Let's talk iPhone - October 4th

Apple did send this week invitations for the upcoming event on October 4th out. Like many other invitations, it is cryptic and does not tell us a lot. Or does it? The invitation is very clear "let's talk iPhone"




We know it will be about the new iPhone and we do not know much more. However with Apple it seems never anything randomly.

At the past they had always something "new" at the event. Like the first smart phone without a keyboard, the first phone with a retina display or the first computer which is not a phone nor a notebook.

"let's talk iPhone" why this headline? I think Apple will introduce their way for voice recognition.

Voice recognition on phone is not new. Google has already some voice recognition on Androids and the google app allows you to browse using your voice.
But now Apple's taking up the torch, and if rumors prove true it's not just adding speech tech to the iPhone... it's transforming the device into something new again, starting a whole new paradigm. If it works for Apple, expect others to follow.

We all wondered for a while about how Apple was going to mix Nuance speech recognition tech with its iOS devices, and how the technology it acquired when it bought Siri (the firm behind an artificially inteligent assistant) would emerge.

9to5Mac claims that Apple's "Assistant" is going to combine all of this technology into one powerful system, that runs throughout the upcoming iOS5 and the new iPhone.

I tested dragon, google voice and a few others but it never appealed to me to use voice instead of my fingers. However, I am missing forever the ability to listen to music and when I get a call to listen who the caller is. I still need to take the phone out of the pocket to see who is calling. Maybe with the new iPhone it will change.

Maybe the iPhone can talk to us and we can talk back. After-all it would make sense to go to the next level. The phone was originally invented to hear and talk, why not taking the hands out of the play once again.

We use our fingers for many things we do with the phone, not because we want, but because it is easier. Voice dial is horrible, works almost never (for people like me with strong accent).

Siri was actually a good app. You could ask for a dinner on Friday and you got a list of restaurants back, but only in text and images and not as voice.

It is only a few days left till Apple hosts the event, and I am eager to see how much weight the talk in "let's talk iPhone" has.

I think, if Apple does build their event around new iPhone and voice recognition, then it will be different than we saw before, and there will be a two way communication. Not only will the iPhone understand us, but as well respond with voice.
Apple voice Assistant interfaces with WolframAlpha--Stephen Wolfram's "fact computer" that can intelligently understand data-specific questions and return meaningful suggestions.
This means I could, ask my iPhone how many shopping days remain until Halloween, where the the nearest mall is and how often Germany lost in a world cup against England in one second and it will fed back to you from WA's computational systems all answers almost instantly.


As we know, Apple seldom does invent something really new. They are reinventing existing technologies or methods to make them mainstream. This is the real strengths of Apple.

Do you think I am totally off and over interpreting the event headline?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Please follow me @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Apple, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods and Roger Federer did dominate for years their sport in a way not often seen before. Of course they have been outstanding athletes but they had two other advantages. They performed their sport different than anybody before and had the mindset that they only can win. Tiger, as an example, was not only a very good player, but as well much more athletic than many players before him or during his strongest time. He could hit the ball further and faster. He could move his body more than anybody else. The other players, on the other hand, did almost fear to play against him, just because he was so strong, that he even dominated much more.




Woods held the number one position in the world rankings for the most consecutive weeks and for the greatest total number of weeks. He has been awarded PGA Player of the Year a record ten times, the Byron Nelson Award for lowest adjusted scoring average a record eight times, and has the record of leading the money list in nine different seasons.
With 2: Set Masters 72-hole record with a total of 270 (70-66-65-69) and set Masters record with 12-stroke victory margin.
Tiger went in the last few years to a lot of private problems and did not make it into the FedEx Cup in 2011. But the biggest difference to 1997 or 2002 is that there are now many players hitting as long as him or even longer. Tigers average distance is even not much shorter than 10 years ago, but now there are at 40 other top player hitting as good as him and are as fit like him.
These are the new young players who watched him and learned from him. His advantage is not existing anymore and therefore he is not winning and we don't have just one dominant player.



We can find a similar evolution in Tennis with Roger Federer. He did dominate over 5 years the tennis court. He won everything he wanted and other players could just not win against him, because they might have been almost frozen when they had to play against him. His style was outstanding as well his mental strength. Today we have DJOKOVIC, Nadal, Murray and a few others; all as good as Federer or even better. Same happens here, the young player watched Federer over years and learned from him.

We can compare Apple and their products with them. Apple reinvented the phone. The first time when i heart the definition of a smart phone was in combination of the iPhone. Apple did dominate the smart phone business over a year. Unique hardware design and new type of OS. Google did copy (yes I think it is a copy) the iOS and some hardware vendors did copy the iPhone design. Not that they really copied it 100%, but before Apple, most phones were cheap plastic and not pretty, similar like PCs. They saw the phone as a tool we use which does not need to be esthetic. Apple changed this, and today almost every smart phone looks like an iPhone or even better. And Android from Google is now the number one smartphone OS.
Last year Apple did release the iPad. Nobody believed we needed an iPad but over 100,000 iPad apps and over 30 million sold iPads tell us a different story. Apple has today a market share of 78% of touch pads with just one product. And there are over 40 other touch pads on the market which are sharing 22%.



If Apple does not come out with a totally new product which we never thought we needed, or with a redesign of existing product (maybe a new approach for toasters or microwaves), then Apple will not be as dominant in 24 months as they are today. The world got transparent. And everybody is catching up. We went last week to
BestBuy and I looked at the Galaxy, Playbook and a Asus pad. All of them look more or less like the iPad and even the OS works the same. Regardless if it is WebOs or Android. All have the same basics like the iPad. Proof: My 3 years old son could open apps and zoom images as they are iPads.

If we compare Apple with sports, then I would say there are many players who watched Apple and are trying to copy it. But there is one player who not only watched Apple and tries to copy but does something totally different. This player will eventually take in 24 months for a few years the dominance till somebody else comes. The player (I am talking about) is Microsoft.



Microsoft's Windows 8 could really kill Android and Apple again. Windows 8 is not only totally different than all other mobile OSs but is as well the step which Apple is trying to do. Windows 8 will be one OS for all devices regardless of smart phone, mobile device or PC.

Microsoft has a lot of advantages to Google. They have already established customer support and a better relationship to hardware companies. And they have a much better enterprise integration than Apple and Google combined.

Apple is eventual too much concentrating on young users in the hope these consumers will keep buying Apple products when they are older. This concept is good, when your product is so much different than anything else.

As an example if you produce a car which has the shifting as tiptronic on the steering wheel and you would market young drivers. The parents might eventual buy for them a tiptronic car and when the kids are older, they would buy one too, because they would not know how to drive a different shifting system. If you are the only company with tiptronic then you will be set.

But Apple does not has this advantage anymore. Design is cool but for iPhone or iPad not much different than others and the OS is almost the same like Android. This helps the kids to switch much easier. Nothing new to learn. Apple does fear this, and this is one reason, why they try to fight against Samsung and other pad producers.

Apple has a lot of services like iTunes, but there is really no need to keep iPhone. Users can have iTunes and other devices or use Windows media center. Plus music future is in the cloud and Microsoft and even Google have much more cloud experience than Apple.

