Tag: tim bajarin

The iPad Mini Hits Windows 8 Where It Ain’t

Tim Bajarin muses on whether it was a mistake for Microsoft to focus Windows 8 on the the larger screen sizes:

When Microsoft decided to get into the tablet business again, it pretty much committed to 9- to 11-inch tablets, mostly eyeing the business market.

… it is clear that Microsoft will stay this course and will not manufacture 7-inch Windows 8 tablets directly or through a partner any time soon.

I believe this is a major judgment error by Microsoft because the plethora of 7-inch tablets coming out soon will become a huge hit with consumers.

Consumers appear to be extremely interested in an iPad mini, but I predict many business users will also fancy it…(too)

Tim goes on to make several excellent points. I would add this. I think the rumored iPad Mini will be a MONSTER hit in education. The current iPad is taking education by storm and the rumored iPad mini will turn the current torrent of iPad adoptions into a virtual flood.

Microsoft is in a very tough spot. They need to get into tablets. They are wise to go with their strength (business). But they can’t neglect education either. It may sound trite, but children are the future. Kids are already enamored with the iPhone and the iPad. Microsoft is in a dog fight to recapture this generation of tablet users. However, if they let the iPad become the de facto standard in education at the K-12 and college levels, all their efforts may be for naught. While they’re busy fighting for today’s customers, they will have already lost tomorrow’s.

Why Microsoft WILL Buy Nokia

In a recent post on Why Google had to buy Motorola, I pointed out that both Ben and I had predicted that this would happen because we were convinced that in order for a company to really be successful in tablets and smartphones they had to own the ecosystem of hardware, software and services.

Today’s announcement that Google would buy Motorola’s Mobility Solutions group underscores this thinking. As Google studied the ingredients of Apples success, it became obvious that Apple’s ownership of the OS and then its ability to fine-tune the hardware to deliver a seamless user experience was critical to consumer’s strong acceptance of the iPad and iPhone. Apple uses this ownership to drive amazing innovation.

This allows them to deliver the upcoming iCloud service so that it can synchronize content and data between all OS devices and utilizes the hardware in special ways. And it gives them a platform for future innovation. For example, what if the next version of the Nano has Bluetooth on it and can be used in a wristband/watch option. Since it is IOS based, it would have the new alert system that will be in IOS 5. That means that technically, if you get an alert on your iPhone in your pocket, that same alert shows up on your Nano watch. This is just one example of how Apple can continue to drive innovation at the hardware, software and services integration level. Knowing Apple I am sure they have dozens of these types of things in the works.

Google clearly went to school on this and while they claim that the patents were a key part of the reason they bought Motorola Mobility, the other reason is that they clearly know that by owning the hardware and software they can now drive the innovation of Android from both the hardware and software level and take more control of their future. And while they want others to keep licensing Android, they basically threw their partners under the bus in order to insure Androids long term success. I predict you will see Android defections or at the very least, companies hedging their bets by endorsing a third alternative by the end of Sept.

Now, don’t think that this same thinking has escaped Microsoft. They have to have come to the same conclusion. Microsoft clearly wants Windows Mobile Phone 7 to become a worldwide hit and at this moment, Nokia is just another distributor of Windows Phone 7 in the same way HTC and other are. But if they decide to keep this OS as a pure licensed property and trust the hardware partners to innovate on their own, that boat has sailed. They too will come to the conclusion that if they want Windows Mobile 7 to be the third major alternative to Apple’s IOS and Google’s Android, they will need to own the hardware as well as the software and services.

Of course, this goes completely against their 30 years of history of being a software licensing company. Actually, they have precedent in hardware with the XBOX. But the rules have changed when it comes to mobile and I believe that Google’s move to buy Motorola Mobility has now forced Microsoft’s hand.

I now believe that it is no longer a matter of “if” Microsoft will buy Nokia but instead a question of “when” they will do it to make sure that Windows Mobile 7 can compete against Apple and Google.

6 Ways Apple Has Influenced the Last 30 years of the PC Industry

On Aug 12th, the industry celebrated the birthday of the IBM PC and its impact on our world of information. But we would be remiss if we did not also point out some of the key technologies Apple brought to the PC industry and how some of their pioneering technology and decisions actually pushed the PC industry towards stronger growth.

