Posted by Antonio
1 day, 4 hours ago (July 2, 2009)
BGR had a very good piece yesterday on the future of RIM with a subtle but important point that few people seem to get: if you don't have a solid software stack underneath your products that you can invest in for the long haul and which will grow to fit new functionality and third party innovation, you're going to get screwed— even if your end users aren't clamoring for it and are still flocking to your devices in droves.
I bet this very observation is keeping our keyboard-obssesed nanucks to the north up at night. Along with Nokia, these guys basically invented the smartphone, and yet, the cost of being first seems to be that their rickety OS— designed for the CPUs and networks of yesteryear— may now keep them from staying in front of the onslaught from Apple and Google.
I've been carrying a Blackberry 8900 for the last month and have to admit that when it comes to messaging and calendaring, neither the iPhone nor the Ion can touch it. But step outside of email/mms/Exchange calendar mode and you'll feel like you've time traveled back and Windows 3.1. The browser sucks, the device itself is laggy, and most task flows feel... well sort of retro.
If I were a RIM executive, I'd be rooting for some skunkworks team putting the Blackberry's messaging magic into Android. Those guys should be getting loads of pizza and Red Bull and plenty of encouragement about how they represent the future.
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Posted by Antonio
5 days, 10 hours ago (June 28, 2009)
The NYTimes has a nice piece on the success of Acer, a Taiwanese computer maker, in becoming the #2 laptop/netbook supplier behind HP. The piece is worth reading for all of the digs that the more established players take at the underdog alone, but it makes two things very clear:
1. If I was betting in this sector, I'd say that Acer, Asus, and any of the other Taiwanese makers are going to take over both the laptop and the netbook market in the next 3-5 years. The key statistic here is that Acer is willing to survive in the market with as little as 2% margins across its product line— which is sometimes less than what the channel makes. More importantly, a 2% net margin business is not something that big American companies like HP are going to play seriously in.
2. It's amazing to see how much all of these laptops and netbooks look like each other— across manufacturers. I guess this is what you get as the ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) like Foxconn and Quanta take on more of the basic product engineering. When you've got the same engineers working on things like thermal envelope and clamshell design and working with the same raw materials (CPU, SSD, etc.), it's no wonder everything starts looking the same after just a few iterations.
If I were trying to compete with these Taiwanese companies, I'd try very hard to get out of banana handling— simply speccing and branding these machines— to more substantial sources of value-add through software and service differentiation. Investing serious resources in this area is very challenging to do, especially as the price premium of these portable computers plummets— but the only real alternative at this point seems to be to exit the business, or get ready for the bumpy 2% banana handler's ride.
And it can't just be about slapping Android on these machines either— real differentiation in software and services needs to start from the most common emergent use cases for the portable clamshell computing devices of today. These use cases then need to be used to rethink the computing experience from the ground up. Efforts like Jolicloud (a startup trying to put some real meat behind the term "netbook") or Ubuntu One seem like a step in the right direction, albeit bite-sized ones.
In the short term though, the one thing that is for sure is that consumers will benefit from the plummeting prices for what used to be a premium computing experience.
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Posted by Antonio
1 week, 3 days ago (June 23, 2009)
Having been the media darlings of 2008, I can tell that netbooks are entering the phase of the media hype cycle where everyone asks just what the big deal was in the first place and wonders how they ever let themselves get carried away with pronouncing the netbook the "computer for the cloud age."
I was intrigued by the whole phenomenon enough to try two different devices (an HP 2133 and an HP 1000) but after some serious attempts at using each as my main portable device, I gave up and declared them to be nothing more than cheap laptops.
But before we get carried away, we should take a moment to consider that "just cheap laptops" is a dumb statement to make. The laptop is a transformative device that opens up whole worlds of opportunity, especially for people who don't have regular access to computers, and making it possible for someone to get that much portable computing power for $300-500 is really quite a feat. We owe a lot of the OLPC and the subsequent race between the Taiwanese manufacturers to get component and enclosure prices down. Sadly, software makers didn't jump at the chance to redefine the experience as well— with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the best viable experiment to date in creating netbook-specific software— but is is still early days here.
And finally, it's important to realize that to first time computer owners who aren't stepping down from 15 inch screens are Core2 Duos, there is a lot of magic in being able to call a general purpose computing device "personal."
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Posted by Antonio
1 week, 4 days ago (June 22, 2009)
This is a hilarious story about a guy who got his iPhone stolen and used Apple's new "Find my iPhone" feature to recover it directly from the thief— Jack Bauer style.
Outside of the persistent connection between the phone and the Apple service (is it via XMPP?), this new location broadcast stuff is the most exciting part of OS 3.0 for me. Because while location awareness has been a part of all of the future vision stuff that Nokia and mobile social network sites have shown for years, with "Find my iPhone" we now have a big vendor pushing it as a platform-level feature, and more specifically, one which is likely to start advertising it to the masses in their usual effective manner.
I suspect that the democratization of this technology is going to have broad ranging implications on privacy, terms-of-service, and just about every part of the "personal" in personal computing in the years to come. And as usual, we'll discover we didn't think enough about the implications of being locatable anywhere at any time via a web service before the feature became as prevalent as say, SMS or voicemail.
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Posted by Antonio
1 week, 5 days ago (June 20, 2009)
I am happy to see Joe Hewitt writing positively about the hardware improvements in the new iPhone because this is a guy that has been there since the very beginning. His iUI framework make stuff happen on the webapp-only iPhone and his subsequent Facebook native app taught us that we didn't have to settle for UITextField as the only way to enter text on our devices.
So when he says that the "S" should stand for "smooth" I feel like we ought to chalk one up for the Internet— as we've come to know it and love it with all of its AJAX goodness— as it gets ready to come to our mobile devices. The future is not, as Tomi Ahonen likes to write, one of the "legacy Internet" and the "mobile Internet," but one where the same experience you get on your laptop gets translated into a truly mobile one thanks to Moore's law and the magic of the free market working its way through the smartphone battle of the 2000s.
Amen to that!
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Hi, I'm Antonio, living in Boston and working this whole net thing out...
