Windows 8 is great
- Created on Friday, 02 March 2012 18:44
Apple, you have a problem. Windows 8 looks great! Surely the guys from Redmond are serious about a comeback. On January I wrote that Apple is getting help from their friends, Google and Microsoft. At least Microsoft is showing it has decided to stop helping Apple and start reinventing themselves.
I only played with Windows 8 for a little while but from what I see so far - it is all I ever wanted in an operating system. It works on my desktop, laptop and tablet. It has a great UI that works well with a mouse and keyboard and with a touch interface. It can run new Metro style applications and my old one as well. It’s integrated with cloud services and it syncs my settings, content and social activity with all of my device, and the cloud. (It doesn’t hurt that Microsoft’s SkyDrive is becoming better and better and these days I’m using it as much as I use iCloud, Dropbox or Box.net. But this is a subject for another post).
Can the chicken and egg problem be solved?
- Created on Wednesday, 08 February 2012 22:12
The answer is no. At least for us it is. We will not invest money that will be spent trying to solve this problem.
We see too many start-ups that have nice applications but they need to bring users in order to bring business in order to bring users... Their plan is to invest in marketing campaigns that would “solve” at least one side of the equation. It never works (unless you have north of $10M for marketing AND you are extremely lucky).
There are, however, a few exceptions:
Apple is getting help from its friends
- Created on Thursday, 26 January 2012 20:44
A couple of days ago Apple reported on a record quarter ending 2011. They made $46 billion in sales and a $13 billion in net profit. They sold over 37 million iPhones and 15 million iPads. These are amazing numbers - no question about it.
Even though competition from Android is strong (Android’s market share has already pass the 50% mark) there is no doubt that Apple is still the leading force in ultra mobile computing (Smartphone and Tablets) with the iPhone and iPad setting up the benchmark.
More than three years ago I predicted that Apple is going to lose the dominance in the Smartphone industry and that it will continue to lose market share as long as it keeps its closed garden strategy. I predicted that history will repeat itself and that what had happened in the PC market would happen again here. I thought Apple’s market share would fall below 10-15%. I didn’t expect Apple would be able to keep the lead for so long.
Thoughts about SOPA
- Created on Tuesday, 17 January 2012 20:44
Before I start, let's make one thing clear: I'm against SOPA and I join the protest. The way the bill is phrased is totally unreasonable (I'm not going to repeat these discussions here). Personally I also don't like the OPEN Act (Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act) that is proposed instead of SOPA but this is not what I want to discuss here.
What I wanted to point out is that when thinking about it, it is actually quite amazing that it took so many years to get an act like SOPA going. Apposing it or not - we all realize that the Internet today has become one of the major world infrastructures. Even more important than the telephone decades ago. This infrastructure was (and is) developed mostly by the private sector and it is not controlled by governments (at least in the western world) but still, for such a major infrastructure, one would expect to have seen government governance and regulations much sooner.
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