March 2011
5 posts
The military plan for removing Gaddafi from Libya
What’s going on. Why isn’t the west doing anything. To answer that you need to think about assets, limitations and what the goal is. Think about how quickly assets move. Think about Baghdad.
Gadaffi won’t be allowed to remain in power, not even in Tripoli. Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron have major stakes in this game now. So do the Arabs. That is the end game and Obama, Cameron and...
This diagramme should be required at all...
as linked to by Kontra on Twitter. Original source unknown. If you know the source please let me know and I will give credit (as credit is due!).
Some people think “open” systems are “better” than closed ones and cite this as a mantra. These are easy terms for fanboys to coalesce around but rather meaningless when you’re a serious business creating products for sale, especially if your goal is to create an extremely user friendly mass market product. On a more sophisticated level its possible to analyse the...
Thoughts on innovation
So what exactly does the word innovation mean in a business context? Like other words of its ilke like “Art” and “Freedom” there are no agreed on definitions. Define innovation too broadly and you find that every small change or alteration is considered innovative. Just listen to Robert Scoble’s enthusiastic gushing about every new twist in social media and...
Thoughts on Innovation at Google and Elsewhere
Patrick Copeland, Google Director of Engineering, gave the keynote at QCon in London this morning (topic innovation) and is reported to have called gmail innovative. Really?
Hotmail (a free email service) was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet. It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996 (Wikipedia)
gmail was launched in 2004.
...
February 2011
6 posts
This is going to sound weird coming from me but Thank God For Android! Today HP showed off Jon Rubenstein’s labours with WebOS and it looks to be very nicely done, simple, elegant, smooth, tasteful… very Apple like in attention to detail. None of those terms apply to Android which is why I’m saluting it and thanking it for what its done to help Apple clean up in terms of profit...
Reportedly an email from new CEO of Nokia Stephen Elop to the troops:
Hello there, There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the...
Recently the press was all inflamed because Apple turned down Sony’s e-reader app for iOS devices. It seems it used the same technique as Amazon’s Kindle e-reader app for iOS, to buy a book you click on a link which takes you to a web page through which you choose your new ebook and pay for it over the web.
The blogosphere was confused because Apple turned down Sony yet Amazon uses...
the Galaxy Tab
So to sum up, Samsung Galaxy Tab sales have been quite small and they have an unusually high for the industry return rate. The real story is all the sensationalist link bait and blog fodder.
This really gets me.
Apparently Google has caught Bing stealing Google’s search results for certain kinds of queries that Bing doesn’t seem to handle well. It’s compelling reading. Having proved their point but established that its not illegal corporate Google writes:
Is it Cheating?
If it’s not illegal, is what Bing may be doing unfair, somehow cheating at the search...
The Apple doesn't fall far from it's tree
Steve Jobs has had a consistent vision of what he wanted an Apple computing device experience to be since before 1984. Here’s a 1984 ad for the then newly released Macintosh; the ad title “If you can point, you can use a Macintosh” could just as well have been written today for an iOS device. Consistency of vision.
How about this 1984 ad titled Introducing Macintosh, For the...
January 2011
4 posts
Nokia
In addition to great device experiences we must build, capitalize and/or join a competitive ecosystem.
So said Stephen Elop the CEO of Nokia at today’s quarterly earnings report. His report was extremely downbeat in that what ever Nokia’s strategy was to stop its precipitous loss of market share esp. at the lucrative high end of the phone market, it wasn’t working. Something...
This Jimmy Wales story at AppleInsider is very bizarre.
Speaking in a “purely personal capacity” at an event in Bristol, England, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said app stores like Apple’s iOS App Store can act as a “chokepoint that is very dangerous.” It is time to ask if the model was “a threat to a diverse and open ecosystem,”
Let’s go back...
on Google
You can see what investors think of Google by looking at its stock price y/y, it’s essentially flat. We’re in year 2 of Android and AdMob and investors still don’t see serious growth oppurtunities for Google’s plunge into mobile OS’s to drive future ad revenues at multiples greater than what they currently are. While advertisers may be shifting where they advertise...
I saw a sneak peak at the new Android OS, Honeycomb, specifically optimised for tablet computers shown here. To me the page turning implementation of an Android ebook page compared to iOS’s page turning implementation is indicative of what is fundamentally different (and worse) about Android compared to iOS (see this at about 46 seconds compared to this at 3mins 50 seconds) . On iOS the page...
December 2010
6 posts
I’m still a bit confused. Steve Jobs at Apple’s Q4 earnings report made a comment about Android fragmentation and backed it up saying that Rovio, makers of Angry Bird, had a hard time porting the game to Android because of the fragmentation problem.
No we didn’t replied Rovio.
Electronista carries an interview of sorts with Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio in which Vesterbacka...
Dan Frommer declares Windows Phone 7 “toast” and says why. One of my arguments has been that Microsoft can’t afford not to be a big smartphone player but Frommer tweeted:
Microsoft has a lot of money, but what are they doing to do to get people interested? The story is still missing.