If we believe in 7 to 12 years cycles (which works in real estate, politics and everywhere we want) then Apples dominance will come to an end. And Microsoft can rise from ash like the Phoenix. MS lost so far the race in mobile but did build an even stronger enterprise empire with Sharepoint, Exchange, Lync and Dynamics products that they can close the gap between mobile and enterprise much easier than anybody else. And as soon the gap is closed, I foresee a lot of people buying for private use once again a Microsoft device.

Especially in a time where mobile, smart phone and PC is almost the same just different form factor. Whatever will come, the winner of the race will be the company which can provide for all devices same OS, a lot of software (not only apps) and can serve to end users and enterprises. For some reason I don't see Google to be in the mix neither.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Please follow me @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Apple iOS, Google Android or Microsoft Windows?

At some point most of us would like to be a Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs or Larry Page - Famous and rich and a part of our history. So do I.

Therefore I decided, it is time to do something which makes me rich and unforgettable. I decided to build an app.

The question is what the desired platform should be.

Let us start with a mobile app for Android OS. The SDK is free to download. There is a one-time $25 fee for registering to distribute apps on the Market:
http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113468&topic=15866
This seems to be right I can (with almost no costs) get an app into the android market. But I can't sell an app over $200 at Android market place.

Min and max prices of android apps:
AUD: 0.99 AUD - 200 AUD
CAD: 0.99 CAD - 210 CAD
CHF: 0.99 CHF - 200 CHF
DKK: 6 DKK - 1200 DKK
EUR: 0.50 EUR - 100 EUR
GBP: 0.50 GBP - 100 GBP
HKD: 7 HKD - 1500 HKD
JPY: 99 JPY - 20000 JPY
KRW: 999 KRW - 220000 KRW
NOK: 6 NOK - 1200 NOK
NZD: 0.99 NZD - 280 NZD
SEK: 7 SEK - 1500 SEK
SGD: 0.99 SGD - 270 SGD
USD: $0.99 - $200

If I want to use google cloud to develop my app, because I don't want to buy hardware for testing and developing, then the costs go up.




But of course I would save a lot of money for hardware and resources. But using the full service costs $500 and more a month.
Developing apps on Google App Engine takes one-fourth to one-tenth of the resources and one-fourth of the time compared to building something ourselves.”
Gary Koelling, Director of Emerging Platforms, Best Buy

Pricing seems alright but the big issue is the big chaos of different OS versions and devices available on the market. Google is not regulating very strong their OS distribution and is not telling the vendors what hardware to use. To develop an android app which should reach 90% of Android users must be tested on over 200 android devices. Ouch. There is no chance to build a professional enterprise app because the max sell price is too low and the testing to expensive.

May 2011:
Android activations swelling to over 100 million worldwide (112 countries) on 215 carriers and 36 manufacturers with 310 different Android devices


Developing an Android app might not cost a lot for licenses nor does Google take a lot for having an app in their store, but I am not willing to hire 20 testers to to test my app nor do I want to develop years to get my app running on all android devices.

Quote Netflix:
Because the platform has evolved so rapidly, there are some significant challenges associated with developing a streaming video application for this ecosystem. One of these challenges is the lack of standard streaming playback features that the Netflix application can use to gain broad penetration across all available Android phones. In the absence of standardization, we have to test each individual handset and launch only on those that can support playback. We are aggressively qualifying phones and look forward to expanding the list of phones on which the Netflix app will be supported.

Maybe I should try Apple.
As we know there are only a handful devices we need to support and would still reach 100 million users. The iOS is running only on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Each of them have only a few versions in hardware and not many iOS in the market. 84% of iOS users are already on iOS 4.
The iPod touch has same screen size as the iPhone. These all sounds reasonable for me for developing an app. I can easily afford to by from each one device and would not spend more than $1,000 (phone contract not included). Apple allows to sell apps over $200. I have seen a few for $999 (there are 20). However the store is so full that it is almost not possible to create an app which not somebody else already did.
Total Apps Approved for US App Store: 589,391
Total Active Apps (currently available for download): 471,319
Total Inactive Apps (no longer available for download): 118,072
Number of Active Publishers in the US App Store: 106,423


Getting access to developer tools is inexpensive as well between $99 and $299 a year.



But there are some issues.
Apple has very strict guidelines how to develop an app. An app can be denied because the developer does not follow the guidelines.
An other issue is, that Apple will take 30% of each sale of an app. This can be very cost intensive. I was thinking about an enterprise app, which I want to sell 40,000 times for $23.99. This is $287,780 for Apple just because I use their app store. Yes I get maybe free promotion and the user does know where to go to find my app, but this a lot of money. I could build an app outside of the app store and publish it only for my enterprise clients, which Apple allows, but I might still pay 30% when Apple find out that I sold the app outside of the store. Apple allows corporations to develop apps which are not the app store, but only for internal use and not for sale of the app.
And then Apple is heavily promoting the iPad and iPhone as a game computer and not as business computer.



I don't want to get rich and make Steve Jobs richer.


As alternative I could develop software for Windows. There are of course many different hardwares to consider, but if I build a web based app with .Net then I could concentrate on 4 browsers (IE, Chrome, Google and Safari) to get most of the users a working app.



The investment would be $11.899 for Visual Studio ultimate with MSDN which gives a lot of developing tools 78 Microsoft products like office etc and $3,500 worth of Microsoft Azure cloud.





This is a lot of money for a startup, but cheaper than Apple in the long run, if I sell more than $35k a year in software.

Interesting is that the same package cost in Germany almost the double $20,900)





This is as much as two Fiat Panda cars.




The last alternative would be the amazon app store.
The Amazon marketplace has considerably less competition than Android store or the Apple app store, I actually might have better results there.
Just make sure that if you agree to be the Free App of the Day, you completely understand what you’re getting yourself into.

Anyway, Amazon has gone ahead and sweetened the deal just a bit: beginning September 2011, anyone who submits an app to the Amazon App Store store will get a free chunk of change to check out the Amazon Web Services suite (amazon cloud).

But apparently Apple isn’t the only company running an App Store with a penchant for secrecy.

In a blog post in August, mobile developer Shifty Jelly has publicly called out Amazon for covertly offering the company featured placement on its unofficial Android Appstore as the ‘free app of the day’. This is a well-known promotion that Amazon has openly talked about, but there’s a twist: instead of paying developers 20% of the app’s List Price, which is what it had previously promised, Amazon is asking them to take a 0% rev share.
People were very clearly told that even if Amazon decided to make an app free, developers would still be making 20% of their list price. In other words, they’d still make money. But not anymore as seen above. This means my $23.99 app which might have downloaded on the free day 20,000 times would cost me not 80% of my potential revenue but all.

I learned that developing an app is more than just being a developer. It is important to choose the right platform.

During my research I learned something really interesting. For PCs, everybody is talking about software. But for mobile devices and OS any kind, we only talk about app. I wonder what is the different between software and application.

After all I decided not to build an app to be as famous as Steve Jobs and that I am going to brew my beer and to sell it to restaurants by delivering it with one of my two new Fiat Panda.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Please follow me @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Google to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings, but why?

To strengthen its mobile business, Google announced on Monday that it would acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, the cellphone business that was split from Motorola, for $40 a share in cash, or $12.5 billion.

Motorola is second biggest cell phone manufacture in the world.