Credit: Austin Computer Museum

The first technology was the Mac and its graphical user interface. When the Mac was introduced in January of 1984, the IBM PC had been out for three years already, and its UI was still text based. But Apple shook up the computing establishment by introducing the Mac with its GUI, mouse and voice feedback and forever changed the man-machine interface for good.

The second major thing they did is toss out the 5 ¼ inch floppy disk and move to what quickly became the next major storage medium for PC’s. Jobs and company decided that the Mac should have a 3 ½ inch disk. At the time, the computing establishment smirked at Apple’s bold move, but soon after realized that this smaller disk size allowed them to create smaller PC’s and by 1986 this smaller floppy became the mainstream industry standard.

Their third major decision was to introduce a Postscript laser printer at an affordable price. This was a huge industry breakthrough. Most laser printers at the time cost well over $50,000 and took up a large space in an office. Not only did Apple bring this laser printer in at a price under $10,000, but also their laser printer actually sat on a desktop. Then, they were smart enough to link Aldus’ Pagemaker to the Mac and this laser printer and desktop publishing was born. From a historical perspective, you cannot underestimate how much this desktop publishing solution has impacted the world of publishing, graphics and even movies.

The fourth major thing they did was introduce Mac’s with CD Rom drives. Again, this was a revolutionary move at the time and in fact, this ushered in the era of multimedia computing. I had the privilege of being a part of the first multimedia roundtable held at UCLA in 1990 that was co-sponsored by Apple and saw first hand the potential that a CD ROM would have on computing by allowing a PC, for the first time, to deliver a storage device that could integrate text, images, audio and video into a storytelling medium. Again, the traditional PC vendors smirked at Apple’s move and said it was just another unneeded expense. But within two years they got the message and started to integrate them into mainstream PC’s as well. And, with the CD rom in PC’s, for the first time, the PC garnered serious attention from mainstream consumers. If you know your PC history you know that it was multimedia computers that finally got the PC into homes and the consumer PC market was born as a direct result of the role the CD ROM played in bringing multimedia content to the PC experience.

The fifth major influence on the traditional PC market came with the introduction of Apple’s colored Mac’s not long after Steve Jobs came back to run Apple in 1997. In fact, this major move to make industrial design a cornerstone of all Apple Macs has, over the last decade, forced the PC industry to completely rethink what a PC should look like and again, it took Apple to lead the way and help them see the future of the PC.

And now they have introduced the iPad. While Jobs likes to say that this is product of the post PC era, I beg to differ with him on one point. If you open up an iPad, it has a motherboard, CPU, memory, IO’s, screens, etc. In my world, that is a PC. And in that sense, Jobs and team again is influencing the PC market in an even more dramatic fashion.

While over the 30 years of the IBM PC, Apple did not achieve the type of market share of the HP’s, Dells, Acer’s etc. And during much of this time, the company actually struggled to remain relevant. But nobody can deny their impact during this period and now, it is the Dells, HP’s et all who are all chasing Apple.

How Amazon Could Own the Android Tablet Market

One of the first marketing classes I had in college discussed the concept of razors and razor blades. Sell the razors cheap and then sell men blades over and over. The profit would be in the blades, not the razors. In our tech world, we have our own version of this. It is called printers and printer cartridges. The printer companies sell their printers at a very low price, perhaps even under cost, knowing full well that they will sell users expensive ink cartridges over and over. The profit is never in the printer. It all comes from the ink cartridges and companies like HP and Epson make billions of dollars a year from their ink business.

With this in mind, if I were Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, I would really go to school on this concept and see if it could be applied to tablets. This model would never work for the PC vendors at this stage of the PC game. Although their PC’s are getting cheaper, they are not tied to an eco-system of software and services in which they could derive additional revenue tied to the PC and earn recurring revenue this way.

But I believe that the tablet is the first PC like device where this could be possible. So, Jeff, if you are listening, here is my suggestion to you. Sell your tablet at a price that is really cheap. Perhaps you sell it for 20-25% below cost. I know this sounds crazy and radical, but you actually have the recurring revenue ecosystem to potentially pull this off. It would take some serious guts to do this but if any one could do it, Amazon could.

In this model, think of the tablet as the razor. And in Amazon’s specific case, their Android Store, UnBox movie service and music service would be part of the “blades” they sell to users over and over again. And add to that the profit they could get through their Kindle bookstore as well as items you might buy from the Amazon store. And then add any Amazon cloud service revenue tied to the device that could also be part of an amortized profit pool over perhaps a two-year accounting period.

