Category: Featured Tech.pinions

The One Feature I Still Want From My Smart Phone

I love smart devices and more to the point I love the potential for smart devices. At the core of my work as an analyst I try to the best of my ability to look at what smart devices do today but to also look at what they may become in the future. I like to look at technologies, products, solutions, etc., and analyze their future potential in light of their present value. It is with this mindset that I have been taking on an experiment I have not done in quite some time.

Since attending Google I/O I have been using as my primary smart phone the Google Nexus running the latest Android OS Jelly Bean. When I get new Android devices, and I get many, I can generally only stand using them as my main smart phone for about a week. My patience runs thin with Android due to the role my smart phone plays in my professional life. The focus of this column is not entirely on my Android experience as I intend to write one just on that subject. But I have been using the Google Nexus with Jelly Bean for almost two months now and it is the first time in a very long while that I have not felt the need to rush back to my iPhone. The last time that happened was with the very first Google Nexus.

I still have my gripes, but the fact I have been able to integrate Android into my life for this long is saying something in my opinion. However, there is one new feature Google has developed with Jelly Bean that has thoroughly piqued my interest.

Google Now and the Anticipation Engine

The feature that Google has developed that has not only piqued my interest but given me quite a bit of food for thought around the potential of smart devices in the future is Google Now. Google positions Google Now as a feature that gives you just the right information at just the right time. The emphasis of this feature is contextually relevant information but it runs much deeper than that.

At the core Google Now learns about key habits on top of attempting to present contextually relevant information. The goal being to present at a glance timely and contextually relevant information. We have written before about this concept of glance-able information and we believe its future is bright.

At a much higher level, Google Now has made me think about something I had trouble articulating before. Namely the one feature I have been wanting as a part of my smart devices overall potential. The feature I speak of is anticipation.

Amazingly somewhere in the core of Jelly Bean and Google Now lies the framework to begin building an anticipation engine. With Jelly Bean we are experiencing the ground level of this foundation and I have found some very interesting examples of its value and potential.

One example is how Google Now looks at my calendar and as long as a location is included in my appointment details, I can launch Google Now at any time and see real time traffic to my next meeting location. I can also simply click from the appointment Google Now card to get navigation to that appointment from my current location. More interestingly, Google Now will alert me via a notification when the is appropriate time to leave for my next appointment based on real time and timely traffic analysis. I found this to be extremely useful.

Another interesting example is related to search. Regardless of what browser I am using, if I am logged into my Google account, when I search for things on Google interesting things start to happen in Google Now. For example my wife and I were recently in the market for a new family car. She started searching for local car dealerships on my notebook using Google. A few minutes later I happened to pull up Google Now on my phone and the top Google Now cards presented to me were map cards including traffic information to all three local car dealerships she had just looked up. I had no idea she was searching for this information so when I asked her why I was seeing directions to Gilroy Toyota on my phone she replied “that’s weird I just looked up Gilroy Toyota on your computer.”

As I further experimented with this I found it quite interesting to search for things like restaurants or other locations either on my notebook using Google or the Nexus itself and know that I could easily jump from that search to Google Now and get exact directions or other information related to that location quickly and easily without having to enter in any more information. Once I started integrating this into my search flow it became habit to utilize the information at a glance Google Now presents and I again found it extremely useful.

As I stated, we are observing the beginning of this anticipation engine concept. There are many ways I would love to see this advance. For example, related to the traffic information, I would love it if my smart device knew not only where I was headed but who I was meeting with. This way if I happened to be hitting traffic on the way to a meeting my smart device could anticipate my time frame and if I happen to be running late present me with the option to email or text those I am meeting with and alert them that I may be running a few minutes late.

There are more examples than I have time to get into of how this anticipation engine has been changing how I think about the usefulness of smart devices going forward. But I am convinced that Google is onto something with this and I am excited to see where it goes.

How Twitter is Evolving

Credit @Jack
As an analyst I am not entirely focused on social media as a primary area of my market focus. But because I study consumer markets holistically it is something I observe with a watchful eye. I was fortunate enough to be able to have candid conversations with many of Twitters earliest investors which has helped me shape my opinion on the platform thus far. And from my view, it has been fascinating to watch Twitter evolve and get to the point today where it is basically embedded into society.

Narcissistic Roots
I have always rejected the notion that the roots of Twitter appealed to people’s inherent narcissism. In fact, I was on a panel many years ago with author Andrew Keen and we heavily debated this topic. Many of Andrew’s books like The Cult of the Amateur are very strict critiques of the negative effects of things like blogging, the internet, and other key technologies on societies. Andrew makes many good points that are food for thought but I largely disagree with the premise that Twitter at its roots is only for those who love the spotlight.

When Twitter was first starting out I was adamant in my analysis of the service that it presented a valuable platform for those who are in the public eye. Folks like celebrities, athletes, political leaders, the media, etc., and that I questioned what an everyday mass market consumer would get from “tweeting.” My thought initially was that the value to the mass market the value would be in consuming tweets rather than actually “tweeting.”

I point out the value of consuming tweets in my column Why I love Twitter. My main point being one of the many ways I use Twitter is as a information filter of many of the key industry sources I follow for work. Twitter’s value as a real-time filter for real-time information is a key value proposition.

Although, now that we have seen Twitter begin its ascent into the mass market, it is becoming clear that Twitter is evolving into a conversation in a fascinating way.

Next Generation Communication
I am convinced that Twitter is no longer a platform to broadcast and has evolved into a platform to communicate. Of course broadcasting can be communicating but it is generally one way. Twitter has now become a two way dialogue with those broadcasting and others interacting.

It is interesting to see how the aforementioned public figures I spoke of are using and embracing Twitter to interact with the masses. Many folks we speak with who joined Twitter simply to follow celebrities, athletes, or media personalities, found that the bulk of their Tweeting was less about saying what is on their mind and more about interacting with those they follow. Perhaps even more interestingly the large majority of those we spoke with received a tweet back or re-tweet of a public figure they follow.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I follow Justin Bieber on Twitter. I do it because I am intrigued with how he uses Twitter (a story you can choose to believe or not.) But I am genuinely surprised at how active @JustinBieber is on Twitter and how often he interacts with his fans. Not only is he encouraging his brand loyalty amongst his fans but he has a instant communication channel with them for anything he chooses–personal or professional.

This is one example of many that shows how Twitter has evolved from broadcasting platform to a true two way communication platform. I believe Twitter will may play a key role in further changing communications as we know it.

Even simply looking at how many broadcast outfits are using Twitter around the Olympics demonstrates my point. Many networks covering the Olympics are not only encouraging Twitter interaction but also tracking and sharing key statistics around how its being used. Many athletes as well are using Twitter (some not too intelligently) to engage with their fan base.

Twitter truly had humble beginnings. And Gripe as some may about how it has evolved, it has added to the evolving use of technology in the ways we has humans communicate and interact. And I believe we are still only scratching the surface of its possibilities.

The Windows 8 UI: Microsoft Makes a Tough Marketing Problem Worse

Over at ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley, master of all things Microsoft, reports sources tell her that having lost the name Metro in an apparent trademark dispute, Microsoft will call the new tile-based user interface for Windows 8 the Windows 8 UI. Beyond a stunning lack of creativity, this is going to cause some real trouble for the already difficult task of educating consumers about what Windows 8 is.

Windows 8 screen shotWindows 8 will existing in two versions on two different types of devices, which would be no problem if the general device type corresponded to the OS version–but it doesn’t. The Windows 8 we can think of as the successor to Windows 7 will run both on traditional PCs and on tablets based on Intel (or more properly, x86/x64) processors. The second version, known officially (so far, at least) as Windows RT, will run on tablets using ARM processors.

Now the version I am going to call traditional Windows, because Microsoft hasn’t really given it a name, offers two distinct user interfaces. There is a desktop interface that resembles Windows 7, but differs from it in some critical elements. And there is what used to be called the Metro UI, which is radically different, using no menus or icons in its full-screen apps.

Traditional Windows runs both types of apps, including applications written for older versions of Windows (though all of these will need considerable work–the sort Office applications have gotten–to look and feel right on Windows 8 and to provide better support for touch.) Windows RT supports only new (Metro) style apps. Microsoft made an important exception for itself: The traditional-styled Office 2013 applications, as well as the Windows Explorer file manager, will be on RT, but third-party software vendors are not allowed to do this.

If you are not thoroughly confused by now, you probably haven’t been paying close enough attention. This was going to be a huge customer education problem for Microsoft under the best of circumstances. But Microsoft now appears to have denied itself even an easy linguistic way to differentiate between these two user interfaces and the capabilities of traditional Windows and Windows RT systems.

I can’t quite fathom how Microsoft stumbled into this mess. But it’s going to be a tough hole to get out of.

Copying Apple or as Samsung Calls it, Benchmarking Your Peers

The Apple vs Samsung trial is a week old and the evidence Apple presented is quite compelling. Nothing has been more captivating than a 132-page internal Samsung document that recommends copying the iPhone.

The document lauded the importance of Apple functions like double-tap on a Web page to zoom in/out and recommended the functionality needed to be supplemented. Apple even showed how Samsung purposely copied the icons used on the iPhone screen to represent things like making a phone call, contacts, settings and photos.

Samsung on Wednesday issued a statement defending itself and downplaying the importance of the document.

“Samsung benchmarks many peer companies,” she said. “In fact, these are typical competitive analyses routinely undertaken by many companies in many industries – including Apple. Samsung stands by its culture of continuous improvement and innovation. We are very proud of the product innovations driven by our more than 50,000 designers and engineers around the world who have made Samsung’s products the products of choice.”

Here’s the problem. Samsung didn’t take Apple’s features and make them better. In fact, looking at the evidence, Samsung did everything it could to make its devices and icons look exactly like the iPhone’s.

No matter how you look at it or which side of this trial you’re on, that’s wrong, plain and simple.

Samsung contends that Apple doesn’t own the right to putting a receiver on an icon to indicate that it’s used for making a phone call. Samsung fans also argue that Apple can’t patent a rectangle. These arguments don’t get to the heart of the matter, which is the blatant copying of everything Apple is doing.

Samsung didn’t take an Apple idea, improve on it and release it in its Galaxy products. Instead, they took Apple’s ideas, copied them down to the color of the icons and released them as their own.

It’s not about rectangles, but rather stealing a unique way of interacting with a device and its software. There can be no doubt that Apple perfected a new way for consumers to interact with a device when it released the iPhone. Until it was released, people used a stylus or directional arrows on a built-in keyboard.

