By Georges van Hoegaerden



I read a lot of iPad reviews before I found myself waiting in line to get a shiny new 3G iPad from the Apple Store last friday. Because WiFi is simply not pervasive (albeit more pervasive where I roam on the east coast than on the west coast, surprisingly I found even gas stations in North Carolina having free WiFi), the iPad without 3G is perhaps best suited for children who need a somewhat controlled access to the internet and for many of us who use their mobile device connected to the Internet primarily from home (according to a pre-iPad market study I recall).

From the many other reviews (including Walt Mossberg's valuable assessment) you can read about the early experiences with this great new device. I agree with most of Walt's assessment but wanted to offer some complimentary considerations (from a demanding early stage entrepreneur, Venture Catalyst, Venture Capitalist and Venture Economist) I did not see.
The iPad is a beautiful, easy to use computer that will serve the lifestyle, internet and computing needs of most people. You should get one at your earliest opportunity.
If you travel frequently, the iPad 3G is so well equipped and easy to use, you can actually peacefully leave your main computer at home. Even novice users will suddenly have the world at their fingertips.

Here are my remarks to make the iPad even better:

Strategically

The requirement to tether the iPad for the first time to a regular computer and activate it through iTunes is beyond a lawsuit waiting to happen (it does not state such requirement on the box), not the right strategy for consumer adoption of the iPad.

The iPad is a device that is likely to appeal to 5/6th of greenfield of the world's population that is not using a computer capable of running iTunes, and bound to find itself limited in market penetration by the tethered activation requirement. Apple should aggressively offer in-store and cloud based activation to combat this issue.

Positioning

Now, Apple is often referred to as a great marketing company, in my view because they don't do any positioning at all. Most of Apple's products are described by virtue of their beauty and their capabilities and just like with finding a woman with those attributes; you know instinctively when you want to be with her.

Most other technology vendors still foolishly deploy expensive marketing departments to preempt who its buyers may be, and Apple merely states what the device does (in terms of benefits), the number one thing I find myself explaining to interested onlookers is that the iPad is a (lifestyle) computer, not just an iPhone Touch with a bigger screen.

The iPad, also by virtue of which software capabilities are included (see below) suffers from a bit of public confusion and identity crisis, as witnessed by the complete lack of built-in printing capabilities.

Hardware

The shape of the iPad is perfect for a handheld device, yet the 3G is big enough to make you want to rest it on your lap or elsewhere and tap around with both hands. My 5-year old daughter with smaller hands juggles with the weight and requirement to move the iPad around while playing games, yet not enough to keep her hands off my iPad.

- The volume button
The volume button on the iPhone and iPad irritates me to no end, not where it is placed but which part of the rocker is volume up or down. Given that the iPad can be used in many orientations I would make the volume up and down switch sensitive to the context of the orientation. Meaning, no matter how you hold the iPad, the volume up and down coincides in direction with the visual clues on the display.

- The home button
The home button is visually undetectable in the dark, and can be left, right, up or down depending on the orientation of use. This button needs a slight backlit to identify itself under low-lit and dark conditions.

- Back curvature
On a completely flat surface such as a desk or kitchen counter the iPad has a tendency to spin around easily, especially when typing hands-free. A slightly less curved back, with more surface area touching the underlying surface would improve resistance and offer more stable usage.

- Speakers
The current speaker position, (on one side only) leads to frequent muffling and diminished volume and clarity of sound when holding the iPad in landscape orientation when hands are prone to cover up the speaker slots. This needs a different implementation, perhaps dual mono sound asymmetric to the orientation of the device.

- Display
The display, even though made from a special material smudges easily which when viewed from an angle and will make the owner look like a dirty animal. I am not an expert in display technologies to offer a solution, and these fingerprints are hardly noticeable to the user with a straight-on view of the device.

- The Base
The docking base for the iPad (sold separately) only supports a portrait display of the iPad while docked, not the most natural way to view widescreen videos nor the default orientation of the majority of photographs while charging.

