Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

Google and the Limits of Love

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

I like Google.

I never liked Microsoft. Windows has never given me much trouble, but it is nothing elegant. MSWord I use every day, and detest – clunky, and filled with bells & whistles I will never use. (Alas, I pine in vain for the long lost simplicity of WordStar.)

I never liked Apple. I’m sure their stuff works great, but Mac fans are so preachy, and the 1960s moderne styling doesn’t move me. Anyway I don’t want Steve Jobs deciding what apps I can run.

I like Google. What’s not to like? Its free! The front page and search results are clean, not tarted up. The ads don’t waste my machine’s bandwidth, or mine. The search results are pretty good. They haven’t beaten SEO spam yet, but has Bing?

My other blog uses Blogger, and though I have separate hosting, Blogger itself is also free, and for my minimalist approach to froufrou it gives me all the tools I need, with only fairly rare glitches.

But when the comment registration button on a blog asked me to join Google Friend, I passed up the opportunity to be closer friends with Google. I have Chrome, but still use Firefox as my default browser. As much as I dislike MSWord, I’m not inclined to switch to Google Docs.

I like Google, but I’m not so in love that I want to become dependent on them.

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Posted in Cloud Computing, Search, Social Media | 4 Comments »

iPad: The Truth Comes Out

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

Lots of items cross our desk. One of them, by Dan Moren at MacWorld, hands out some Official Dish from Apple about the iPad.

You can follow the link to read about ‘groundbreaking’ data plan options, and various nifty features. But one item jumps out, made a subtitle so you won’t miss it.

‘Reading is fundamental,’ says Moren, and with that the light of comprehension dawns. Everyone wondered what exactly the iPad really is. Now we know.

The iPad is, at bottom, e-reader, just packaged in with music, a way to go quickly online, and video if you decide you just want eye/brain candy. It’s a compleat e-reader.

The cult of Apple can get annoying, but Steve Jobs is really, really sharp.

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Posted in Mobile Internet, New Media | 2 Comments »

iPad: The First Reviews Are In

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Apple’s new iPad comes fully customized: There is a review for every taste, from Rave! to Bah, Humbug! For Slate’s Farhad Manjoo the iPad is ‘the computer I’ve always wanted.’ To Adam Frucci of Gizmodo it has ‘backbreaking’ shortcomings, and after listing eight things to hate about the iPad he added three more.

Rachel Mets of Associated Press declares that the iPad is more than just a bigger iPod Touch. Meanwhile Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle says, ‘You mean it’s a big iPod Touch? Basically.’ Which, Kim adds, is just fine.

As noted previously in this blog, there is a long back story to the iPad, an industry fascination with devices – call them slates, tablets, or now presumably pads – that are bigger than a smartphone but smaller than a laptop. Michael Malone of ABC News calls it a Holy Grail quest, even speculating that this size corresponds to a deep rooted human impulse going back to the first data processing technology, the Sumerian clay tablet.

Opinions on the iPad may be all over the map, but digging a bit under the surface reveals a pretty consistent underlying topography. Love it or hate it, the reviewers identify much the same strengths and weaknesses. The differences in opinion come from how they weigh them.

The iPad is not ‘a computer.’ It runs a version of the iPhone operating system, and like the iPhone it completely hides the file structure from the user. If you like simply using a functionality with a minimum of fuss that is a plus; if you like knowing where your content is, and being able to move it, this hidden-ness will be a minus.

Likewise, all reviewers seem to agree that Apple has not solved the keyboard problem. If you only expect to use it to send the occasional instant message or tweet, this won’t be an issue, but if you want to write paragraphs, this is probably not the device for you.

Put another way, based on the early reviews the iPad is a good device for consuming online media while on the go – reading the news or an e-book, surfing the Web, watching video, and the like. But for interacting with online content – playing with it, mashing it up, creating it – the iPad’s limitations are more serious, perhaps fatally so.

In short, if you wish your iPhone had a bigger screen, the iPad may be what you are looking for. If you wish your laptop were lighter and easier to carry, it probably is not.

