New Years Resolutions for the Tech Industry in 2012

We thought we would recommend some new years resolutions for the tech industry at large for 2012. Some of these are company specific and some are general.

From Patrick Moorhead

Tablet OEMs: Invest what it takes to create and market something dramatically valuable, demonstrable, and most of all, differentiated. The answer to that lies with the usage models. The solution should solve a non obvious problem or open up a new way of having fun. Don’t immediately dismiss ideas just because they didn’t work before or because the resources don’t appear to be there. Take some risks and partner on the gaps you cannot afford. The other option is a money losing price war with the iPad or the Kindle Fire.

Consumer PC OEMs: Start adding incremental value over and above a convertible tablet or docked smartphone or there may be a much smaller PC market in the future. Leverage the larger design (versus tablets) to house better hardware components which when paired with the right software create new experiences. Think effortless and accurate personal video face tagging, 99% accurate speech command, and dictation, the highest possible quality video communications, in-home PC game streaming to phones and tablets, etc. Forget about the past of what new usage models sold and what didn’t sell, because those solutions were half baked.

Social media companies: Two different social models exist, “broadcast” and “personal”. Services like Path, while more intimate, are still, broadcasting somewhat randomly to an audience that may or may not see something or may not even be relevant. In real life, there are an infinite number of “micro-circles” that exist with varying levels of context. Companies need to grasp this concept of “personal” and build tools to leverage it.

From Steve Wildstrom

For RIM: work to salvage your enterprise customers’ investment in BlackBerry Enterprise Server infrastructure even if you can’t save their investment in BlackBerrys.

For PC OEMs: Stop trying to imitate the Mac Book Air. Ultrabooks can’t win that game on price or design. Show some creativity of your own.

For tech bloggers: Stop chasing page views by running uncritically with every Apple rumor, notated how silly, unlikely, or old.

From Ben Bajarin

For PC OEMs: Stop innovating in the rear view mirror. Simply trying to make MacBook Air clones is not a strategy that will yield much fruit. A friend and colleague Rob Enderle once told me that when Toyota was grabbing market share from GM in the late 70s, GM simply tried to reverse engineer Toyota cars. Which meant that GM was making great 1970’s cars in the 1980’s while Toyota was focuses on the future GM was focused on the present. Create value, experiment, try things that are new and most importantly create a vision for your products future.

Create Feature of Value: Focus on finding and creating features that your target customer base find valuable. It is important to know what your customers want or what kind of technology innovations you can create that solve real world problems for consumers or make every day tasks easier and simpler to accomplish using your technology.

From Peter Lewis

Resolved: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. And, as Scott McNealy says, Stay Nervous.

Resolved: In 2012, the tech industry must make computer and data security its No. 1 priority. Accelerate the use of biometric log-ins for computers and mobile devices.

Resolved: Vote against any Congressperson who votes for the House’s Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) or the Senate’s even-more-evil Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Resolved: We don’t say we’re e-writing someone, or e-calling, or e-reading. So let’s stop calling it e-mail and e-books and e-commerce, et cetera.

The Top Tech.pinions Columns of 2011

As we bring 2011 to a close we thought we would share the top five most popular columns of 2011. Even though our technology opinion column based website is only 6 month’s old, many of our columns made it around the webosphere. So here are the top five Tech.pinions columns of 2011

1. Why Google Should Buy Motorola
At the time, we simply wrote a theoretical analysis of all the reason why Google should buy Motorola and the benefit such an acquisition would bring to both companies. Turns out five days later, Google did actually purchase Motorola.

2. Why Google and Microsoft Hate Siri
Siri’s potential impact on search is the subject of this column. The potential impact to Google and Microsoft in terms of search is analyzed as well. This was also the most commented on article of the year.

3. Why We Witnessed History at the iPhone 4S Launch
History isn’t made every day. Seems like the past few years have been history by themselves. Looking at some of the ways Siri could impact the future as an inflection point for today.

4. Nuance Exec on iPhone, 4S, Siri, and the Future of Speech
A great interview with Vladimir Sejnoha, chief technical officer of Nuance, as well as some analysis and commentary around the subject of voice and artificial intelligence.

5. Apple Will Re-Invent TV
A deeper look at how the television transforming into a platform, to deliver rich software and services, will lead to its re-invention.

There they are, the top five most read columns of 2011. Other than our very timely Google and Motorola acquisition suggestion, it seems like Apple was yet again a hot topic in 2011. Looking forward to seeing what 2012 will bring!

Why Microsoft should buy RIM

Three years ago, in my annual prediction list, I said that Microsoft would buy RIM. However, I also stated that this was a very wild prediction that I doubted would happen.

Last week, All Things D wrote a piece that said Microsoft and Nokia had discussed jointly buying RIM but that the talks did not go anywhere.

But if you think about it, Microsoft owning RIM, especially their customer base, makes a great deal of sense. At the moment, Microsoft’s Windows Phone is basically designed for the consumer market and has little traction in corporate offices. In fact, Apple’s iPhone is eating Windows and RIM’s lunch in smartphone enterprise deployments. And while Google and their partners who have Android smart phones are taking aim at the enterprise, their acceptance in this market has been weak up to now.

But RIM’s assets still carry significant value in the enterprise. From their secure servers to their BBM messaging service, RIM still has serious technology that draws great interest from the corporate set. But, RIM is at a major junction in their history. If they are to have any chance of growing their business, they must move their customer base from its existing Blackberry OS to one that is much more powerful and will meet the needs of their business users as smartphones get smarter. To that end, they bought QNX and are planning to migrate to this smartphone OS by sometime in 2012. But here is the rub for them. Besides being very late to the market and having only a minor ecosystem of apps and services to work with now, the investment needed to get software developers to write apps for QNX will be very steep. And given the fact that developers are already backing iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7, it will be a tough sell as well.

In the mean time, Apple’s iOS and Android’s ecosystem that targets the enterprise is rising fast. And even though most of the apps written for Microsoft’s Windows Phone are consumer based, Microsoft too has their eyes on the corporate market.

In my viewpoint, the chance that RIM can be successful with their strategy, given their lateness in providing a powerful smartphone OS for their business users and what it would take to get software developers to back it is marginal at best. And although their market value has taken a big hit over the last three quarters, I doubt that it will recover given the difficult position they are in considering the current competitive smartphone climate.

Consequently, this is a perfect time for Microsoft to make a serious attempt at buying RIM and use this to jumpstart their enterprise smartphone business. Interestingly, the idea of Microsoft using RIM to counter Apple’s iPhone move into the business market was at the heart of my wild prediction 3 years ago.

While RIM has been trying to move QNX into their business smartphones and getting software developers to support it with minimal success to date, Microsoft could instead move very quickly to marry their Windows Phone 7 architecture to replace RIM’s QNX. Then they tell their current Windows Phone 7 software developers that it is now time to begin writing powerful business apps for this smartphone platform. I say quickly but I realize this would take some serious software engineering to make this happen. However, Microsoft’s smartphone OS is very stable and already has strong developer support and a move like this could make Microsoft a serious player in enterprise smartphones almost overnight.

So, will this happen? Probably not. RIM’s management seems determined to try to save the company with QNX and hoping to get developers to support them. Good luck to them but in my view, that ship has passed.

