Apple margin per device – expressed in Chinese
[Image by Sven Teschke] An article in the New York Times published 2 days ago suddenly gained a lot of traction and got discussed, reposted and reblogged today: Apple making money off of the United States, while directly employing “only” twice as many employees in the US than overseas – but indirectly more than ten [...]
Steve Jobs
I have paid attention to Steve Jobs only in knowing he was producing some pretty sexy products at Apple. I had never owned one until December 23rd of 2011. I had however respected Apple & Job’s Products. I knew very little about the level of his drive and passion. I also knew little about his [...]
Why Every Company Needs to be More Like IBM and Less Like Apple
I was thirteen years old when I first saw it on TV. An army of blue-gray drones march in lockstep through a long tunnel into an auditorium filled with more drones dressed in futuristic, grey drab. All eyes are transfixed on a big-blue image of a man speaking from a theatre-sized screen, extolling the virtues [...]
Reality Distortion Field : 17 Companies’ Sitrep
I’m sitting on the bus this morning. As happens almost every day of the week. I’m flipping pages, sort of, it’s an eBook on my Kindle App. I’m reading about Steve Jobs taking over the Macintosh Program at Apple. How things started to fall into place for Apple, for the Macintosh, and how Jobs saw what could be a pushed for it. Everybody else; Microsoft, Xerox, Canon, and practically every single other company was missing it. Xerox Parc had it right in front of them, the GUI, Mouse, Object Oriented Language, and about every single thing we assume for computer use and development today but wasn’t doing anything with it. They were all missing it, except Jobs. The eccentric, crazed, reality distortion field generating Jobs pushed forward and found those that agreed, this was absolutely the future. Today’s computers owe so much to Jobs efforts to pull these people together, to what he saw as the future, and our modern computing world will forever be indebted to Steve Jobs.
Howard Hues had done this 50 years earlier. He simply stated, “nobody wants to fly on a plane at 10k feet and get shaken to pieces, planes need to fly at 30,000 feet or more were the air is smooth!” He then went about working to get a plane built that could do this! The Government was in his way, the industry was fighting him, everybody said this wasn’t the way to go. Nobody could build a plane that would do that right now! It’s absurd. He did it, and bought every single one of them he could putting the airline (TWA) in hock at the same time! But it paid off, and his airline had the nicest planes, best flight in the world, easily. Today’s airlines are all modeled after this ideal, our modern travel owes a huge debt to what Howard Hughes pushed forward.
The competition, the fighting pushed the envelope, but in both cases a visionary could see the future. To them it was plain as an image on a clear sunny day. To them, the future didn’t need to be tomorrow, it was ready right now. The future just needed dragged kicking and screaming directly into today! They did this, they pulled people together who could make these changes, and they with their teams yanked the future right into humanity’s grasp.
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Consumer and enterprise IT company analysis
In January this year I did an analysis of “classical” US IT companies: Google, Microsoft and Apple, which are targeting consumers, and Oracle, SAP, IBM and HP, which are targeting companies. Yes that’s a fairly big generalisation but please allow me to do so… This is the update which includes the next year, I need [...]
The good, bad and ugly of cloud mobile apps
Since the introduction of the iPhone we have gotten used to expecting more functionality from smaller , more portable devices. Today smartphones ship with dual core chips and cameras more powerful than the digital camera I bought a few years ago. However, even with all the advancement in hardware for these devices they remain constrained [...]
Kingdom Conquest from Sega, ITunes, and Theft
From what I have been able to research the Kingdom Conquest in app purchases that are unauthorized just keep on coming. It has been about a year now (based on what I was able to find) that this has been a known issue, with Apple giving refunds to customers. Given the amount of data, it [...]
Weekend Review: Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson
Just finished reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and thought I will add few thoughts here. Two words that came out of my mind after finishing the book: Filthy Genius I saw many reviews that talked about possible bias in favor of Jobs but I never spotted the bias. In fact, I started reading the [...]
Innovation Culture Eats R&D for Breakfast
Research and development is a mainstay of the innovation strategy for companies. And with good reason. R&D can invent new products and technologies that redefine markets. Think electricity, telephones, airplanes, semiconductors, the Internet. R&D can pave the way for whole new industries. Exciting, for sure! But there’s a problem. Too many companies treat R&D as [...]
Did Apple finally get hitched?
[Image by Roberta F.] Thanks to Peter Hicks for inspiring me for this title Lately I’ve noticed quite a few complaints regarding the upgrade to Apple’s iOS5. A few examples of that: the upgrade itself failing to complete, having to restore factory settings and lose all apps and files, battery draining like mad, Twitter failing [...]
iSalute : Remembering Steve Jobs
I was about to board my flight at Chicago’s O’Hare when the news of Steve Jobs passing away broke. When I landed in San Fran (My United flight did not have Wi-Fi)- my thoughts were with the family, Apple colleagues and the huge number of Steve Jobs and Apple supporters. Innumerable iPads, Macs, iPods inside [...]
Steve Jobs THINK DIFFERENT – a Visual Tribute
Saddened by the loss of an individual who has brought great joy and anticipation back into our lives. He’s the only individual I know of where millions of people tune into his product announcements. He’s earned that level of attention by bringing to market products that create emotional bonds with the owner. So, out of [...]
Amazon’s Kindle Fire diverges the Tablet market
In his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species. Last week Amazon enhanced their Kindle range of e-readers, but also applied some divergence to the tablet market by extending in to a new sub-category of mobile tablet devices with the Kindle Fire. I think it’s [...]
Innovation – today’s Golden Calf
This week I had a conversation about Innovation and IBM. Vijay Sankarav wrote a follow-up post on that as he was forced to “leave early” – this is my reply to that. I think the three of us usually agree pretty much on pretty much everything. And this was an awkward one really It all [...]
Mac Battles, The Personal Day to Day of Software Development and Morale
I’ve been using a Mac for a couple of months now. My employer purchased a few for us coders to try out, and I’ve become spoiled. I rarely want to use my other machines now, as they seem cumbersome and inefficient. Mainly from a hardware perspective, as the OS itself seems to have plusses and [...]