With info I have on components from my contacts in Taiwan, I was able to do some back of the envelope calculations to see how this could work. Bill of material costs along with manufacturing costs, shipping and tariffs most likely would put the device cost around $300 depending on its specs. For sake of argument, let’s use this as the baseline. But let’s say Amazon discounts this by $51,00 and sells it for $249.

Now, they do some research and determine that over a two year period, a person who has that tablet would buy or rent 15 movies, stream or download 50 songs, could buy 18 books and might pays $5.00 a month for cloud storage from Amazon. And, they purchase let’s say five items through the tablet’s Amazon store that can be counted against a 2 year amortized profit curve. And lets throw in some advertising in this mix as well. Although the prices of the books, video, music, etc would vary, by my guestimates, they would make back the lost “cost” of that $51.00 within six months and realize a profit of anywhere from 20-35% on the tablet over the last 18 months of the devices accounting period.

Amazon already has the trust of over 200 million users as well as their credit cards. And their “one click” buying model would make it quite easy for an Amazon tablet user to buy often through both the Android store and the Amazon store in general. Of course there are a lot of variables in this model, but you get the idea. The tablet is the razor and all of these apps and services are the blades.

Now imagine how this could affect the other Android vendors making tablets. Amazon would provide a product that if sold under cost with the goal of making up the rest of the cost and profit from apps, services and even advertising, it could give all of the other Android vendors a serious run for their money. And, given their deep eco system, other Android vendors would find it very difficult to compete with them. This could make Amazon, measured by units shipped, the king of Android tablets very quickly. In fact, I would go as far as say that they could “own” the Android tablet market.

For Apple, this would be a competitive threat but they have a pretty big lead and their own rich echo system of apps and services that could continue to keep them a market leader in tablets. And given their history of riding down prices of the iPod once it gets to scale, you can imagine that Apple will also be more aggressive with the iPads pricing over time and, as they are today, use their apps, services and the upcoming iCloud to deliver high margins for a long time.

But as radical as this idea might sound, it could make a lot of sense for Amazon to go to market with their tablet with this business model. As I stated earlier, it would take guts, but the impact on the market for tablets could be significant if they did this right and the consumers bought into their version of the old razor/razor blade school of marketing.

What is the future of the PC Industry?

As I perused the recent PC shipment numbers from last quarter and saw that they were rather anemic and with relatively slow growth forecast in the future, it became even more evident to me that we are at a major inflection point in our journey with personal computers. We started this journey in the 1950’s with mainframes and then went on to minicomputers. But with both of these technologies, only a limited amount of people had access to them.

But when the PC came on the scene, it democratized the computing experience and made it possible for millions of users to experience the virtues of a computer. At each point in history, as we moved from mainframes-to-mini’s-to PC’s, we have had a major inflection point in which one technology faded from the forefront and the one’s following it took center stage. But even as we moved from one computing design to another, the older technology matured and took a different place in our digital world. Mainframes are now the super computers and backbones of huge enterprises. Minis have transitioned to powerful workstations and clustered servers in a sense. And the PC’s, which cut the cords to mainframes and mini’s to define their existence have become the workhorses within a family’s home, managing their digital movies, photos, finances, etc. At this stage PC’s have matured and settled into a comfortable place where its reason for existence is more and more focused on handling the heavy digital lifting we need from time to time.

Now, even if the PC market is slowing down and is not as robust as in the past, we are still going to sell 350-400 million PC’s every year for some time. They have a place and will continue to be important digital tools in business and the home. However, we are at the next major inflection point and PC’s are about to take a back seat to the newcomers that will define the next major growth phase of computing.

I believe that this inflection point can be described as going from personal computing to personalized computing and will be defined by tablets and smartphones that take all types of shapes, form factors and designs that make the computing experience more personalized and customizable. This inflection point is just as dramatic as when the PC came on the scene and cut the chord between the mainframes and mini’s and brought personal computing local. Another way to think of this is that we are moving into a phase in which people want a PC on their desktop and in their pocket.

But, it goes even deeper if you look at the PC, tablets and smartphones as just another screen in our digital lives. In the future we will have a lot of screens in our lives as well. A screen in our cars with a 3G chip in it so that our cars can be connected to the cloud at all times. Or screens in our refrigerator that is tied to application specific functions related to the kitchen and food. Or a screen built into the mirrors in our bathroom that is tied to the Internet and can deliver custom information on demand as we get ready to head out for the day.