- Touch
It is probably a software modification, but I found the iPad sometimes responding to fingers not fully out of the way of the touchpad causing some unexpected behavior. Some of those fingers do not need to touch the iPad, I found out, to cause an in-adverted detection and operation.

Software

Apple is clearly ahead of the pack in delivering a compelling lifestyle computing device we can all use and therefor will catch most of the wind in addressing the imperfections of the software provided. That does not mean I suggest you should not buy the device, but it does mean Apple has room to improve with software updates that make the iPad better.

I can tell (and know) that Apple is developing the software in corporate divisions with their own disparate decision making. As the first vendor to provide truly integrated desktop, mobile and cloud computing services Apple needs to reorganize itself amongst the development of IP (Intellectual Property) that spans those boundaries. No longer is the power of one capability on one platform important, but the lowest common denominator now defines the overall experience.

- Portable capabilities
With much of development efforts at Apple focused on newer devices such as the iPhone and iPad, the lack of development efforts on its OS X companions are affecting the (synchronized) reliability of data on the new devices. With the release of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) Apple has really dropped the ball on the stability of the address book, iCal, e-mail and others that affect the use of all devices in concert. With the latest release Apple changed the way it deals with address book imports, how it deals with duplicate contacts, how it syncs address book images etc, to the extent that you need to verify and make frequent backups of every part of the process to prevent unexpected behavior.

- MobileMe
MobileMe is a necessity to synchronize over-the-air many of the e-mail interaction, contact, calendar and notes to keep your information up-to-date at all times, and you should therefor subscribe to it (a $99 / year charge). But it took me two months to figure out how to use MobileMe for my business without showing that the e-mails I sent were coming from MobileMe (a long story). Every business owner who wants to take maximum advantage of the iPad and iPhone capabilities is in the same predicament. The cloud services provided by Google's gmail finally came to the rescue.

But it does worry me that to get and send e-mail using MobileMe a la BlackBerry demands the proper workings of no less than four e-mail servers. The same with calendar sharing where Google cloud services trump those of MobileMe, and for the first time my wife and I can now share a social calendar (using CalDAV) to which we both can add, edit and delete from the same calendar whenever we wish. These everyday capabilities should be supported by MobileMe monolithically by now, but are not.

Also, MobileMe's iDisk and Gallery applications are not (yet) natively available on the iPad and users need to use the iPhone derivatives to continue to use those features. I am expecting a beautiful new Remote application from Apple soon, that allows me to control the Apple TV in wonderful glory.

- AppStore
The Application Store (for the iPad) is supposed to support The Long Tail of applications plus the Torso yet it provides no intelligence (yet) to figure out what based on your interest is the best selection of apps available. That means you need to scroll tediously through thousands of apps icons only to have to start over once you installed one of them from that list (as the store does not remember your last position prior to install). That means you give up exploring the Long Tail of applications pretty fast, and the meritocracy the marketplace (and thus opportunity for app vendors) the AppStore intended to provide is severely diminished.

And while iTunes bravely installs all previously installed compatible iPhone apps on the iPad, the AppStore makes no attempt to then upgrade the Apps (read upsell opportunity) to its iPad native companion. So, it takes hours perusing the AppStore to figure out which of your favorite App has a more capable iPad cousin. I found myself abandoning iPhone apps and instead bookmarking their respective webpages with an icon on the home-screen.

It is also a bit of an embarrassment for AT&T not to have a iPad native iPhone account management app that also incorporates managing the 3G iPad subscription service.

- Dictionary
When entering text the iPad prefers to use capitalization in some weird places, insert spaces at other times (without "suggesting" it first) and in e-mail actually changed the from-address descriptor from "The Venture Company" to "The Company". It appears the dictionary used in the iPhone is more robust than the one used in the iPad.