I wrote earlier this week that Apple’s motives for suing Samsung had nothing to do with the $2.5 billion in damages Apple is seeking from the court for past products from Samsung, but rather to protect future products.

Samsung has made it clear that it will shamelessly copy everything Apple does, so Apple needs to stop that now. Apple can’t risk having Samsung copy its future innovations. By suing them now, Samsung will have to rethink its strategy and innovate on its own.

There is nothing wrong with a competitive analysis, they are done all the time in every industry. However, it’s not right to take that analysis and steal from your competition.

Making the Cloud Safe for Consumers: Time for Apple To Step Up [Updated]

iCloud illoThis has been the Year of the Cloud.  Apple, Microsoft, and Google, the three companies that matter most to consumers, have all been rushing headlong to establish personal clouds that will link consumers’ data across multiple devices, making it available anywhere, any time. What could possibly go wrong?

We learned the answer in dramatic fashion this week when a hacker, apparently just out for kicks, wreaked havoc on the digital life of journalist Mat Honan, wiping his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook, deleting data from his iCloud and Google Apps accounts, and sending out a stream of ugly tweets from the account of his former employer, Gizmodo. Honan’s Wired account of just what happened and how is long but well worth reading.

A watershed event. It’s rare that a single incident marks a true tech watershed, but this may well be one. The personal cloud is definitely looking like the Next Big Thing. But the problems raised for cloud purveyors including Microsoft, Google, and above all, Apple are not just issues of public relations or marketing. They are going to have to make some real changes to assure safety.

Apple bears the biggest initial burden because of the ease with which the still unidentified attacker winkled Honan’s password out of Apple technical support and the company’s utterly incompetent handling of the issue once Honan discovered his problem. (Amazon played a relatively small but critical role in the attack, which relied entirely on social engineering rather than a technical assault. Wired Gadget Lab reports  that Amazon has quietly plugged the hole.) But Apple, as it its wont, has remained stonily silent on the matter. According to Gadget Lab,  Apple appears to have shut down telephone iTunes password resets, the crucial point of attack against Honan, but the company has announced no policy changes.

UPDATE: Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris confirms that the company has stopped providing password resets over the phone. It plans to resume the service at some unspecified point in the future, but when it does so, users will be required to provide stronger authentication.

By his own admission, Honan made several serious mistakes in this episode, the most serious being the way he linked his Apple iTunes, iCloud, and Google accounts. That allowed a successful attack on one to be used against all. But if a savvy and experienced tech journalist couldn’t get this right, how much greater is the risk for the average consumer? Apple all but forces you to use the same username and password for iTunes and iCloud; the password you use to secure 99¢ song purchases can open the way to someone wiping out the data on a Mac.

Friction isn’t always bad. Apple’s goal in setting up iCloud was clearly to make transactions of all sorts as frictionless as possible. But friction is by no means always a bad thing, especially when it slows down an attackers. There is nearly always a tradeoff between convenience and security, and its clear that the dial is going to have to be turned toward security.

Keeping the focus on iTunes/iCloud, iTunes itself does not require a very high security barrier. Although you have a credit card on file, it’s hard for an attacker to buy very much very quickly. The main change needed is that Apple should greatly speed up the process of sending email purchase notifications. On Amazon these are nearly instantaneous, but I sometimes don’t get iTunes Store or App Store notifications until a day after the transaction. Your best protection is to get immediate notice if someone is making unauthorized use of your accounts.

Changing account settings, especially the email address associated with the account, should require a much higher level of protection, as does access to any iCloud data and the Find My Mac, iPhone, and iPad features. These features are used infrequently, and introducing a little, or better yet, a lot of friction will provide protection with minimal inconvenience. And password recovery procedures need a top-to-bottom reconstruction. For example, an individual who cannot produce acceptable credentials online or on the phone might be required to go to an Apple Store with government-issued ID and a credit card to establish identity. Yes, it is inconvenient; it’s supposed to be. (In Honan’s case, stronger passwords would not have helped in the least since the attacker was able to obtain his password.)

Unintended consequences. Another issue the industry as a whole has to come to grips with is unexpected interactions among different cloud services. This is an old and very difficult problem in security. Amazon’s policy on revealing information on existing credit cards when you entered a new one was mildly dumb. But combined with a totally unrelated Apple policy that let anyone use the last four digits of a credit card number to recover an iTunes password, it became catastrophic. Honan thought linking iCloud to Google was an innocent choice, but it, too, proved to have disastrous consequences.

The personal cloud is far too valuable to put it at risk through stupid security practices like those that clobbered Honan. It’s time for the services to take the lead and fix the problems in a public and transparent way (I’m looking at you, Apple.)

Final bit of advice to users: Honan says his biggest regret in this episode was the loss of photos of his child’s first year. As useful as the cloud is, it is no substitute for a secure local backup or backup to a dedicated service. Sync is great, but it is not backup. You should understand how different sync services work. I’m a big fan of SugarSync, which not only stores data in the cloud but, for important files, creates up-to-date local copies of files on multiple PCs. For important data, a belt, and suspenders, and maybe a second belt isn’t too much.

 

Boingo+Cloud Nine=Free Wi-Fi+Ads

Wi-Fi service provider and aggregator Boingo announced today is was acquiring privately held Cloud Nine Media, a Wi-Fi add network. The result is likely to be growth Wi-Fi services that are free- but supported by ads.

Boingo logoFree Wi-Fi is understandably popular with users in all manner of public places. But the quality of the service is often terrible. This shouldn’t be surprising. Providing decent internet service costs money, particularly for the backhaul connection to the network. The economics can be awful, especially if what it mostly does is fill seats with “customers” who use the network connection but don;t buy much of anything. Often the free Wi-Fi seems to exist mostly as a upsell opportunity for a paid premium service.

Cloud Nine helps solve the problem by placing a 30- to 45-second ad in front of the user before a fiull network connection is established. The ads can’t be fully personalized because Cloud Nine has not personal information on users, but they can be tailored closely to the venue. “We know the exact context that a user is connecting from in a way the most ad services don’t,” says Sebastian Tonkin, CEO of Cloud Nine. “If a user is connecting from an airport, there’s a very good chance he’s waiting for a flight. We can tailor the content to the scenario, for example, serving a Hipmunk ad for hotel search.

Boingo and Cloud Nine have been working together for a while. but the acquisition is likely to accelerate the rollout of ad-supported free networks. Boingo also provides subscription and fee-for-service access as well as free Wi-Fi and recently signed a contract to provide Wi-Fi connections at Wendy’s fast-food stores.

Apple’s Curious TV Plans

In Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, he related a conversation with Jobs in which Steve says they [Apple] nailed what a true interactive TV experience should be in the way of UI, content and hardware. (My paraphrase) Although he did not announce any new products, he basically laid the groundwork for a lot of speculation about what he meant and what Apple might do with their future Apple TV plans.

Most speculation has been on the idea that Apple is going to do an actual television and could have it in the market sometime in the next two years. Others see the current Apple TV becoming a greater vehicle for content and UI innovation and that this is what Jobs meant.

Over the last two weeks, Apple has made a very important and, to us long time Apple watchers, curious move when they added Hulu to the Apple TV line up and then the following week, allowed Amazon’s Live TV and Movie streaming app to go on to the iPad. I say that this a curious move because these products compete directly with Apple’s own iTunes TV and movie store and at least in theory, would impact their services revenue coming from similar iTunes products.

While Apple could still make an actual TV, I think this move with Hulu and Amazon essentially signals a strategic move by Apple and is probably at the heart of their future TV plans. The key here is that for Apple’s current TV device to make money, it needs content. By biting the bullet and offering competing services to iTunes, the value proposition of an Apple TV device just went up. And it now lays the groundwork for Apple to accelerate their TV plans through an area they excel in. That area is software and human interfaces and I believe that they can do all that they want to do in this area through an external box that connects to a TV and delivers Apple’s iTunes and cloud services. The problem with TV’s is that people buy them and hold on to them for 5 to 7 years on average. And while Apple could design a TV that could be upgraded in software, it makes more sense to create a more sophisticated box that works with all televisions and allows them to innovate around this model.

More importantly, as technology advances, they could redesign the box every year or two and given its low cost, people could just upgrade to get these new features. That is what they do now with the iPod, iPhone and iPad and it makes sense to carry that business model to the Apple TV too. While Apple is clearly a hardware and software company, it is pretty clear to me that the software exists to help them sell hardware and ultimately deliver a whole eco system of products and services that allow them to make money through all of these offerings.

I am not sure how much margin they have in the Apple TV, but knowing Apple’s way of thinking about margins, I believe that they make enough profit to keep their “hobby” going. This buys them time to innovate around the software UI and services that make these boxes very valuable to Apple customers and draw new users into Apple’s overall eco system of products and services.

Also, Hulu debuted on the iPad and migrated over to Apple TV and it is only a matter of time before Amazon’s streaming service shows up on Apple TV as well. Apple knows content is king and that it helps them sell hardware.

As I stated earlier, Apple could create an Apple TV, but I really doubt that this is in the cards and I would be highly surprised if they did a stand-alone television. Instead I believe Jobs’ and team saw the long term evolution of what the external Apple TV could become and that it this box, tied to advanced UI’s and innovative services and content that is at the center of Apple’s vision of revolutionizing the interactive TV experience.

Why UltraBooks Have Been Slow to Take Off

One of Intel’s big programs for this year has been the development and marketing of a new line of slimline notebooks called Ultrabooks. This product is really following in Apple’s MacBook Air footprints, a product that has been very successful for Apple.

In reality, as technology has gotten smaller and more powerful, it was inevitable that laptops would follow Apple’s MacBook Air example and become thinner, lighter and still have serious computing power. To that end, Intel and almost all of their OEM partners have jumped on the Ultrabook bandwagon.

In the spring, Intel and their partners launched a major marketing push for Ultrabooks and have spent a huge amount of money trying to get the attention of business and consumer users to try and move over to the Ultrabook platform of notebooks. Also, most OEM’s have created some great versions of Ultrabooks that at the very least has caught the eye of these folks who really do like the idea of a lighter laptop.

However, the cheapest Ultrabook starts at $699 and is a relatively low powered system. But most of the Ultrabooks have been priced in the $799-$899 range, a price that although reasonable, we believe may not be an attractive price range for consumers. And although business users are OK with these upper endprices for laptops, they continue to want laptops that have a lot of power and features that can’t be crammed into these thinner laptops. This has been at the heart of the slow uptake in Ultrabook purchases so far.

