Economic innovation for a bright new world
Technology
4G LTE is the new social network
Wednesday - March 28, 2012.
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Calibrate; Thunderbolt; MacBook Pro dead
Wednesday - July 27, 2011.
- First thing every new Mac needs is display calibration, right out of the box. In my twenty years of buying Macs I’ve never encountered one that is close to correctly calibrated. Expect more realistic colors from your Mac when calibrated with a piece of hardware such as Pantone’s HueyPro (priced below $100). [Links: Pantone
] - For many years I bought into maximizing my Mac experience and thus into Apple’s serial interface dance, reaching all the way back to the Apple Desktop Bus, that many times has led to an accessory stalemate at the next rendition of innovation. So I couldn’t be more surprised to discover (not published anywhere but in the new MacBook Air’s manual) that Apple’s Thunderbolt interface is compatible with Mini Display Port, which means last year’s 27 inch monitors will work with the new MacBook Airs released last week. [Links: Apple
] - Those MacBook Pros are awesome laptops, just not as portable as Macbook Airs. And Apple knows it, rumor has it Air is going to replace the whole MacBook Pro line-up. [Links: AppleInsider
]
Lion spam boon
Friday - July 22, 2011.
- The new Mail application in Lion no longer supports turning preview off in its default new look, which is a boon for spammers. Suddenly all e-mails that did not get detected by the spam filters get opened by simply selection and with some clever HTML reference and inclusion alerts the spammer who did so. Expect your information to get collected and to get spammed even more. Automatic mail previews is a insecure concept. [Links: Lion’s new mail]
Gesture (on PC) is out
Thursday - July 21, 2011.
So, I am disabling most of the gestural recognition in the preference pane, not because I don’t want my iPad and MacBook to behave the same, but simply because they are not.
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Apple please dump Ping, LinkedIn time-bomb
Friday - February 25, 2011.
By economic principle Facebook is a winner-takes-all (if it doesn't trip up), or put differently social networking is not a category but a platform (to which extensions and applications can be built) owned by Facebook. Hence building Ping, a social network around music from Apple (and integrated in iTunes) is poised to fail. Apple instead should stick to its knitting and enable Facebook "likes" to optimally cross-pollinate media content to some 500 Million users instantly. Segmentation of social networks is not in the interest of users, because it is impossible to segment people's social behavior and subsequently expect them to maintain its fragmented access.
Mark my words.
Even LinkedIn is doomed if it tries to encroach on Facebook's territory with more social networking capabilities for business. All Facebook needs to do is turn their social attention to business (which is still somewhat rudimentary today). LinkedIn is not a free-market as it does some pretty shady and in-transparent things when people are looking for a job, such as providing unwarned access to people who are not your references (something I was offered when I was evaluating people through LinkedIn for a startup). LinkedIn better run for its IPO real fast, while the public has no clue of how much shorter its shelf-life has become since Facebook.
Back to Ping: you can drag the album art in the Store directly to the "add link" section in Facebook, should you want to do Apple a favor.
Mark my words.
Even LinkedIn is doomed if it tries to encroach on Facebook's territory with more social networking capabilities for business. All Facebook needs to do is turn their social attention to business (which is still somewhat rudimentary today). LinkedIn is not a free-market as it does some pretty shady and in-transparent things when people are looking for a job, such as providing unwarned access to people who are not your references (something I was offered when I was evaluating people through LinkedIn for a startup). LinkedIn better run for its IPO real fast, while the public has no clue of how much shorter its shelf-life has become since Facebook.
Back to Ping: you can drag the album art in the Store directly to the "add link" section in Facebook, should you want to do Apple a favor.
Location-location-location
Friday - January 21, 2011.
- Location based services from Google Maps
trump those from secular vendors TeleAtlas (now TomTom) and Navteq (now Nokia) strategically. Think of the latter two as proprietary databases and Google Maps as the application that can seamlessly map multi-nodal information derived from anywhere to serve dynamic routing and information requirements. Because of that Google Maps is not only more flexible in what information it can present but often way more complete and accurate than TomTom
claims to be. After almost 4 years TomTom still cannot find the street I live on, and neither does the Navteq service in my BMW.
How developer platforms (should) drive marketplaces
Monday - March 24, 2008.
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Bose: A great company experience
Sunday - December 30, 2007.
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BlackBerry just got a make-over (by Cingular)
Thursday - July 27, 2006.