- iWork
As a long-time iWork user (for most of my work) iWork on the iPad is a big disappointment. I was hoping to use my iPad as the device I could take to Limited Partners and present my now famous "2010: The State of Venture Capital", but I quickly found out that iWork on the iPad is not compatible (in many ways, it imports rather than opens OS X documents) with the version that runs on OS X. As stated before, parity of software capabilities between platforms should be of new importance to Apple as that will prevent people from re-evaluating other options. iWork (KeyNote, Pages and Numbers) are fantastically powerful apps on OS X, and in its infancy on the iPad. Novice users can still have fun with iWork on the iPad.

- Mail
E-mail on the iPad looks and behaves stellar, yet with a few quirks. It appears impossible to change the reply-to address, notes are not synced over-the-air by default, regular IMAP e-mail is pull only and you cannot set a polling frequency. Some e-mails (such as private equity online) previewed incorrectly, the rendering engine must be different from on OS X, where it showed up correctly. Some Word documents could not be opened in Mail, not even with the version of Pages (and part of iWork on the iPad). I hate the horizontal scrolling while you reply to an e-mail, making it impossible to review what you wrote in place.

- Calendar
The Calendar views are visually stunning and well laid out. But some of its functionality bothered me. One cannot change the calendar of an appointment after it has been created. I could not find an option to display the time in the week view (as on OS X), nor could I find a way to accept a Microsoft Outlook invite which it entered correctly in the Calendar.

- Browser
A version of Safari runs well on the iPad, but I miss a few capabilities including a pinning of favorite pages (as available on OS X). Some documents, including v-cards (address book information from LinkedIn for example) do not load into the appropriate application (address book in this case). Some of the new social call-backs designed to integrate social capabilities by Facebook and Twitter do not work well on the iPad browser, thankfully a onetime process that can be handled on the desktop as well.

- Long list navigation
Long list navigation needs a new indexing approach, plowing through 4,500 contacts on the iPhone or iPad is not fun, nor is scrolling through 2,500 photos (a hobby) really practical. Some of the new indexing capabilities of iPhoto on OS X (face, date, folder, theme) would be welcome on the iPad.

- Multi-user login
Even before purchase my daughter "claimed" certain usage rights to my iPad, which to keep things safe, really requires a multi-user login with separate menus. I am hoping that becomes part of the unannounced features pending for the iPhone4.0 release for the iPad slated for the fall.

A new dawn

I may discover more things that are not perfect on the iPad, but so far I have been inseparable from this nifty lifestyle device that manages to take on a much larger part of my business requirements as well.

The continued development of the iPad will change the face of computing forever, and as a result people are no longer beholden to the lazy innovation and complacent attitude of Microsoft, joined by the mediocrity of cheap and ever commoditizing hardware partners.

Apple has singlehandedly changed the computing agenda from business to lifestyle, and managed to serve its fast growing customer base with an experience that truly meets their every day needs.

The iPad has become the third "woman" in my life (in the aforementioned analogy), who is bound to become more capable and more beautiful every day.

Tags: iPad, Apple, IPhone, ITunes, OS X

By Georges van Hoegaerden

I recently ran into a great new application called cooliris (funded by Kleiner Perkins) from a similar named company in Palo Alto. But much more than just a cool application cooliris is the pre-cursor to a new way of accessing the internet, if the company plays its cards right.

I ran into cooliris when it first launched because of its initial focus on photography, and since then the company continued to dramatically improve its scope and has quickly become an appealing application to get news presented visually.

Stronger put, I predict that in 5 years from now the browser (like Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer) will not be the predominant way we access the internet. But that perhaps is an easy prediction. The majority of applications on an iPhone already use non-browser access (Facebook, Plaxo, eBay etc) and so do a few others on the PC (such as iTunes).

The browser is a very technological way of accessing data on the Internet, with poor navigational attributes. The URL language is certainly not one everyone understands and that relegates the dependency on search, which is still the primary way to navigate the Internet. And as the internet continues to grow in size, search will yield ever diminishing navigational success.