Here is a chart from one of our presentation decks that shows what this might look like. Out in the periphery are a whole host of screens. Next is a layer of services that serve as gateways to things like apps and various services that are then tied to the cloud.

This new inflection point is being led by tablets and smartphones but is bound to carry over to a whole host of others screens people might choose to meet more personalized needs over time.

On the surface, the PC industry and PC companies who have a history as hardware vendors should see this as a new opportunity to extend their PC design and manufacturing prowess to this new extended personalized computing opportunity. But that is not the case. Except for Apple who has made this transition quite smoothly, the rest of the PC vendors are quite challenged when it comes to designing products outside their normal PC expertise. And it is really unclear to me if they ever will be able to extend their experience in PC and laptop expertise to personalized computing.

It gets even more interesting when you realize that hardware is actually only 1/3rd of the equation. In the future of “personalized computing” there is also the apps and services layer and then how all of these work with and react to a cloud based back end. These screens may be smart but they get much smarter when they have apps and are connected to the Internet.

At the moment, most of the Windows PC vendors realize that moving to a tablet/smart phone extension of their business is pretty tough. Indeed, the big guys seem to be putting more energy in the core strength’s, which are enterprise computing and SMB. I don’t think they will give up but I suspect this will be a big struggle for them to create “personalized” computing devices that really add to their bottom line.

This leaves room for potential outsiders to swoop in and become major players if they have the ability to create new “screens” of their own that can be tied to a rich eco system of apps and cloud services. The one that I see on the horizon that fits this description is Amazon. It is widely rumored that they will do a tablet this fall. But it is their back end and services that could make them a major player over night. They have a music store, a video store, an Android apps store and the big kicker-credit cards of over 200 million users. Like Apple, they have spent over a decade building this back end and customer loyalty/commerce engine and would be well positioned to end up being the #2 consumer tablet player almost overnight.

Further Reading: The Amazon Tablet Opportunity Could be Huge

So how will this ultimately impact the traditional PC vendors? My best guess is that they will not be able to compete in the consumer tablet and smartphone market unless they pour billions of dollars into building similar cloud based back ends and services that make their digital screens sing. The only traditional PC vendor who could have a chance at playing in this new personalized computing consumer space is HP if they are willing to make the billions of dollars in investments to build out their own eco system of apps, services and a rich cloud back end that equals Apple and Amazon.

Further Reading:
HP TouchPad Review – 3 Things that Set it Apart
10 Days with the HP Touchpad

Instead, what I believe will happen is that the traditional PC makers could and should make a major push into corporate with tablets and own that space. Yes, Apple is gaining serious ground here, but they don’t have an enterprise sales and service organization that is really needed to support and integrate tablets into an IT department. In the end, I believe they will realize that it will be almost impossible to compete at the consumer level with Apple and Amazon and put more of their energy into enterprise and SMB focused tablets.

The PC market is maturing and mainstream PC vendors are still well positioned to create new and innovative products around PC ‘s and laptops that could still see yearly growth as much as 10% over the next few years. But I am not optimistic about their chances of extending their computing expertise beyond the more traditional PC and laptop form factors and take serious ownership of the digital consumer. That will come from Apple and Amazon and anyone who can build out a complete eco system of hardware, software and services that really meet the needs of the consumers of the future.

Why Tablets Won’t Cannibalize Laptop Sales – Yet at Least

If any of you have gone out to buy a laptop computer lately, you may have asked yourself “do I need a laptop or could I get by with a tablet?” We know from our research that this question is top of mind with a lot of consumers these days as tablets have really clouded their thinking when it comes to new laptop purchases.

Last summer, when the PC vendors were planning their spring collection of laptops, consumer tablets were still in their infancy. Apple’s iPad had some serious interest from consumers but at that time, it had only been on the market for a few months and the vendors did not see it as a threat to their laptop business. But by the holiday season they realized that Apple not only had a hit on their hands but also were pushing more and more non-PC vendors to jump on the tablet bandwagon. They also saw that Apple’s iPad and Google’s Android tablets were starting to get serious attention from potential laptop buyers.

