iPod
follow the money
03/07/07 20:41 Filed in: Apple
There has been a bit of speculation on why Apple
would want to introduce an internet browser for the
PC market. On the face of it it is an odd decision,
granted making a browser can be quite profitable if
search engines are paying to be embedded, but I don't
really think that is the reason.
My take on it, is that you need to follow the money. These days Apple is making a lot of money from things that are not actually Mac OS platform specific, the iPod works equally well for both PC and Mac, the iTunes site likewise, the iPhone does not require you to own an iMac.
Not only are these good revenue streams, but they probably have better margins, and a more realistic potential for a growing market. Even if Apple only manages to snag a small fraction of the mobile phone market the potential revenues are huge. People replace their mobile phones far more often than their desktops.
We are now entering the world of the post-pc gadget. Granted everyone will probably have a computer of some sort, but that is pretty much a commodity market now, people can get a laptop for a few hundred, and unless there are compelling reasons, then they will simply buy computers that only offer a tiny margin to the manufacturer. There is now little scope for compelling additional functionality to append to a computer, and it is not a highly visible object that you feel compelled to keep updated to be fashionable.
So if Apple wants to grow, then it will not be looking to sell more iMacs, or new operating systems, it will drive forward in the post-pc market, and find compelling ways of offering content online.
It is not inconceivable that the Mac OS might cease to be radically differentiated from any other operating systems, as more and more of our lives are lived via broadband, the amount actually residing on our hard drive is bound to diminish, so less applications on your desktop, and more as cloudware. The internet is driving our lives now, and as it is already operating system neutral.
In short, Apple operates in three realms,
hardware and associated software, the iMac, iLife,
cloudware like iTunes
post PC devices like the iPod and iTunes
the market they have been in longest, is not the one with the most potential, so why restrict your potential by tying in either your cloudware or post pc devices to the Apple OS and hardware, a PC version of Safari, is merely a component of this strategy.
My take on it, is that you need to follow the money. These days Apple is making a lot of money from things that are not actually Mac OS platform specific, the iPod works equally well for both PC and Mac, the iTunes site likewise, the iPhone does not require you to own an iMac.
Not only are these good revenue streams, but they probably have better margins, and a more realistic potential for a growing market. Even if Apple only manages to snag a small fraction of the mobile phone market the potential revenues are huge. People replace their mobile phones far more often than their desktops.
We are now entering the world of the post-pc gadget. Granted everyone will probably have a computer of some sort, but that is pretty much a commodity market now, people can get a laptop for a few hundred, and unless there are compelling reasons, then they will simply buy computers that only offer a tiny margin to the manufacturer. There is now little scope for compelling additional functionality to append to a computer, and it is not a highly visible object that you feel compelled to keep updated to be fashionable.
So if Apple wants to grow, then it will not be looking to sell more iMacs, or new operating systems, it will drive forward in the post-pc market, and find compelling ways of offering content online.
It is not inconceivable that the Mac OS might cease to be radically differentiated from any other operating systems, as more and more of our lives are lived via broadband, the amount actually residing on our hard drive is bound to diminish, so less applications on your desktop, and more as cloudware. The internet is driving our lives now, and as it is already operating system neutral.
In short, Apple operates in three realms,
hardware and associated software, the iMac, iLife,
cloudware like iTunes
post PC devices like the iPod and iTunes
the market they have been in longest, is not the one with the most potential, so why restrict your potential by tying in either your cloudware or post pc devices to the Apple OS and hardware, a PC version of Safari, is merely a component of this strategy.
write about TwentyOneBlog here
02/06/07 08:03
It is tempting to have a huge rant about all the
changes at work, but although everything seems very
different and uncertain at the moment, as well as
being personally quite inconvenient, I'm sure that
things will fall into place eventually.
I think that traditionally jobs were about bashing out widgets as quickly and as cheaply as you could.
Nowadays a lot of that bashing out widgets work has been automated, so that clever people are not bashing out the same widgets for a whole career, instead they are figuring out how to bash out new widgets, or how to bash out old widgets in a new factory, or what sort of widgets we should really be bashing out.
Although there is a certain amount of routine process work in my job, there is a policy element, where I should be doing something new, thinking about new things, pushing forward new solutions.
I think that a lot of our organisation is about doing new stuff, relatively speaking we are not a large organisation, but like many businesses that deal with information and knowledge, we concentrate resources into the bits that deal with change and 'new-ness'. And correspondingly take resources out of an area once it has been 'fixed'.
With a new government in place there is a lot that is new, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld
As we know, There are familiar old things. There are things we know we know. We also know There are familiar new things. That is to say We know there are some things That are new. But there are also unfamiliar new things, The ones we don't know and haven't planned for.