Having tested a ton of phones, PDA's etc over the years, the 7130c is a very attractive competitor to the bulky Palm Treo 650 and ... certainly more usable. The small dimensions of the 7130c cuts the size of the older Blackberry almost in half, a little thicker than the Motorola RAZR (which I love) and a bit taller, the 7130c still fits in the pocket of my pants easily. I like it so much, that I decided to get rid of my old Blackberry (on eBay) and my RAZR (although I'll keep it around, just in case) and combine two capabilities into one.
The 7130c with EDGE internet connectivity is actually fast enough to make it a delight to browse the internet (and visit the WAP site of CNN) and read e-mail, while waiting for the traffic light to turn green. The industrial design is good enough (not great) and appealing, the screen that is clearly visible in bright sunlight and adjusts automatically to your surroundings. This is absolutely the best screen I've ever seen on a mobile device.
Phone services are integrated into the PDA capabilities, but this part could be more intuitive. The heritage of the scroll menus from the Blackberry PDA platform complicates things beyond what is necessary. More 'special purpose' buttons would solve the problem. For now however, the Blackberry 7130c
has become my new one-eyed king in the land of the blind. Security 3.0: from after-market to security platform
Friday - April 21, 2006.
Internet security companies are the Jiffy Lubes of the auto industry, they require constant innovation to keep up with the changing product stack they attempt to optimize, but not own. Some companies achieve innovation through non-organic growth (Symantec), others build a set of urgently needed technologies that becomes bigger as customer requirements grow (Trend Micro, McAfee). But keeping up is a challenge, and I expect security companies and the stack owners to aggressively pursue acquisition strategies to round out and secure their own future. Stack owners (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Cisco) will become fierce competitors to security companies, if partnerships are not appropriate. Today's Security leaders need to change and look into new business strategies.
Looking at the security marketplace from a fresh perspective, I give the current marketplace a 1.2 grade on the following evolution scale.
Security 1.0: the internet is not secure by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is the conventional world. So, get over it. Security is also not an absolute science. Spam, Viruses, Exploits, Worms, Cross-site scripting etc. deliver a vast amount of opportunities to security companies that provide band-aids to the multitude and severity of security gaps. 83 Enterprise AntiSpam companies battle it out every day. Leaving it up to customers filled with fear, uncertainty and doubt to wade through a plethora of point products to select which one is best, and when. It's a jungle out there.
Security 2.0: a secure enterprise, shielded from some of the garbage on the internet, needs protection in the same way you secure your house. Depending on personal preferences that define the vigor and quality of security, securing the doors without securing the windows doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Security is really a risk management issue, a delicate balance in which no single piece of security, data type or communication channel prevails; the equilibrium of security techniques (AntiSpam, AntiVirus, AntiSpyware, Web Application Security etc.) needs to provides sufficient shelter and trust. Leading security companies need to move towards marketing that equilibrium and scope.
Security 3.0: while internal threats are becoming a force to be reckoned with, many security companies are developing a Security 2.0 strategy that incorporates content compliance and other technologies to protect company assets against the employees themselves. I believe security companies should focus on aggressively protecting against outside threats, yet stimulate and enable the internal exchange of information. Content compliance should be checked but not enforced. The integrity of your business lies in the hearts and minds of people, not technology. Moving on, Security 3.0 is a platform strategy consisting of a framework in which a multitude of vendors can provide plugins that separate threat detection from distribution. It will be a free-market in which the best technology will plug into a framework that allows this technology to be used on any type of information, in motion or at rest. I believe many stack owners and security behemoths will play a pivotal role in defining the key components of this security platform and new security specialists will define the new, and highly specialized, security threat detection capabilities.
Bottom line: plenty of acquisition opportunities continue to exist for emerging security companies as the incumbents and stack owners battle to own a large part of the security framework that is essential to instill trust with customers.
The size of after-market providers like Jiffy-Lube, AutoZone is larger than the market size of the car manufacturers, proving that after-markets will exist for quite some time. Security is still the after-market of the technology industry and I see no vendor changing that paradigm significantly today. New security vendors will continue to reap rewards and the incumbents will slowly move towards owning something they've never had, a technology (or platform) stack.
Looking at the security marketplace from a fresh perspective, I give the current marketplace a 1.2 grade on the following evolution scale.