But there seems to be another reason for the slow uptake in Ultrabooks with consumers and even many business users. We have been privy to some very interesting research that shows that the market for laptops appears to be bifurcating into one that is focused on low cost notebooks and the other on the higher end of the notebook market. The research suggests that the mid market for laptops is declining and that laptops priced at $699-$899 may be going away as users either opt for low cost laptops or if they want more powerful laptops, buy up to laptops in the $999-$1299 range instead.

Part of this lack of overwhelming interest in the $699-$799 price range is also due to the iPad. The interest in the iPad remains high, and right now from our research we are learning much higher than notebooks by the mass market. Because of that UltraBooks priced around the range of the iPad seem to of less interest. It appears for the mass market next generation notebooks need to be lower cost than the iPad or much higher and include valuable innovations in the upper end to make it attractive.

One could also argue that Windows 8 could play a role but many consumers in the market we speak to are not that interested in Windows 8 yet.

If true, this is bad news for the current crop of Ultrabooks. Due to component costs and other related marketing costs, almost all of the Ultrabooks are priced between $699-$899 with a few even at $999-$1200. To be fair, many upper end models that are really high-powered laptops are being called Ultrabooks, but at this price they are considered upper end laptops.

This research reflects similar information we are getting from consumers. Over the last 3 weeks I have spoken to dozens of consumers about their back to school or fall laptop purchases and all planned to spend no more than $599 for a laptop. All where aware of Ultrabooks and while they would have liked to have one, they did not have the budget for anything more then $599. And if they were buying it for their kids as part of the back to school requirements, the prices they planned to spend was closer to $399 to $499 for laptops this year.

If it is true that the mid market for laptops in the $699-$899 range is going to evaporate, it will put a lot of pressure on the OEMs next year to try and get prices down on Ultrabooks if they want any traction with consumers in 2013. The good news for them is that business users seem to want to buy up and laptops in the $999-$1299 range have good margins which means they can actually make some money on these laptops.

Ultimately, Ultrabooks will be successful since the technology is here to make them lighter, thinner and still have good computing power. But for them to sell in the volumes OEM’s need to make money on low end laptops they have to have more consumer friendly pricing to really take off.

Algebra Matters, But Not for the Reason You Think

New York Times illustration
New York Times, illustration by Adam Hayes

People who work with numbers, a group that includes a substantial share of the tech world, were understandably outraged by political scientist Andrew Hacker’s lead piece in The New York Times Sunday Review, ”Is Algebra Necessary?“ The odd thing is that Hacker’s central point, that hardly anyone needs the math taught in high school and beyond in their lives or jobs, was quite correct. But both his arguments and, more important, his conclusion, were totally wrong.

Two years ago, mathematician Underwood Dudley wrote a provocative article titled “What Is Mathematics For?” in which he questioned the increasingly common assertion, promoted mainly by teachers of mathematics, that a wide variety of jobs requires skills in algebra and maybe calculus. If Hacker had been serious about engaging in the debate, he surely would have encountered Dudley’s widely read and easily accessible piece.

That he apparently did not is a shame, for Dudley not only made the argument against the necessity of algebra with far more wit and cogency than Hacker, he came to the opposite conclusion. While higher math is actually used only in very, very few jobs, learning it is nonetheless a vital component of any decent education.

Dudley demolishes the arguments for job-related math by pointing out that just about any problem that anyone might encounter has been solved and converted into a readily available formula. All that most people, even engineers, have to do most of the time to get the results they need, is to plug in the numbers. Rarely are math skills required beyond those you learned before reaching middle school. For example, I know how to compute the discounted present value of annuity using algebra, but if I need to do it, I’m going to plug an income stream and a discount rate into Excel or an HP12C calculator.

Dudley decries “the error of supposing that problems once solved must be solved anew every time they are encountered. House builders have handbooks and tables, and use them. Indeed, houses as well as pyramids and cathedrals, were being built long before algebra was taught in the schools and, in fact, before algebra.”

So why do algebra and other higher math disciplines belong in the curriculum? Dudley argues that it teaches reasoning better than any other subject: “Reasoning needs to be learned, and mathematics is the best way to learn it.”

I’ll go a step further and make explicit an argument that Dudley makes only implicitly. Mathematics at its core is about abstraction, about drawing the essential facts out of a situation, analyzing them, and rationally applying general principles to find the correct solution for a specific case. This is a high-order thinking skill that really is needed for a wide variety of jobs, not to mention the challenges of daily life, and the only place most students will ever be exposed to it in a rigorous and formal way is in algebra and beyond.

Even the tech industry doesn’t require a lot of day-to-day math from most of its engineers. Coders don’t really need calculus, but they do use a lot of discrete math. But engineers and programmers definitely need strong and deep abstract thinking abilities, and math class is where they are going to acquire them.

There is another importance to math education that mathematicians don’t much talk about. Math courses are useful gatekeepers. We want college-bound students to take four years of high school math because we want them to prove they have the cognitive skills and reasoning ability to do college-level work.

(There are some students who, for poorly understood reasons, struggle mightily in mathematics while excelling in other areas. There may well be a neurological basis for this, but the area has been much less studied than learning disparities involving reading or writing. It should be possible to make accommodations for their deficits, as we do for dyslexia.)

I was particularly disturbed by Hacker’s criticism of medical schools for requiring undergraduate calculus. “Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status,” he writes. It’s trues that doctors don’t use calculus much if at all. But to be honest, I really don’t want a doctor who lacks the analytic skill and reasoning ability to get through first- and second-year calculus.

Hacker is an emeritus professor at the City College of New York, but he seems unaware of the fact that his own field had become increasingly quantitative. Economics papers look like they belong in math journals. And questioning why “philosophers face a lofty mathematical bar” ignores the fact that philosophy has become a highly technical field that operates at a level of abstraction that baffles many mathematicians.

I’ll freely admit to a bias. I’m writing this at Math Fest, the summer meeting of the Mathematical Association of America, in Madison, Wis. (Both my math teacher wife and math professor son are active participants.) I hang a lot with mathematicians, who are not only, as widely believed, extremely intelligent but, in contrast to the stereotype, extremely interesting people who care deeply about many things other than mathematics.

The MAA is concerned primarily with undergraduate mathematics education. It shares a good bit of the blame for promoting the vocational necessity of high school and college math. Fewer math students mean fewer jobs for math professors, a subject that concerns them deeply. But a major concern of the participants and the sessions is improving the abstract, high-order thinking skills that make math education valuable. Andrew Hacker should have stopped by.

 

 

 

The iPad Put A Fork In Personal Computing

 
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in January 2010, he wondered aloud whether there was room between the smartphone and the notebook for a third category of tablet device like the iPad.

Everybody uses a laptop and a smartphone. And a question has arisen lately: is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone. And of course we’ve pondered this question for years as well. The bar’s pretty high. In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks. Better than a laptop. Better than a smartphone.

Hard though it may be to believe, Western Civilization once had to collectively ask itself a similar question regarding a then radical new form of technology…a fork.

Before the fork was introduced, Westerners were reliant on the spoon and knife as the only eating utensils. Thus, people would largely eat food with their hands, calling for a common spoon when required. Members of the aristocracy would sometimes be accustomed to manners considered more proper and hold two knives at meals and use them both to cut and transfer food to the mouth, using the spoon for soups and broth.-Wikipedia


A FORK IS A CATEGORY ALL ITS OWN

A spoon, a fork and a knife are three different categories of cutlery. A smartphone, a tablet and a notebook are three different categories of computer.

A fork is its own category because it is far better at doing some key tasks. Better than a spoon. Better than a knife.

A tablet is its own category because it is far better at doing some key tasks. Better than a smartphone. Better than a notebook.


A FORK DOES NOT REPLACE A KNIFE

When I eat, I have a choice between using a spoon, a fork and a knife. A fork does not replace a knife. But its presence means that I use a knife less often.

When I compute, I have a choice between using a smartphone, a tablet and a notebook. A tablet does not replace a notebook. But its presence means that I use a notebook less often.


A FORK DOES NOT COMPETE WITH A KNIFE

Sometimes a fork complements a knife. Sometimes a fork is used on its own. But always a fork is used when it is most useful.

Sometimes a tablet complements a notebook. Sometimes a tablet is used on its own. But always a tablet is used when it is most useful.


A FORK IS NOT DEFINED BY HOW IT IS LABELED BUT BY WHAT IT DOES BEST

When I eat, I use the utensil that best serves my needs.

I do not ask silly questions, like whether a spoon is a liquid consumption device and a fork is a solids consumption device. I do not ask whether a knife does “real” work just because it does not, ordinarily, convey food to my mouth. I do not obsess on the exceptionally rare times when I may use my spoon as a fork, my fork as a knife or my knife as a fork. Instead, I simply use the right tool at the right time.

When I compute, I use the device that best serves my needs.

I do not ask silly questions, like whether a tablet is a consumption device. I do not ask whether a phone or a tablet does “real” work. I do not obsess on the exceptionally rare times when I may use my phone as a tablet, my tablet as a notebook or my notebook as a tablet. Instead, I simply use the right tool at the right time.


A FORK DOES NOT ASPIRE TO BE A KNIFE

Each utensil should be employed to do what it does best.

A fork does not aspire to be a knife. A knife does not aspire to be a fork. And most especially, a fork and a knife do not aspire to be one and the same thing.

Each device should be employed to do what it does best.

A tablet should not aspire to be a notebook. A notebook should not aspire to be a tablet. And most especially, a tablet and a notebook should not aspire to be one and the same thing.


A SPORK, A SPIFE, A KNORK AND A SPORF

A spork is a hybrid form of cutlery taking the form of a spoon-like shallow scoop with three or four fork tines.

A spife is a tool where the blade of a knife is used as the handle of the spoon.

A knork is a hybrid form of cutlery which combines the cutting capability of a knife and the spearing capability of a fork into a single utensil.

A sporf is a single eating utensil combining the properties of a spoon, fork, and knife. One popular brand is the Splayd.


MANY USES, FEW USERS

What does a spork, a spife, a knork and a sporf have in common?

Few have ever heard of them. Even fewer have any use for them.

What does a Surface Tablet, a Windows 8 Tablet and a Windows 8 desktop have in common with a spork, a spife, a knork and a sporf?

Everything.

They compromise on everything and excel at nothing. They provide far more features but far fewer benefits. They do many things but they don’t do any things better or even as well.

They’re not category defining because they’re not far better at doing any key tasks than are the already existing categories.


ONE MORE THING

Who are those most interested in using combination cutlery like the spork, spife, knork and sporf?

Specialists, with special needs, like campers, backpackers, fast food restaurants, schools, prisons, the military, plus special tasks like cutting kiwi fruit (spife) and special circumstances like those with only one hand (knork).

