How Apple keeps rolling lately..

It is an interesting twist and with Jobs ingenuity at work, Recently Apple again positions itself soundly among the toughest mobile phone competition in the US market.

Say, AT&T always had a sweet spot for Apple for being Apple exclusive for the last five years, which now ends and sells iPhone 3GS for free (0.99c), then, on the other hand Verizon and Sprint, arch rivals of iPhone without having it for years, promptly grab the iPhone and Apple demanded a premium subsidy so it can showcase the lowest seemingly price for it’s phone among the industry’s high end phones in Verizon Flagship Store.

Surprisingly Apple being premium, now has the lowest price there. What an irony!

Verizon rumored to be paying 450USD subsidy for each of the Apple models so
Apple sell them a lot cheaper than the competition. Indeed Job seems a genius
in negotiations and marketing.

How did Adobe Flash go from leader to loser?

It came as no surprise, toady Adobe announced it’s no longer commited to develop the Flash Mobile, means all Flash content will move out of Flash into the open web, HTML 5 and beyond, soon. I knew this day would come, eventually. I have written about Flash in the past which can be found bellow. It was how a wonderful product can get extinct by bad marketing and greed. Back in the days Flash was a wonderful tool. it still is. problem is Adobe wanted it to be everything, from design tool, to developer script machine to gaming platform. Aren’t there enough platforms which does cater each indivual need better? lack of focus and commitment to do better while still wanting to be everything is where Adobe got messed up this game. Now, almost single handedly killed by Apple iOS arrival. Flash seriously has no relavance in modern computing.

 Living broadband while Flash eats my tube…

Flash didn’t just die.  It was managed into oblivion by the way Adobe handled it.

Windows 8 – Tiles are nice, but alas!, It doesn’t run X86

Windows 8 Unveiled. – Years after MS have hired some nice guys to do their new Windows 8 UI. The Tiles ( Metro-Styled ) are a nice concept (for a tablet), novel, intuitive and innovative, pundits already touts an iPad killer Windows 8 tablets in the works, except one big problem they don’t see, that it ain’t run any of X86 legacy code yet. (Noemal Windows Applications).

Nice UI, but what if when the user looks for the famous Office™ icon here?

Microsoft is struggling to remain in relevant with the promise of another new edition of Windows where everything about its core legacy is now covered up with an animated web-based distraction layer called Metro-Style. Inherited from the Windows 7 Phone interface, it’s nice in rival concept, if Apple can turn Mac OSX into iOS and iPad apps, so can Microsoft, quite easy right?

Except one fundamental flow in their new concept which pundits fail to see. Companies make blenders in many forms, Microsoft has many references on this regard. Anyone remember Tablet PC, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Kin, Zune, anyone? Nokia’s current situation is another, here I have written another. These seemed good sound business decisions at once, it’s not that you can’t try new and fail. It’s that if they are flowed from start due to wrong intentions ot lack of analysis. They fail anyway. Company’s should invent itself and initiate new risks looking at their own core strengths rather than looking at others’ success on a particular field. This is where they are doomed.

Microsoft surely need its presence in mobile space now. Runaway success of iOS and Android made anyone in industry, envy. So tries many things since Palm Pilot days to copying others’ success but without any significant success, or road map. This novel App Tiles idea is nice for different a start, for ripping and copying anything else. but it directly contradicts MS’s own efforts to preserve its Windows and MS Office legacy strength. MS suggesting the top way to build apps is pure HTML seemsn now MS eats its own dog food. Since when HTML became stronger app plaform andn MS new motto? Forgetting something Microsoft fought and learned from the Netscape/ IE days and introduced Silverlight as an Adobe Flash-like alternative and HTML5 to make sure Windows remail dominant in desktop space. It’s like now MS is trying to paint itself again in Apple’s shoes, desktop wars were long ended. The problem is, unlike in the history that initioal MS’s Mac Office did bring in actual Windows success later. (Anyone specticle please do read how MS Office and Windows came to be)

Apple even didn’t bring Mac OSX desktop apps to its iOS, it only merged the core technology behindnand invent itself a new category of multi-touch applications commonly refers as Apps where no Mac OS X user did expect iPhone or iPad to run their comventional Mac OSX desktop apps on them. The beauty is if Apple ever wanted them to be, technically they can do that since this is all the same Coca APIs and Touch Frameworks out of the Xcode. In software perspectives this is “All new ball game” and much easier for developers now!