Security 1.0: the internet is not secure by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is the conventional world. So, get over it. Security is also not an absolute science. Spam, Viruses, Exploits, Worms, Cross-site scripting etc. deliver a vast amount of opportunities to security companies that provide band-aids to the multitude and severity of security gaps. 83 Enterprise AntiSpam companies battle it out every day. Leaving it up to customers filled with fear, uncertainty and doubt to wade through a plethora of point products to select which one is best, and when. It's a jungle out there.
Security 2.0: a secure enterprise, shielded from some of the garbage on the internet, needs protection in the same way you secure your house. Depending on personal preferences that define the vigor and quality of security, securing the doors without securing the windows doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Security is really a risk management issue, a delicate balance in which no single piece of security, data type or communication channel prevails; the equilibrium of security techniques (AntiSpam, AntiVirus, AntiSpyware, Web Application Security etc.) needs to provides sufficient shelter and trust. Leading security companies need to move towards marketing that equilibrium and scope.
Security 3.0: while internal threats are becoming a force to be reckoned with, many security companies are developing a Security 2.0 strategy that incorporates content compliance and other technologies to protect company assets against the employees themselves. I believe security companies should focus on aggressively protecting against outside threats, yet stimulate and enable the internal exchange of information. Content compliance should be checked but not enforced. The integrity of your business lies in the hearts and minds of people, not technology. Moving on, Security 3.0 is a platform strategy consisting of a framework in which a multitude of vendors can provide plugins that separate threat detection from distribution. It will be a free-market in which the best technology will plug into a framework that allows this technology to be used on any type of information, in motion or at rest. I believe many stack owners and security behemoths will play a pivotal role in defining the key components of this security platform and new security specialists will define the new, and highly specialized, security threat detection capabilities.
Bottom line: plenty of acquisition opportunities continue to exist for emerging security companies as the incumbents and stack owners battle to own a large part of the security framework that is essential to instill trust with customers.
The size of after-market providers like Jiffy-Lube, AutoZone is larger than the market size of the car manufacturers, proving that after-markets will exist for quite some time. Security is still the after-market of the technology industry and I see no vendor changing that paradigm significantly today. New security vendors will continue to reap rewards and the incumbents will slowly move towards owning something they've never had, a technology (or platform) stack.
The brains are in the service
Monday - April 10, 2006.
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.
PowerPC or Intel, who cares? Or do I?
Saturday - July 09, 2005.
Apple switching to Intel is a move that stunned the faithful Mac community, yet most of us knew Mac OS X was derived from a dual core OS Steve Jobs had been running for a while at Next. Had we forgotten?
Did the success of the iPod blur our vision? But more important than the choice for Intel CPU's is the impact on the choice for other hardware components of the computer. The Mac derives its cool look, slim laptop design, unique features and true innovation from a primarily proprietary hardware design process. Low cost and commodity designs from mostly Intel, AMD, and other mass market producers still turns out computer bricks. Intel performance is good, instead of "Intel Inside" just add "Apple Everywhere Else".
Did the success of the iPod blur our vision? But more important than the choice for Intel CPU's is the impact on the choice for other hardware components of the computer. The Mac derives its cool look, slim laptop design, unique features and true innovation from a primarily proprietary hardware design process. Low cost and commodity designs from mostly Intel, AMD, and other mass market producers still turns out computer bricks. Intel performance is good, instead of "Intel Inside" just add "Apple Everywhere Else".
Step it up Skype!
Wednesday - June 29, 2005.
Treo650: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king
Thursday - May 26, 2005.
As a fervent Macintosh user (I have never bought a Windows PC in my life, but been "forced" to use one), the Treo650 is about the only game in town to get your office with you on the road. The success of the Palm in 1997 started with a simple concept, provide business users with four simple buttons that gives them access to everything they need. No more, no less. Since then the Palm platform has grown in all directions, except the one I need; better support for the business user. I like access to e-mail and a decent browser, I don't like the fact that many of the phone software capabilities are not truly integrated with the original Palm software capabilities. Bluetooth performance of the Treo is below par, calls sometimes do not get sent to the Treo headset, regardless of the button you press (the headset works fine with my Powerbook and Skype). Categories don't work with the Mac. Call log can't be scrolled through using navigation keys. No keystroke consistency between applications. No global hot button consistency. Inconsistent user interface behavior between applications. Should I go on?Opinion: I wish Apple made a phone, using a proprietary device that serves the needs of a business user very well (a key target considering its $500 price point) , instead of trying to appeal to a broad software market. In the same way the iPod did that for music players. Proprietary platforms competing with "open-source" will yield better customer value, Apple please bring it on.