And according to cnet.com the Motorola phantom 4G is even the second best smart phone on the market.










But in June 2011 data from Nielsen for the US shows that Motorola is only number 5 smart phone manufacture:






Motorola did fail to have same success with smart phones as they had it with the RAZR. Over the RAZR's four-year run, Motorola sold more than 130 million units, becoming the best-selling clamshell phone in the world (and is still today).

However Motorola is still a big name under cell phones and had the first real competition to Apple iPhone with the DROID.

The offer, Google’s largest ever for an acquisition is 63 percent above the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday. Many Motorola manufactures phones run on Google’s Android software and is therefore a good fit. The acquisition will bring Google very close to Apple in terms of phone manufacturing.

But Motorola would bring much more to the table. Google would gain 17,000 patents and a lot of service.

When Google first started to sell their own HTC phone called Nexus One, it was a disaster. The phone was only sold on Google website and Google was not able to give the needed customer support. Buying Motorola would Google give expertise in service and a sales force which knows already to get phones into retail stores.

This buy could catapult Google very far on top and shows where Google want to go next. If the deal goes through, it will take at least 12 months till we the merger comes to success, however the Motorola unit could help Android OS a lot. The biggest issue for Android is the variety of different phones and form factors. Therefore many Android OS versions are on the market and the user seldom knows which one is available for the phone. And it makes harder for developer to build and test an app against all Android phones and Android OS versions.

Apple success is, that there is only one phone with max 3 generations (iPhone 2 is not anymore with latest OS supported). This makes it so easy for Apple to build a perfect OS and easier for developer to build apps. As a result most iPhone apps are better in quality and iPhone users are more willing to pay for an app. The iOS is much smoother and iPhone users tend (maybe for these two reasons) to download more apps and listen to more music than Android users.







An Android user (as shown in Nielsen info graph) has a higher average Data usage than iPhone but overall less app downloads or online gaming. The higher data usage could result of less app quality and therefore more unnecessary package transfers.

If Google is smart, which I believe, then they will first dump all Motorola devices which are not using Android or which are not smart phones. Then they should take the top two models, like the phantom 4 and build their OS perfect for these models hardware.

Google would not do good, if they would keep all current Motorola models which are currently 32.






Having their own Android phone and the right sales and service behind is all Google needs to strengthen their OS. Even if Android is an open OS it is sometimes better not to have too much diversity.

Smartphones are much more than hardware. Smart phones are service hubs. Search, music, social every thinkable Internet service is combined in a smart phone and the better the OS is calibrated to the hardware the better these services are working.

And the future and money is in services and not hardware or OS. Apple already understands this concept and therefore they are building an infrastructure which will give the user no other chance then using their services. I am still cursing the day I bought my first iMac computer, from this day on I was married to Apple and even if I would like to get divorced today, I could not easily because of iTunes, and how well all my devices are connected to each other.

I am wondering if the Motorola Xoom is a part of the mobility holding (according to the website, yes) then Google does get much more, not only the smart phones but as well tablets, software, baby phones, two way radios, navigation devices and 17.000 patents.






Google could be from one day to another a second Apple, selling phones, tablets and other Android devices and would have finally an online store.






The $12.5 billion is a good investment to move out of "search" and "advertising" and to go from virtual to products which people can touch and Ro bind them to Google only devices.

Google has over $39 billion in cash and the $12.5 billion would not hurt but could bring a lot.

Maybe we see soon Google stores next to Apple stores.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Please don't forget to visit my blog http://new-kid-on-the-blog.com or follow me on twitter schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Google+ games are now available

Google+ offers now games like Facebook. However there are not many games yet which will change soon. Unfortunately google seems to make a mistake like FB. Granted the idea is good that games messages are not showing in your normal stream as prominent as in FB, but google seem not to understand that many users are using iPads or Android slates for their daily google+ usage.




But first to new games feature. Google+ added on top one more icon for games, where the user get a list of available games. At least it is much easier to find games with google+ but only now because there are not many games. I am missing a games search. You can use the find people search to find games but a special game search would be great. Finding games at FB is not possible if you don't know for what game you are looking for, I hope google does not do same mistake.
Install is easy. Click on the game and allow the game access to your info.

But here comes the problem. If you use your iPad, you have to switch to desktop version to see the games and to be able to play the games. Here comes the next problem, some of the games are developed in flash and require flash 10 player which even Android tablets mostly don't have.



Some games are done in html5 which allows to be played on the iPad. However the iPad will always switch to mobile version when you navigate to another page. I guess google does not want you to use desktop version on your iPad.

Other games like Angry Bird are recognizing that your are using the iPad and ask you if you want to download instead the Angry Bird version for the iPad. Which is odd because I have already Angry Birds installed. Why does it not open my Angry Birds instead going to the app store? On the other hand I might want to play in google+ Angry Birds to get better ranking because there are less players playing, but I did not get the chance. And Angry Birds has no google+ connect yet to post scores etc to google plus. The games are either to play in google+ plus or are not connected at all to google+.

After all it is important to have games on google+ because most people do play games on social networks, but I was hoping that google does a better job with integration and does not allow old technologies like flash, especially that many mobile devices don't have flash or only limited flash. After all social works best on globile (smart phone) and lobile (iPads etc.). Desktops and notebook are more and more only for business use and we better don't do too much on social networks through company network and on company devices.

Google+ gets from me right now only a C+.

What do you think about google+ games, do they do it right, or should google have wait a little?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Please follow me @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

No Samsung Galaxy 10 inch in Europe (only in Netherlads)

Apple did win for now against Samsung and therefore Samsung is not allowed to sell their Galaxy tablet in Europe Union besides Netherlands.

The main reason why Apple did not want to have the Galaxy sold, is the too similar design to the iPad.








I think there is more behind than cloning the iPad. The Galaxy does look little similar but is it not normal when creating a tablet? Should have Samsung put handles on the Galaxy or external antennas or maybe made it round that it does not look like the iPad?

There is not much vendors can do when the goal is to have a 10 inch tablet, very light and sophisticated looking. Look at desktop computers. They all look similar, even notebooks are now closer to Apple notebooks.

Honestly I don't like neither that many japanese cars look like Mercedes or BMW, but it is as it is. If the price is lower or quality better then we buy it.

I understand that Apple has patents (not that I agree on our patent system in the US) and did spend a lot of money and research to make the iPhone as a 9.7 inch device. But Steve, you honestly do not think we believe you that it is about the design.

Europeans have usually a less brand affiliation than Americans and sometimes they even tend not to buy a leading brand, because the brand has too much market share and control.

But more important is the picing strategy from Apple, that usually a device in Europe costs the same as in the US but in Euro which makes the poducts 30% more expensive. Apple is in the most part following this price philosophy and therefore the other vendors can score very easily by reduced prices.

And then, Apple does have in Europe much less stores than in the US.
The iPad maker has 52 stores in the region, compared to 238 in the United States.
Acerbic, Asus, HP, Motorola, Samsung and the other tablet companies have a much better and deeper experience dealing with local distributors. If Samsung would be able to sell the Galaxy they could have the device in thousands of stores over night.

Right now there is no competition on the horizon and Apple might be holding major of the tablet market till 2015. The biggest mistakes the other vendors did, was to build and sell 7 inch tablets. Surveys did show that the consumer does prefer 10 inch because 7 inch is too small as a tablet. As a result all other vendors starting to build 10 inch versions of their tablets.