Microsoft on the other-hand, naming this web-apps only layer for tables as Windows 8 gives a BIG false hope for the user that they will run their typical Windows Apps. When they find that they DON’T here goes another vaporware down. Announcing this without ever getting ready to port it’s Windows native APIs for developers or hasn’t shown much interest in bringing its own cash cow Office Apps to the Windows 8 tablets. In contrast Apple released redesigned multi-touch enabled iWork alongside the first iPad launch even though iPad buyers did not initially except iPad to run iWork, when it did they found it surprise!

Why has Microsoft been so slow in seeing or showing any benefit to bring in its all successful desktop class software titles to the Win 8 tablets is anyone’s guess. Doesn’t it sees MS Office does make good money in Tablets and lock on the enterprise? The real issue is here that even for the biggest software maker on earth it takes enormous amount of time, resources and money which MS doesnt have to port it’s all legacy Windows APIs to ARM chip (the processor found on tablets) and beyond (remember Intel, sluggish Atom netbooks anyone? Does it happen any of Andriod or iOS app?) and let developers to build successful Windows native applications for these ARM based new world of energy efficient multi-touch devices.

People who tout Adobe Flash too, remember Flash was developed as single input device platform in mind (mouse). Adobe now cant run back and redesigned it as multi-touch finger friendly platform.

Egg before the hen issue here, any potential buyer who buys these Windows 8 tablets will expect them to run Windows applications (Native). So let alone buyers, why on earth any manufacture agrees to build such a tablet device instead of loyalty free Android is a question, on the other hand if you take iPad, which already has the economy of scale, apps and these already runs all Windows applications by the form of Citrix like remote desktop, visualization or by some other form of software. (For Eg: Documents to Go, QuickOffice)

Windows 8 will shatter the tablet market, yeah YOURS truly!

Looks like leading to the wilderness to me, a road to oblivion?

The only thing Windows 8 will do for tablets is to fragment non Apple fans between Android and Windows 8, making it easier for Apple to lead the tablet market even further. It will also fragment the efforts of companies like Samsung and HTC (HP and BB now out) that are trying to decide which platform makes most of the sense.

Microsoft’s experiments with a web-tablet by the name of Windows (it sounds full pledge Windows PC to the people except it isn’t) while confuse many and add evidence to the already Dead-On-Arrival HP’s WebOS Tablets and BB PlayBook lukewarm interest. remember those were similar but mature (Actually shipping devices!) webOS and Google’s Chrome OS devices. Both are another two ways of delivering a non-Windows, web-based experience on low power devices which hasn’t shown any commercial success yet.

So here we go, while Apple only faces a single credible competitor in smartphones, it appears there will be multiple disjointed efforts among tablets partners to prevent any one brand generating enough muscle to challenge the original iPad. Microsoft’s hoax “animated web-based Windows distraction layer” wowed some pundits, it’s just another skin of Kin, Zune or Windows 7 phone.

Even my 2 year old little is so obsessed with post PC mulch-touch devices I can clearly see that the iPad credibly challenges the conventional PC market, she will hold no resplendence to our “keyboard tethered hooked up beige boxes” nor will she ever make sense of it.

Funny Microsoft tries to make a web-application device in 2012 (out by when?) by sacrificing its core strength Windows and it’s Office in it. Plam Rest In Peace, HP is in flames of shame. BlackBerry digs their burial, Nokia is just figuring out what hit them. And now I guess MS is just started of seeing the ghosts of AppStore sans first iPhone in 2007.

Whether Microsoft can deliver Metro Office apps interesting enough to spur demand for Windows 8 tablets, or whether Windows 8 tablets will find a market without critical apps such as Office, are important issues Microsoft leaves completely unanswered.

Coolest cat leaves the den – Steve step aside from Apple!

Happy and sad, one of the most influential man in our time takes back seat. It was considered that the cat had the upper hand that we didn’t see any iPhone 4 or iPad II baseband hacks got materialized lately.

It’s like even by numbers itself almost everyone got cuddle up to the big cat’s paws.

Here are some of the best responses quotes of him.

Hope Apple will still produce the future we indulge!

Cheers and Good luck Steve!

Ginie out of the bottle, Finally a PC for my Dad!

Well, I was engulfed, long before most of the folks realize it makes less trouble to keep a Mac running than a PC. I started to use Mac back in 1998 and then switched to Windows and then again came back with Intel Macs in 2006 something. I knew it wasn’t the place I wanted to be, but it was the best place available for me to settle with minimum irritations. So I did settled with Macs and it’s OS X, switching back and forth with Windows clan. Almost all the time I just realized Macs just worked where PCs often failed, crashed, due to virus, software issue or a connection issue.