But it sure would be interesting if Microsoft did buy RIM and tap into their loyal customer base and over time move all of them to Widows Phone 7. In fact, it may be their only hope of gaining any ground on Apple in the enterprise and keeping Android at-bay in business as well. And while it would be risky, the upside of owning RIM’s customer base and transitioning them WW to Windows Phone could be huge. I am sure that is what Microsoft and Nokia were thinking about when they discussed this idea recently.

But given RIM’s managements current position, it seems likely that this will never happen, even though it would be best thing for both of them.

My Favorite Piece of Tech Gear Right Now

I have nearly every gadget and gismo imaginable. Luckily for me, analysts get great gear to review as well. A friend at a party, who knows all to well about all the great tech gear I get to play with, asked me what my favorite was at the moment. I didn’t even hesitate and I said my GoPro HD.

Before I go further you have to understand that I make a lot of home movies and take a lot of pictures. For me preserving memories is a very high priority. So I’m that dad that takes pictures and video in a simple attempt to preserve as many memories as possible and is always looking for a great moment to capture.

The GoPro HD was designed primarily with extreme adrenaline junkies in mind (which I used to be) and not necessarily for dads who like to take video walking around Disneyland but that is exactly how I used it.

Convenient Hands Free Video Recording
One of the problems with taking a lot of video to capture memories and moments is that you often miss the actual moment. You are so focused on holding the video camera or camera phone and making sure the moment is in focus and captured accordingly that you are staring at the moment through the phone or video camera lens.

I constantly see others trying to record a moment on video, while simultaneously trying to look over the camera so they can see the moment first hand. All the while looking back and forth between the video camera and watching what they are trying to record.

This is what a wearable recording device solves. It gives the watcher the ability to record a first person point of view recording while also being able to focus on the moment.

One particular operating challenge they solved was how to operate with only one hand and while not looking at the camera. This is needed because more often than not the camera and casing are either on your head with the head strap or mounted to your helmet. Understanding this the team at GoPro made the device dead simple to operate. One button turns it on, and the other starts and stops the recording. The on/off button also allows you some menu customization but I rarely use it for that.

The GoPro was specifically designed for the extreme sports enthusiasts and of course it works brilliantly for this use case. I use it frequently when I ride ATVs. I, however, found it interesting how useful it came in for non-extreme sporting events and everyday life events. Like swimming in the ocean or a pool with my kids, or on roller coasters and other rides at Disneyland, and riding bikes with the family in Tahoe. Although these were not the primary use cases marketed for the GoPro, I am convinced that even for the non-extreme sports junky this wearable recording device is a easy and convenient way to capture great and unique video.

The only dilemma you have to overcome to use it outside of extreme sports, is the odd looks people give you when you go out in public with a camera mounted to your head. Here is a slightly embarrassing picture of me on the Tea Cups at Disneyland sporing the GoPro.

The key is to not take yourself too seriously.

The camera while in the case is very durable. It is waterproof, sand proof, dust proof, tree branch proof (since I whacked it on a low hanging tree brance while riding my ATV on a trail), and a whole lot more.

So why is the GoPro HD my favorite piece of tech right now? The answer is simple. Most of what I have in the way of tablets, notebooks, smart phones–and more–are personal electronics and mostly only enjoyed by me. The GoPro, however, although used by me produces things that can be enjoyed and fun for everyone. It enables a memorable and shared experience that is fun and entertaining. This is what makes it great. It is fun to use, I am having fun when I use it, and it produces content that can be shared, consumed, and valued by my family and friends. Therefore everyone wins–not just me.

The Tech.pinions Predictions For 2012

It’s fun to make predictions. Luckily none of us are in the predictions business but it’s fun to analyze, speculate, and simply hope for interesting things to come prior to each new year. This year, rather than have each of our columnists write a number of predictions we decided to have each submit two. So below for your reading pleasure is our bold proclamations for the technology industry in 2012.

Peter Lewis

1) The existence of the Higgs Boson, also known as “the God particle,” finally will be confirmed in 2012 as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva ramps up to full power. Not to be confused with the Higgs Boston, which confers Mass. to Beantown – I’d love to take credit for that line, but The Onion beat me to it – the Higgs Boson is a theoretical subatomic particle whose existence would take humankind a step or two closer to understanding the very nature of matter, the mysteries of space and time, and the future of the universe, which could come in handy in case you’re trying to decide whether to buy or rent. This very tiny particle will be the biggest science story of the coming year. At the very least, it will justify the estimated $4.4 billion cost of one of the largest and most complex pieces of technology ever built, not counting Windows Vista.

2) This was the year of Big Data and Cloud Computing. Next year will be the year of trying to actually move Big Data through the Cloud at useful speeds. Scientists in 2012 will achieve a breakthrough in sustained data transfer speeds on wide-area networks, paving the way for government and academic transfer rates approaching 100 gigabits per second. Unfortunately, you’ll be very old, or perhaps even up in the clouds yourself, by the time such speeds are available to personal computer and mobile device users. In theory, you’ll be able to download the entire Library of Netflix in 14.4 seconds, but. In practice. Your movie. Will. Download. And download and. (Go get a cup of coffee.) Download. Like. This. On the bright side: I predict that the average broadband speed in the United States in 2012 will finally catch up to the average broadband speed in South Korea in 2002.

Tim Bajarin

1) Netbooks will make a comeback.
In 2011, netbooks fell out of favor with consumers as tablets became the hot mobile product. The education market is still interested, though. If vendors bring out netbooks that look more like Ultrabooks but are priced between $299 and $350, these types of products could strike a nerve with consumers again. Of course, they would have lower end processors, a shortage of memory, Android as the OS, and could even just ship with the Chrome Browser on it.
Although they may only be a small part of the PC shipment mix, I believe there is still real interest in a lightweight, very low-cost laptop. While Ultrabooks will fit the bill for those with more cash on hand, a fresh generation of netbooks could find new life at the very low-end of the laptop market.

2) Ultrabook-tablet combo devices will become a big hit.
Ultrabooks with detachable screens that turn into tablets could be the sleeper hit of 2012. Also known as hybrids, the early models of this concept used an illogical mixed operating systems; Windows when in PC mode and Android when in tablet mode. But by the year’s end, both Windows 8 for tablet and Windows 8 for laptops will be out and these hybrids will be completely compatible. I expect to see solid models of this type of hybrid by quarter four.

Patrick Moorhead

1) Smartphones and Tablets erode PCs even more than expected
Smartphones and tablets will disrupt consumer PC sales even more than anyone predicted. The “modularity effect” will start to engage where smartphones and tablets, when wirelessly connected to large displays and full-sized input devices, can replace a PC for basic usage models. That sefment of consumers will be willing to pay even more for their smartphones and even less

2) Auto check-in subsidized phone or service launched
The first phones with private “auto check-ins” for stores, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, malls, and gas stations will be launched in exchange for an additional $49-$99 subsidy. Competitive deals and loyalty benefits will be presented to the consumer based upon where they are checking in. The auto check-in will only automatically be shared with the company providing the subsidy and not be public, unless the consumer decides so. The phone will be marketed to middle-income, younger consumers who are willing to trade privacy and advertising for cash.

Steve Wildstrom

1) A major professional sports league will do a deal with Microsoft for over-the-top streaming of live games via Xbox. This will be a major step in breaking the iron triangle of content owners, networks, and cable/satellite distributors and will increase Microsoft’s lead over Apple and Google in streaming content.