There is a big chance that Apple will in 12 months not anymore dominate the European market like they do it in the US. Already now, Apple iPad has in Europe only 70% market share but in the US 80%.

I remember when I went in 2005 to Germany to visit my family, that only one of 4 mpg players were iPods. But in the US almost everybody had iPods. so I asked some people why they don't have iPods? Two standard answers. Either because iPods are just too expensive and don't do more than other mpg players, or because they did not want to support a big arrogant company.

Apple had with the iPhone in 2010 in Europe only 18% market share, but in the US 28%.








The same could happen with the iPad.

Now we know why Samsung is so eager to get into Europe market with their Galaxy and why Apple does not want this to happen.

I am disappointed that Apple is playing the patent card instead of doing what they are the best. Keep building new toys which have best usability, best battery live and do look just perfect. Even if the Galaxy looks not much different, the battery life is shorter, the usability is not as good as the iPad and it is still heavier. If Apple does fear this, then I don't know what will come next.

I am actually right now pretty annoyed about all these patents fights going on. Apple against Samsung, Google against Microsoft, Microsoft against Motorola and so on.

It is time that our patent rules a getting changed.

(info and statistics from Forrester, The firm surveyed nearly 14,000 online consumers throughout Europe to find that between 2 and 7 percent of consumers surveyed own a tablet and 10 to 14 percent are interested in buying one. Tablet ownership was highest in Spain and lowest in France. Interest in tablets was highest in Germany.).

Samsung is not allowed to sell the Galaxy in Europe, but i am wondering if I could sell them from the US through my online store to Europe? Could be the big deal. I should start to count my winnings.

Let me know what your thoughts are about the whole patents fights?

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

First Palm, then RIM and then Facebook?

You might ask what Facebook has to do with Palm or RIM. But at the end of the article you might get the point.

Palm was in the 90th the rising star. They came out in 1993 with their palm pilot and their innovative Palm OS. One of the best OS at its time. Palm in the time did reinvent hand writing rather than the palm pilot needs to learn the users writing, the user had to learn how to write as the palm can understand. At the time all others tried to build complex software for computers to understand different hand writing styles. It took me maybe three days to learn how to write on the palm and then it was just easy.




Palm eventually became big and hired a lot of people. Every year came a new model out, better faster etc, even with a color screen.
Palm allowed other companies to write application for the palm and users could choose from hundreds of extra apps to install on the palm.
The concept was similar to Apple. Palm developed hardware and OS.

Palm was on top and the leading company for handhelds, but their biggest problem was, that they had only one product. Instead of working on new products, besides handled, they focused too much on the handheld competition and lost the race. Palm is today a small devision of HP and only delivers the webOS which is Palm's latest OS based on Linux.


RIM (founded 1984) a Canadian company started in 1998 to sell Inter@ctive pager 950 which had two way paging and wireless e-mail network. About the size of a bar of soap, this device competed against the SkyTel two-way paging network developed by Motorola.

The big break through came 1999.
In 1999, the Blackberry wireless e-mail device, the BlackBerry 5790, was revealed along with the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) for Microsoft Exchange. The BES provided the conduit between the wireless handheld and the corporate Exchange mailbox, with contacts and calendar, putting current business e-mail in the hands of the mobile worker. New content updated in the mailbox was “pushed” out to the BlackBerry keeping the worker up-to-date. The first fully integrated phones were shipped with the 6200 series after the 5810 and 5820 provided phone functionality only with an external headset. RIM also expanded its network coverage from GSM to add CDMA.

At this time cooperations started to buy cellphones from RIM because they could not only send and receive emails but were easily to connect to Microsoft Exchange and the data transfer were encrypted. RIM grew and grew. RIM was second largest smartphone company in the world in 2008




In 2010 RIM did fall back to 3rd place.






RIM had even a much higher market share in companies. But many companies did start to switch Apple iPhone. Our company had only blackberries for our sales people in 2008, today our salesforce is using only iPhones. We are not big, but we have hundred or so sales people.
RIM lost their momentum because they tried to fight against Google Android and Apple iPhone. RIM announced that they will lay off 2000 people. They should have extend their business to other types of products, when they were still the rising star. Now it is almost too late and RIM can be soon history. A much bigger fall is actually Nokia. Once unreachable number one cell phone company with over 50% market share, did fall down to just 20% in 2011.

Let us look at Apple. Apple was almost bankrupt when Steve Jobs came back in 1997. He did the right thing, he throw all kind of products away and concentrated on building just a few but great products (similar like Palm and RIM), However when the success started for Apple again, he did not stop. Apple did build new products. The trick behind was, that they took time to make the products good.
They started with a revolutionary iMac.



Just one form factor. It got successful. In the meantime they started to work on the iPod but did not release the iPod before it was ready for the world in 2001. And then a few years later the next product came and so on. But different than other hardware companies, they did not just throw products on the market, they took time to build them.

Apple could have just stopped with the iMac and build every year new models and some more sizes. But they did not. They have one product with max two versions. As soon the product does get very successful they bring out something new.

This Apple concept is genius. And any company should learn from it.
Imagine Apple would have stayed just with the iMac or maybe just with the iPod? Apple would be a small company today.

Back to my headline. What does this has to do with Facebook?

Everything.

Facebook did grow tremendous in the last 3 years and grew from 20 million to 700 million users. This is amazing. However Facebook has still one flaw which will kill Facebook (I think FB is already dead, they just don't know it). FB has only one product. The product which gave them success. But instead of building new products they just stay with their social network. Google+ will not kill Facebook but FB will kill themselves. Everything they do is around their FB, new features, layout changes or like recently a business Facebook. Google is smarter, they extend their business with new products. If nobody searches anymore on google, then they have still their ad servers for other companies to serve ads, and they have Android etc.

Bottom line is, that having just one product is great to get big, because you can concentrate just on this and make it perfect and it is easier for marketing. However when a company reaches the point, where they are market leader then they need to have already a different product to redefine their market niche. Jack Welsh once said, it is easier to get to number 1 than staying to be number 1.

Why is it bad to have just one product? First of all other can learn from your product and after a while they can make it better, because they saw the mistakes, the things which are missing and have more fresh ideas. Second, consumers needs are changing. Social is big today, but maybe not anymore tomorrow. I think social will not go away, however there will be no need in the future for one big social network because it will be a part of our online life. It is like the internet. AOL got big, because we needed an access point for Internet and there was AOL which offered it for us, but then when Internet got big, AOL was not anymore needed we suddenly could go to the internet without AOL.

Palm, RIM, Nokia, myspace, AOL were once the stars, now their light is out of fading.

And all ends that Palm, RIM and Facebook are so different but similar.


- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Mac OS X Lion what a great idea

I got extra early up on Wednesday to download and install the new Lion OS On my iMac. Unfortunately it was not yet available at 4:00am. I had to wait a whole day till I was back from my office. The install was pretty straight forward. You go on your iMac to the app store click on download and voila. The OS is 4GB and can take a while to download. It took with my slow Internet connection a little more than 1.5 hours.