My job is supposed to be about dealing with change, and now that there is a bit more change than I am used to, I should just get on with it, demonstrating an ability to cope well with change should be a good thing. BUT IT IS WEARYING.
Other slightly more random [my daughter's favourite word, apparently it is like 'cool' when I was young, the shorthand for all that is good, for the people your age, as clearly anyone older is hopelessly 'uncool' or 'unrandom'] notes.
Last weekend I had a few extra days appended to my weekend. Had a trip over to my mother-in-law's to tend the patch of ground over there that I am using as an allotment. It is laid out so that it can run okay with a few short trips each year, whereas my own garden is a lot closer, so it gets more regular attention. A quick morning blitz, spent digging up and digging in winter field beans/green manure which I will certainly try again, and generally weeding the plot. All going well I will have a crop of garlic and carrots and for decoration I am growing some dill from seed down the centre of the plot.
While getting some crops is welcome, I am also keen to improve the soil, currently very light, and quite poor, hence the green manure. I am also starting to understand why traditional farming patterns often involved small plots in various locations, rather than the modern practice of huge plots. By having a variety of plots, in different areas with different soils, you can plant far more appropriately, and are far less likely to face catastrophic losses. Traditional farming had to be much more sensitive to what nature would allow, as there was less scope to use brute force such as nitrogen rich fertilisers. In general nature uses evolution and good solutions, rather than brute force, and the appliance of energy intensive solutions. Smarter enzymes rather than more power.
Also did some work on my own garden, mainly digging out a small patch and putting in a cranberry pit, basically just a small area with old manure bags dug in round it, and backfilled with ericaceous compost, topped off with pine needles and pine forest mulch, with a few cranberry plants. With luck, and good acid soil, they should thrive. The composts are awful loose, might need to dribble in some clay to give it some body.
This will bring the total number of fruits in my garden upto, "I've lost count, plus one". Clearly a substantial increase!
I did keep a notebook recording what I was doing in the garden, but I'm switching onto Voodoopad, for those notes now, and it is just so great. For example noting down all the different types of greenmanures that I am using, and how I get on with them. I had been noting down some garden stuff in a notebook, other stuff on loose pieces of paper, and it just never worked in any sort of useful way. Also my handwriting is illegible.
It is really fun putting together a page on voodoopad about how I have planted up cranberrys, what the various books said about them, posting in a few pictures, some interesting facts from wikipedia.
The more I use voodoopad, the more impressed I get with it, and the more useful it gets.
Final piece of random jotting. My ipod Nano went phut yesterday, my iMac refused to recognise that it was attached. Tried a few things, updated the iTunes software, restarted, swapped round cables, reset my factory settings on the iPod itself. Then worked through the five R's that you are supposed to try, and the second recommendation, the hard reset, press the menu and select at the same time, till the apple appears, did the trick.
Reading through the support material on the Apple site was not much help, they really need to update it, for example iTunes 7.2 rather than iTunes 7.1 and the iPod software updater no longer seems to exist as a standalone piece of software, but trawling round the endless look that is the support articles, who knows? Maybe that is why the need to employ geniuses as tech support.
As a mea culpa, the iPod battery was well run down, I was asking the ipod to sync more stuff than it had room for, and there was a new version of iTunes to install, so some ipod moodiness was not altogether unexpected.
=============================
As a PS I note that wikipedia is to launch a new search engine, one of my pet gripes lately has been that google has jumped the shark as a search engine. I am repeatedly finding it dificult or impossible to find anything useful using google. To be honest, most of the time I do find something useful it is simply a link to a wikipedia page, and I hardly need google to tell me that I could look in wikipedia. The problems with google are
there is so much stuff on the web now
advertised stuff is bumped up to the top, but is not often much use
the sorting for most useful does not seem to help much
I really rather miss the old yahoo where they had stuff sorted into relevant topics, and there was a degree of authorial authority. I'm all for Wikinomics and the wisdom of crowds, but there does need to be some sort of rethinking of how google works if it is to continue to be useful. Maybe a wikigoogle is the way to go.
PS today's image is a wikipedia image of a cranberry harvest,
I think that traditionally jobs were about bashing out widgets as quickly and as cheaply as you could.
Nowadays a lot of that bashing out widgets work has been automated, so that clever people are not bashing out the same widgets for a whole career, instead they are figuring out how to bash out new widgets, or how to bash out old widgets in a new factory, or what sort of widgets we should really be bashing out.
Although there is a certain amount of routine process work in my job, there is a policy element, where I should be doing something new, thinking about new things, pushing forward new solutions.