Who are those most interested in using combination devices like the Surface running Windows 8?

Specialists, like reporters, road warriors, gadget freaks, technological gunslingers, plus those with specialized tasks and special needs. In other words, the kinds of people who regularly read and even comment on tech blogs like this one. But not ordinary folk.

Just as the spork, spife, knork and sporf are extremely useful to the extremely few, so will the Surface and Windows 8 on tablets be extremely useful. But if you dare dream that any of these will go mainstream and earn a regular place at the table…you can stick a fork in it.

NBC and the Olympics: Why Cord-cutting Will Be Slow and Hard

NBC Olympics logoNBC’s exclusive U.S. coverage of the the 2012 London Olympic Games has not, to say the very least, been a hit in the tech world. Twitter has been buzzing since last Friday about NBC’s delayed showing of major events, endless commercials, insufferable commentary, cheerleading for U.S. athletes, mawkishness, sentimentality, and a hundred other sins. All of it is true, and all of it has marked coverage of every Olympics I can remember.

There are two important things new. One is the ubiquity of social media, which have grown tremendously since the 2008 Beijing games. Twitter, Facebook, and the rest give us a global water cooler where we can we can grumble and complain to anyone who will listen. The other  is the ubiquitous availability of streaming media on our phones, tablets, PCs, game consoles, and just about anything else with or connected to a screen.

The  combination has created a strange sense of entitlement among many of the tech savvy. who seems to feel it has a right to watch the Olympics live wherever  and whenever they want. The problem is that for all the quasi-governmental, nationalistic trappings of the games, the International Olympic Committee is a private organization to which NBC Universal, another private organization, has paid a grade deal of money for the rights to televise the games in the U.S. For reasons well explained by The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber, NBC’s economic interests lie with the status quo, and are likely to for some time to come. This bodes ill for those who are counting on the internet to disrupt the way television content is delivered.

First, no one has a right to anything other than over-the-air content broadcast by local stations. Some local stations offer streaming, but it’s only of their own content, mainly news, because that is all they own the rights to. Networks offer selected shows, either on their own sites or through service such as Hulu.com, but what they offer and when they make it available is entirely up to them. That is why calls for a Federal Communications Commission investigation of NBC’s delayed and mangled streaming of the Olympic opening ceremony were nothing more than venting.

The situation is not going to change as long as those who control the content don’t see cord-cutters, who who would rely exclusively on over-the-top delivery on the internet, as a major economic threat to their very lucrative relationship with cable and satellite operators on the one hand and content owners, such as studios and sports leagues, on the other. That is why they are taking only baby steps to stream their content, and why Olympic streamcasts and services such as HBO Go are available only to people who are already cable subscribers. (Of course, NBC’s relationship to cable is more than close; NBC Universal is owned by Comcast.)

Furthermore, the distribution of content is tied up in a maze of contractual agreements. ESPN, for example, has contracts with Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Assn., the NCAA, and the College Football Assn., among others, and each specifies just how the content may be distributed. These contracts will evolve, but slowly.

One thing that is absolutely clear is no matter what alternative means for delivering content are developed, you are going to pay for the good stuff. Like newspapers, television content distributors have not found an internet advertising model that works anywhere near as well as traditional broadcast or cable. In the future, you may be able to subscribe via the internet, but you are still going to pay.

I pay a lot of money for my Verizon FiOS video service and don;t really watch very much television. I sympathize with those who only want to watch Game of Thrones but are unwilling to pay for a cable subscriptions plus an HBO premium just to get the one show they really want to see. I don’t know that HBO will ever sell subscriptions to individual shows–it doesn’t suit their business model well. But I’m sure the time will come when you will be able to subscribe to HBO without going through a cable company.It’s just going to take a while, and that is more likely to be measured in years than months.

Maybe by 2016, we’ll be able to subscribe to live feeds of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics (Rio is just one hour ahead of Eastern time, so there’s not much of an excuse for delays.) I certainly hope so. But for the time being, we all need some patience.

 

The PC is Not Dead

I chose this title because so many still associate the term PC with a notebook or desktop computing form factor. Let me first start by re-affirming my conviction that tablets as well as smartphones are in fact personal computers. The reality is that consumers are using a multitude of devices to accomplish what we have always considered computing.

It is no secret that I am bullish on tablets growth potential. With all the data I am seeing around consumer adoption of tablets world wide, it is hard not to be. But my perspective on the tablet form factor has always been that the tablet, and even to some degree the smartphone, does not replace a computer with a larger screen like a desktop or notebook. Rather these other devices simply take time and even some tasks away from the classic PC.

I still believe consumers will own computing devices with larger screens, more processing power, more storage, etc. However, the big struggle many in the industry are facing is the reality that the classic PC is no longer the only device in consumers lives. When the category for notebooks was a huge growth segment, it was being driven by two things. First, the fact that the category was maturing and prices were coming down. Second, because notebooks were the only mobile personal computers in consumers lives. All of this has been turned on its head with tablets and with smartphones to a degree.

The perspective that needs to be emphasized on this topic is that although the classic PC is not going away, its role is changing.

There is No Longer a Dominant Screen

The classic PC for many years was what we liked to call the “hub of the digital lifestyle.” It was the primary screen used for computing tasks in consumers lives. Other devices like iPods and early smartphones for example, had a level of dependence on the notebook or desktop. Even when the iPad first came out this philosophy was employed and was dependent on the PC to an extent. The desktop or notebook was the center and other devices revolved around them in this role. This is no longer the case for many and will soon no longer be the case for the masses. As more consumers fragment their computing tasks to be done on a number of screens, each screen will find a role as a part of a holistic computing solution.

The Cloud Becomes the Center

Although no single screen becomes the center of a consumers computing lifestyle, another solution takes the place. And that is the cloud. Personal clouds will be the glue that tie all our devices together. This is clearly evident with Apple’s latest OS release OS X Mountain Lion. This is the first classic PC OS which embraces the paradigm I just described, where no single computing device is the dominant screen. Many of the same apps, the same data, the same media, all available on every Apple screen.

Whatever screen is the most convenient for a consumer to use to look at an email, answer an email, browse the web, watch a movie, listen to music, check Facebook etc., at the exact time they want to do it, is the right screen for the job. The important word here to understand is convenience. Our research shows that people grab the screen that is closest or easiest to access to do a task the second they want to do it.

If I am in line at Disneyland and I want to do the above tasks, then my smartphones becomes the right screen for the job. If I am on the couch with my tablet near me, then it becomes the right screen for the job. If I am sitting at my desk with my notebook or desktop then it becomes the right screen for the job.

The beautiful thing about OS X Mountain Lion is that it enables and even encourages this computing philosophy I just described. Which is:

– let the consumer choose the right screen for the job
– make sure they have access to any and all programs, documents, and media
– anytime, anywhere, on any Apple device
– so that no matter which of their Apple screens they have or choose to use, IT becomes the right screen for the job.

This is the beauty of the cloud and the clouds role as the center of our personal computing infrastructure.

The classic PC used to be the center to which other screens depended on. But now that role as shifted to the cloud. This reality, not just tablets, is what is disrupting the classic PC.

The market is embracing this concept of screens (whether they know it or not) and will soon be conditioned to depend on the cloud rather than any one screen. It is for this reason, that in Apple’s case, iCloud is just as important of a platform as iOS and OS X. Other platform and hardware providers need to confront this reality and find their place in it.

The Classic PC Still Plays a Role

This is why I am emphasizing that the classic PC still plays a role. It does not go away but its role does change and, perhaps more importantly for hardware companies, the classic PC lifecycle has changed. Some hardware manufacturers may emphasize its role more than others. Some software platforms may embrace its role more than others.

Consumers will not abandon the classic PC. Because of this role change in classic PC usages, I believe some classic PC manufacturers will be confronted with some very challenging pricing economics in the very near future. (More on this in a later column)

My conclusion, however, is that anyone who does not have a clear focus on the cloud as the center and has a weak strategy for the rapidly changing role of hardware is headed for some very rough waters.

Microsoft’s confusing tablet message

When Microsoft first announced its Surface tablet, the company seemed to be focused on taking back some of the ground it lost to longtime rival Apple since the release of the iPad. However, I find the company’s inconsistent message since the unveiling to be a tad confusing.

While I may disagree with Microsoft’s overall strategy for the Surface, I do give them credit for not blindly following Apple’s lead in the tablet market. I also agree that if its partners aren’t portraying the vision of Windows correctly, then Microsoft should step up and make sure their vision reaches the public. That vision should be consistent though.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates went so far as to call the Surface introduction “a seminal event,” and even speculated that there was “a strong possibility” that Apple may have to create a Surface-like device in the future.

Strong words from a company that took on Apple’s iPod with the Zune and suffered a crushing defeat.

And then there’s this comment from Gates:

“You don’t have to make a compromise. You can have everything you like about a tablet and everything you like about a PC all in one device. And so that should change the way people look at things.”

That actually sounds like a good thing. Here is the confusing part.

When Microsoft announced Office 2013 it’s not optimized for touch-enabled devices. Microsoft is telling its customers that the Surface tablet is important to them, but yet it’s most important application won’t work properly with the device.

That either screams poor planning between the hardware and software teams or Microsoft jumped on the idea of making the Surface rather quickly and couldn’t change the path of Office development.

In fact, Office is so bad for touch-enabled devices that Ars Techinca’s Peter Bright wrote an article titled “Why bother? The sad state of Office 2013 touch support.”

In that article he said:

These are not touch applications, and you will not want to use them on touch systems. They’re designed for mice and they’re designed for keyboards, and making the buttons on the ribbon larger does nothing to change that fundamental fact.

Those are damning comments, but they’re also true. You can’t expect your customers to purchase a touch-enabled device and then to use desktop software. That is not a winning strategy.

It’s easy to say that Microsoft can fix it in a future release, but new versions of Office aren’t released every year. To make matters worse, they are taking on a strong player in Apple — one that everyone else has tried to take on and failed so far.

Microsoft should do what Apple did before it with iWork. Create touch enabled Office apps that share data with its desktop equivalent in the cloud. Let’s face it, Microsoft is already three years behind Apple in tablets, so it’s not like the need to create touch-enabled apps should come as a huge surprise for them. If it does, Microsoft has bigger problems than touch-enabled apps.

Of course, the Surface comes with a stylus, but I agree with Steve Jobs on this one. If your product has a stylus, you’ve done something wrong. The Surface is supposed to be touch-enabled, not stylus-enabled.

In order for Microsoft to take any significant share of the tablet market, it needs to come out of the gate strong. Sending mixed, confusing messages to its customers about what’s important is not the way to do that.