2) The U.S. government will conclude its antitrust investigation of Google without bringing any charges. The EU, however, may take a harder line, so Google won’t be out of the woods.

Ben Bajarin

1) Google will sell the Motorola hardware division. When I wrote back in August about why Google should buy Motorola, I didn’t intend it to be a prediction. Even though a week later they actually did buy Motorola. For me it was more of a theoretical analysis of what I thought Google should do and what would be best long-term for Motorola. Given that the patents are what Google is claiming is most valuable to them, once the acquisition is complete and the active lawsuits are settled, Google can legally sell the hardware division and still keep the patents for future protection. If Google truly wants to maintain good relations with their customers, it behooves them to get rid of the Motorola hardware business.

Although, I wouldn’t sell this business until 2013 if I was Google. Just in case their current partners like HTC and Samsung for example begin to shift their loyalty to Windows Phone or even perhaps webOS. This would inevitably hurt their market share and could lead them to go the vertical route, which they would need to Motorola hardware division to do.

2) Google will launch a Chrome based tablet, probably called the Chromepad. It will be priced at $99 and only be used for browsing the web and web services through Google’s Chrome OS. It will be highly disruptive and usher in the era of low-priced, web and web app only connected tablets.

BONUS Far Out Prediction

I’d like to throw in a bonus wild prediction. I think it would be great and completely re-shape the broadcast and over-the-top TV landscape. Microsoft will buy DirecTV and integrate it with the XBOX 360 and all future US-based XBOX’s going forward.

From all of us at Tech.pinions, Happy Holiday and have a great New Year’s.

The NTSB’s Cluelessness Could Actually Hurt Car Safety

In Maryland, where I live, it is illegal to have a phone in your hand to talk or text while driving. But it seems that maybe one in four drivers I see on the road have a phone to an ear–and often, they are driving really badly. I fully support the notion that people should not phone and drive. But I think the recent call by the National Transportation Safety Board to ban the use of portable electronics by drivers is seriously misguided.

It’s a little hard to tell what the NTSB, whose powers a purely advisory, not regulatory, wants states to do since its recommendations seem to consist of a vague press release. Its justification for the recommendation consists of a string of scary anecdotes, the primary one being a horrifying tale of a driver who caused a multiple-fatality accident after sending 11 text messages in 11 minutes. Quoting the press release:

The safety recommendation specifically calls for the 50 states and the District of Columbia to ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers. The safety recommendation also urges use of the NHTSA model of high-visibility enforcement to support these bans and implementation of targeted communication campaigns to inform motorists of the new law and heightened enforcement.

This is a truly bad idea for a number of reasons. First, the NTSB doesn’t tell us what a “portable electronic device” is or what it means for it to be “designed to support the driving task.” Are navigation devices, which seem to me to support driving, acceptable? Is it OK to type in your destination on some navigation device’s horrible keyboard while tooling down the road? What about speaking your destination to Google Maps on an  Android phone?

Second, the ban is unenforceable. Judging by what I see every day, the police cannot or will not enforce the laws already on the books.  Broadening the law, especially if it is complicated by making fine distinctions about what devices are permissible, will only make things worse. In my Acura TL, I can make or receive a call without taking even one hand off the wheel through a combination of buttons built into the steering wheel and voice control. Presumably, the NTSB recommendation would make using it illegal. But no law enforcement officer could ever say with certainty that I was talking on the phone while driving, and I can destroy the evidence at the push of a button. (Cathy Gellis discusses the legal and enforcement issues in more depth here.)

But finally, and most important, the NTSB seems to have no sense whatever of the growing use of mobile phones as the data link in telematics systems for everything from entertainment to safety. The craziest idea, not included in the NTSB recommendation but discussed by the U.S. Department of Transportation, is technology that would somehow block phone transmissions from inside of moving cars.  Never mind the technical difficulties in doing this or the protests that are sure to arise from the FCC, it’s a terrible idea.

If On Star is acceptable, even welcome as a safety enhancement, what is wrong with a system that performs similar functions through a phone rather than a radio embedded in the car? SYNC, a collaboration between Ford and Microsoft uses a phone to link to everything from in-car entertainment to real-time car diagnostics–and even monitoring the health of the driver.

The truth is that cars are becoming connected devices and for a whole lot of reasons, it makes more sense to use a phone for the link than building it into the car. The NTSB seems to be perfectly oblivious to this trend and in the long run, the board’s recommendation is more likely to hurt than help safety.

Distracted driving is a real menace, and phone use is a big part of the problem. Education and common sense might go a long way toward alleviating it: use a hands-free system, never text and drive, and if you must use the phone while driving, keep the conversations short and simple. The NTSB ban is the wrong way to go and buy denying the many benefits of electronics in cars, it could actually make things worse.

 

Voice Control Will Disrupt Living Room Electronics

In what seems to be a routine in high-tech journalism and social media now is to speculate on what Apple will do next. The latest and greatest rumor is that Apple will develop an HDTV set. I wrote back in September that Apple should build aTV given the lousy experience and Apple’s ability to fix big user challenges. What hasn’t been talked about a lot is why voice command and control makes so much sense in home electronics and why it will dominate the living room. Its all about the content.

History of U.S. TV Content

mic

For many growing up in the U.S., there were 4-5 stations on TV; ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and an independent UHF channel. If you ever wanted to know what was on, you just looked into the daily newspaper that was dropped off every morning on the front porch. Then around the early 80’s cable started rolling out and TV moved to around 10-20 channels and included ESPN, MTV CNN, and HBO. The next step was an explosion in channels brought by analog cable, digital cable and satellite. My satellite company, Time Warner, offers 512 different channels. Add that to the unlimited of over the top “channels” or titles available on Netflix, Boxee, and you can easily see the challenge.

The Consumer Problem

With an unlimited amount of things to watch, record, and interact with, finding what you want to watch becomes a huge issue. Paper guides are worthless and integrated TV guides from the cable or satellite boxes are slow and cumbersome. Given the flat and long tail characteristic of choices, multi-variate and unstructured “search” is the answer to find the right content. That is, directories aren’t the answer. The question then becomes, what’s the best way to search.

The Right Kind of Search

If search is the answer, what kind of search? The answer lies in how people would want to find something. Consumers have many ways they look for things.

Some like to do surgical searching where they have exacts. They ask for “The Matrix Revolutions.” Others have a concept or idea of what they are looking for but not exactly; “find the car movie with Will Ferrell and John Reilly” and back comes a few movies like Step Brothers and Talladega Nights. Others may search by an unlimited amount of “mental genres”, or those which are created by the user. They may ask for “all Emmy Award winning movies between 2005 and 2010”. You get the point; the consumer is best served with answers to natural language search and then the call to action is to get that person to the content immediately.

Natural Language Voice Search and Control

The answer to the content search challenge is natural language voice search and control. That’s a mouthful, but basically, tell the TV what you want to watch and it guides you there from thousands of entry points. Two popular implementations exist today for voice search. There are others, like Dragon Naturally Speaking, but those are niche commercial plays.