Clearly more companies are looking to improve Internet navigation. AT&T’s new Pogo browser, Google Chrome and enhancements to Firefox are an indication of the awareness of the pain. We will see more examples of improved navigational capabilities, some of which I can’t divulge at this point. But until then - enjoy cooliris.

Tags: FaceBook, Firefox, Browser, EBay, AT&T, Google

By Georges van Hoegaerden

I was flattered last week by a visit from Rick Smolan, the creator of some very creative photo-projects, such as From Alice to Ocean, America 24/7, Blue Planet Run and his latest America At Home. Since the early 90s, From Alice to Ocean stuck with me when it was first introduced and distributed with Apple computers and the clever use of multimedia capabilities built into the Mac early on. But the great thing about these projects is not just the stunning imagery but rather what they evoke. Again, the value of photography is in the eye of the beholder.

Rick approaches photography in the same way I look at business; by simply surfacing the facts. So much in our lives is influenced by mountains of politics and rhetoric that reduce the chance of quick resolution and success. How do you think we can ensure a vibrant global economy and peace if 1.1 Billion people - 1 in every 6 - worldwide have no access to clean water. The book Blue Planet Run displays that with chilling accuracy.

But Rick Smolans projects shed light on reality, good and bad. America at Home is a compelling compilation of how American families live at home, rich and poor, photographed by the families themselves and complemented by photographs from professional photographers. The pictures and their captions are so inspiring that a country decided to buy more than 200,000 books to educate their children on who Americans really are. Transparency works both ways.

I would like to see Rick do a book of “The World at Home”, so I can continue to sit down with my daughter and give her a peek into the living rooms across the world.

Our welfare greatly depends on our ability to become a citizen of this world. To achieve that every school should at least purchase one of Ricks books so our children receive an objective view of the opportunities and problems in our global eco-system and thrive.

Update: For readers of my blog, Rick has graciously offered a discount of $10 off his book America At Home, which you can customize with your own image on the cover. Just enter the code GEORGES at checkout.

Tags: Photography, Mac, Photographers, Apple, Economy, Transparency

By Georges van Hoegaerden

With that title I just pulled the pacifier out of the mouths of many marketers...and many of them will start crying.

But smart business people know better. Compartmentalization is very fundamental human behavior, in our personal life and business. In business the definition of “The Market” is the currency that aims to provide quick answers to everyday questions. The problem with market categorizations is that they are often incorrect, irrelevant, stale and frankly, the antagonist of innovation.

Here is why:

1/ People buy products, markets don’t.
No matter what the scenario, in the end people (not businesses) make purchasing decisions. And since people are unique, so are their complex reasons to buy. A unique mix of psychographics and demographics aided by free-market access to the Internet further emphasizes the power of “You” over the power of “The Market”.

2/ Markets are bad type-castings.
Customer surveys show that the compelling-reasons-to-buy rarely match up with the predetermined definition of “The Market”. And since many purchasing decisions rely on factors unrelated to the product (such as budgets, approvals, personal relationships, operational planning, risk mitigation etc.) a prospect qualification or disqualification within that market means absolutely nothing.

3/ Market definitions are bad currencies.
Since there are no rules for defining markets and everyone gets to dream up their own, the value of that market definition is meaningless. Imagine the value of the dollar if everyone gets to define how much it is worth and print theirs at home. Market segmentation and negotiations on market positions with analysts further deflate the significance and trust in traditional market definitions.

4/ Time changes everything (but markets).
Market definitions (in technology) change slowly yet products that attract new buyers change quickly. That means the definition of “The Market” (to which much decision-making is attached) is always far behind the adoption rate of new products and therefor far behind the identification of a new set of buyers. The minute “The Market” is defined, it has become irrelevant and ripe for disruption.

So, where does that leave marketing? Is marketing dead?

No, but it is time for technology marketers to grow up. The pacifier is being replaced by something else. Something more substantial and meaningful. Food becomes the new pacifier and customers will be feeding it to you.

