. In his recent book, Remix, Lawrence Lessig looks at copyright law in the age of the internet and gives many interesting examples of over-zealous record company and …

Thanks. If you can track down Ballmer's address, feel free to pass it along. :-)

Thanks for commenting and I'm glad you liked the post.

I've been fascinated by the recent series of Microsoft ads that go after Apple. On one hand I commended Microsoft for having a unified message in Microsoft Gives Apple the Full Court Press. On the other, I think the message is off kilter as I wrote in Apple's Value is More than Skin Deep.

That's why a recent post on BusinessWeek, Mac vs. PC: What You Don't Get for $699, caught my eye. In it, Arik Hesseldahl breaks down why the PC is not such a bargain and quotes a terse Apple spokesperson, who left it at this:

"The one thing that both Apple and Microsoft can agree on is that everyone thinks the Mac is cool. With its great designs and advanced software, nothing matches it at any price."

Probably not the point Microsoft was hoping to make, which has left me wondering why Microsoft is targeting Apple at all, and if they are really rivals for the same business. I spoke to Dave Caolo, who is co-lead blogger at TUAW.com to get his view.

Microsoft is Confused

Caolo believes Microsoft has a serious identity crisis. It's simply not sure who its target market is and this has resulted in them trying to be all things to all people. "The current batch of ads puts their identity crisis front-and-center," Caolo says. "Microsoft doesn't sell computers, they sell an operating system; an operating …

I opened up Google Reader this morning and found major rumors from our favorite corporate rivals Apple and Microsoft. For Apple it is the oft cited iTablet. For Microsoft, it's a supposed iPod Touch clone. I try not to give too much credence to rumors (as I wrote in It's Time we Learned to Dismiss Apple Rumors), especially when one of them involves the Zune, which is hardly a rival to the iPod at all (as I wrote in Zune and iPod : A Tale of Two MP3 Players), but the juxtaposition was just too hard to ignore, so let's take a closer look and see what we've got.

The iTablet Rumors Won't Go Away

This rumor has been circulating for the better part of a year it seems. Think of the iPhone or iPod Touch with a larger screen. It could be Apple's answer to the Kindle, and because it's a full fledged OS, if it came to pass and the price were right--two things that are not clear as of now--it could blow the Kindle out of the water. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen gushed about the Kindle when it came to books, but for anything else he gave it low grades. It just doesn't fly right now as a portable internet device and an iPod tablet computer would certainly fill that void.

Adding fuel to the fire of speculation, the Wall Street Journal weighed …

Imagine my surprise when I learned this morning that an IBM researcher believes that Moore's Law-- that the number of transistors on a micro processor would double nearly every two years-- could be nearing the end of its run. Amazingly Moore made this prediction in 1965 and his law has stuck pretty much dead true for almost 45 years. So it's Friday and it got me wondering, if Moore's Law is going down, what could this mean to other famous laws:

Murphy's Law: Anything that Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong.

Over the next several years, some researchers believe this law will begin to reverse and anything that can go right will go right. Pessimists everywhere are up in arms about this one, saying nothing ever goes right, so how could this be true?

Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

It is now believed that time will actually expand to allow for people who can't complete work in the allotted time. Procrastinators are looking forward to technology that will allow them to simply change the time when their projects aren't done. Murphy's Law advocates believe something will go terribly wrong with this.

The Peter Principle: Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence

Many people believe that George W. Bush's presidency marked the high water mark of this law and the trend has actually begun to reverse with the election of a …

Believe it or not I have two netbooks: an Asus Eee and a HP Mini. I like the bigger keyboard on the HP better, but I prefer the Asus because it's running Linux and it's faster and more stable even though it's an older machine. The whole idea of the mini is to use it to access cloud applications. The underlying OS doesn't really matter in that context.

My goodness! Thank you for the detailed incredible comment. I think it's longer than my actual post. :-)

Seriously, I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. I love when my blog provides an avenue for people to think through ideas and share their thoughts and you have certainly done that with this comment. I hope you'll come back and keep reading.

Thanks again (and I think we are in agreement here, for the record).

I'm not complaining at all. I was trying to make that point and show how useless it is for Microsoft to get into a pissing contest with Apple. Thanks for adding your thoughts.

It's with more than idle curiosity that I've watched the recent Microsoft ads that attack Apple, subtly suggesting that it's too expensive and that it's all glitz with no real computing power. There is so much wrong with these assertions that it's hard to know where to begin. There is after all something to be said for getting what you pay for, and when you buy any old Windows PC based on price and specifications without regard to quality, you have no idea what you're getting. When you buy a Mac, you may pay more, but you know exactly what you're getting because they all come from the same source.

As I wrote recently in Microsoft Gives Apple the Full Court Press, it's a great ploy for Microsoft to be on message about this with Ballmer giving the hard stuff, publicly dissing Apple, while the commercials come in underneath with a more subtle approach for the general public, but the more I've thought about this, the more I wonder, what this strategy is about at its core.

