tundraboy's Profile

A souped up dual-processor Mini at XBox prices? Hackers and modders will be all over it, converting it into a low-cost full-fledged Mac two days after initial release. You think Apple would come up with such a product?

@Chris: (BTW I think the iPhone fad could pass as soon as Android and the Palm Pre and Blackberry get their acts together) You judged netbooks to be a fad, a passing fancy, based on the observation that netbook buyers have been ditching their purchases out of sheer disappointment. I don't think anything like that type of remorse is being exhibited by iPhone buyers. Android is a one OS-multiple hardware platform model like Windows and Linux and Symbian. With the level of complexity inherent in current gadgets and a future that promises even greater complexity, I have my doubts on whether this model is still viable as opposed to the Mac, iPhone and Blackberry approach. So I don't know if Android will ever get its act together to the same level that iPhone and Blackberry has. Palm Pre, maybe, but their starting from a whole and past ineptness just might be an indicator of future ineptness. The market penetration of smartphones has reached down to the level of non-tech sophisticates. These buyers are not adventurers, they will buy what their friends, colleagues and relatives bought so that they have a ready source of technical support close by. It just might be too late for any other smartphone platform to catch up to iPhone and Blackberry. Heck, even mighty Nokia is lagging! For the iPhone 'fad' to pass. It is not sufficient that the others get their act together, you also need Apple to mess up big time. We're talking mess up bigtime like W Bush messed up bigtime. (I always have to get my digs in on our erstwhile torturer in chief. Can't help it.)

The question is, how closely should Apple tie the iPhone to OS-X? I mean in terms of should Apple intentionally make the iPhone-OS-X experience richer, more functional than iPhone-Windows? My gut instinct is no. Otherwise it'll be like Windows-Office where each product's technical advancement is hampered by the additional requirement that it defend the other's market position. The best way to insure that iPhone and OS-X remain at the cutting edge is to aim for being the best, period. Not the best OS for iPhone users, or the best smartphone for OS-X users.

Microsoft is the GM of the tech industry. However, to me they will always be the company who cynically supported Bush in 2000 because he was going to let them get away with a mere slap on the wrist after they got convicted for criminal monopolistic acts. I remember reading back then that pretty much the whole company from Gates all the way down were going for Bush (even though the Republican platform probably made most of them them cringe) because Bush will stop the DoJ from pursuing a break up. In short, to get away with corporate felony, Microsoft sold the country out.

So to those of us in the know, Steve Jobs' retirement (to enjoy the remaining HALF of his life, hopefully) will be a buying opportunity as Apple stock swoons momentarily from skittish low-info investors. Yes, the fuzzy succession picture at Apple is unfortunate. But contrast that to the much more orderly hand off that took place in Microsoft, where of course the problem is the orderly hand off handed off to a most disorderly minded buffoon. As fuzzy as the Apple succession scenario may appear, anyone of Cook, Schiller, Oppeheimer, Ive, or the few other names bandied about is certainly more reassuring than anointed heir apparent Balmer whose only qualification for his current position is that he was Bill Gates' college buddy.

The point of any ad is not really to convince the customer to buy your product, but to convince her to seriously think about your product; try it out, take it out for a spin, and hopefully you'll like it and buy it and be wedded to it for good or for a very long time. Nobody bought a Mac because of I'm-a'Mac-I'm-a-PC. But a lot of folks went out to an Apple Store and looked at one, maybe asked a friend about it, or researched the internet about it then decided they liked what they saw and went ahead and bought one. Ads just call attention to the product, the product still has to sell itself. I seriously doubt that the new MS ads will make a serious dent in deterring potential switchers. This new campaign is in the same vein as Think Different -- it's not about the features of the product it's about how admirable and heroic the people who use the product are. Think Different was interesting and entertaining, but did it sell Macs? In the end Macs started to sell not because the ad campaign was so great but because the product was, or is. And besides, Microsoft's problem isn't really the switchers. Their problem is the high school and college kids who are making their first serious, informed computer-buying decision and are going for Macs in droves. They are technically 'switchers' because they were probably using PCs but that choice was made for them by their parents or before they really knew what they know now about computers. This is the generational tidal wave that is staring Microsoft in the face and I'm not sure Ballmer sees it, realizes it, or feels any urgency to address it.

Yes Apple is focusing its iPhone efforts on the younger demographic, but that's how you attack a market with an established encumbent. Jobs fully understands that the battle for market share when you come late into the game is a generational campaign. Win over the young and keep on catering to them (and their kids) as they grow older and reach their prime earning and decision-making years. In fact he's doing the same thing with the Mac. Why target the enterprise market? CEOs and CIOs are mostly old and set in their ways. There's nothing new in this. Toyota wrote the playbook 30 years ago. (Ballmer though still hasn't read it.)

There is a basic tension between a single platform provider (MS for Windows, Google for Android) and their client hardware manufacturers (PC makers for Windows, smart phone makers for Android). This tension arises from the fact that the platform providers will always want the client PCs or phones to be as similar to each other as possible, while the client machine makers will want their PCs or smart phones to be as highly differentiated as they can get relative to their competitors. Life would be easier for MS if Dell, HP, etc. would be happy just selling generic, interchangeable machines. But of course the PC manufacturers wouldn't want their product commoditized. Same deal with Nokia, Moto, Samsung etc. The inevitable result is platform complexity that negates the presumed advantage of sharing a common platform. Android will suck for the same reason that Windows sucks: The effort to constantly fine tune the code just to accomodate this and that phone manufacturer's idiosyncratic specs will divert Google's resources away from truly innovative software development work. With so many moving parts, introducing a new feature or capability for Android becomes an excruciatingly slow process because every new thing must be tested against all the different Android smart phones out there.