The Opinion Cast: The Future of Smart Watches

In this opinion cast, Bill Geiser the CEO of MetaWatch and I have a candid conversation about the future of smart watches. Bill is a smart guy and has quite a history in the connected watch business and he shares some great perspectives about the space.

In this discussion we talk about why the wrist is prime for a connected screen, the role of the smart watch, and what it may take to get smart watches onto the wrists of mainstream consumers.

MetaWatch launched a new project on KickStarter today. So be sure to check out the MetaWatch STRATA smart watch launch on KickStarter which went live today.

You can also subscribe to our opinion cast in iTunes here.

The Swedish Surface and the Pathetic State of Online Journalism

ZDnet screen shotYesterday, an obscure–outside Sweden, at least–web retailer, webhallen.com, published a page that purported to give the still unannounced pricing for Microsoft’s Surface tablets. The surface was quoted at a ranged from $1,000 for a minimal ARM version to $2,100 for a loaded x86 model.

Wpcentral.com was apparently the first to come across this report and run with it. But it was quickly followed by many others, including some of the biggest names in online tech news: ZDnet, InformationWeek, Mashable, Cnet, and many others. Many of the reports, while expressing some doubt about the authenticity of the information, were quick to speculate about a monumental screwup by Microsoft. For example, Cult of Mac went with the headline: “Don’t Worry, Apple! Microsoft Will Kill Its Own Surface Tablet With $1,000 Price Tag.”

Of course, when someone finally got around to talking to Webhallen, the great scoop turned out to be nothing but a dummy page. When Paul Paliath of Techie Buzz reached a Webhallen spokesperson, the company admitted that it had no idea how the Surface would be priced or even whether it would be carrying the product.

In the grand scheme of things, this was all a tempest in a teapot. Still, it demonstrates important weaknesses in how news is being reported and disseminated these days. There are several factors that should have given any reporter or editor pause before taking the prices seriously:

  • Online catalog pages are a notoriously unreliable source of information on the availability or pricing of new products. Dummy product pages have an unfortunate way of escaping from staging servers, where they should stay hidden, onto the public web.
  • The information didn’t pass a simple sanity test. Microsoft is not going through all the effort and cost to bring the Surface to market only to price it so high that failure is guaranteed. The reported prices made no sense.
  • It seems unlikely that Webhallen would be first in line to get Surfaces to sell. Microsoft has said that  initial sales would be through its own stores.

But the pursuit of news on an otherwise slow summer day seems to have overwhelmed many writers’ and editors’ common sense. And this sort of hting, of which this is only a particularly egregious example, undermines the credibility of all online news.

The much maligned traditional media always had rules about sourcing and verification of information. I started my career at the Associated Press and even though there was tremendous pressure to be first–as great as that on any web site–there was even more pressure to be right. Being late could produce a slap on the wrist; being wrong could end your career. It’s time we on the web worried a bit less about being fast and a lot more about being right.

The Opinion Cast: The Significance of Mountain Lion

I thought it would be fun to capture Tim and my conversation at the office today around Mountain Lion and our thoughts on what it means for Apple, computing, and even some comparison’s with Apple’s philosophy and that of Windows 8. Often he and I have these chats to get caught up and synchronize our thoughts and I thought I would share this one with our readers.

I hope you enjoy and any and all feedback and / or dialogue is of course welcome.

You can also subscribe to our opinion cast in iTunes here.

OS X Mountain Lion: My Favorite New Features

Tim wrote earlier this week about his conviction that when it comes to post PC platforms Apple will keep OS X and iOS separate rather than merge the two as many expect. What Apple has done with OS X Mountain Lion proves that a desktop class OS can live in harmony with a pure mobile OS and provide a seamless experience across them all.

After using OS X Mountain Lion for a little while now, I have to say that the full experience of seamless integration between all my Macs and iOS devices is quite profound. The funny thing is upon hearing of OS X Mountain Lion’s new features I fully expected it would be, however, it was even more pleasant when I finally got to integrate it into my personal computing ecosystem.

Apple took advantage of their iCloud infrastructure, and tightly integrated it into this new OS release. Apple has continually emphasized a works better together philosophy with their products and iCloud has been a key puzzle piece in this philosophy. Apple executives have referred to iCloud as a strategy for the next decade, but it is most likely the strategy for much longer. iCloud is the glue that ties all of your Apple products together and never is that more clear than with OS X Mountain Lion.

In this analysts opinion, OS X Mountain Lion brings Apple customers one step closer to a seamless and more importantly continuous personal computing experience. Apple has been heading in this direction for a while with things like Photo Stream, iBooks, and others that let you instantly keep experiences in sync. But OS X Mountain Lion takes us even further with things like documents in the cloud, iCloud Tabs, Game Center, and more.

Continuous computing will be a key driver for Apple’s ecosystem going forward. As consumers realize that not only does all you key data, documents, personal settings and more stay synced in real time across all your Apple products but that you can switch from one device to another and feel like you can always pick up where you left off.

Let me know share my experience with a few features that I found particularly useful.

Safari and iCloud Tabs

The updated Safari for OS X Mountain Lion is easily one of my favorites. Primarily because I use Safari as a large part of my daily computing time. The new sharing feature is particularly handy and I used this quite a bit more than I thought. I like to share quite a bit of what I find on the Internet to Facebook and Twitter and being able to share right from Safari without having to jump to a different application or website was extremely useful.

But the biggest new feature that I truly appreciate is iCloud Tabs. I have a Mac and an iPad and I use them both in different ways. Within my personal work style I use them both in conjunction together as a solution rather than as separate products. Because of that I can’t tell you how many times a day I come across a website on the Mac and then want to read that website on my iPad or vice versa. A common use case where this happens is when I am using my Mac and looking up recipes. Once I find the recipe I want I used to have to email it to myself so I can then pick it up on my iPad, which is the tool I use in the kitchen quite often. Now with iCloud Tabs any open tabs in Safari, whether that is on the iPad, iPhone, or Mac is accessible to me. It seems small, but for me it is extremely useful and appreciated.

Notifications

To be honest I have wanted notifications on my Mac for quite a while longer than I wanted notifications for iOS. What is really nice is that you can customize which applications notify you and which ones don’t. For me the most important notifications are email and this one feature has served me greatly.

In my day to day I get well over 100 emails and somedays twice that much. I could literally sit all day and just answer email and it would keep me busy. Obviously because of that I have to prioritize. Pre Notifications in iOS, when I heard an email come in I would click on mail and see who its from then determine if I needed to respond immediately or later. This routine can be quite disrupting to ones work flow. Enter Notifications for email and now as I am working I quickly see who an email is from and without ever having to change applications and quickly read said e-mail, I can choose to respond or keep doing what I was doing.

Since I also text message with work colleagues, friends, and family, quite often having iMessage notify me of a new message was equally pleasant. This kept me from having to disrupt my work flow to check iMessage or my iPhone to see who it was from. Notifications is just one more way that Apple is extending features we know and love on iOS and bringing them to the desktop in a relevant way.

Air Play Mirroring

Air Play support on iOS and even in iTunes on the Mac has been one of those features that I use way more than I expected to. So it was no surprise to me that when Apple brought it to the OS X Mountain Lion that it was on the features I found most valuable. This is key for reasons in my professional life and my personal life.

In my professional life I give a lot of presentations and work collaboratively with teams of executives and product groups. More often than not in these meetings most of the content we are working off resides on my Mac. With Air Play Mirroring we don’t need to huddle around my computer or fiddle with chords and cables and projector issues with inputs or resolution scaling. Now we can simply broadcast the whole of OS X and all the content on it to the large screen or projector. Because of this one features I expect many more Apple TVs in conference rooms.

In my personal life, this is the feature I have been waiting for. Primarily because I watch a lot of video on my Mac. This happens to be because currently many sites I frequent still use Adobe’s flash player– especially the network TV sites. I stream a lot of TV shows from network sites or the web directly and many of them are still on Flash. Unfortunately many of these sites still hold prime TV content from their apps or Hulu + so it is hard to get access to all their content from the apps they release on iOS. Often times I would literally connect my Mac to my TV just so I could watch some shows on my TV. That is why this was one area where Air Play mirroring in OS X Mountain Lion came in for me big time.

I can honestly say that thanks to Apple TV and Air Play Mirroring my living room will never be the same.

Lastly I want to touch briefly on Game Center. This is a feature that I believe may be incredibly disruptive. Now that Game Center games and experiences are unified across all of Apple’s products, the Apple ecosystem has become a fully cross platform gaming environment. I was able to play games with my kids from my Mac while they were on their iPod touches or other iOS devices. Apple is a sleeper in the gaming category and I believe they will soon be a major player from a gaming platform standpoint. And add what I pointed out about Air Play and all of a sudden Apple has a game platform for the big screen as well.

The overall key takeaway for me is what I said a while back in a column about Apple’s promise to their customers. Which is that when you invest in the Apple ecosystem, Apple promises to keep making your experiences better.

And they did just that with their latest release of OS X Mountain Lion.

It’s Not Just the Internet: How Government Built the Computer Industry

This week, the Wall Street Journal‘s L. Gordon Crovitz wrote a strange column decrying the claim that the U.S. government created the internet as an “urban myth.” Crovitz was quickly debunked by myself and many others. The truth is even deeper. The U.S. high-technology industry, and the computer industry in particular, owe their existence to the government.

Photo of Eniac
A technician changes an ENIAC tube. (U.S. Army)

The computer was a war baby.  The U.S. Army and Navy, needing fast ways to solve the differential equations they needed to aim long-range guns, funded major research projects. The Army effort, at the University of Pennsylvania, yielded ENIAC. The top engineers on the project, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly started their own company (soon sold to Sperry Rand) which built the first “private” commercial computer, UNIVAC.

In addition to being based on ENIAC, UNIVAC incorporated important advances from John von Neumann’s group at the Institute for Advanced Studies as well as work from Maurice Wilkes’ group at the University of Cambridge and Alan Turing’s cryptographic computing efforts at Bletchly Park. All of these efforts were funded by the U.S. and British governments. And the buyer of the first UNIVAC system: The U.S. Census Bureau.

IBM’s work with the Navy was less groundbreaking, but the company moved into electronic computers in a big way after the war. A declassified history of computing at the National Security Agency shows just how deeply the NSA was involved in the design and development of IBM’s 700-series computers. NSA also paid for development of the first supercomputer, the IBM 7030 Stretch, in the late 1950s and its successor, HARVEST. It really wasn’t until the 1960s that commercial demand for computers eclipsed government purchases and the design of those business systems, such as the IBM 1401, 7090, and System/360, was heavily influenced by the work that had been done on government contracts.