I saw a generations of people grew up, in 90′s, wanting, needing but without being really knowing how that they fit in, be in sync with this PC era. My mom, dad and uncle and the folks, they watch me in despair, that some idiot beige box I sit and stare and play in front of, wax it, tax it and fix it days without eating or beating. Dad specially wanted to know that what the darn thing is good at. He thought it was the culprit of his high electricity bills in our house. I tried telling him, but wasn’t all that good in doing so. But I wasn’t alone or the only one to blame.

The system was broken. Wires, minces, sockets, Windows, Macs, PCs, USBs, CDs, disks and zillion cables came with them made me a creature from a horror film of their time for my parents.

For me it was fun and game up until I had to work on projects, schedules. The cycle repeated when I got my first real mobile toy, Palm Treo 650, It was the Digital Nirwana for me, Still Dad and Mom’s day was dawned as usual, they didn’t know how to make a call with it even in emergency. I heard them calling, ” in our times, we never get a chance to learn this gizmos” they didn’t miss it, but they wished they could help me, or knew how to answer that gizmo big screen and keys Treo kept blinking when one of my friends call me.

And then came the iPhone. Using the Treo and switching to iPhone was unbelievable. I felt like the wiz kid in the Harry Potter Sequel. Touching, feeling, swiping, oh.. my god. That was so high. And the experience started to be an obsession, a drug, addiction. Apple is one of the most innovative companies and iOS is the best mobile platform still (2007-2012) out there. So I knew my parent’s day would come sooner than later. They played iPhone, looked through those beautiful pictures, play a song or two, and did answer calls came in while they were at it. It all felt natural, finger movements.

Swiftly fast forward the decade gone by of PC era, four years after the iPhone. Today I see when the generation of my kind, the netizens, wowed, glee and glued to the Apple’s iCloud keynote. I see a hope.

Suddenly I realized when Steve says ” It just works!” he actually means it, my parents’ day has come. I can jump up and yell, look Maa, no wires, finally! No, nothing to dangle. The iPad I may be gonna get for them, just works, right out of the box. No inheritance of the past post PC era iPhone they played with.

This image wraps up it all. Click for the full Engadget coverage here.

Finally the Ginnie is out of the bottle, a PC system without the nightmares of the PC world for the common man. All unified, the future waits right here with today’s Apple announces. Soon all will start their photocopiers but this time it would be very hard for anyone to offer anything this elegance all across the device spectrum. iOS, iPhone iPad and the upcoming OS X Lion. Wow!

So when I see that my parents are ready for iPad and I still wish my iPhone had that wonderful Treo keyboard. My little Sanu seems marvelously comfortable with “multi-touch” all natural finger movements as and when she learns them. This two years old is already quicker than my lousy hand with her iTouches. Here I realize the future is already here, already begun!

Cycle of Dreams…!

Abundance!

I remember
Since the childhood days
I was amazed with
Spellbound by
Geeked out
Wowed at
With the sheer marvel of tech gadgets
The electronics
High-tech gear
Gizmos!
I remember the ways
I was dreaming of having
A LCD calculator
A timer clock
A cassette
A Walkman
A high-beam MagLite torch
A telephone
A mobile phone
A CLIE PDA
A Treo Smartphone
World’s first true smart-phone
When it was more than a luxury
A 1000 Grands in local money
While I made mere fraction of it
Years gone by
Suddenly
I looked at my desk
7 iPhones in abundance!
It flashes me through the memories
Some dreams
Do really come true
When someone close by
Greeted me with his joy
Of his this new found toy
A dream of another me
Another Dreamsmademe
Breaks loose…
Expecting the least
Hoping for the best
Merry-go-round
Another Cycle-to-Begin with….

Pushing the impossible when failure is not an option!

These times are eventful. Corporate shakes are everywhere.

From the company I work for, Egypt as a country to HP-Palm to once rival Nokia – Microsoft handshake is intriguing stuff. I’ve been thinking this for a while since I was also going through some rough times, again.

I kinda like the new Microkia merger (or whatever you call it) because it reminds me the MS-DOS, IBM sega at one time which ended up with PC centric world.  Luckily Apple did survived for guys like me to have continuous fun. Even in 2006 no one believed Macs are more human and hassle free (think of viruses) this is after Apple had been running Mac OS X for nearly six years! So I hope Likewise I hope these new trends will define the tech landscape for the years to come and create more win-win atmosphere for everyone in the business. Unlike MS created an IBM cloned world, now Apple runs, Google dominated, RIM and Nokia world. All will have formidable counter competition that everyone’s luck will be hard pushed.