Microsoft Kinect

Microsoft has done more more to enhance the living room than any other company including Apple, Roku, Boxee and Sony. Microsoft is a leader in IPTV and the innovation leader in entertainment game consoles. With Kinect, a user can use Bing to search and find content. It works well in specific circumstances and at certain points in the experience, but it needs a lot of improvement. Bing needs to find content anywhere in the menu structure, not just at the top level. It also needs to improve upon its ability to work well in a living room full of viewers. Its beam-forming is awesome but needs to get better to the point that it serves as a virtual remote.

Finally, it needs to support natural language search and the ability to narrow down the choices. I have full confidence that they will add these features, but a big question is the hardware. The hardware is seven years old. Software gymnastics and offloading some processing to the Kinect module has been brilliant, but at some point, hardware runs out of gas.

Apple Siri

While certainly not the first to bring voice command and dictation to phones, Apple was the first to bring natural language to the phone. The problem with the current Siri is that its not connected to an entertainment database, its logic isn’t there to narrow down choices, and it isn’t connected to a TV so that once you find what you are looking for you can immediately switch the TV.

As I wrote in September (before Apple 4s and Siri), Apple “could master controlling the TV’s content via voice primarily.” If Apple were to build a TV, they could hypothetically leverage iPhones, iPads, iPods to improve the voice results. While Kinect has a full microphone array and operates best at 6-8 feet, an iPhone microphone could be 6 inches away and would certainly help with the “who owns the remote” problem and with voice recognition. Even better would be if multiple iOS devices could leverage each others sensors. That would be powerful.

While I am skeptical in driving voice control and cognition from the cloud, Apple, if they built a TV, could do more local processing and increase the speed of results. Anyone who has ever used Siri extensively knows what I am talking about here. The first few times Siri for TV fails to bring back results or says “system unavailable”, it gets shelved and never gets used again by many in the household. Part of the the entertainment database needs to be local until the cloud can be 99% accurate.

What about Sony, Samsung, LG, and Toshiba?

I believe that all major CE manufacturers are working on advanced HCI techniques to control CE devices with voice and air gestures. The big question is, do they have the IP and time to “perfect” the interface before Apple and Microsoft dominate the space? There are two parts to natural language control, the “what did they say”, and the “what did they mean”. Apple licences the first part from Nuance but the back end is Siri. Competitors could license the Nuiance front end, but would need to buy or build the “what did they mean” part.

Now that HDTV sales are slowing down, it is even harder to differentiate between HDTVs. Consumers haven’t been willing to spend more for 3D but have been willing to spend more for LED and Smart TV. Once every HDTV is LED, 3D and “smart”, the key differentiator could become voice and air gestures. If Sony, Samsung, LG and Toshiba, aren’t prepared, their world could change dramatically and Microsoft and Apple could have the edge..

What Next for T-Mobile?

AT&T’s proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA has been unraveling ever since the U.S. Justice Dept. sued to block the deal  and was effectively doomed when the Federal Communications Commission said last month that it also was opposed. So it was  a bit of an anticlimax today when AT&T officially called the deal off.

The collapse of the merger leaves T-Mobile’s corporate parent, Deutsche Telekom, $4 billion richer in a termination payment from AT&T. But other than acquiring some spectrum from AT&T as a consolation prize, T-Mobile is left to stagger forward on its own facing the same problems that led DT to seek the AT&T deal in the first place.

T-Mo is in a fairly distant fourth place behind Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint, has a relatively weak nationwide footprint, and currently has no clear path to LTE, the next generation wireless technology. But finding a new partner won’t be easy. A combination with Sprint looks out of the question because Sprint, with serious financial strains of its own, is occupied salvaging the wreckage of its 4G partner, Clearwire. And Verizon is a nonstarter for the same antitrust reasons that killed the AT&T deal.

Furthermore, a combination with either Sprint or a second-tier carrier, such as US Cellular or C-Spire, would be very difficult technologically. Like AT&T, and unlike nearly every other U.S. carrier, T-Mobile uses GSM network  technology. While LTE may eventually provide a common technology platform for all carriers, the reality is that at least for the next few years, T-Mobile and AT&T will be carrying the bulk of their traffic on GSM-derived protocols (EDGE, UMTS, HSPA), while Verizon, Sprint, and most second-tier networks will run primarily on CDMA 2000 technologies. Trying to mix and match these technologies isn’t impossible, but it would add a huge burden to the already difficult business of wireless mergers.

DT has made it clear that it would much rather get out of the U.S. market than dive in deeper, so a major investment in T-MO USA from its German parent is unlikely. One reason that many consumer groups, and much of the technology industry, opposed the AT&T deal is that T-Mo had earned a reputation for being open to innovative handsets and aggressive pricing. We’ll have to see if they’ll be in a position to keep that up following the non-deal.

At least with AT&T no longer in a position to oppose it, T-Mobile might finally persuade Apple to give it the iPhone.

Why The Android Update Alliance Was Doomed From the Start

When Google announced the Android Update Alliance, an initiative to bring each new Android OS release to all devices in a timely manner, it was well-intentioned but doomed from the start.

Jamie Lendino over at PC Magazine had a great column called “Google’s Android Update Alliance is Already Dead.” I recommend a read of this column in order to get some more context from the handset OEMs and carrier quotes on the subject. The reality is that this alliance was flawed at a fundamental level from the beginning and was destined to failure.

There is an important element to understand about this industry and it comes down to two types of strategies to bring devices to market. The first strategy is a direct to consumer product development approach. This is the strategy most closely followed by Apple, due to the fact that they have their own retail stores and control their own retail presence. Both of those strategic points in Apple’s favor are strengths at a competitive level. In this strategy the end consumer is your customer, they are the ones you are attempting to sell directly to. When a more direct to consumer strategy is employed, a more limited product mix is possible.

The second strategy is a channel strategy. This is the strategy that many take by order of necessity. In this strategy, although devices are made for consumers, the customer is actually the channel, or the retailer and carrier. Device manufacturers actually create products specifically for the channel in the hopes that the channel can sell them to consumers. Device manufacturers are not guaranteed that the channel will sell their device or give them favorable margins on devices sold. Because of this fact, device OEMs must create a device menu in order to give many different channels the opportunity to sell different devices. The other key point in a channel strategy, is that the channel (whether it be a retailer or a carrier) is not interested in selling two products that are too similar to each other or target the same market segment. This is why we see such a heavy device mix in carrier retail for example. I empathize with companies who have to employ a channel strategy because it is very hard and very frustrating–and also very political. However, employing a channel strategy engrains in a device OEM what I call a “ship-and-forget” mentality. This is at a fundamental level why the Android Update Alliance was destined to fail.

This mindset is unfortunate but necessary to employ a successful channel strategy. Companies that make a menu of devices to sell to the channel need to move quickly to the next batch of devices and commit existing development resources to this new batch of devices.   This makes supporting legacy devices more difficult due to most of the engineering always having to move to new product development. There are fewer resources, and less priorities frankly, for legacy devices because almost all the focus is on the future not the past. This again is fed by the business model of those who are selling to the channel which yields low margins but requires high volume.

It is also partially Google’s fault because they put updating and supporting devices in the hands of the OEMs. Often this is because the OEMs have changed Android slightly in order to differentiate their handsets, therefore said OEM is responsible for the engineering to get their legacy devices up to speed. It is hard to side with one or the other on this issue. Of course if no one changed Android and left it stock, it would be easier to update quickly. The only problem with that is that there is VERY little differentiation in that world and any differentiation is limited to hardware. This is the sea of sameness I talk frequently about and in the past it led to spec battles and very little innovation.