Government influence was pervasive elsewhere. Jay Forrester’s Whirlwind, the first real-time, distributed system, was originally a Navy project but evolved into the Air Force’s SAGE strategic defense control system. COBOL, the most widely used business programming language for decades, was developed in a private-public partnership led by the Commerce Dept.

It is doubtful that modern supercomputers would exist  had government not financed their development down to the present. IBM now sells Blue Gene systems commercially, but the initial units were built for the Department of Energy’s national labs. The 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world are all at government-owned or government-sponsored labs; No. 1 is an IBM Blue Gene/Q system at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (And those are just the ones we know about; the NSA does not release any information on its advanced systems.)

None of this is to say that private companies and private investment didn’t play a huge role in the development of the industry. While the government continues to play an important part in funding some of the most advanced developments, its contribution is many orders of magnitude smaller than in the early days. But the ideologically-driven insistance that the government’s role in the creation of the industry was small or non-existent is simply denying a n important and well documented history.

How Android Raises the Experience Bar with Nexus 7

As a technology insider who has actually planned, developed, and launched products, I have always believed it was important to spend inordinate amount of time living with new and emerging technology products.  Only this way, can you get the “feel” of a product; where it is and where the category is headed.  With regards to Android tablets, I have lived with every version of operating system since inception on 10” and 7” tablets. For every Android tablet version, I added every single personal and business account and used it as I would expect general and advanced users to use it.  While I had experienced some very positive things about each Android tablet version, whenever I held it to the iPad, it just didn’t compare.  Either my preferred apps weren’t available, the content I wanted was missing, or it just didn’t “feel” right.  After using the Google Nexus 7 for a few days, I can say the experience is solid and a lot of fun, something I have never before said about an Android tablet.

Why Non-iPads didn’t Sell Well

We must first understand Google’s previous missteps with Android tablets to fully appreciate how far they have come with the Nexus 7.  While I penned this post a year ago outlining why Android tablets weren’t selling well, let me net it out for you.  Non-iPads haven’t sold well over the last year because:

  • tablets were sold with incomplete collections or no available movies, music, TV, books, and games
  • tablets were sold with minimal applications optimized for the platform
  • tablets were released with unusable features like LTE, SD cards, and USB ports
  • tablets didn’t “feel’ good as there were stutters and sputters
  • with all the issues above, most 10” tablets were sold at the same price as the iPad

Think about the horrible stories consumers who paid full price for an HP Touchpad, Motorola Xoom, or BlackBerry PlayBook tell their friends and colleagues today.  Given tablets are a new category and still a “considered” purchase, everything other than the iPad was considered risky, particularly for the non-techie consumer.

So why will the outcome for the Nexus 7 be any different? Well, it’s all about its integrated and holistic experience.

Nexus 7 is a Big Phone with Access to 600,000 Phone Apps

No one doubts that Google’s Android has been successful in smartphones.  They’ve been so good, in fact, that Android even eclipses iOS in market share.  This is why it’s so important to understand the implications of Google choosing the phone metaphor for the Nexus 7 as its it’s all about apps.  Even today, Android tablets apps are counted in the hundreds and iPad tablet apps are in the hundreds of thousands.  Apps and content are to tablets as roads are to a car, and consumers have access to at least 600,000 of these Android apps.  It’s not only about leveraging the phone app ecosystem as the HTC Flyer were phone-based 7” tablets and didn’t exactly set the world on fire in sales.

Nexus 7 Uses State of the Art Hardware and Software

I liked my Kindle Fire when I first got it, but in reality, I was most impressed with the price versus the iPad than the experience. Over time, my Kindle just sat in my drawer at home and I used my iPad 2 then the iPad 3.  I stopped using my Kindle because the web and mail experience were just so pathetically slow, and quite frankly I got tired of staring at pixels as I am very near-sighted.  I attribute this to the cheaper hardware, a much older Android 2.3, a slow browser for complex sites, and a lower resolution display.  I must reinforce, though, it was at less than half the price of the iPad 2 when it shipped and millions looked the other way as they were just happy to have a tablet.

The Nexus 7 uses state of the art hardware and software and at least for 6 months, buyers won’t have too many levels of remorse. The two main drivers of the experience are Android Jelly Bean and the NVIDIA’s Tegra 3. Jelly Bean, the latest Android OS, adds a tremendous amount of new features but, in short, enable:

  • Project Butter which doubles the UI speed to 60fps so Android finally feels responsive
  • fully customizable widgets at any size the user chooses
  • voice search and dictation that actually works, as Google moved much of the logic and dictionary back to the client and off of the cloud
  • fully customizable notifications, to see just what you want to see and very little of what you don’t want to see
  • Google Now, their first intelligent agent

The NVIDIA Tegra 3 SOC is just as impressive as it has:

  • quad core processor clocked at 1.3Ghz which speeds up tabbed browsing, background tasks, widgets, task switching, multitasking, installing apps, etc.
  • 5th battery saver core which operates in idle mode, which saves battery life
  • GeForce graphics with 12 cores clocked at 416MHz to play the highest-end Android games and HD video

When you add these features to the 7”, 1280×800 (216 PPI) display, you get a very solid experience that just “feels” good.

It’s All About the Experience

As the rest of the phone and tablet industry has painfully learned from Apple, it is about the delivering the holistic and integrated experience between software and hardware, not the ingredients that make it up.  The Nexus does deliver a good, holistic experience, and not just at a certain price point.  While what defines as “good experiences” are very personal, here are many of the experience points I believe will be universally appreciated:

  • light enough to comfortably hold in one hand and small enough to put in a coat, cargo pant pocket or purse
  • the UI “feels” fluid and very fast
  • cannot see any pixels which can distract from the visual experience, particularly when using in bed or with near-sighted users who hold the tablet near their face
  • the tabbed browsing is very fast, focuses well on desktop-sized sites, and bookmarks sync with desktop Chrome
  • the apps and content users want will be available, at least in most countries
  • email is full-featured and very fast, with no lag to delete, create, or linking to web sites
  • notifications are subtle, non-invasive, and speedy to resolve
  • live tiles are fully customizable and save time to see content, even eliminating the need in many cases to open an app like email or calendar
  • with multiple apps running in the background with data feeds updating, it still feels smooth

The holistic experience is greater than just the sum of its piece parts, a first for Android tablets.

Nexus 7 Significantly Raises the Android Tablet Experience

As Ben Bajarin pointed out here, usage models will differ between 7” and 10” tablets. One thing I must add is that like the Fire, the Nexus 7 will pull some potential sales away from the iPad if Apple does nothing.  This is an element that many fail to recognize.  The analogy I will use to show this is between sedans and minivans.  If minivans had never been introduced, sedans would have sold more.  In parallel, without a Nexus 7, Apple would sell more iPads, even if they aren’t the same exact usage models or price points.

Will Apple roll over and let Google and Android slow down its march toward digital dominance?  Probably not, as I do expect Apple to introduce a 7” tablet for many reasons and also as Apple laid out at WWDC, iOS 6 is very compelling, especially when connected with other Apple devices.  Today, the broad tech ecosystem and investors see Apple as invincible, understandable as they have plowed over many of the largest companies in tech.  If Google and Android start to gain credibility in the tablet space, what message will that send about invincibility?  Apple needs to stop Google in their tracks and remove all of the oxygen during the holidays to maintain its dominant status.

One thing for certain is that the Nexus 7 and Jelly Bean significantly raise the bar for the Android tablet experience, something that has been absent for 18 months.

WSJ’s Internet History Is Way Off

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page seems to have dedicated itself to showing that every single thing uttered

Photo of Bob Kahnd
Robert E. Kahn (Wikipedia)

by President Obama is at best a misstatement. Today, Gordon Crovitz takes on the President’s statement that the government helped business by creating the internet. Unfortunately, in the process he mangles facts and history.

Lets look at some of the claims:

“The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.” This statement is attributred to Robert Taylor, who was present at the creation and certainly should know, but lacks any context. ARPAnet was created specifically to connect disparate research networks working on DARPA projects, mainly at universities.

“If the government didn’t invent  the Internet who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.”  Vint Cerf developed TCP/IP jointly with Robert E. Kahn. At the time, both were employed by DARPA. Tim Berners-Lee may have invented the World Wide Web, but the idea of  hyperlinks goes back to Vanevar Bush and Ted Nelson and was extensively implemented in HyperCard well before Berners-Lee’s work.

” It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.” This one is a howler. Ethernet was indeed invented by Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC. It it was, and remains, a local networking standard. It was tremendously importnat in the development of the internet,  but was never used to link networks together.

The history of the internet is not particularly in dispute and we have the great good fortune that most of the pioneers who made it happen are still with us and able to share their stories. (For example, my video interviews with Cerf and Kahn.) In a nutshell, the internet began as a Defense Dept. research project designed to create a way to facilitate communication among research networks. It was almost entirely the work of government employees and contractors. It was split into military and civilian pieces, the latter run by the National Science Foundation. By the early 1990s, businesses were starting to see commercial possibilities and the private sector began building networks that connected with NSFnet. After initially resisting commercialization, NSF gave in and withdrew from the internet business in 1995, fully privatizing the network.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you can look it up in a book–or a web site.

 

Confirmed: The iPad Isn’t Good At What It Isn’t Good At

What is it about the iPad that moves seemingly rational people to say perfectly ridiculous things?

The latest example of this foolishness is Matt Asay, writing in The Register, who argues that because there are some enterprise chores that the iPad does not do well or at all, “iPad is RUBBISH for enterprise.” The gist of Asay’s argument goes something like this:

  • Enterprise users depend on heavy-duty apps, especially Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
  • These apps are not available on the iPad.
  • The Apple alternatives, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are less capable.
  • Therefore, the iPad is unsuited to enterprise use.

Each of these statements except the last is indisputably true. And that conclusion is completely wrong.

The problem is the implicit assumption that unless a computing device is well-suited to everything we might ask of any computer, it isn’t suited for anything. This is the sort of thinking–Microsoft is particularly prone to it–that has given us bloated all-purpose devices that can do anything, though often not very well.

To support his case, Asay quotes a Macworld article (unfortunately, no link was provided): “For the most part, I love writing on my iPad. But I still do so only when my MacBook isn’t around…”

I would say the same thing, and I would add that I don’t use my MacBook Air when my 27″ iMac or desktop Windows PC is around. The critical thing is that the iPad is always around when I want it; it has the right mix of capability of mobility for a vast variety of jobs, many of them as great utility to the enterprise.