1/ Listen before you speak.
Literally. Forget about what you as the marketer think of the product, early-adopter purchasing decisions are much more valuable in determining how the product is perceived and received. The credibility of new customers counts, more so than the ability of a marketer to spin a story. Spend time with your VP of Sales, in online forums, setup a Google Alert and figure out how to market customer perception.

2/ Manage the promise.
Crucial to the impact of marketing is the credibility of the company promise. Marketing, and specifically Product Marketing is vital in establishing that the promise is fulfilled to the satisfaction of the customer. A few bad words from customers on the internet can cost the company millions of dollars to repair, if it can recover from it at all. So, it is important that the promise to customers does not consist of blatant lies, leads to frustration or bleeds hundreds of support calls. Manage the critical success factors of your promise.

3/ Enable the dialog.
Orchestrate the interaction between customers and prospects and be sure to listen in. They will give you the marketing messages that truly resonate - on a silver platter.

4/ Manage the conversion rate.
Getting crowds to listen or visit the company website is rather simple, getting them to buy the product is more difficult. The company is only measured on the latter and since marketing is usually the scape goat and the first to be questioned when results are down, implementing a mechanism that detects, manages and reports on conversion rates yields invaluable metrics for improvement.

As long as there is macro-economic benefit to using your product, marketing is a very straightforward process. It requires a new class of people that are not afraid to throw the old-class of market definitions overboard and focus on the extrapolation of existing sales success, by simply listening for and consistently reverberating an honest and effective marketing message.

As Don Draper, the biggest ad man at the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency of the TV series Mad Men explains; I don’t tell stories - I sell product.

Tags: Markets, Marketing, Performance, Promise, Analysts, Google, Psychographics, Demographics

By Georges van Hoegaerden

I still edit all my photographs (thousands) in LightZone, and have always vehemently made statements against Adobe Photoshop. Not because of the lack of photographic capabilities but primarily because of the proprietary language it forces you to understand before you can use Photoshop effectively.

Photoshop remains the “vi”- editor of photo editing, powerful yet very cumbersome to use. No secretary uses “vi” today, and the future of Photoshop is moving further and further away from the mass market Adobe should be trying to attract. Nothing new there.

But Photoshop CS4, after a long track record of rather meaningless innovation and UI revamps now includes some very nifty innovations worth looking at, as the videos demonstrate. Content aware scaling (from a company Adobe acquired last year), panoramas and the new 3D capabilities are very cool. So, if you’re interested in rudimentary 3D capabilities before you jump into Maya, check out Adobe’s website where the nifty new capabilities of Adobe’s Photoshop Extended are available for roughly $1,000. But, perhaps this time around, the premium price is worth it.

Credit where credit is due.

Tags: Photography, Photoshop, LightZone, Maya, Photographers, Adobe, Experience

By Georges van Hoegaerden


Facebook, one of the fastest growing social network sites has really screwed up User Interface (UI) design with its new look. Take a look at the screen capture above. Now you tell me in 5 seconds the intuitive difference between clicking on: [Facebook] and [home], [home] and [profile], [profile] and [Georges van Hoegaerden], [settings] and [profile], and [settings] and [Georges van Hoegaerden].

But more importantly, Facebook has clearly not read my blog on removing the technology language to appeal to consumers, an issue that prevents many consumer technology companies from maximizing their growth potential. But who’s counting at Facebook these days?

Facebook is a technology company that exposes social networking capabilities in a very technological fashion. The examples are plenty: the workings of the UI described above, the categorization of data optimized to suit their internal data-models and the very complicated way to add applications to the platform, and we can keep going on. But for now, they’ll get away with it. Other consumer technology companies won’t be that lucky.

A great user interface can never be an objective by itself as that just presents a pretty face, try living with a person that only has that. The ultimate user experience (and this is where I politically depart from the previous analogy), is defined by an ecosystem of capabilities, cost and ease-of-use that creates the real and sustainable appeal.