If you want to see the sea of sameness in action, go to a big box retailer who sells PCs and look at the wall of Windows machines, all running identical software thus the only difference is in hardware. Hardware differentiation alone would be a boring future.

The channel strategy that is employed by many in the industry is a simple truth about how this industry works. It has its plusses but it also has its minuses. Vendors must differentiate, but they also have to cater to the channel. The channel, and horizontal operating system solutions create this sea of sameness due to the nature of the business model.

Everyone from the OEM, to the channel (retailer and carrier), as well as the software platform (Google) have to align for the good of the ecosystem if this is to get any better. The only problem is from what I see so far they are still more dis-aligned than aligned.

So although it was well-intentioned, the channel strategy and lack of Google’s own committing of more resources to assist OEMs is what keeps the Android OS unity a pipe dream.

The iPhone May Foreshadow The Future of Personal Computing

In 1989, I wrote a piece in one of my internationally syndicated columns about a mobile computing concept that was very modular in nature. Back then, portable computers were pretty bulky and heavy and having to lug them with me around the world was a pain. That led me to think about what future portable computing might look like and I took a stab at this idea of a modular approach to personal computing.

In hindsight this was ridiculously wishful thinking on my part more than anything else since the technology at that time was not there then to make those current portable computers smaller and lighter let alone modular.

At the heart this vision was the idea of having a lot of screens available in my work and home lifestyle. I envisioned these screens as being “displays” that my modular computer would connect or plug into in a lot of places and locations. The most far out thing I wrote about was the idea of the back seat of every plane having a screen and the bottom side of the tray would be a keyboard. In my model, there would be someplace for my “modular brick” as I called it to connect to this screen and keyboard and instantly become my personal computer.

The key to this idea was that the brick would have my CPU, OS, my own customized UI and all of my files and data. That meant that I would always have my own personal computer with me everywhere I would go and I would just plug it into an available screen and keyboard. Of course, that meant a large infrastructure of screens, keyboards and standardized I/O ports would need to be available everywhere. In the end, this vision was too early for its time, and even today would be hard to pull off given the state of the current technology.

Interestingly, we already have modular computing of sorts today. It comes in the form of our laptops where we have our own OS, customized UI and all of our personal files and can be plugged into a screen and keyboard as part of our computing model. Indeed, when I get to my office I connect my 13 inch MacBook Air to a 27-inch screen and use a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard. In this case, my MacBook Air is kind of brick–in this model–in that it just sits there providing the CPU power, OS, UI and access to my files.

But what if we could have that same kind of modular functionality in a “brick” that fits in your pocket? A very small device that houses a powerful CPU, OS/custom UI and data files and can be docked with a multitude of screens that are accessible around the office, school, home, shopping malls, etc. As far out as this seems, I believe that this is exactly the vision Apple has for the future of the iPhone.

If you have used an iPhone in an audio docking system you may have already thought of this idea. I was recently in a rented home in Hawaii where the entire home’s audio system was hooked up to an iPod and iPad audio/out dock. And if you have ever used Apple’s Air Play, you kind of have a glimpse of how the iPhone and the iPad can use wireless technology to share images and video.

One of the key technologies Apple has created that would help facilitate part of this concept is their 28 pin connector. While it has 28 pins, only about half of them are actually used for dock syncing, audio/video out, etc. In essence they have future proofed this connector so it could be used for a lot of other high intensity driven functions in the future.

One interesting example of this would be for an iPhone or iPad to be able to someday drive very high-resolution video monitors. Today it can only power basic VGA monitors. I recently saw technology from Corning’s Fiber division that has created a fiber cable that can be twisted, knotted, and even stepped on with no loss of high-speed transmissions. And these cables can carry data at speeds well over 50 GBPS. If this can be commercialized with the proper I/O connection points in place, it would have major ramifications for computing at all levels. But it could really enable something the like iPhone to become a modular device driving full PC functionality via various docking systems tied to all kinds of available screens, even very high resolution ones. This of course is a futuristic view but the technology is there to make this happen in the very near future.

The other roadblock to making this modular concept work today is the CPU itself. Although we are making great strides in low voltage processors that still deliver great performance, we will need very high speed mobile processors with extended graphics functions to make this modular vision work. However, if you look at NVIDIA’s current Tegra 3 chip with its 5th core, you can see that they are actually heading in this direction. And of course, we expect that Apple is working on their own mobile ARM chips that map this direction too.

I suspect that within 2-4 years we will have mobile chips that could drive this modular approach with smartphones forward.

Another interesting example of this modular connection to a screen would be in a car. All the car would have to have is a basic screen and, in Apple’s case, a dock with the 28 pin connector tied directly to it. That would mean that all you need to do is dock you iPod into this car’s iDock and that screen on the dash is now your full personal computer with added functionality tied to things like hands free navigation maps, traffic info, etc. And it would have all of your apps and files if you should ever need them via this screen.

Or perhaps the screen in the refrigerator is a dumb screen and would get all of its intelligence from the iPhone. Or for that matter, the work area on your desk at home would contain only a large screen and keyboard and you just dock your iPhone to this and you instantly have a full fledged PC.

Of course, things like the iCloud will make it much easier to keep your personal UI and data available across a lot of “smart” screens, but this modular approach could be interesting for the consumer in that the iPhone could bridge that gap between local protected content and the cloud in a much more mobile fashion. And since the smartphone is always with you, you would have the equivalent of a full PC at your disposal all of the time.

Could other smart phones become modular as well? Sure, but Apple has a jump on them with their future proofed connector and this group would need to settle on new high speed I/O s and connectors that would need to be adopted in all of their smartphones to make their modular eco system work. But Apple would appear to have quite an edge on any competitors who would want to do something similar given their advanced thinking on their own I/O’s and the fact that this connector is now on all of their devices.

As far fetched as this might sound, the concept of a smartphone as a modular computer has a lot of legs. And I know of quite a few people in various industries who are thinking this concept out now. But I believe that Apple has had this idea in their sights for some time and they too are thinking about how the iPhone could serve as the heart of a future modular computing model. And given what they have already done with the iPhone and their connector eco system, they could clearly be the first to flush it out and capitalize on this idea well before their competitors can.

Why It’s All About the Digital Ecosystem

My firm, Creative Strategies, has been talking extensively about what we call the digital ecosystem for over 10 years now. As we have been analyzing the technology industry and the underlying fundamentals that make it work, we have been trying to think about this from the vantage point of ecosystems. We believe that products are better as a part of a solution and in this ecosystem view-point, products are not islands but part of a solution (or ecosystem). This view works in every segment of the market as it is universal.

So what do I mean by digital ecosystem?

Based on the Merriam-Webster definition of an ecosystem I’d like to submit this definition for a “digital ecosystem”.

“the complex of a community of digital devices and their environment functioning as a whole”

A complete digital ecosystem consists of hardware, software, and services. All play a particular role in the ecosystem in order for it to function as a whole. Based on the design of the hardware, the function of the software, and the services provided, ecosystems can target specific parts of the market or the market as a whole. Microsofts’s XBOX is an example of a hardware, software, and services solution targeted for a specific part of the market. The point is that all three components are necessary for a holistic ecosystem.