After it is done you start install and then it takes (depending on the computer) another 30 minutes to install. At the end the computer reboots and your done (almost). After restart your Mac will inform you that it deleted some of your not compatible applications. In my case it was mostly CS3. Because these old Adobe apps were written for PowerPc and used Rosetta to run on MacOS X.



I had in total 20 programs which showed me that on one hand I could use 10 years same apps and on the other that I was too cheap to buy new versions over the years.

It will take a while to open mail, when you run mail the first time after the upgrade. Because it gets completely changed and I have thousands of emails in mail. It took 20 minutes with my mail to be converted. But the new mail is very slick.

After all, my computer did seem very slow after upgrade, till I figured out that my OS started indexing for faster search. Because Lion is not an update but a full new install of OS the old indexing does not work.
Indexing is done and speed is fine.

I think, I never saw such easy install of an OS, I would had preferred if the installer would have told me before installing OS which program will not work after the upgrade, that I could decide to postpone the install. But I guess not many people have such old apps like me. But if you have a design studio am you run CS3 then you are out of luck, you must get at least CS4.

There were already thousands of positive ratings for Lion when I downloaded it, even if i did it on the first available day. This is crazy.




I don't want to go into all new functions and behaviors, because I am sure there are many blogs writing about it. But what is really clear, is, that the new OS has a lot of similarity to iOS. It is now having iPad with two 27inchs.

I like it and Apple did a very smart move. There are over 20 million iPad users and 100 million iPhone owners. Many of them are kids. And Apple is building on Kids. If their first computer is an iPad they might want then an iMac or MacBook Pro when it is time for a new bigger computer.
Anybody who never had a PC but an iPad, can instantly use the Mac computer, if Lion is running on it. There are no scrollbars anymore, all is multiple touch like on the iPad. You have a screen to see all your apps arranged as square icons like on the iOS etc. It is iOS on steroids.

Microsoft did miss to attract young people, they thought the first computer will be at work and then the people will buy a private computer. Which was true 20 years ago, but not anymore. Today we have computers as young as 3 years (my son has no computer but he knows how to use the iPad and he is 3). In his private live he will most likely never have a Windows PC. When he starts to work he will expect an Apple computer or might be lost the first few weeks because of a different OS.

Google does lead the mobile smart phone market with Android, but in tablets still behind (Apple has still 79% market share). And there is not yet a good Android OS for computers.

Apple did it right again. But to warm you. You will have some problems with Lion if you used a lot the previous OS. The handling is totally different (as I said like iOS).

And they moved a lot of things around. To see now how much space is available on your hard drive you need to go to info, it is not showing anymore in the window, maybe there is a setting but I did mot find it.

I talked with a bunch of people and followed twitter, I heard almost only good things about the new OS, but everybody says that they need to get used to how to resize and scroll in windows.

I can see that in a few years iOS and MacOs are one OS.

Apple did a nice job with new OS and if your computer is not too old then buy it, it OS just $29.99 which is pretty cheap. And I bet because of the low price and the easy install it will be the fastest upgrade of OS ever, if there are no big bugs within the system.

You can go to any Apple store and download there or get it from HD installed for free if your home Internet is too slow. Apple knows what service is.


BTW
I was disappointed I got the notification email from Apple on Wednesday night 6 hours after I installed Lion. They should work on their email marketing.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Why Facebook is already dead

I give Facebook not more than three years and then it is just another myspace. I know this is a very strong statement but we have to face it.

The secret of Facebook had three big components.

1. It was limited to certain schools. Facebook opened it's portal school by school to officially control the growth and to ensure to keep the portal running. However more important was the factor that kids did want to join a network which they could not. It is similar like a night club. We all know the good clubs have bouncers and only let few people at any time in to keep a big crowd outside. This alone drives more people to the club. The human nature is pretty simple. We want to be a part of something others can't be. Especially for younger people under 25 (when they are still in the phase of having hundreds of "friends") there is nothing better than to tell everybody that they have been somewhere special. I can remember (as a teen) I was standing 2 hours in front of a club to get in. Finally it was time my friend could not get in because he had white socks. We run home, he changed and we tried it again. Only that we could tell our friends the next day, that we were at club xyz and how cool it was. Even if it was not cool, because it was too crowed.
Facebook was the same. We always asked others if they are on Facebook.
But today almost everybody is on Facebook and it is almost cooler bot to be on it.there is almost no li,oration to sign up for FB.

2. Facebook was advertisement free and clean.
A lot of people left myspace and joined Facebook, because it was much cleaner and easier to use. One click and your page is ready. At myspace we needed to spend an hour to get all things nicely set up, we had just too much options. And everybody had different colors and fonts, it was horrible. Facebook on the other hand was minimalistic and clean. No ads and easy to use.
Today companies can have Facebook pages and these pages are sometimes full of chaos. Privacy settings are so complicated that it needs hours of reading internet forums to understand how to set it right.
And then the layout is changing monthly. Suddenly we have at the right a selection of friends or notifications are moved to top navigation and so on. Missing one month to go on Facebook is like learning FB again.
Ads are everywhere. In status updates, in wall entries, on uploaded photos and of course on the right rail.
But worse, many ads are not instantly recognizable as ads. I understand that FB needs to generate revenue but from a company where the founder hated to have ads to a company which is starting to cannibalize the space with ads, it is a big change.




Facebook 2009





Facebook 2011





3. Apps and Games
Facebook understood very fast that an open API for app development is key factor to grow. This allows many new features developed free by others. The biggest hit in Facebook are the games. People like to play small and easy games. Before Facebook were many other places to play games but either you had to search for it, or were miserable in layout or did costs money ($10 a month the good games sites). With Facebook everything changed. You needed only to go to Facebook and could play tons of games from very silly like feeding your fish to see them grow to strategic games like chess. And then came Zynga and made all of us playing Farmville, poker etc.
The strategy went really well. However at a certain point there were too many role games an we got tons of notifications that somebody poked us or somebody needs help fro xyz. the whole start page was full of requests. Lucky wise they moved it away. Today it is almost not possible to find games we play only the ones which are promoted. I tried to find a travel map app, and I am sure there is one, but I got lost. And since Android and iPhone most of the games are available outside of Facebook. We started to play on our phone instead on Facebook. As great the idea of games was, Facebook missed mobile and allowed too much flash. They are changing it but it might be too late.

Facebook doubled since 2009 their members. FB had in May 2009 350 million members. Today FB has 750 million active members however in 2009 in average 10,000 people did deactivate their account on a daily basis. Today is is in average 100,000.

All this is of course not enough reason to believe that Facebook will die. Myspace, as bad as it was, would not have died, if there was no alternative. And till a few weeks ago there was no alternative to FB. Google finally started a social network which is ad free, no chaos, very clean and only open for invitations. Exact same methodology as Facebook once had, but with easier privacy settings. A small feature with big impact called circles. Granted Facebook has groups but much harder to work with than circles. But google has something more. The time for having just a social network as entry point is over. We want to go to one portal and do everything. This is exactly google. Going to google.com allows us to do many things and now to be social.




If you have a gmail account which most of us have then you have a nice navigation on top of the page when you are logged in.

And google does not need to have ads on google plus (their social network) because they have so much real estate on google search, YouTube, gmail etc. I am pretty sure google will hold off with ads till they destroyed Facebook.