The movie “Jurassic Park” says some of this history’s worst things were done with best intentions. Likewise still some of these bold attempts may go fruitless without a sound plan or proper execution, unfortunately a reason sometimes now I can be reason with when I think of even my company’s perspective…

When corporations battered difficult times and came out, it is always the companies who learn from the past come out sound. Mine were also like that. When this cycles happen again and again, if the management get the illusion of security that things will itself work out “like” any “other” times and attempt to push the envelope further may almost commit suicide. These corporate stirs which exactly created the situation called “The Air Sandwich” where it actually hinders even a sound company’s bread and butter operations into a drag.

When employees had butterflies in the stomach to go for what the management outlines, you see these some of these bold moves collapse,

The top exec’s strategy doesn’t jive with what employees know to be true, questions stream continuously through people’s minds as internal dialogue:

“Is it just me, or is there a fatal flaw in this strategy?”…“Am I sup- posed to say something?”…“Will I get in trouble if I say some- thing?”…“Will I get in trouble if I don’t say something?”…“If I talk about my concerns, will I be perceived as a troublemaker?”…“If I can’t see how I can make this happen, will I be told I’m being too tactical?”…“Will I have to pay a price somewhere down the line if I look like I’m not on board with this plan?”

Questions such as “Should I say something?” or “Do they care about my opinion?” are whispered between coworkers when the organization lacks the tools for involving people and supporting collaboration in the strategy creation.

 

These kinds of unasked questions are a sure sign that a strategy is headed down the path toward failure, because they signal that the strategy wasn’t created properly or vetted deeply enough in the organization to be executed well.

Source:  “The New How” comes from the author Nilofer Merchant. Above is may be the best case study I was looking for. Excellent reading.

With new developments we will see the rising starts out of this rubble, I wonder how many mobile platforms can survive at the end of the day. Android was a fun product for Google when all it meant was bleeding Microsoft.  But it eventually made Apple into an enemy, and now Nokia.  Android seems unintended bonus and free wheeling for cheap Chinese manufactures to compete with the industry’s top brass. Google made an enemy that even Google itself will blindly get caught in the ripple effect. Google may have increased the display space so waste at the expense of others dime. But time only will say how that industry shake up turns in to sound business.

A beauty in my hand – Nikon D3100

This has been an ancient hobby as well as a desire. I was in love with digicams back in the days I have first seen them, and owned a Chinese (Mercury) model  since the day one they became affordable (to me) around 2001-2002. Then and there I have owned couple of Point & Shoots and for the last two years I was without a one.

Though I would have loved to have a DSLR  those were not in the affordable and sizable range until recently. Finally here seems a model that would fit in my hand under the wallet’s range. Reviews seemed good enough. So is the jump.

If you are in FB here you can enjoy some of the first picture those came out of my new camera. Back to a Forgotten Hobby – Experiments! (Facebook Album)

OUT OF MY FIRST COLLECTION

This is the first time I have taken a such lovely shot with bokeh (defuse background) effect.

Bye Bye Optical Discs! Apple sends the CDs in to the thin air!

This tale is interesting. I presumed this has to happen in one way or the other. I stopped piling up CDs roughly 2.5 years back when I brought my 500GB external drive.  With legendary iMac, Apple killed the Floppy Disc. Coincidentally Apple seem to be in the driving seat for the second time.And I guess they has confirmed that it is driving the final nail in to the Optical Disc Coffin too.

Today in modern computing world Optical Discs has no or little use. They are becoming more and more unpractical. CD/DVD are no longer used as they used to be in the past and they will soon go in the same way Floppy went, obsolete!

Also I guess the DVD is gonna be the last mass produced Optical Disc Format we saw in human history.

Now with recently announced Apple MacBook Air you open the box and you will find no Optical Discs inside. Normally, Apple includes at least one back-up DVD to reinstall OS X and other software if your computer fails. But now, that has been replaced with a super-slim USB stick. This stick, packed in with your manual, is all you need to reinstall your system now. (I’ve been doing this for years!) Apple has been shipping iPhone and iPod products without any Optical Disc doing a huge manufacturing and environmental saving. So all the Mac too will soon come without any CD or DVD in it’s packaging.

