Apr 2006
Security 3.0: from after-market to security platform
Friday - April 21, 2006 Filed in: Security
The bottom-line is, a two year old, top-of-the-line Powerbook is suddenly on its last leg. I can only wonder what upcoming updates of Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Dreamweaver and others will do to my geriatric Powerbook. Desktop software is still an important catalyst, fueling new hardware replacements in a slowing PC market. Software and services will live alongside each other for quite some time, in the interest of PC manufacturers and admittedly, end-users.
Tips for Aperture enthusiasts:
Two tips that will smooth a transition and took me two months to figure out: 1/ Remove all videos from the iPhoto library, Aperture will abort, in my case after 14 hours, if you don't. 2/ De-fragment your hard-drive after a successful import, or simply copy the main Aperture library to a backup disk, remove the original and copy it back. The Aperture import process fragments the library dramatically; I ended up with a Library of over 6,000 file fragments, absolutely killing performance.
Fat desktop software still fuels hardware sales
The bottom-line is, a two year old, top-of-the-line Powerbook is suddenly on its last leg. I can only wonder what upcoming updates of Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Dreamweaver and others will do to my geriatric Powerbook. Desktop software is still an important catalyst, fueling new hardware replacements in a slowing PC market. Software and services will live alongside each other for quite some time, in the interest of PC manufacturers and admittedly, end-users.
Tips for Aperture enthusiasts:
Two tips that will smooth a transition and took me two months to figure out: 1/ Remove all videos from the iPhoto library, Aperture will abort, in my case after 14 hours, if you don't. 2/ De-fragment your hard-drive after a successful import, or simply copy the main Aperture library to a backup disk, remove the original and copy it back. The Aperture import process fragments the library dramatically; I ended up with a Library of over 6,000 file fragments, absolutely killing performance.
Blackberry needs a new industrial designer
Monday - April 17, 2006 Filed in: Mobile | Consumer
Technology
Recently I was asked to think about how to improve
the phone features and functionality in an ever
commoditizing "Terminal market" (an Ericsson
acronym). There is a lot at stake here; lots of
people buying phones, 2.2B of them to be exact, not
enough of them buying the associated internet
service.
Improve the specs and make it look good is the easy answer to that question. That is, if you are building a phone not a PDA. In a PDA you can pull technology, services and memory into a bulky enclosure and rely on nerdocrats to buy them; not a large market. So how do you build a phone that is just as smart and fits in the enclosure of a RAZR? Or smaller? Research shows that people buy cool looking phones, rather than bulky ones stuffed with functionality.
The answer in my view is services. Just as the power of the iPod stems from the iTunes library on your desktop connected to the iTunes store, phones should become re-play devices to services provided on the backend. The phone should be an iPod geared towards managing and replaying service data; contacts, calendar items, music, news are pushed out to it automatically, pictures are taken, stored and uploaded automatically to your section of the "store", ready to be shared and, yes, sold. Enabling free market principles to the content distributed by these services, completes the value chain and drives growth of the platform, regardless of phone.
Phone manufacturers need to learn how to build a value chain, not just a phone. Business innovation is just getting started.
Improve the specs and make it look good is the easy answer to that question. That is, if you are building a phone not a PDA. In a PDA you can pull technology, services and memory into a bulky enclosure and rely on nerdocrats to buy them; not a large market. So how do you build a phone that is just as smart and fits in the enclosure of a RAZR? Or smaller? Research shows that people buy cool looking phones, rather than bulky ones stuffed with functionality.
The answer in my view is services. Just as the power of the iPod stems from the iTunes library on your desktop connected to the iTunes store, phones should become re-play devices to services provided on the backend. The phone should be an iPod geared towards managing and replaying service data; contacts, calendar items, music, news are pushed out to it automatically, pictures are taken, stored and uploaded automatically to your section of the "store", ready to be shared and, yes, sold. Enabling free market principles to the content distributed by these services, completes the value chain and drives growth of the platform, regardless of phone.
Phone manufacturers need to learn how to build a value chain, not just a phone. Business innovation is just getting started.
The brains are in the service
Apart from previous comments in this blog about the Treo with regards to UI, target market etc., the Treo's bulky form-factor (which still reminds me of the old Ericsson, pre-Sony phones) with its pointy antenna, really started to bother me. I felt like a cop patrolling the neigbourhood with a gun in its holster.
But the real reason for my change is a strategic one. I lost confidence in the Palm (Source) platform and so apparently has Palm's CEO. The announcement of the Treo700 based on Windows Mobile has reduced Palm to a commodity hardware player with not much to be proud of. Owning and refining the Palm OS and segmenting it to identifiable target markets would have been the winning business strategy.
Amazing is the power and persistence of Microsoft who now delivers the Windows Mobile version on PDA phones from Motorola, Sharp, Samsung, HP and other brands, steadily repeating its Windows PC software success downstream. I am eagerly awaiting Apple's foray in the phone OS business.