Facebook will of course make more and more money through ads, but if more and more people go to google and the advertiser understand that advertising on Facebook is even more expensive than on google then the game is over.

Big difference between google and Facebook is that FB wants to keep the people on their website, and google does not keep the people on theirs. At the end advertisers will prefer a solution where the click of the ads will guide the user to an experience the advertiser controls 100%, which is not the idea from Facebook.

And then there is mobile. Google owns half of the mobile market and can easily get the users to mobile. Facebook is late with mobile and did not find yet a good solution.

If google starts to open google plus for 3rd party developers then good bye FB and hello google plus.

Mobile with social integration is the future. Trying to keep users within a social network is not the future. Social will be a part of everything and the company which offers the service wins over the company who controls a platform.


Facebook might be in 2012 too late for an IPO, but for sure it will get into our history books as the biggest billion dollar loser of the century.

The only chance FB has is to go very soon public and use the money to reinvent themselves. The good news is that a Mark Zuckerberg will win billions and regardless if FB dies or not, we will hear many years from him as one of the biggest investors like today the paypal mafia is famous.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Amazon to release tablet in September or October - danger for Apple?

Rumors are out that Amazon is going to introduce a color tablet based on Android In fall this year. Will it be successful?




(Image copied from Wired.com)

Apple introduced their tablet (iPad first generation) April 2010. Since then many tablets have come on the market with more or less no success.

According to a market research, Apple's iPad accounted for 89 percent of worldwide tablet traffic on the Internet in May, easily besting Android-based tablets and other slates.

Apple has sold 25 million iPads since the tablet's launch in spring 2010. Moreover, iPad held 87 percent market share in 2010, according to research firm IDC. Another research firm, Gartner, said it believes the iPad will own 68.7 percent of the market in 2011. Android devices, on the other hand, will only have 19.9 percent share this year, the firm said.

Why did so far none of the competition pick up on Apple? In my opinion there are many reasons, but mostly because the OS is too limited (like the playboook from RIM, which can only do mail with a Blackberry) or because the hardware is not as light as good and has shorter battery life (like Galaxy and Zoom). Plus none of the tablets are cheaper than the iPad. Another important factor is the amount of applications and the quality of applications. There are already 5,000 apps for Android tablets but the quality of many apps is not good because google does not control the applications.

The consumers are ready for another tablet which can compete with the iPad, not because the iPad is bad or the price is too high, but because we don't like to have only one real choice.

Amazon has a great chance to be the second winner in the tablet market. Which is an irony because Amazon is not a leading hardware company. But Amazon has something nobody besides Apple has. Amazon has a good app store and does control all submitted apps. It has less restrictions than Apple but more than Google.
And Amazon is like Apple a retailer and does know how service and support works which Google is just not good in.

Amazon is the biggest online retailer and has a big customer base, therefor they can and will market their apps in their store better than Google. As a amazon app developer i get frequently emails from Amazon with tips and helps to support me or to market my app.



There are a lot of complains from developers that Google does not support them . The latest example is Lodsys patent infringement claim. Apple is taking the fight but Google leaves it to the developers.

Amazon will and can do it better than Google, and can build a fast thin tablet with long battery life. Even if the kindle is not a tablet, Amazon still learned in the last few years a lot about tablet devices and integrated services.

Amazon has not only the retail experience but as well music service, video and ebook experience. A tablet could combine hardware with all these services.

If anybody can really compete with Apple on the Android market then it is Amazon. Pretty sure in 2013 we will have 50 or 80 different tablets but only two will share 70% of the market. All others will have together 30%. One of the two is Apple and the second one could be Amazon.

Microsoft can still catch up but yet we need to see a windows tablet or some success with windows phones. Microsoft missed the idea that the OS is not the most important part, it is the services around the OS. Windows got only so big because there was more services and apps available then for Apple computers.

Same happens right now with Apple iOS, regardless if the iOS is great or not, there are so many apps and services available that it would not make much sense for the user to buy something which would limit them.

But as I wrote, we never just like one choice, and I believe Amazon could win big against all other tablet manufactures.

Now here comes a thesis which is maybe totally crazy. Amazon will grow to the biggest Android market place that in 4 years most of the people won't remember who originally did develop Android.
Or do you remember which Linux was the first and who Linus Tovald is?

Stay tuned and keep your eyes open for a new Amazon device.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Anacortes, Skagit, Washington

Google music or Amazon cloud player?

Today I decided to test in full google music with amazon cloud music.
To install amazon cloud player you download for your mac an installer and then run the installer. The whole installer inclusive icons looks like build from a Linux techie.



Amazon installs an app to upload files to the cloud and finds automatically your iTunes music folder which is in my case not on the local drive.But it does not let me choose from the beginning it just starts scanning. However you can stop and manually choose your folders. The upload app is simple but gives good information.





You can see how much GB is left and how much you would need to upload your songs.
Unfortunately the first version did not work well on the iPad. But the latest web version does work fine. but it takes a few seconds till a song is playing.



Amazon look and feel is simple and easy to understand. It has shuffle, playlist and preview of CD cover with title and lengths of the playing song. Uploading songs took about 30 seconds per song (I have a slow Internet connection).
Nice at Amazon is that they offer music to buy, when you buy you can choose to download the song or to move it in your music cloud.




Google music installer is much nicer on the mac than the amazon version.


When you download the DMG file it will unzip automatically and when it is done it asks you to drag an drop the app into application folder. Pretty easy the install.
The app settings are actually stored in System settings which makes it easier to access.




Google music will ask you, when you first start the uploader, if you want to use your iTunes library.
If yes it will scan your library, regardless if external or internal HD it finds the library. The scan is much faster than with amazon, but you are limited to 10.000 songs (just %25 of my songs). Google does upload files better in background than amazon and you have the option to automatically upload new iTunes music to google.
You get up to 1.000 free songs, when you first sign up for your google music account.





I selected to upload 10,000 songs to google (which is max) and after 14 hours I had just 1675 songs uploaded. This will take a while. But seems still faster than Amazon.

Playing the songs from google is as easy as with Amazon





However I like the google UI a little better. But Google has as well a few seconds delay before the first song starts. But Google does not sell music, you would still need to buy it amazon or iTunes.

Both services have androids apps but no iPhone or iPad app. But both work over browser on iOS devices which OS good.

Amazon is free up to 4.5GB, Google has 10,000 songs free (what if each song is 300 minutes, will it be still 10,0000?).

The third big music cloud player will be iCloud from Apple. But Apple will work slightly different by letting the user download first the song before it plays, to avoid streaming. We will see how this will work out.

Google is for me a good alternative at work, hence my iPhone has only limited songs on it. Hopefully Google will extend the memory to more songs, but on the other side it is a free service and 10.000 songs is a lot. However it is not more than the iPhone or other smartphones usually can hold. To get users to move their music in the cloud would help, if the data storage is unlimited or would exceed what we usually have on our phones.

Apple is promising that you pay once and then you can have as much as you want.

Amazon neither Google is upgrading your songs. The quality you upload the quality you get. With Apple you don't need to upload, they compare your song with their songs in the cloud which are always high quality. Therefore you get always the best quality. Of course there are songs which Apple does not offer in the US or even not available at all, these song you can upload into your iCloud account according to Apple.


- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

The future of Apple

Fall 1990, I had my first day at university. I have been an early adapter with computers. I had my first computer 1984 but i never had a windows computer. However at the university we did need a word program and a CAD program. Sure I could have used my Atari for this but neither our professors nor my colleagues had Atari but most of them (if they had a computer) had Windows with Word for Windows and AutoCAD 10.
I switched again away from Windows when a friend and I started an advertisement agency. We used Macs and Ataris even if most of our clients had windows. In 1994 I was sure no real design company could work on Windows computer. We with Apple had Photoshop, Quark Express and Freehand. Windows had CorelDRAW, which we called a housewife drawing program.

But when I joined in 1999 a bigger company (NEC), i had to use Windows again. I finally joined the corporate world. At this time and later most of my friends did buy Windows computers because they were used to them through work or bought them because it was important to have Windows and Office experience to get an office job or even a better office job.

From the beginning Microsoft understood that the first time people will be confronted with computers will be at work. The mission from the beginning was to build a mass OS for companies, they saw that in the 80es the mainframe server-terminal configuration will die. Apple on the other hand had always the consumer in mind, they did want build an easy to use computer. The problem was that computers have been expensive and there was no Internet. Not everybody could afford a computer or did know what to do with a computer at home after a long day at the office.
I believe, that Microsoft became the number one operating system for consumers was only an unexpected side effect. But it worked out. Because we used Windows and office at work, we decided to buy the same for home, we knew how it works and we could bring our documents to work to print or we knew we could share it with everybody.
Computer usage got a necessity at work, did not matter what our profession was, in some way we most likely had to use a computer.
Microsoft went further and did build and buy more and more enterprise applications. In the mid and late 90es the home computer got more and more introduced to younger people. The first generation had kids which have been now teens. And game companies started to build more and more games for Windows computers to attract the teens. At this time, game consoles were expensive and could not keep up with the speed. The first playstation from Sony got introduced 1994. But already a year later the graphics on the PC were so much better that it made sense to buy a computer instead of a game console to keep up with the rapid changes in speed and graphic. And then there was the Internet and AOL. In 94/95 we were able to use our home computer to read news, to talk to other people around the world. More and more people saw more sense in having a computer at home. The prices of the computer did not much go down but there were suddenly unlimited software for the consumer available.

In 1998 Apple started a strategy which changed everything.
I am pretty sure Steve Jobs was sitting 1997 on his back-porch and thought that it would be nice if computers could attract kids, the future working and decision making people. He needed to do something that children will influence their parents for the better of Apple. He knew the first contact with a computer is not anymore the enterprise world. It is in every house household.

When Apple released the first iMac in 1998, they changed the way we look at computers. Not only was the iMac not as boring as Windows PCs but was as well priced closer to PCs than ever before. The iMac was priced $1,299 same price as an average PC with monitor.




But there was an issue. Windows office was expensive on the iMac and there was not much common with the Windows UI.

2001 was the biggest most important step. Apple opened their first Apple store, totally designed to that whole families have fun. Parents can bring their kids to the store and can play at a round table on iMacs kids learning games.
In the same year Apple started to sell the iPod and iTunes. A great music player targeted to young audience with an easy to use music library. The iPod was an instant success but computers are still not growing as good as they could.

But Apple needed to understand a few years that beautiful computers don't sell if the user does not know how to use them. Apple introduced intel based imacs and bootcamp in 2006. Which allowed the user to install Windows on a Mac computer. This brought Apple closer to PCs. Consumers were now able to buy computers with beautiful design and still to run Windows on them. But at the same time the consumer is able to boot the Apple in MacOs.
I don't know how many people did really buy an Apple and run it only in Windows, but the marketing was good enough that Apple finally found a bigger user base for their computers. In Fiscal Year 2007 (October 1, 2006 - September 30, 2007), Apple sold approximately 4,887,000 Macintosh computers. In this year Apple market share almost doubled. And from there on Apple grow each year faster than PCs.




Of course it is easier to grow if you are an underdog.

Apple started something in 1998 which got perfected in the last 4 years. A way to introduce a new system to the consumer of the future for a price same or lower than the competition. In 2007 Apple released the iPhone and iPod touch. The iPod touch is basically a mini computer with music player. A device we parents do not mind to buy our kids if they are asking for a music player, it would not hurt our pockets. In 2010 Apple extended the mini computers (iPhone and iPod touch) with the iPad. A tablet computer. For all three devices are now over 400k of applications available (smart move to have one place where we can find all apps). And because there are some many apps, Apple was able to sell over 200 million of their devices. Many of them are used by kids. Apple took it a step further. If every kid knows how an iPod touch, iPad or iPhone works, would it not cool if they could switch to a computer and it would work the same way?
Therefore Apple introduced Lion and iOS 5.0. Two systems which got just closer. In only 2 years, there will be in the base functions no difference. Microsoft missed the step and was too much concentrated on the thing they are good. Game console and business. Unfortunate the xbox has not much in common with computers and what drove people to buy a PC will change in the opposite. There will come the time where businesses will choose what people are used to work with from childhood on. The biggest problem for Microsoft was and is the Internet. The Internet made it possible to run applications on browsers which are mostly OS independent. The cloud will even support web browser based applications. With the cloud it is not anymore necessary to have Office only to work as a desktop application. It will enable us to use it through browsers, like Google is already showing.

I believe Microsoft will be more and more an important role in enterprise applications and DB but will lose extensive market share in PC or user OS. We will see a lot of Apple products in offices in 5 years.

The question is were will google play a role in this? I can't really tell, Google has a potential to be a bigger player than Apple. But I doubt it will be in the office world. Google is too open. As an example, Linux might have been the better OS than Windows and even did run on PC and the best part, it was free. However support is difficult and there are not much applications on the market. Linux made it into the web server world because there you don't need tons of apps. Google has a similar problem, they have no experience with support and this will be their problem why they won't get fast into the office world.
Apple on the other side has a lot of experience in support and offers hardware with software which allows them to have a more stable system, because they can build it against their specifications, they don't need to consider many difference form factors or hardware part to support.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Is the Apple TV dead?

Apple announced last week their impressive quarter sales, but no word about the Apple TV 2. October last year the second generation of the Apple TV went on Sale. Three weeks later we heard that the Apple sold 250,000 units. In December 2010 we got the last time a number of 1M.
We are now 4 months later and no words. If Apple did sell 2 million so far then the revenue would have been $200M. Which is not a significant number but significant enough to be on their 10-Q form. However the Apple TV is only named twice in the document but the iPad 37 times, iPhone 42 times, iPod 28 times.
This is a big difference.






After all, the Apple TV is a great idea and very cheap, only $99. The Google TV is at least $299.
But there is another problem. More TVs are coming out with games, apps like pandora and Netflix.



If Apple is smart (which they are), then they could do something they usually don't do. They could make deals with Sony, Samsung, LG etc to build the Apple TV into their TVs.

We all know that Apple wants to have control over hardware and OS, this is what Apple made strong to ensure best user experience. With all other devices it is to understand they can't just give other companies their OS to use for their hardware. First of all because Apple would not have influence in hardware design and could lose the beauty of the devices, second of all it is harder to develop an OS which needs to function with any combination of memory, CPU, screen size etc.
Google and Microsoft learned it the hard way.