This makes a lot of sense. CDs were replaced by DVDs because they offered a lot more storage. But flash memory cards, such as the one Apple includes with the Air, are already blowing DVDs out of the water when it comes to storage. They may still be more expensive to produce, but Apple has clearly figured out a way to make it work.  As far as I can remember I have hardly ever used the DVD ROM drive in my Macbook for my own purposes except an occasional film on a DVD. And the the software, all of it, including the latest Windows 7 installation (ISO) I run from a file stored in my home network without ever needing a CD/ DVD. I even install Mac OS X if I ever need from a specially formatted 8GB USB Flash Drive without ever needing a Optical Drive on my Macs. So the future is already here, it’s just that we face it.

To add confirmation to the theory, Apple even unveiled a Mac App Store. It will work pretty much just as their App Store does on the iPhone. There will be free and paid apps. There will be one-click downloads. There will be automatic updates. All that. Bingo!

There won’t be are any optical discs. No shrink wrapped Software Boxes anymore!

Up until now, the vast majority of software (at the commercial variety) has been distributed by way of CD or DVD. The Mac App Store could very well change that. Every app found on that store, undoubtedly including the big ones we all know and love and use on our computers today, will be distributed over the Internet. This is long overdue.

Plenty of companies have tried Internet distribution for a long time. Some have success, and some don’t. But none have the type of central repository that Apple is offering here. This is going to be huge.

If it sounds similar to what Google is working on with the Chrome Web Store, or what Mozilla is proposing with their Open Web Ecosystem, remember that those are only web apps. We’re talking native applications for the Mac App Store. We’re talking apps that run on our computer, just like we have now, they’re just distributed in a way that makes a lot more sense.

They’re distributed in a way that makes the CD, DVD, and every other optical disc obsolete. And that’s good, since soon the optical drives will start to fade out of existence as well.

With the launch of the iTunes Music Store years ago, Apple put the wheels in motion to kill the CD. Then they sphere ahead the iPhone App Store without ever needing a single Optical Disc for 100 million odd iOS devices sold.

Today, they kicked off their Final Assault. There will be no survivors.

(Inspired by a www.techcrunch.com)

RIM or RIP – Is BB driving downhill?

Sometimes we need a head-turner. I guess after the Palm’s debacle and MS Mobile extinction, RIM needs one too. That’s what my favorite tech analyzer Michael Mace says. For most conventional tech companies the story seems a good lesson.

Outstanding analysis,  I would say, you must read on

Berried in BlackBerry Maze

I agree nonetheless. This was the exact same reasons why Palm did fail and went unheard of now with their mobile strategy.

I saw this problem when in the last days of my Palm Treo 650 use. I had no successor to turned towards but Apple’s new comer. yet, for the sake of the platform, assuming Palm will turn the tables. I brought a Treo 680 just to give Palm a breathing room to reinvent. They never did it in time. WebOS was good, good enough to keep me hooked but they missed it by large 2-3 year head start of Apple Rainbow Marketing Machine.

Also as some comments suggests I see no immediate threat to Apple from Android clan or any other, which is mostly fragmented. I have tried the greatest Nexus One to the latest Samsung Galaxy S, all at least trialling a year behind gaining the perfection to the amount of the very first iPhone ecpectations.

I am being modest and not bias, the iPhone experience can not be matched by Android just as yet.

Also since I know of little bit of iPhone Ecosystem and after life (www.iphonion.com), iPhone users hardly switch phones, perhaps not at all for another year or two.

So they only cut into MS mobile, RIM, Nokia and Chinese knock off sales, not in to Apple’s cash cow.

Though technically and mentally challenging I presume the best bet for the mobile consumer would have been either RIM or MS was buying out Palm which didn’t happen. MS survives due to bigger PC earned chest to live up to WP7, even that now rivaled by Google Android and gains no momentum as yet. RIM on the other hand has no any other business than sweat on mobiles.

Apple now even drawing the focus elsewhere like TV-in-Apps back to Mac OS like things which drives variation while others struggle just to copy what Apple did a good four years back with their competent bleeding edge iOS ecosystem.

I have personally not used a BB though, I loved Treo 650 keyboard, which was the only reason I would have brought a BB if ever. Now even my 1.5 year old so accustomed to finger swipes, where now she even tend to swipe my “ordinary” laptop and camera screens as they are “multi-touch” enabled. The golden days for Physical Buttons (Treo Keyboard and BB) also seems doomed in the tech space.

There goes Michael Mace‘s good article. Head on with little BB rant.