It is true that putting capable Office programs on tablets gives Windows  slates a potential advantage in the enterprise markets. But, as I have written, the new versions of Office programs, while more touch-capable than their predecessors, still are not very well suited to touch use. It’s not at all clear at this point that a Windows tablet running Excel 2013 will really be very much better for enterprise spreadsheet use than an iMac with Numbers.

The big problem here, though, is the fallacy that lack of capability at any task the enterprise may demand renders a device useless. Let’s accept–and celebrate–the fact that we are living in a world where we have a choice of devices of varying capabilities and where

Why Apple Stands Apart From the Competition

I have been covering Apple now for 31 years and have a pretty good feel for how Apple works. Of course, how they worked changed over the years depending on who was CEO at the time, but there have been a few guiding principles that has driven the company from the intro of the Mac in 1984.

I was sitting in the third row of the De Anza Flint center when Steve Jobs unveiled the Mac. My first reaction upon seeing it was “that does not look like any computer I have ever seen.” But as he got the Mac to say hello to us and started showing us how it worked, I began to realize that Apple did not think like the PC vendors I knew at the time.

In 1984, all computers were square boxes and most of them were painted battleship grey. And when it came to ergonomics, it was clear to me that not much thought was given to its design. Although Compaq’s first PC, which looked like a Singer sewing machine, did break the mold of past PCs, it was not long before they started making PCs in square box designs and basically copying what IBM and others were doing with their PC designs.

But the Mac broke all conventional wisdom of what a PC would and should look like and in my notes of the event, I wrote that Apple clearly thinks differently then the other PC vendors at the time. Little did I know that this term, or the grammatically incorrect “Think Different” theme would eventually become a major marketing campaign for Apple as it strove to set itself apart from the rest of the PC vendors schlepping PCs that all looked the same.

Think Different, Be Different
The first way Apple sets itself apart from the crowd is to “think different” and not let what others do impact the products or services that they themselves create and bring to market. This has to be a very freeing feeling for Apple execs as they continue to put themselves in the drivers seat and create new products and even new categories of products that have driven innovation desktops, MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, and laptops over the years.

Team Players
There is another important way that Apple sets themselves apart from their competitors and that is in the way they run and control their own company. I have worked with a multitude of companies over the years and so much of their decision making process is done by committees and having to get approvals and partnerships from one of their “silo businesses” before they can move ahead. This is why many companies have so many problems keeping up with Apple and the market. Their individual businesses seldom talked to each other and getting approvals on any device or project took serious coordination between these silo businesses to get anything done.

But Apple has one central executive committee that works together seamlessly to design products and make decisions on how the company moves forward. Also, they own their own hardware, software OS, software apps, and services, as well as their new Cloud architecture so they can tie everything together neatly. There are no silos inside Apple and all decisions are made by this single executive committee. That is why all they do works together so seamlessly. This difference of the way Apple runs their company compared to competitors can’t be emphasized enough. And it gives them a big edge over the competition because of that.

But the third reason Apple is set apart from their competitors is design.

At the Fortune Tech conference in Aspen this week, former Apple executive Tony Fadell summed it up pretty well. He told this stellar audience that “great design principles are pervasive in the Apple DNA.”

In Steve Job’s Stanford commencement speech, he spoke about his love for calligraphy and how this influenced his thinking about design and how this drove him to be a perfectionist. And you can see this design DNA in everything Apple brings to market. Although Steve Jobs is not with us any more, Jonathan Ive is now tasked to embed this design DNA in all of their products and teach it to new Apple employees as the company grows.

Over the last few years I have been often asked how to compete with Apple. At the moment, if you look at pretty much all of the smartphones and even new laptops like the Ultrabook as well as competing tablets, they all are mostly copying Apple’s smartphones, tablet and thin Macbook Air designs. So when I am asked that question, I tell these folks that if they really want to compete with Apple, they need to start innovating on their own and stop simply trying to copy Apple. These folks often shrug when I tell them this and point out that Apple’s products sell and they just follow Apple’s lead. But what they are really saying is that they have companies that are run very differently then Apple, that they have little design skills and that they must lean on others to drive any innovation.

The good news is that at least a few ODM’s are getting their own internal design teams and I am starting to see some really new and interesting products, especially coming out of Taiwan and Beijing. But even with that, the OEM’s are slow to react and continue to let Apple lead while they follow.

The bottom line, unless these competitors start innovating on their own, is that Apple will continue to have at least a two year lead on them and thanks to their ways of “thinking different,” management style and design DNA, will keep their competitors following them instead of truly leading the market forward themselves

The PC is the Titanic and the Tablet is the Iceberg. Any Questions?

Most tech pundits are confused about the Tablet computer. They compare the abilities of the PC (traditional notebook and desktop computers) to those of the Tablet and find the Tablet wanting. They can’t understand how the Tablet can be so dog gone popular when it makes for such a terrible PC.

What they don’t understand is that the tablet isn’t trying to be a PC (unless it’s the Microsoft Surface). Tablet sales are exploding because the Tablet is competing against…nothing. The Tablet is going where the PC is weak and where the PC is absent. There’s virtually nothing standing in the tablet’s way.

Comparing the PC to the tablet is like comparing the Titanic to the iceberg that sank it. It wasn’t the one-ninth of the iceberg protruding above the waterline that sank the Titanic. It was the eight-ninths of the iceberg that lurked beneath the surface of the waters. Similarly, it isn’t the few overlapping tasks that the PC and the Tablet can both do well that matters most. It is the tasks that the Tablet excels at – and which the PC does poorly or not at all – that will ultimately reduce the PC to niche status and turn the Tablet into the preeminent computing device of our time.

ABOVE THE WATERLINE
The PC and the Tablet – like the Titanic and the tip of that fateful iceberg – do compete on rare occasions. Companies like SAP and IBM have ordered tens of thousands of Tablets and some of those Tablets have replaced traditional PCs, especially in those instance where the PC was overkill for the task it was originally assigned to do.

But let’s be real. The PC is a better PC than the tablet is, or ever will be. The number of Tablets that will directly replace PCs will never amount to great numbers. Accordingly, we should no more fear the Tablet replacing the PC than the lookouts on the Titantic should have feared the the damage that could have been caused by protruding tip of the Iceberg. They knew, and we should know, that that’s not where the real danger lies.

AT THE WATERLINE
There are millions upon millions of Tablets that are supplementing, rather than replacing, the PC. These Tablets are being used by Lawyers and Financiers, by CEOs and Presenters, by Presidents and Prime Ministers, by Queens and by Parliaments. The Tablet frees the owner from the constraints of their PCs. They can use the PC when they are at their desks and use the tablet to take their data with them wherever they may go.

These tablets will not sink the PC because they complement the PC. However, they may well extend the life of the PC, thus slowing the PC’s upgrade – and sales – cycles.

BELOW THE WATERLINE
The bulk of the iceberg that destroyed the Titanic lay beneath the surface of the waters, beneath the vision of the lookouts, beneath the ship’s waterline. Similarly, the bulk of the tasks that the Tablet excels at, lies beneath the PC’s level of awareness, beneath the PC’s contemptuous gaze, beneath the PC’s areas of expertise and far, far below it’s area of competence. The PC will not lose in a fair fight, anymore than the Titanic lost in a fair fight. Instead, the Tablet will hit the PC where the PC is weakest – below it’s metaphorical “waterline”.

  • STANDING:

Tablets excel at working while you are standing. Tasks done by matre d’s, inventory takers, tour guides, concierges, face-to-face service providers and order takers of every kind, benefit from the use of the tablet.

Can the PC adequately compete with the tablet as a stand-while-you-work device? No, it cannot.

  • ROOM TO ROOM, DOOR TO DOOR AND REMOTE LOCATIONS:

Tablets excel at working when one has to move and stop and move yet again. Car Dealerships, like Mercedes Benz, are giving tablets to their salespeople. European doctors are rapidly taking to the tablet. Service Technicians at Siemens Energy are using tablets while servicing power installations. Scientists are using tablets during field research. Nurses, Realtors, Journalists, Park Rangers, Medical Technicians…the list of users and uses is nearly endless.

Can the PC adequately compete with the tablet as a work-and-move, and work-and-move-aagin, device? No, it cannot.

  • SALES:

If you’re in Sales, you’re into Tablets. Whether you’re traveling or standing or presenting or taking an order and acquiring a signature – Tablets are a salesperson’s best friend.

Salesforce purchased 1,300 tablets and Boston Scientific purchased 4,500 tablet for their respective sales forces. And just this week, NBA Star, Deron Williams, signed a $98 million dollar contract…on a tablet.

Can the PC adequately compete with the tablet as a sales computing assistant? No, it cannot.

  • KIOSKS:

While the PC makes for a terrible Kiosk, the tablet is almost ideally suited to the task. Tablets as Kiosks are making their presence known in places as diverse as malls, taxi cabs, hospitals, the Louisiana Department of Motor Vehicles, and the FastPass lanes at Disney World.

In the coming years there will be millions of Kiosks converted to Tablets and millions more in new Kiosks created from Tablets.

Can the PC adequately compete with the Tablet as a Kiosk? No, it cannot.

  • POINT OF SALE:

Today there are millions upon millions of antiquated PCs being used as some form of cash register or point of sale device. Let me put this as diplomatically as I can – they suck.

They’re going to be replaced by Tablets, almost overnight. And tens of millions of new Tablets are going to be used as cash registers and point of sale devices in all sorts of new and unexpected places.

Can the PC adequately compete with the tablet as a Cash Register? No it cannot.

  • PAPER REPLACERS:

I’ve been hearing about the “paperless office” since the 1970’s. Yet every year, the PC generates ever more, not less, paper. But that was yesterday. Today the Tablet may finally be able to fulfill the promise that the PC so carelessly made – and broke – those many years ago.

Airlines such as United and Alaska are replacing their in-flight maps with Tablets. The United States Air Force is replacing their manuals with Tablets.

Construction companies are replacing their on-site blueprints with Tablets.

Governmental bodies of every shape and size are reducing paperwork through the use of Tablets. City councils and municipalities have jumped on the bandwagon. The Polish Parliament and the Dutch Senate have substituted Tablets for paper printouts of the documents read by their members. The British Parliament just replaced 650 of their computers with Tablets. And the President of the United States and the Queen and Prime Minister of England have all used Tablets in their briefings.

Twelve NFL teams, including the Denver Broncos, Miami Dolphins and Baltimore Ravens have replaced their paper playbooks with tablets. In Major League Baseball, the Cincinatti Reds have done the same. And at Ohio State, all the athletic programs are replacing their playbooks with tablets. Can there be any doubt that this trend will extend ever outward and ever downward to every professional team, every college team, every high school team and even, eventually, perhaps to amateur sports teams?