What is Microsoft Afraid of?

Why is Microsoft afraid of Apple? Apple still only accounts for between 10 and 20 percent of market share depending on whose numbers you believe. Yes, it's been growing, at least until recently, but is Apple really such a big threat to Microsoft desktop domination? What's more, it's not an (ahem) apples to apples comparison. Microsoft doesn't make a computer, remember? …

In fact, I think many of us already are, but you're right, how much you allow that to happen should be up to the individual. I don't like to give my cell phone number to people because I don't like to be that accessible to people other than my family, but I use my iPhone to send Tweets and check Facebook. It is an interesting set of issues and we will need to work out those boundaries as we move forward.

Ken:
You need to read my other AIIM post on by Ron Miller:
Social Media Cynics in the Press Room:
http://byronmiller.typepad.com/byronmiller/2009/04/social-media-cynics-in-the-press-room.html

See my first post on Andrew Lippman's fascinating AIIM 2009 Keynote called The Third Cloud and the Future of Social Computing. http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4208.html

In his keynote last Wednesday at AIIM, Andrew Lippman from MIT's Media Lab pointed out that not that long ago we went to work then we went home and watched TV and the two worlds never collided, but toda social networking tools and mobile devices are blurring the lines between work and home.

He said, "Social networks are important because they break the notion of what IT is about and they break the notion of work and play." It's so true, but what does it mean for us as we design social networking tools moving forward?

One Device to Rule Them All

Mobile computing has evolved quickly. If you think back as recently as 2007, the first generation iPhone had only the apps that came with it. It's only been a year since Apple released the first iPhone SDK (as I wrote about it in App Store's Astounding Ascent...). Twitter is just 3 years old. It's only really found mainstream acceptance in the last several months (as I wrote about in Twitter's Popularity Hits New Heights). We are moving very quickly here, but as we do, the ways we socialize are changing dramatically. Suddenly these iPhone (and other devices) apps let us access our social networking tools wherever we are and Lippman says this has changed the way we think about our work and home lives, breaking the barrier between them.

To illustrate this, he gave an example of people who walk …

I'm not thrilled about it either, but we expose more of ourselves in the online world all the time. It's hard to have privacy in this context unless you simply don't use the internet (which isn't an option for many of us). But you still have options and choices about what you want to do.

Thanks for commenting and the kind words about the blog.

Hi:
Understood. I was simply trying to articulate that it was based on your speech, but thanks for the clarification and for such a great keynote. You've truly got my brain working in all kinds of directions as a result and that's what a speech like that is supposed to do.

See the second post based on Lippman's keynote called: Social Networking is Blurring the Lines Between Work and Play. http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4209.html

Andrew Lippman, who is the Founding Associate Director at the MIT Media Lab suggested at a talk last week that we were on the edge of a new third cloud where assistance becomes as important as access. The first cloud was the internet itself. The second cloud provided the services layer for the cloud (i.e., Google, Facebook, Amazon and so forth). The third cloud will take us to another level.

It will be geared to individual spaces like offices and airports and the goal won't be access, but assistance, helping users accomplish a single specific task without thinking about it. Lippman made his comments last Wednesday morning during his keynote address at the 2009 AIIM Content Management Conference.

One Application at a Time

Lippman says the idea of the third cloud began to percolate when he went to the Consumer Electronics Show and watched iPhone applications in action. He said the epiphany had to do with the idea that on the iPhone, you could only look at one application at a time, then you had return to the main page and choose a second application.

This is in stark contrast to an operating system which allows secondary windows to open, for multiple applications to be open at the same time and lots of complex interactions. Lipmann pointed out that the difference between mobile apps and the ones we use on our desktop computers was that they were meant to …

Video killed the radio star.
Pictures came and broke your heart.
~Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Star

It turns out the old song was wrong. Video didn't kill the radio star and the internet didn't kill the newspaper industry. It was a failure to embrace new technology, to believe they could continue to do things the old way while the world changed, a steadfast refusal to understand the new ways of doing business.

What happened to the news business was a combination of myopia and intransigence, a complete lack of vision and leadership and buying into to the whole decade of greed, the likes of which we haven't seen since the 80s. What we're witnessing right now is the death of the 20th Century newspaper business model. Sadly, the news business got perverted into a 21st century profit-driven cesspool that lost sight of its primary mission: news reporting.

In the Days of My Youth

When I was coming of age in the 1970s, the newspaper business was at the peak of its power. Investigative journalists were folk heroes. Woodward and Bernstein brought down a powerful president with good reporting. The Washington Post was almost literally a fourth estate and Publisher Katherine Graham and Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee were willing to put their newspaper business on the line to print the truth. They understood that the reporting the news was Job One. Just a decade later that …

And here's another view from Venture Beat who opines that ad is geared toward people who were going to buy a PC anyway. I still maintain going after Apple on price is a smart move, but once again Microsoft fumbles the execution by using an actress instead of a real person.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Venturebeat/~3/VpBtK6n5dns/