But the Apple TV is different. It is a very small device which could be easily build into any flatscreen TV. If you take the Apple TV out of the case than it is less than an inch thick.

Apple would still control the hardware of the Apple TV and the OS. They could even send their remote with the TV to ensure that beauty of the remote remains. Even today we need two remotes (I use my iPhone for Apple TV and my universal remote for all other devices).

I think this is the most likely way Apple can get their both feet into living- and bedroom.

Another possibility is that Apple starts to advertise how easy it is to stream videos, photos and music to a TV when an Apple TV is connected to the TV.

But this would only get iPad owners to buy Apple TVs. I think it would be smarter to go the route with the TV with build in Apple TV. Samsung etc will then automatically promote Apple TV and best Buy and Walmart could sell 54inch TV with iPad in bundle.

A lot of people are speculating that Apple will bring their own flatscreen to market. Which is possible especially that I did not see any TV as good in image quality as the 27inch Apple monitor. And all of the TV manufactures have an deficit in building a good GUI and remote. Apple knows a lot about GUIs and simple remotes. This would be a good fit.

However there are many screen sizes with TVs and Apple usually only develops one or two the most 3 different screen sizes per device. On the other hand there are right now almost only 16:9 TVs on the market. Therefore Apple would only need to have one UI for multiple screens. One is sure, if Apple builds a TV then the image quality will be better than ever with a great UI.

With all speculations, I believe the Apple TV 2 is in a few months dead as the Apple TV 1 is today.

But at the same time I believe that Apple will play am important role in TV. Apple has iTunes and Apple has iPhone and iPads. We all know that mobile is important but we can't live without big screens. Apple has all necessary services and if the Apple TV does not get integrated into standard TV or if Apple does not build their own TV then they will build a projector which can project an image in TV quality on any wall.

I can't imagine their will be a future without Apple and TV.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

What makes Apple so successful?

The Apple stock constantly grew since July 2008.





Why is July 2008 such an important month? Apple released on July 11th their iPhone app store. Before, consumers were only able to put short cuts of web pages on their phone but no 3rd party apps. All this changed on the 11th.

I did blog a while ago that I used to be an Atari user in the 80es but switched to Windows, when I went to university. One of the biggest reason that I chose Windows instead of Apple, was the ability to access software.

In the early 90es and even till now, there was much more software available for Windows than for Apple PCs. And everybody I knew at the university had used programs like Word for DOS which was not available for Apple.

Apple had the better interface but if you are not a designer or in desktop publishing then there was no reason to spend more money on something which was not compatible with other systems.

However I was amazed when I came 1990 to the US and saw many schools using Apple. I guess Apple missed to take advantage out of this.

Point is, that not always matters how good a device looks or how perfect the quality is. It matters who has the best Eco System. It was Microsoft in the 80es till end of 2009 and in PCs it is still Microsoft.

Apple's first big hit on the market was the iPod. The iPod is a digital music player but Apple was not the first company to sell a digital music player. In 1998, Compaq introduced the first hard drive-based digital audio player. The player had an initial capacity of 4.8 GB, with an advertised capacity of 1,200 songs. Two years later, the upgraded 6 GB NOMAD Jukebox became available.

The iPod was released in 2001 but did not have significant market share till Apple released the iTunes Store (introduced 29 April 2003) an online media store run by Apple and accessed through iTunes. Till then there were 100 of different music players but nobody did offer a software to store and to buy music for their music players.





Apple got only so successful with the iPod, because of the iTunes Store. There were other nicer players on the market, but they could not access iTunes store.

Apple did a great job to build relationships and contract with music industry when everybody was using Napster instead of buying music. Apple could offer songs for $0.99 which nobody was able to. At a time where a music CD was between $9 and $20.
Consumers could suddenly buy single songs instead of a CD with 15 songs.
Windows tried later on to compete by introducing Zune but had not such good deals with the music Industry. And if you don't offer enough music to buy, then you you are out of luck.

The iPad got introduced in April 2010 when everybody said there is no market for a super sized iPhone. But the analytics were wrong, the market was there and Apple sold within weeks millions of iPads. The most successful factor for the iPad was the App Store.

Over two years, the app store for the iPhone grew to over 250.000 applications. This was the perfect time to introduce the iPad. Starting with a phone is much easier, because we all had already cell phones and most of us did not like the UI. Apple just needed to make it better and was the first who allowed to have web pages short cuts on the phone, this was new. Other phones offers already a lot of apps to download but they were not easy to find or in a centralized system. Apple had no apps but short cut of web pages were at this time almost better, especially the iPhone had a full web browser not just a mobile limited version.
If Apple had first introduced the iPad, it would have failed because of missing apps for the iPad. Steve Jobs said once he had first the idea for the iPad, but he was smart enough to wait.

The iPad had from the beginning 250k apps (not native ipad apps). They did run in iPhone mode but consumer is able to double the size with one click. In my opinion, this was the reason why iPad has the same screen ratio like the iPhone and not wide screen. Today are over 40.000 native iPad apps in the app store and 100.000 apps which can run on iPad and iPhone in full screen size.



Google is a smart company and understood fast that Apple has something going. Google came out with Android, their version of Apple iOS. Google Android phones have, after less than 2 years, the highest market share on smartphones and over 100k applications.
But Google made an important mistake. They offer their Android as free open source which results in many different Android versions and many different devices.

Apple was again smarter, by having only a few devices with a few different hard ware and only two screen sizes. There are basically only the iPod touch, the iPhone and the iPad. A heaven for developers. It is much easier or develop for one type of device than for 100 different devices. As a result apps for Apple are usually better looking and higher in quality with less crashes. Google is like Microsoft for mobile. The second mistake google did was to have an app store with no control. It is sad but true an android user does need already and anti virus software.

Google tried to fix their OS concept with the tablet market by being more tied. But the hardware companies are still not yet taking any bigger share on the market from Apple. And the reason is so simple. There are only a few apps for Android tablets. Developers are not yet jumping on Android tablet development. They are frustrated and busy with Android phones.
Google would have more developers if they would not have copied the idea from Apple to run apps in full screen modus only. I believe if an app would run like apps on PC in windows instead in full screen it would be easier for the developer. They could develop for one size if it fit or not. And give the user the ability to resize if they want.
Of course another hurdle is to develop against many different hardware. It will take at least another 6 months till we see thousands of Android software for tablets and then Google has a big chance again. But till then Apple might have opened another market which we did not know exist.

Apple did again a smart move. They bought almost the whole market on touch screens and memory. The high volume allows Apple to sell the iPads to a descent price, which so far the big competition can't really undercut.

Next infrastructure step will be cloud. Apple will build an easy to use cloud Eco system which will drive more users to Apple.

I see only one company, right now, which could get close to Apple. And this company is Amazon. Amazon has a good infrastructure and Eco system as well, but the hardware is missing. Amazon has the kindle, a great ebook reader and maybe is even the market leader in ebooks, but Apple proofed with the iPad, that people don't like dedicated devices. A device should do multiple things not just be an ebook reader. Amazon must (if they want to compete with Apple) come with their own mobile device. The Beauty is that it can even be running on Android. If Amazon is able to convince developers to build software for Amazon devices then the cards will be different.

But till then, Apple will keep going up.


- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69