The important thing about ecosystems is that they create dependencies. These dependencies can lead to consumer loyalty. They, however, can also lead to consumer revolt. Microsoft, Google, and Apple are out to create ecosystems that drive loyalty. In my opinion, companies like Comcast create ecosystems that lead to revolt since I would prefer a better TV service and integrated solution.

Our conviction is that over the course of the next few years, consumers will consciously begin to make decisions about products based on whose ecosystems they desire to be a part of, or the ones that work better for their life or environment. The hardware, software, and services will be important but more importantly, consumers will commit to and invest in ecosystems.

As it relates to personal computing, there are three main companies who enable ecosystems today. They are Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Microsoft and Google are more horizontal, where Apple is more vertical.

The history of the technology industry informs us of a fascinating value shift. This shift begins where value is initially in hardware, then as the market matures it moves to software and then eventually to services. I would argue that this value shift is more significant with horizontal plays than with vertical plays. This is important to keep in mind as we look at each ecosystem.

Microsoft, Google and Apple all think about ecosystems differently, which is why I choose to look at them separately.

The Microsoft Ecosystem
As I pointed out in last weeks column, I believe Microsoft thinks more like an operating system company than a software company. This is not always a bad thing and in this case, thinking in terms of enabling a platform is a good thing. What is important is how that platform enables an ecosystem. Microsoft has been relatively strong as it relates to desktops and notebooks. If you are not Apple and you need to ship an OS for a desktop or notebook, Microsoft is your best choice.

Where Microsoft has been weak with regards to personal computing is in the area of services. This is not to say they don’t or can not think like a services company. In fact XBOX Live is, I believe, the best service for gamers out there hands down.

Microsoft has been strong in enabling hardware and software for PCs but needs to strengthen that strategy as it relates to smartphone and tablets. Microsoft and Google both need to invest in helping those in their hardware and software ecosystem differentiate and make money.

In this new era of truly personal computing, being led by devices like smartphones, and now tablets to a degree, Microsoft is well behind Google.

The Google Ecosystem
Google has been fascinating to watch. I believe that Google, unlike many businesses, thinks first like a services company and then works backwards. What I mean is that while Apple and Microsoft think more from a hardware and or software viewpoint first, Google thinks first and foremost like a services company.

In this mindset, it becomes pretty clear that, unlike other companies in this industry, Google exists to make money for no one else except Google. They may say this is not true but their actions prove that it is. Google wants to extract value from all hardware, while using software (like Android) only as mechanism to connect to their services, which is how they make money.

For Google’s ecosystem to strengthen, they need to figure out how to work better with hardware manufactures in order to create a unified ecosystem AND invest in helping others make money. If they do not do this, their ecosystem becomes unsustainable and could someday be void of life.

The challenge that the horizontal platform strategy brings is that it makes it harder for hardware players in the ecosystem to differentiate. Both Google and Microsoft enable what I call the “sea of sameness.”

In a world where consumer preference and choice is prevalent, a lack of differentiation is the slow kiss of death.

The Apple Ecosystem
Apple on the other hand stands out clearly from the pack due to their vertical approach. By owning and controlling all the major parts of the ecosystem, the hardware, software and services, they are in the drivers seat when it comes to emphasizing value.

I stated the historical observation earlier of how value moves through the ecosystem cycle. I believe, because Apple is vertical, they can keep value in hardware longer–or perhaps indefinitely– where other hardware players in other ecosystems can not.

Unlike Google and Microsoft, Apple doesn’t enable a hardware ecosystem for anyone other than themselves. I view this as a strength, but I know many who view this as a weakness. When it comes to software, although they own and control the OS and a few “core apps,” they do a great job enabling the software community to add value to their ecosystem.

Apple is strong in hardware and software but like Microsoft they need to get better at cloud services. This is where the true stickiness of any ecosystem will lie.

Ultimately the biggest opportunity is to create an ecosystem that is simple and convenient to be a part of. This will drive product after product loyalty and keep consumers invested. And, if people eventually choose a product based on ecosystems, then any company dealing with a product needs to make sure they can deliver true consumer value throughout the entire solution if they want to keep their customers happy.

The key to building a stable ecosystem is to create value for everyone involved.

Apple + Anobit: Compeititive Advantage Through Flash Mastery

With its vast cash hoard, Apple could buy pretty much ny company it took a fancy to. But Apple continues to show no interest in making big, splashy acquisitions, concentrating instead on strategic investments that bring the company key technologies and engineers with deep and sometimes exotic talents.

Apple’s reported near-deal (Calcalist via Reuters) to buy Israeli flash memory specialist Anobit appears to be the latest in a string of strategic acquisitions that included low-power processor specialist PA Semi and artificial intelligence gurus Siri. Few technologies are more important to Apple than flash (not the kind that comes from Adobe.) The iPhone and iPad depend entirely on it for storage and Apple has been moving fast to replace traditional Mac hard drives with flash-based SSDs.

A post on ZDNet’s Storage Bits blog by Robin Harris makes it clear  what Anobit might bring to the Apple party. Flash is a difficult technology and getting harder as storage densities rise. The ever tinier memory cells can be difficult to read, flash storage can be unstable because of internal voltage leaks, and too many writes to the same memory cells can degrade performance.

Anobit applies signal processing technology, which it calls Memory Signal Processing, to improve the accuracy of memory reads. An it uses a variety of flash management techniques to manage errors, increase speed, and lower power consumption. I urge you to read Harris’ full post for the details.

Assuming the deal goes through and Anobit delivers what it promises, the acquisition could widen Apple’s already considerable advantages over its competition. The company has already moved aggressively to lock up abundant supplies of flash memory at attractive prices. An Anobit acquisition adds the possibility that Apple could run rings around its hardware competitors through use of superior flash controllers.

Thus do the good get better and the rich get even richer.

Kindle Fire: The Most Divisive Product of 2011

A month after its launch, Amazon’s Kindle Fire continues to be an extraordinarily polarizing product. Lots of people like it and it appears to be flying off the shelves (though it would be nice if Amazon supplied some actual numbers to back up its glowing sales reports.) But a significant element of the tech world has nothing but contempt for the 7″ ereader/tablet.

Kindle Fire photo
Amazon's Kindle Fire

The split in opinion reflects an analytical division that has colored the debate since Amazon announced the Fire in September. Some folks see it as poor (if smaller and much cheaper) version of Apple’s iPad, while others view it as a more limited device dedicated to the consumption of Amazon content, particularly books.

The latest round of discussion was  triggered by a New York Times Business Day article by David Streitfield. The piece leaned heavily on criticisms by usability guru Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, who declared: “I feel the Fire is going to be a failure.” But Nielsen is no great fan of the iPad  either. Though he has praised the hardware design, he has been sharply critical of both iPad apps and web sites optimized for the tablet. And his criticism of the Fire’s display of web pages in a bit odd, that pages designed for a 10″ display don’t work well on a 7″ screen. People who buy a Fire looking for a general-purposed web browser are going to be disappointed.

Streitfield’s article immediately inspired Fire defenders. In a post aptly titled “The Kindle Fire is a Kindle Killer, Not an iPad Killer–That’s Why It Works,” Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan wrote:

The Kindle Fire originally disappointed me. While it had the form factor I wanted, it was heavier than I wanted to hold. I’d also grown to love the e-paper format of the regular Kindles. But for the past two weeks, the Kindle Fire has grown to push aside my use of the other Kindles.