BMW figured out early on that the Ultimate Driving Experience™ is what sells cars albeit their engine capabilities and timing was their initial core strengths. Today they sell the sum of all parts, The Ultimate Driving experience: great engine capabilities, spiffy performance, practical design and excellent comfort - a thrilling way to drive from A to B.

Facebook currently has a horrible “Ultimate Social Experience”: good (but no longer unique) social networking, so-so performance, impractical design and pretty bad comfort. Those are probably the reasons why 90% of my Facebook friends never use any Facebook features but simply create an account.

Many of Facebook’s recent poor decisions (including ad network issues etc) are evidence that user growth is outpacing their ability to grow up. And that could be catastrophic. Facebook is a great social networking platform with a lot of potential that many people rely on.

Facebook better watch out and prevent that too many people will start hating it. Those same users may use Facebooks own social networking capability to turn it off as fast as they initially turned it on.

Tags: BMW, FaceBook, Performance, Platform, Consumer, Startup

By Georges van Hoegaerden

Two days ago we got word about the demise of the Photoshelter collection marketplace. Not surprising because Photoshelter was not a marketplace. Technologists have a tendency to slap the marketplace label on anything they build, without understanding what it truly means.

Marketplace models, criteria, funding and execution are fundamentally different from premium market models. Photoshelter was really nothing more than a replica of Getty Images without Getty’s money to buy inorganic growth.

Here is how Photoshelter failed to meet marketplace rules:

Marketplace violation 1: Photoshelter artificially arbitrated supply, through a lengthy subjective signup process in which Photoshelter arbitrators determine whether you get to play.

Marketplace violation 2: Photoshelter artificially arbitrated demand, as it aimed to sell it to “the industry’s top buyers”, not to everyone.

Marketplace violation 3: Photoshelter gave preference to images they liked, rather than simply connecting any supply with any demand.

Marketplace violation 4: Photoshelter deployed a sales-force (from Getty and other photo agencies) that promoted a premium market model, like any sales-force driven by quotas would.

But CEO Allen Murabayashi makes a few damaging statements in his blog on why they failed and tries to blame that on the market as a whole:

“Licensing photography is fraught with clearance issues”
150 Years of photography exchange has resolved the fundamental issues of rights management quite effectively. Getty-Images, Corbis and others have gone through a well defined process in order to clear rights in their move from analog to digital exchange. Photoshelter has relied too much on a model that requires people intervention, while the majority of rights and enforcement can be embedded in and enforced by technology and made the responsibility of the asset owner. In the same way eBay sellers are responsible for the fulfillment of transactions. That enforcement guarded by a true meritocracy will quickly weed out bad behavior (that plagues any marketplace).

“Stock photography is a slow growing market dominated by a single player”
Nonsense, the term stock photography is an artificial classification (made up by its current participants) that bares no value. Today $22B of photography is exchanged of which less than 10% is transacted electronically. Growth through the premium market model of Photoshelter is limited because the photography market requires a free-market.

“Research Requests move too quickly for individuals to react in a timely fashion”
Perhaps they do in the “top buyer” segment, but certainly not in all. Since Photoshelter artificially limited the demand characteristics, any assessment of market traction and behavior should be taken with a grain of salt.

“Buyers desire more diversity, but convenience (aka subscription deals) triumphs this desire”
Absolutely, buyers deserve diversity, and buyers should be presented with the ultimate experience (subscriptions are not the answer). What has fundamentally changed in a 150 year old analog photography market is that demand does not come from a few buyers, but a highly fragmented buyer market that will want to use an image for any purpose (not just for your average advertising purposes).

“A crowd-source model for stock will likely never work”
Absolutely disagree. Photoshelter deployed a premium market model on a market that requires free-market principles. It failed for the same reason Getty Images fails to become a market-leader in the un-arbitrated exchange of digital photography (identified by roughly 30% market ownership). Getty Images grew by inorganic growth and acquiring other photo agencies with staff photographers that create the majority of images it sells (less than 7% come out of third party supply according to a statement by its CEO in 2006).