But the problem for the PC vendors is that the projection of cannibalization of laptops by tablets is also all over the map. Some financial analysts that I talk to who cover the PC vendors think that tablets could cannibalize as much as 50% of the laptop business for traditional PC vendors by 2014. In my talks with PC vendors, they currently fear that tablets could impact their total laptop sales by more then 10-12% over the next three years.

However, a new report from Bernstein Research Analyst Toni Sacconaghi is challenging this assumption. John Paczkowski over at the AllThingsD blog shared the reports findings and added some thoughts in his article. Sacconaghi believes that tablets are not cannibalizing notebooks but are instead converging with them. He postulates that a product like Apple’s MacBook Air, with its thin and light design, is more synergistic to Apple’s iPad. And that it represents a broader convergence of the tablet and notebook designs.

He is on to something here. If you look at the key trends in processor designs that focus on very low voltage yet high performance, you see that PC vendors now have the technology to create very thin and light laptops that in some ways work the same way. With a tablet, all you need is a Bluetooth keyboard and it in essence is a notebook. What’s more, if you take a very thin and light laptop and put a touch screen on it that can be folded back or slid down, you have a tablet.

Mr. Saccononaghi also says “ironically, availability of such notebook devices might undermine tablets sales rather then vice versa.” That is a possibility. But the blurring may really come through what we call Hybrids or sliders. When I was in Taipei a few weeks ago I saw a couple of products called sliders. The one officially launched was the Asus slider but I also saw one behind the scenes that will be ready for the holidays that was even cooler then the one from Asus. Both work like a laptop when the screen is slid up and then works like a tablet when the screen is slid down. A tablet and laptop all-in-one!

We see this hybrid slider as the device that actually does blur the two devices into one and could end up driving a portion of the market to buy products like these instead of a laptop or a tablet individually. However these designs still have small 10.1 inch screens and laptop users – who are used to larger screens to work with – may be intrigued by this design but still opt for a laptop and a tablet if they feel the need both.

What’s interesting is that if you consider a tablet a portable computer and lump them into total portable computer sales, Apple would be the #1 portable computer maker in the market today with HP being a distant second.

In the end I believe it will come down to personal choices. If a person uses their computers more for productivity, then a laptop is still needed. But if they mostly use computers for content consumption, then a tablet is more ideal for them.

Either way, consumers will end up with a lot of compelling choices and form factors for ultra light computing and will buy the ones that make sense for them. And for the PC industry, the amount of portable computers shipped starting in 2013 will increase by at least 50%. The big question when we get to 2015 though will be who the real Apple challengers will be and how much market share Apple will still own in both the ultra light laptop and tablets markets by the middle of the decade.

HP’s TouchPad-Can it compete with Apple’s iPad and Android Tablets?

Over the last few weeks I have spent a lot of time testing out two new tablets that are now on the market. The first is the Samsung 10.1” Galaxy Tab and the second is the new Palm TouchPad. Up until these two tablets came out it was clear to me that Apple pretty much had the tablet market to themselves. And while I had also tested the 7 inch Galaxy Tab, the 7 inch Zoom and the 7 inch RIM PlayBook, I felt that the real competition for the iPad would only come when we had tablets with 9- 10 inch screens that rivaled the iPad’s design.

For a full week I carried all three of these tablets with me everywhere I went and used them each for all of the basic tasks I do daily on a tablet. All three have very good Web browsers although Flash works just like it does on a PC on the TouchPad. All three have good touch based user interfaces. And to some degree, they actually all looked the same when I laid them down on a table and the screen was turned off. As I have stated in previous articles, one major attraction of a tablet to me is that it is a highly portable screen that serves as a window to the Internet, applications and ultimately the cloud. Of course, once you pick them up you notice immediately that the iPad is the sleekest of the bunch and the new Palm Touchpad is the thickest of the three.

Much has been written about the iPad so I won’t spend any time on this elegant product that, at the moment, dominates the tablet market. And there are dozens of reviews out on the Galaxy Tab as well. And reviews for RIM’s Playbook are also plentiful. So for this article I would like to share some thoughts on HP’s Touchpad, the newest tablet on the market and I will focus on two pressing questions.

The first question I get asked often is whether the Palm Touchpad is competitive?
The simple answer is yes it is. We have worked with Web OS for many years and consider this the most stable mobile OS on the market next to Apple’s IOS. And although our familiarity with Web OS has mainly come through the Pre, using it on the tablet now was as easy as it was when I first got the iPad and used IOS on it the same way I had used it on the iPhone. In that sense, Palm Pre users will feel right at home with this tablet.