Why? For one, the screen is nice and being backlit, I don’t have to purchase a light to read at night. Consider that for the cheapest basic Kindle for $80, you’re going to spend another $60 for a case that integrates a light, if you want to read it at night. That’s $140 right there — getting pretty close to the Kindle Fire’s $200 price and gaining so much more.

The Kindle Fire doesn’t replace my iPad, but it sure has replaced my Kindle Keyboard. That’s the killer factor here. I think the Kindle Fire will pull more and more Kindle users into the tablet world, where for just a little more money, they get books and more — and for a lot less than buying an iPad.

At TechCrunch, John Biggs wrote:

The Kindle Fire is Amazon’s Trojan Horse. It’s made for the mass of men and women who have been looking into this whole tablet business and like what they see. But it is, first and foremost, a reading device and to fault it for not playing Angry Birds well or offering a sub-par Netflix experience is to ignore its primary goal: to inject the concept of Amazon content downloads into a consumer base that is increasingly inundated with video, audio, and ebook sources.

And Technologizer’s Harry McCracken, writing at Cnet, said:

For now, mentioning the first Kindle Fire in the same breath as the Edsel is even more of an overreaction than assuming that it was going to be an instant blockbuster. With tech products, following through on a product’s promise is at least as important as getting things right in the first place–and Amazon, unlike some of its tablet-making rivals, has a strong record when it comes to doing just that.

I’ve been using a Fire for about a month and I mostly am very happy with it. My biggest complain, shared with most users who have written about the Fire, is the relative insensitivity of the touchscreen. To the extent that is a software problem, I hope it will be addressed in an update Amazon told Streitfield to expect in a couple of weeks. Another prime candidate for an update is the rather fidgety nature of the home page that can make it hard to select one item from the ever-growing panel of favorites at the top.

Another urgent item for correction is a point made by many writers and commenters on the Amazon site. As currently configured, the fire has * no parental controls. The built-in one-click ordering lets anyone who picks it up, say your children or a total stranger, order books, videos, or music without any authentication.

The hardware is what it is and there won’t be any change until a second-generation Fire comes along, most likely in the first half of next year. But even then, don’t expect miracles. Amazon’s top priority is keeping the price low, not producing iPad-like near perfection. That means there will continue to be hardware compromises. But it also means that Amazon can continue to address a price-sensitive market  interested primarily in a media consumption tablet.

The Fire will never make folks who know and love the iPad happy. The good news is that it doesn’t have to.

*–The original version said the Fire does not offer a password lock. This was incorrect and I thank Michael Gartenberg for pointing out the error.

 

 

Apple iCloud Shortcomings Provide a Competitive Opportunity

Apple iCloud launched two months ago to huge fanfare and punditry. It’s no surprise given the huge future opportunity with the cloud. Also, it was a big deal for Apple given their past online endeavors had been so unsuccessful that even Steve Jobs issued out one of the few apologies Apple had ever made. In that case, it was about MobileMe. Two months in, Apple has done an admirable job, but it’s clear if they don’t plug some holes, competition has the ability to swoop and and deliver a much more user centric, comprehensive solution.

iCloud Problem #1: Lack of video sync
Unlike photos with Photostream, iCloud will not sync videos taken off of an iPhone and sync to a consumer’s iPad, PC, Mac, or Apple TV. So that last minute winning basketball score…. you are out of luck. Lose the video? Oops… With advanced and mainstreamers users already embracing video this is a huge hole that will be be filled by someone. Bandwidth isn’t an excuse because there’s certainly enough of that over WiFi at home or the business. This is a hole that Google could easily fill in that they get video via YouTube. And with Apple owning both ends of the pipeline, they could even develop a proprietary CODEC that shrinks and expands the files minimizing bandwidth even over WiFi. Microsoft certainly has the capability given they own the PC market and with Live Mesh could provide an solution that never touches an external server.

iCloud Problem #2: Fractured productivity pipeline
Unlike photos, iCloud requires significant user intervention to sync documents, presentations, and spreadsheets between iOS devices and PCs/Macs. If a user creates a document on an iPad and wants to pull it into Pages for Mac, the user is required to download from iCloud.com. After changes are made on the Mac, the user needs to drop it back into iCloud.com. Seems like syncing documents folder on the Mac and PC would have been a whole lot easier. Again, an opportunity for Google Docs and Office 365 from Microsoft.

iCloud Problem #3: Lack of on-line photos
Unlike Google Picasaweb and Yahoo Flickr, iCloud provides no way to go online and view, download, and share pictures from a web browser. This is a very basic feature that is surprising in its absence. Microsoft Live Mesh and Windows Live service can easily fill in this gap.

iCloud Problem #4: PDFs are books, not documents
For most consumers, PDFs are intended to be files intended to be uneditable documents. They are so pervasive that even global governments use them as standard document formats. How does iCloud treat them? As books, of course. In Apples war with Adobe they have crossed the line and have sacrificed the consumer in the process. This is easily addressed by Google and Microsoft.

Filling the Gap
Many companies can fill the gap opened by the lack of iCloud comprehensiveness, timing, and completeness. They fall into two categories; niche plays and comprehensiveness plays.

From a comprehensive standpoint, there are three options, Google, Microsoft and an OEM. Google and Microsoft solutions are straightforward, but the OEM play is a bit complex. Google and Microsoft can build cross platform smartphone, tablet and desktop apps that keep everything in sync. Google already has many desktop apps, with Picasa 3 already filling the comprehensive photo sync role to Picasa Web. Microsoft already has a comprehensive solution with LiveMesh and Office 365 but need to provide more robust smartphone and tablet integration. OEMs like HP, Sony and Dell could either build their own infrastructure or partner with companies like Box, Dropbox, or Sugarsync to fulfill that need. They could also partner with Microsoft and Google as well, but sacrifice some level of integration and control.

The niche players are in the market today, companies like Sugarsync, Box, Dropbox and even Evernote. Essentially, a consumer looking for a specific, non-integrated solution can look to these players today to provide cloud sync. While they aren’t always integrated into an end to end pipeline into the apps, they provide a solution today, and maybe even tomorrow who don’t want to get locked into a solution. Most sophisticated and experienced users will actually prefer this approach as they understand the complexity and see the downside to being locked into an app environment. Probably many reading this blog in fact.

Microsoft, Google, and Independents Fill the Gap
I believe Apple is rolling out online, integrated services as fast as it can, prioritizing what it believes consumers will want first. Services hasn’t been Apple’s core competency, as Ping and MobileMe highlight this. It’s on a slow pace which will let Microsoft and Google edge into a market leading position, regardless of Apple’s prowess in phones and tablets. Microsoft will leverage their ~95% share in PCs and Google will leverage their market share advantage in smartphones and search. The big question is, can Apple accelerate into an area rife with competition in an area which isn’t it’s core competency?

Why webOS Deserves Another Chance

My colleague at Tech.pinions, Steve Wildstrom, wrote a great piece last Friday that chronicles Palm’s past and suggested that webOS is at the end of the road. While he may be right, a part of me wants to think that at least Web OS could live on even if Palm as we knew it has lost most of its key staff and any talent left have been absorbed into HP.

webOS got its first chance for life inside Palm, and its second chance when HP bought Palm and made a commitment to use it as an alternative mobile OS to Android.