Photoshelter, as lovers of photography, seemed to have their hearts in the right place but not their execution. And they neglected to respond to our offer for help one year ago, when we saw their demise coming.

Tags: Photographers, Photography, Getty-Images, Growth, Free-market, Marketplace

By Georges van Hoegaerden

I bought the Apple TV the moment it came out about 9 months or so ago. Initially surprised by the tethering requirement to a computer running iTunes, I used it quite a bit as a giant picture frame (showing off on a 50" plasma), playing music during parties and watching kids shows with my daughter. Now, with Take 2, Apple has stepped it up and provides HD quality movies (and 5.1 Dolby Digital audio) and, less talked about, removed the need for a separate Airport Express to stream any iTunes audio through your Entertainment center.

But very interesting to see is how a technology called Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous - 13 year old Apple technology, first available in AppleTalk) automatically finds and connects iTunes capable devices on the network and staving off the need for central media management. And it does so quite well and transparently. Movies, music purchased on the Apple TV show up on the iTunes on your laptop and vice versa. When Comcast showed off a central media server for the home at CES 2007 that could stream content to any of your cable connected devices, I thought it was going to give Apple a run for its money on the movie rental business. But more than one year past and still product from Comcast in sight. Don't even start about the current Comcast DVR mess, possibly the worst UI experience I've ever encountered (the Tivo deal may ease the pain a little, but the early news is not encouraging). With Apple TV, no more runs to Blockbuster, or mailing DVDs to and from Netflix, just sit at home and watch whatever you want.

What I admire most about Apple is its ability to not just create new products but that it adjust its business and operating model so those products can succeed. That is a gift bigger companies like Oracle (my former employer) and Microsoft can learn from. Media and content are the new Consumer Packaged Goods of this century and if technology vendors don't invest in the ecosystem around it their technology solutions will continue to yield mediocre user experiences and sub-par adoption.

In converging media markets, the new leaders are going to be the ones that build disruptive business models first and great technology products to support that, second.

Can't wait for Apple to strike a deal with Comcast and similar to the iPhone strategy, replace the Comcast DVR with an Apple TV capable of receiving regular broadcasts as well as tap into the power of iTunes. All Apple needs to do is use its cash war-chest to "threaten" ComCast to go at it alone, just like it "convinced" AT&T it would be better for AT&T not to let Apple become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator.

Tags: Apple, Broadcast, Comcast, Consumer Packaged Goods, DVR, Netflix, Media, Entertainment, ITunes, HD, Mobile

By Georges van Hoegaerden

Apple has just released Aperture 2.0 today. A nice product to manage your photographs has gotten even nicer. But -- there should not be a need for Aperture.



Digital asset management, which is the predominant function of applications like Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, should not need to exist, especially not if you are Apple. If Steve Jobs were to take his own media hub strategy serious, advanced asset management capabilities should be available right in the file-system, as a function of the OS. Asset management for photographs is why people buy computers today, so why still does a separate application need to deal with our most precious assets. Incremental revenues perhaps?

Today's proprietary photo management systems eat disk space like nothing else. Non-destructive editing is supported by making superfluous copies of originals (especially when using an external editor). The derivatives are usually many times larger in size than their originals (especially when stored in TIFF or PSD), which forces you to stock up on hard disk space. I will keep using LightZone as my main photo editor and save precious disk space by leaving my photographs right where they are. Can't wait till the operating system innovates and supports photographs natively.

Tags: Adobe, Photography, LightZone, Aperture, OS X, Asset Management

By Georges van Hoegaerden

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".

Tags: Intel, IPod, Apple, OS X, Steve Jobs, AmD, Design

By Georges van Hoegaerden

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.

Tags: Treo, Apple, Windows, Palm, IPod, Skype, Experience, Open Source, Mobile