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Posted in Mobile Internet, New Media, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

iSlate?

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Update: As it turns out, it’s the iPad. Isn’t that awfully close to ‘iPod?’ Farhad Manjoo raves about it at Slate, but even he admits that it isn’t suited to typing much more than a tweet. Does it matter? We’re about to find out.

[Original post]

Steve Jobs knows what I am thinking: Does the world really need a tablet computer? The idea has been around forever in geek years. Jobs’ former nemesis Bill Gates predicted in 2001 that tablets would be the most popular type of PC within five years.

We are still waiting for them to break the 1 percent barrier, but the wait could be over tomorrow, when Apple is expected to make the public launch of its tablet, rumored (by Slate magazine) to be the iSlate.

So, does the world really need a gadget that is too big for your pocket or even your purse, but too small to have a true keyboard? Steve Jobs knows that my opinion doesn’t matter, since I’m not a mobile device user and don’t own iAnything. I’m not the target market.

The consensus seems to be that no, there really isn’t much market out there for a tablet computer – but Apple will probably manage to create one. I have to agree with the conventional wisdom.

The Apple mystique has always eluded me, but there is no doubting that it exists. The iPod transformed music listening, and the iPhone is transforming the way we think about smartphones, so no one will be surprised if Apple also transforms the way we think about tablet PCs.

They have a rare talent for guessing what consumers will like, and they certainly have everyone’s attention. I wouldn’t want to bet against them.

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Posted in Mobile Internet, New Media | 4 Comments »

Clash of the Titans

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s resignation from the Apple board early this month has tech industry observers picking their seats and calling for hot dogs wrapped in grape leaves. Another tech industry battle of giants may be shaping up, this time to rule the mobile Internet. And for once Microsoft will be watching from the stands instead of fighting it out as one of the gladiators.

Peter Burrows of Business Week gets props for putting the looming fight in historical context. Battles royal are nothing new to the tech industry. In the 1980s it was a double round as Microsoft both wrested the PC away from IBM and muscled past Apple to dominate the personal computing market. In the late 90s it was Microsoft again versus upstart Netscape in the browser wars – a desktop battle over access to the Internet.

What makes the looming Apple-Google battle an epic is that more than just market share is at stake. Like the battles of the 80s it pits open standards against a closed ecosystem. IBM took for granted that the hardware manufacturer would call the shots, the way it was in mainframe days. Apple thought the same thing. Microsoft upended them both, first turning desktop computers into a commodity, then opening its operating system to third-party applications. ‘Openness’ is not a word we associate with Microsoft, the company everyone loves to hate, but it conquered the world by letting in third party apps.

Apple survived, proving that even in the tech industry there are second acts. With the iPhone it has jumped to an early lead in the industry’s fastest-growing segment, the mobile Internet. But one thing hasn’t changed since Apple II days. The iPhone App Store may have thousands of apps, but if you want to play, Apple is referee and scorekeeper … as Google found out when it had an app rejected.

Google, in contrast, is the new champion of open standards, with its Android operating system slated for use in a slew of competing smartphone brands. And with its push for cloud computing it is proposing to move the apps onto the Internet, making the devices in our hands really just super browsers. So the stage is set for a new clash of philosophies: Apple, stylish and powerful but offering what Burrows calls a ‘walled garden,’ while Google offers the cloud.

Meanwhile, what of Microsoft? It hasn’t put down its sword completely, needless to say: Even as Google and Apple square off over the mobile Internet, it is taking aim at Google’s core business with Bing. But Microsoft has always been business-oriented (which is why MS Word has 10,000 features most of us never use and wish would go away). Bing, a ‘decision engine,’ is pretty unabashedly a shopping engine – and also a suitable platform for enterprise search.

Microsoft has never been a great consumer company. It conquered the computing market by offering business productivity suites, with the home computer a bit of an afterthought. It may be leaving old rival Apple and new rival Google to fight it out for the consumer-centric mobile Internet, and concentrating its own efforts on the business end. Meanwhile, take your seats as we await the march of the gladiators.

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Posted in Mobile Internet | 6 Comments »