As Frommer asks, what will drive adoption of the WP7 platform? They don’t have many...
Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and EMC. What do 3 of these companies have in common? They’re all suing Google. And who are EMC? They are a private cloud company, a Google competitor.
Why does that matter? Because these 4 companies have formed a consortium called CPTN Holdings LLC, a company incorporated in Delaware which just purchased 882 patents for $442 million in cash from the company...
Comparing iPhone ads to Windows Phone 7 ads reveals much about why one company is surging and one company is struggling.
Have you seen the “Really?” ads for Win Phone 7? Here’s one. The basic premise for all these ads is that people are unhappily glued to their smartphones and have lost all connection with the “REAL” world. The advantage of using a Windows Phone 7...
Here’s an interesting tidbit: The BBC iPlayer is being rolled out for an international non-British audience as a subscription service that runs on the iPad. Hello, what does this tell us?
1) It tells us that iPlayer for iOS will not be a Flash app, most likely HTML5. And that means that unless the BBC decide not to, that the iPlayer app will bounce video from the iPad its playing on to...
Bloomberg has caught up with info that I published months ago (on April 25 to be exact) here at RelentlessFocus, namely, that Apple had hired a world class law firm specialising in IP law (Kirkland and Ellis). Apple’s team of lawyers at K&E is led by the leading IP lawyer Robert Krupka who has won many big IP cases.
So much for breaking news over at Bloomberg.
That Bloomberg article...
November 2010
10 posts
The saga over AirPlay continues. The folks over at Cydia who jailbreak iOS devices have developed a hack that gets AirPlay working with all iOS apps including Safari though it’s said to be less than fully stable at present.
In the meantime John Gruber, who has an uncanny sense of how Apple thinks and what they’re working on, said tonight on his 5by5 podcast with Dan Benjamin, that...
You may have read that Apple is selling all it’s new computers without Adobe’s Flash. There was a time when it was a big deal that Flash was inluded on a mac but times change. It’s easy to see how some will interpret this as mean spirited and an attack on Adobe.
I think Apple’s motives are different.
Adobe has made a talking point that Apple is closing off the web and...
AirPlay turns out to be another Apple hobby. The situation is that Apple is keeping the video portion of the API private which means that developers are not alowed to make use of the API. Apple is occasionally enigmatic and inscrutable and this one of those times. Video streaming would create a highly desirable product out of the AppleTV 2. As it stands AppleTV 2 approaches being a worthwhile...
AirPlay is out and it’s the killer feature I predicted for AppleTV 2 and less. Less because at the moment it only works with 2 apps. You an see a demo of what works and what doesn’t over at Gizmodo (shudder) and read John Gruber’s theory about what’s going on here.
But if Plex can get their iPad app to work with AppleTV 2 then suddenly we’ll have BBC iPlayer and a...
Back on 29 May 2010 I wrote that offering free MobileMe services to anyone buying Apple CPU products would be an excellent way for Apple to both defend itself from and to attack Google’s entry into the world of smartphones.
It’s beginning to sound like Apple has just this idea in mind if reports at AppleInsider and other web sites are accurate.
Apple has a consistent strategy. They...
There is an elephant in the iOS room and nobody is talking about it. In iOS 4.2 which will unify the OS for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad there is a new feature called AirPlay. It’s a feature of the OS itself and it’s on by default. It allows an iPhone, iPod Touch or an iPad to stream audio and video to the new, small AppleTV. It’s available in any or should I say every app that...
So once again I’m confused… Remember at Apple’s Q4 earnings report Steve Jobs talked about Android fragmentation and specifically pointed out that Rovio was having trouble programming Angry Birds for Android because of Android fragmentation. And the very next day the guys at Rovio tweeted
“Did we say at any point it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr, Nope, no we...
Remember Google Buzzzzz? It fizzzzed. Designed to integrate a wide variety of online sharing it was poorly implemented, confusing for many and the launch was complicated by Google’s failure to think through privacy issues from the point of view of users. By being automatically on, some people were aggrieved by the privacy violations.
So today Facebook announced what I’m terming the...
According to Asymco, Android currently holds 25% of the burgeoning smartphone market. I wonder if Android can significantly raise its market share beyond 25%. Even if it can eventually grow to and replace Symbian’s current 40% is that significant enough for Google’s agenda for Android?
40% market share for Android means 60% of the market is out of Google’s advertising...
Steve Jobs mentioned at Apple’s Q4 results report that he sees the smartphone market in 2 phases. In the first, the potential market grows as do actual sales. All boats float though not at the same rate. In the second phase the market is mature and competition becomes a zero sum game. Thinking of the second phase first I can see the real advantages to owning the high end of the mature...
October 2010
4 posts
A long time ago John Sculley won a power struggle against Steve Jobs. Scully ran Apple, Jobs was out.