Can the PC adequately compete with the tablet as a paper replacement? No it cannot.

  • LOANERS:

Tablets are starting to show up as “loaners” that are lent out as entertainment devices. They’re being purchased by libraries. Airplanes run by Singapore Airlines and Qantas use them as in-flight entertainment devices. Airports like New York’s LaGuardia, Minneapolis-St. Paul International and Toronto Pearson International, lend them out to waiting passengers. The Tablet is ideally suited for the task. It is light, it is portable, it is versatile, it displays content beautifully and it is sublimely easy to use.

Can the PC adequately compete with the tablet as a Loaner? No, it cannot.

  • EDUCATION:

PCs in schools are mostly relegated to teachers and computer labs. Tablets live in the classroom and they reside in the hands of the students. No one wants to learn HOW to use computers anymore. Students simply want to use computers to help them learn.

The Tablet is starting to take educational institutions by storm. It acts as an electronic blackboard, as a digital textbook and as an interactive textbook.

It’s at the K-12 level (the San Diego School district just ordered 26,000) and at the Universities (Adams Center for Teaching and Learning at Abilene Christian University, George Fox University, North Carolina State University in Raleigh). Tablets are even finding their way into the top-tier high schools in China.

Some schools have even reported a 10% improvement in the exam scores of students who use Tablets in lieu or paper books.

Can the PC adequately compete with the tablet in education? No, it cannot.

  • NEW USERS:

The tablet excels at creating new computer users. This might seem a bit controversial, but it shouldn’t be. Just think of anyone who says that they hate computers – they’re a candidate for a Tablet. Just think of anyone who is too young or too old or too infirm or too disabled to use a PC – someone like a 3 year old or a 93 year old or a recovering cancer patient or an autistic child or someone with learning disabilities. They’re all perfect candidates for the Tablet. The tablet will create a whole new class of computer users – people who have never used a computer before.

Can the PC adequately compete with the tablet as no-fuss, no-muss computing device? No it cannot.

  • NEW USES:

What makes the Tablet so very exciting is that we haven’t even begun to touch on it’s full potential yet. With desktops, we were desk bound. With notebooks, we were surface bound. The Tablet allows us to do new tasks in new places and in new ways.

And it’s virtually impossible to say what these tasks will be. We’re limited by our experience and the scope of our imaginations. Tablets are going to be used in ways that we haven’t even begun to think of yet.

SUMMING UP

Can the PC compete with the Tablet while standing, while moving, in sales, as Kiosks, as Point of Sale devices, as paper replacers, as loaners, in education, with wholly new users in wholly new uses? No, it cannot.

It is in these areas – the areas that are below the PC’s level of competence, below the PC’s level of contempt – that the Tablet will establish its empire. And there is simply nothing that the PC can do to stop it.

Like Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic, the Captains of Dell, HP, Google, Microsoft and many other computing companies, have failed to adequately grasp the true significance of the danger they are facing. They looked at the Tablet and thought: “What the hey, I can avoid that dinky little tablet floating there on top of the waters. It’s no bigger than an ice cube! It’s no threat to me and my business at all!” But what they forgot, is that most of the tablet’s strength lies hidden beneath the optimal level of the PC, i.e., beneath the PC’s “water line”. THAT is where the real danger to the PC lies.

LESSONS LEARNED AND LESSONS YET TO BE LEARNED

So, what should all of this be telling us?

Is the PC really the Titanic?

Sure, why not. The PC may sink beneath the waves like the Titanic did…but it will leave hundreds of very large “life boats” in it wake. Anywhere that the PC is weak and the Tablet is strong, the PC will cease to exist. And that’s a LOT of places. But the PC will continue to exist – just in a much diminished state.

It is not so much that the PC market will grow smaller (which it will) that matters. It’s much more a matter of the Tablet market growing larger. Much, much larger. Soon the ships that are the PC will be floating atop a sea of Tablets. And what was once a “Titanic” PC industry, will merely be just one component of a much larger, and much more diversified, personal computing industry.

Is the Tablet Really an Iceberg?

Sure, let’s go with that. The important thing to note is that the portion of the Tablet market that everyone is focused on – the portion directly challenging the PC – that portion is, by far, the smallest and the least dangerous portion of the Tablet market.

Tablets will not so much reduce the number of PCs we use as they will simply outgrow the total number of PCs in use. Tablets are additive. They will replace a few PCs but mostly they will replace millions upon millions of tasks that never before were done with the assistance of computers. While everyone is bemoaning the fact that PC sales are flat or diminishing, the reality is that the actual sales of personal computers are currently exploding. True, the PC market is shrinking. But mostly, the Tablet market is growing, and it is growing so fast that it will soon overtake the PC market.

Like the iceberg, it is the rest of the Tablet market – the part that has not yet been fully discovered – that will overwhelm the PC. There will be far more Tablets than PCs simply because there are far more tasks that the Tablet can do, and do well, than tasks that the PC can do, and do well.

This is a novel concept for most. We tend to think of computing only in terms of the tasks that the PC is capable of doing today. We define those tasks that computers are currently doing as the only tasks that could possibly require a computer.

But the number of tasks being done WITHOUT the assistance of a computer dwarfs those that are currently being done WITH the assistance of a computer. And while the PC has pretty much maxed out the number of tasks that it can do, the limits to the number of tasks that the Tablet can do are undefined – and nearly endless.

Will Windows RT Include Outlook? Microsoft Won’t Say

Office 13 logo
Folks who plan to use Outlook on ARM-powered tablets, such as the Windows RT version of the Surface, may be in for a disappointment. The materials Microsoft released this week along with the Consumer Preview of Office 2013 were frustratingly vague about the RT version, saying only that Windows RT tablets would come bundled with a version of Office that included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

In in response to a direct question on whether Outlook would be available for RT, a Microsoft spokesperson said “we are not sharing more specifics about ARM plans today.”

A lack of Outlook on RT tablets has important implications. Many enterprises rely heavily on Outlook, especially as the front end to Exchange mail and collaboration systems. and the lack of Outlook would eliminate a major competitive advantage for Windows tablets vs. the iPad and other tablets. Users would be stuck with the mail, contacts, and calendar programs built into, and the mail program, at least as it exists in the windows 8 Consumer Preview, is particularly weak. It’s Exchange support is limited and  it does not support standard internet mail (IMAP or POP3) accounts at all.

However, as I point out in a post earlier today, Outlook 2013 shares the space and resource hungry architecture of earlier versions and implementing it on an ARM device would be highly problematic. In particular, Outlook’s storage requirements will prove very troublesome on tablets where storage is limited to a few gigabytes.
 

 

 

Office 2013: Can Complexity and Touch Get Along? [UPDATED]

The new versionOffice 13 logo of Microsoft Office, unveiled this week in a consumer preview, has an awful lot riding on it. The strongest claim Microsoft can make for Windows 8 tablets, including the Microsoft-branded Surface, is that they will deliver the full Office experience. This probably won’t mean much to consumers, most of whom can do perfectly well with with the Office alternatives available today for the iPad. But it is a very big deal in the enterprise, where Office still rules and advanced features are routinely used.

To an extent that technology writers on the web often ignore, enterprises live and die in Office and its back office companions, especially Exchange and SharePoint. Support for these technologies in both iOS and Android is limited by the lack of support for full-featured Office applications. Windows 8 delivers that, at least in part, but there are major questions about the usability of the apps without a keyboard and mouse. Based on preliminary experience with the new Office, it looks like the software could give Microsoft a competitive edge, but it is very far from being decisive.

Outlook on RT? There’s a lot we still don’t know about Office, especially the version that will run on Windows RT (ARM-based) systems. For example, we do not know for certain whether Outlook, a critical enterprise application, will exist for Windows RT. The version of Office that will be bundled on Surface and other Windows RT tablets will not include Outlook. If Outlook is not available separately–and Microsoft has not yet responded to inquiries on this point–enterprise users with Exchange accounts would have to make do with the much more limited Windows 8 mail, calendar, and contact programs. UPDATE: A Microsoft spokesperson says the company has no further information on its Office for Windows RT plans at this time.

Microsoft developers faced an impossible task with Office 2013. The essence of Office is the richness of its applications. But feature-rich applications require complicated interfaces, and complicated interfaces are very difficult to implement for a touch-only tablet environment. Consider the iPhoto application for the iPad. It’s a very rich app by iPad standards, though it contains only a small fraction of the features of Photoshop. Yet it has a user interface that, again by iPad standards, is unusually complex and fussy.

Microsoft decided to make only evolutionary changes to the Office UI. A lot of touch features have been added, especially gestural controls, but access the the myriad features still requires negotiating Office’s maze of ribbons and menus. Unless you have Steve Jobs’s famous sandpapered fingers, you’re going to need a stylus or some other sort of pointing device to do that with any efficiency. Ars Technica summed it up well in a downbeat analysis of touch features in Office with the subhead: “Office 2013 makes concessions to tablet users, but they’re far too few.”

How big a problem this is depends on how an individual wants to use Office on a tablet. Having the full apps lets you view files, make minor changes, and save or send them without the fear you may have that a third-party tablet app would make a mess of complex formatting. But any attempt to do serious work on complex documents will prove extremely frustrating without a keyboard and a pointing device. You have all the features, but they are just not highly usable in touch mode. (I found that highly formatted documents did not do at all well in Word’s new Reading view. Pages with multiple elements broke up in ways that made it difficult to understand the relationship between them.)

The mail challenge. Outlook is a special case. Outlook 15 does not appear to have tamed the application’s hunger for resources, both CPU cycles and storage. This will be problematic on tablets, with their very limited storage. I installed the new Outlook on a laptop running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and set up two mail accounts: The IMAP service I use as my primary mail account and a lightly used corporate Exchange account. The local database (OST file) for the Exchange account, which was limited to the last six months of messages, weighed in at 211 MB. The file for the much more active IMAP account took up 1.9 GB (the option to time-limit the messages stored locally is available only for Exchange accounts.) Unlike the mail programs designed for tablets, Outlook clearly does not have the economical use of local storage as a priority–and this is why I think it may not be an option on Windows RT devices, which are likely to have more modest specs than their Intel-based brethren.

Microsoft made a decision to deliver the full Windows experience on tablets. The difficulty is that it isn’t a very good tablet experience for the same reasons that Windows 7 was not a satisfactory touch experience. The richness and complexity of Office may appeal to IT departments looking to support uniform software across different types of devices, but I think users will be frustrated.