With that in mind, it is clear to me from a hardware and software OS standpoint, that this is a solid product and one that is more then competitive at these levels. However, this leads me to the second major question I get often.
Can HP/Palm be successful with the TouchPad coming to market this late and with very little software support from the 3rd party developers?

This is a harder question to answer and one that needs to focus on three key things that HP/Palm need to do to make it a market winner.

First, they have to step up their efforts with the third party community and drive them to create thousands of native apps for the TouchPad. When I used native Web OS apps on the TouchPad that are identical to ones that are on the iPad or Android platforms, they looked just as good and worked the same as the do on these other operating systems. And in some cases, thanks to the Touchpad’s UI and multitasking, some worked even better.

On the test unit I had, many of the 6500 Web OS apps available at launch were apps written for the 3.5 inch Pre screens and do not scale to the 9.7  inch screen on the Touchpad. And unlike Apple’s iPhone apps on the iPad, they don’t even have a 2X button to artificially make them scale to a full screen and just sit in a 3.5 inch window in the center of the TouchPad. Although these apps work, they clearly do not take advantage of this new screen real estate. However, there are 300 apps written for the Touchpad that do work in full screen mode. This to me is perhaps their greatest challenge given the fact that Apple has over 60,000 native apps for the iPad and counting and Android has bout 10,000 tablet apps and strong developers support for this platform.

Second, they are going to need to make sure their channel partners really know how to sell the Touchpad and can demonstrate the areas where it differentiates from the iPad and Android tablets. Unlike Apple, who has their stores to enhance the selling process of the iPad, HP has to lean on its hundreds of thousands retailers of all sizes to sell this new product for them. And I believe they will need to spend serious ad dollars over the next 18 months around the world if they want to make any dent in the iPad and Android Tablet market share that is growing by leaps and bounds.

But the third thing that they need to do is put a tight focus on tablet solutions for the enterprise. They need to deliver a seamless integration of the TouchPad with their current IT services and solutions programs. The market for tablets is very crowded in the consumer space and even if they get more apps and spend more ad dollars pushing people to the channel to buy the Touchpad, they have a lot of competition from Apple and Google there. On the other hand the enterprise market for tablets is in its infancy. Yes, Apple has made some impressive headway in enterprise but this is not their primary focus for the iPad. And Windows 8 for Tablets is still a year away and Android’s lack of major security software and enterprise apps has slowed down its adoption in the enterprise.

But HP pretty much owns the enterprise for PC’s, laptops and servers and with a major focus on integrating the Touchpad into their overall IT solutions program, HP could deliver a powerful tablet that enterprises could adopt in large numbers. I consider this a critical factor for the TouchPad’s ultimate success and all indications are that HP is going to key in on the enterprise with this new tablet of theirs as well as extend Web OS to PC platforms to give developers even more incentive to create apps for Web OS. HP has hinted that they will ship as many as 100 million Web OS devices yearly, of which 70-75 million will be integrated into their PC’s and tablets.

Given the strong lead Apple has in the tablet market and the inroads Android is making via its various licensees, HP will clearly have an uphill battle coming to the market this late with their new TouchPad. But I am very bullish on it’s the quality of its OS and even the Touchpad’s solid design. If they can get strong software support as well as make enterprise a key target for this tablet, then the TouchPad can clearly be competitive and could become a third solid tablet device that consumers and business users can choose from in the years ahead.

Why Apple’s Loss of Retail Chief to JC Penney is Apple’s Gain

I have written in various columns over the last few months, that once Apple moved the center of our digital life from the Mac and to the cloud, they could be freed up to offer many more devices that are Apple branded and gain greater features from their cloud offering.

This idea became crystal clear when Steve Jobs demoted the Mac to being just one of their devices that connect to the cloud. What Jobs and Company know very well is that we are moving to a world in which users will have a whole lot of screens in their digital lifestyle and will not be limited to just the PC like devices we use today to access the cloud. Over time, we will have screens in our cars, refrigerators, household fixtures, etc and all will have some type of connection to the cloud. Actually we are in what I call the first phase of “screenplays” in which the PC, smart phone and tablets are the dominant screens for this type of cloud based connectivity. Continue reading Why Apple’s Loss of Retail Chief to JC Penney is Apple’s Gain