Sculley was interviewed by Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac:
All the stuff we did then were all his ideas. I understood his methodology. We never changed it. So we didn’t license the products. We focused on industrial design. We actually built up our own in-house design organization, which they...
John Gruber in a recent podcast give a very positive review of a short time he got to spend with a new WinPhone7 prototype mobile. I’ve said many times here and at the Apple Finance Board that the future may not look like the past and the current smartphone wars of iOS v Android as created by the media may look very different in the future. Anyone predicting Android dominance is premature....
Speaking of Google sanctioned phones, Microsoft sued Motorola today for patent infringements based on Moto’s use of Android OS. I find the timing a bit strange. Remember back in April Microsoft made a similar threat against HTC and HTC signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft paying Microsoft a license fee for each Android handset HTC sold.
And then Microsoft waited until 1 Oct. to drop...
Off and apparently not really off, Apple’s negotiations with Facebook is a crucial linkup to control the growth and hegemony of Google in it’s need to index every click on the Internet and link them to highly personalised advertising campaigns which is Google’s only real revenue stream.
Apple needs Facebook and Facebook needs Apple because both are trying to put up walls against...
September 2010
5 posts
Months ago I wrote that Apple would try to tie itself closer to Facebook as a way of fending off Googles full on attack on Apple’s key markets (OS’s, the iPhone, iPad, iTunes, etc). Today Apple Insider describes reports of 18 months of negotiations between Apple and Facebook which recently fell apart just before the launch of Appl’s new social media experiment Ping.
I was really confused when Apple launched the new AppleTV. It clearly ran iOS and yet there was no way to add apps to it. Apps in my opinion was what was needed to break the link between AppleTV and iTunes, a link which was keeping AppleTV from becoming a really interesting product. But without apps AppleTV is just a conduit to the iTunes store and the iTunes video and movie store just...
Today the IDC made some predictions about market share for mobile OS’s in 2014 that hide more than they reveal. Electronista.com headlined that Android would pass iOS leaving iOS with only 10.9% of the smartphone market compared to Android’s 24.6% in 2014 Market Share. Sound scary as an Apple investor?The IDC numbers are here:
Two comments about these numbers:
First the smartphone...
The big news out of Cupertino at Apple’s yearly “Music Event” wasn’t the products they announced but the quality of the live streaming video. Many years ago Apple used to live stream big Apple events and they were pretty torturish to watch, the video would break up and fall behind the audio, the biggest viewing size that could be called decent was 320x240 and at that Apple...
The latest rumour about Apple’s (maybe they will, maybe they won’t) not yet announced iOS tv product is that it will have netflix, a streaming movie service in the USA. I find this unsurprising, the real message is that this new device will run apps and that’s it’s killer feature. Netflix will run in a netflix app and if successful we’ll see all the major video/media...
August 2010
9 posts
Weeks ago I predicted that the companies competing in the smartphone market and which didn’t run Android as their OS (RIM, HP, Microsoft and Nokia) would want to emulate Apple and do their own in house advertising. Today the Wall Street Journal is running a story that RIM are shopping around for a mobile advertising company to buy. Assuming the WSJ article is correct, the question is not if...
Michael Gartenberg partner in Altimeter Group writes
I did ask the representatives of one media outlet if they didn’t feel silly running stories about every aspect of this [antennagate] story, including what bookmakers were setting odds for at the Apple press conference. Their response made it clear why this was happening: the Apple stories they posted generated the most traffic of any stories...
And yet another example of this eyeball baiting is the ridiculous flap over a report that an unannounced and unconfirmed new version of AppleTV will be renamed iTV which is the name of an independent television channel in the UK. We don’t know there is actually a product, we don’t know that the name is being changed but there are any number of analytical reports like this one from...
Another example of creating FUD about Apple to attract eyeballs.
Because Apple is frequently the victim of sloppy journalism designed to be controversial in order to attract attention in order to keep readership numbers up, I’m linking to a clever idea by Tom Scott here. Scott says:
It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there’s no similar...
With a clever twist Eric Scmidt, Google CEO, has managed to turn the meaning of net neutrality on it’s head so that Google can both gain an advantage for it’s services while still managing to claim that Google supports net neutrality. Here’s how it works.
Net neutrality means that ISPs don’t discriminate between packets of data by giving an advantage to some over others...
Today I spent some time in Apple’s latest and largest store in Covent Garden in London. It’s really tastefully done.
I was on the second floor when someone said “I know you, I helped you buy your iPhone” and when I looked up sure enough there was the chap who helped me set up my iPhone after purchase.
On launch day when I bought my iPhone we had got to talking as you do...
“Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos! People will find it’s very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot…But society isn’t ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content.” ...
The tech blogs and press are really bizarre. Today there were headlines how unit sales of android phones have surpassed unit sales of the iPhone for the 3rd quarter (the one which ended in early June). Ok they forget to mention “in the USA” because, well, that’s how Americans think. But no matter…
Also today RIM launched their latest phone which they hope will help...
July 2010
10 posts
No better or worse than (Samme Resultat)