I think that a lot of our organisation is about doing new stuff, relatively speaking we are not a large organisation, but like many businesses that deal with information and knowledge, we concentrate resources into the bits that deal with change and 'new-ness'. And correspondingly take resources out of an area once it has been 'fixed'.
With a new government in place there is a lot that is new, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld
As we know, There are familiar old things. There are things we know we know. We also know There are familiar new things. That is to say We know there are some things That are new. But there are also unfamiliar new things, The ones we don't know and haven't planned for.
My job is supposed to be about dealing with change, and now that there is a bit more change than I am used to, I should just get on with it, demonstrating an ability to cope well with change should be a good thing. BUT IT IS WEARYING.
Other slightly more random [my daughter's favourite word, apparently it is like 'cool' when I was young, the shorthand for all that is good, for the people your age, as clearly anyone older is hopelessly 'uncool' or 'unrandom'] notes.
Last weekend I had a few extra days appended to my weekend. Had a trip over to my mother-in-law's to tend the patch of ground over there that I am using as an allotment. It is laid out so that it can run okay with a few short trips each year, whereas my own garden is a lot closer, so it gets more regular attention. A quick morning blitz, spent digging up and digging in winter field beans/green manure which I will certainly try again, and generally weeding the plot. All going well I will have a crop of garlic and carrots and for decoration I am growing some dill from seed down the centre of the plot.
While getting some crops is welcome, I am also keen to improve the soil, currently very light, and quite poor, hence the green manure. I am also starting to understand why traditional farming patterns often involved small plots in various locations, rather than the modern practice of huge plots. By having a variety of plots, in different areas with different soils, you can plant far more appropriately, and are far less likely to face catastrophic losses. Traditional farming had to be much more sensitive to what nature would allow, as there was less scope to use brute force such as nitrogen rich fertilisers. In general nature uses evolution and good solutions, rather than brute force, and the appliance of energy intensive solutions. Smarter enzymes rather than more power.
Also did some work on my own garden, mainly digging out a small patch and putting in a cranberry pit, basically just a small area with old manure bags dug in round it, and backfilled with ericaceous compost, topped off with pine needles and pine forest mulch, with a few cranberry plants. With luck, and good acid soil, they should thrive. The composts are awful loose, might need to dribble in some clay to give it some body.
This will bring the total number of fruits in my garden upto, "I've lost count, plus one". Clearly a substantial increase!
I did keep a notebook recording what I was doing in the garden, but I'm switching onto Voodoopad, for those notes now, and it is just so great. For example noting down all the different types of greenmanures that I am using, and how I get on with them. I had been noting down some garden stuff in a notebook, other stuff on loose pieces of paper, and it just never worked in any sort of useful way. Also my handwriting is illegible.
It is really fun putting together a page on voodoopad about how I have planted up cranberrys, what the various books said about them, posting in a few pictures, some interesting facts from wikipedia.
The more I use voodoopad, the more impressed I get with it, and the more useful it gets.
Final piece of random jotting. My ipod Nano went phut yesterday, my iMac refused to recognise that it was attached. Tried a few things, updated the iTunes software, restarted, swapped round cables, reset my factory settings on the iPod itself. Then worked through the five R's that you are supposed to try, and the second recommendation, the hard reset, press the menu and select at the same time, till the apple appears, did the trick.
Reading through the support material on the Apple site was not much help, they really need to update it, for example iTunes 7.2 rather than iTunes 7.1 and the iPod software updater no longer seems to exist as a standalone piece of software, but trawling round the endless look that is the support articles, who knows? Maybe that is why the need to employ geniuses as tech support.
As a mea culpa, the iPod battery was well run down, I was asking the ipod to sync more stuff than it had room for, and there was a new version of iTunes to install, so some ipod moodiness was not altogether unexpected.
=============================
As a PS I note that wikipedia is to launch a new search engine, one of my pet gripes lately has been that google has jumped the shark as a search engine. I am repeatedly finding it dificult or impossible to find anything useful using google. To be honest, most of the time I do find something useful it is simply a link to a wikipedia page, and I hardly need google to tell me that I could look in wikipedia. The problems with google are
there is so much stuff on the web now
advertised stuff is bumped up to the top, but is not often much use
the sorting for most useful does not seem to help much
I really rather miss the old yahoo where they had stuff sorted into relevant topics, and there was a degree of authorial authority. I'm all for Wikinomics and the wisdom of crowds, but there does need to be some sort of rethinking of how google works if it is to continue to be useful. Maybe a wikigoogle is the way to go.
PS today's image is a wikipedia image of a cranberry harvest,