The key reason for HP’s decision to buy Palm, and use webOS, is that after years of being tied to Windows and then looking at the prospect of being caught up in a similar relationship with Google and Android for their mobile devices, they made the calculated decision to back webOS. And in buying it, it was supposed to assure them that at the mobile device level, they could finally control their own destiny and not be forced to back Android and all of the things Google demands associated with Google product attachments in order to use it.

Not long after Palm started development of webOS, our firm, Creative Strategies, was asked to look at this new mobile OS and work with them on mobile use cases. As a result of this project, we got to see webOS up close and through this exercise, we began to understand that this was, at the time, the best mobile OS available. Since we did that project, Android and iOS have emerged as major operating systems for mobile devices, but from our work with webOS, we still consider it better than Android and in some ways equal to iOS.

One of the things we discovered early on is that webOS is built on WebKit and as a result, software developers can use standard Web development tools to create apps. We saw this as a real advantage since it meant that Web developers as well as professional software designers could write apps and we expected a robust eco system of apps to evolve quickly.

However, HP was slow in getting an actual tablet to market with webOS and given the competitive landscape, it was pretty much DOA when it did finally ship. And as you perhaps know, Their webOS tablet was killed after only a week on the market.

Last Friday, HP’s CEO, Meg Whitman apparently said in some media interviews that HP would bring out a webOS tablet in 2013. However, I went back to HP to clarify that statement and while my sources did not refute what she said, they hinted that what they most likely will do is look for new form factors to use for supporting Web OS and that a tablet may be one of them, although that is not in stone at the moment.

For now, webOS will move into an Open Source environment and although HP will have a dedicated team of developers contributing to the further development of Web OS, now many other developers can also add to and enhance webOS as well. That means that webOS should get even better than it is today. Given that perspective, I would like to suggest that webOS could and should have a third chance at life in the mobile market.

One key reason is that webOS is really an excellent mobile OS that is built on a strong foundation and is easy to develop for. Another reason is that to date, there have been no legal or patent claims against it and as far as I can tell, it is legally the cleanest mobile OS available. And third, smartphone and tablet vendors are still interested in a third OS or more specifically an OS in which there are no strings attached.

This last item is important. Samsung recently decided to back a third OS called Tizen (formerly known as Moblin, ) as they wanted an OS that they could control on their own. But they chose Tizen because webOS was not available and at the time, Tizen was the best option available that they could choose. Many in the industry thought Samsung would actually bid for webOS after HP said the were going to drop this OS, but its price tag back the was probably over $1 billion. But now, with it going to Open Source, it would not surprise me if some of the tablet vendors, especially those on the fence when it comes to backing Windows 8 for Tablets, decide to use webOS at least for their consumer products even if they have Android products in the works. The main reason they might consider this is that with webOS they would have control of their own destiny and not be forced to adhere to and be driven by Google and Microsoft on future products.

I don’t know if webOS will gain traction, but given the fact that it is a great mobile OS that is very easy to develop for, and one that would give vendors more control of their mobile futures, it would be a shame if it does not see the light of day in some other new mobile products and form factors in the near future.

Palm: The End of a Long and Troubled Road

Palm P{ilot photo
The original Palm

I was delighted back in the spring of 2010 when Hewlett-Packard announced it was buying Palm. I’ve been a fan of Palm for 15 years, but throughout its history, the company has always been hamstrung by a lack of adequate financial resources. With mighty HP behind it,  Palm could finally reach its destiny.

I couldn’t imagine that 20 months later, after wasting more than $3 billion, HP would put Palm’s sole remaining asset, the webOS operating system, out at the curb with a “Free to a Good Home” sign around its neck. (I’m sorry, I simply cannot credit HP CEO Meg Whitman’s claim in an interview with The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky that we’d eventually see new HP tablets and smartphones powered by webOS.  If HP meant that, it  wouldn’t have let the webOS team scatter to the winds.)

But if it’s a sad end to the Palm line, it is somehow a fitting one. Palm always  was a company that couldn’t buy a break.

Palm’s  troubles started at the very beginning. Having failed to raise venture capital funding to get the original Palm Pilot manufactured and marketed, founders Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins, and Ed Colligan had to sell the company to modem maker U.S. Robotics in 1996. Almost immediately, U.S. Robotics turned around and sold itself to 3Com. It’s not clear that 3Com was more than dimly aware that Palm was part of the deal. It certainly clear that 3Com never had any idea of what to do with it.

Palm was forced to stop using the Palm Pilot brand in a trademark dispute with the Pilot Pen Co.

After founders Dubinsky, Hawkins, and Colligan left in a dispute over strategy, 3Com spun Palm into two companies, PalmOne, which made PDA hardware, and PalmSource, which owned the operating system. The goal was to license Palm software to third parties, but the only really significant licensee it signed was Handspring, the company started by Dubinsky, et. al. PalmOne (which later renamed itself Palm) struggled with constant management turmoil, while PalmSource struggled, mostly without luck, to modernize Palm’s increasingly creaky operating system.

Meanwhile, the crew at Handspring managed to turn the Palm into the first real smartphone, the Treo.  Eventually, in a bity of financial judo, Handspring merged with Palm and the company regains the right to develop its own OS, which by then had been sold to Access, a japanese software company.

Alas, it was really too late. Money was as short as ever and drastic action was needed to save the Palm OS from hopeless obsolence (by this point, Palm was becoming largely an OEM of Windows Mobile phones.)  In 2008, Palm got a $100 million infusion from Roger McNamee’s Silver Lake Partners and former  Apple hardware guru Jon Rubenstein came aboard, eventually as CEO. The new team produced webOS and got it into the Palm Pre, but the hardware never won the accolades the software earned. It was a modest success at best and the money drain continued.

The HP acquisition was supposed to change Palm’s fortunes for good, but of course we know how that turned out. But given the soap opera history, the ending should hardly be a surprise.

Analysis: HP Releases webOS to Open Source Community

Today HP made a fascinating decision. One that is disruptive, exciting, and could lead to valuable innovation. HP has decided to release webOS to the open source community. This decision could have significant impact on the mobile landscape and may end up being one of the most disruptive moves yet.

A quote from the release:

“HP plans to continue to be active in the development and support of webOS. By combining the innovative webOS platform with the development power of the open source community, there is the opportunity to significantly improve applications and web services for the next generation of devices.”

The move by HP to put webOS into Open Source is a brilliant one. Although it was a disaster for them and forced them to write off the $3 billion they invested in it, it is now a gift from them to consumers and could have a drastic impact on the future of mobile devices. Next to Apple’s iOS, webOS is arguably the best non-Apple mobile OS on the market. And it is easy to develop for since software developers can use mainstream Web tools to create webOS applications. Also as a part of the release to open source HP will also contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS.

Meg Whitman stated in a quote from the press release:

“webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.”

Unlike Google’s Android or Windows 8 for tablets, it will come with no strings attached. As a rich Open Source OS, webOS could finally reach its full potential. It would not surprise me to see many of the big Android backers in tablets move quickly to webOS and some may even use it for some innovative smart phones as well.

We believe Android could be the biggest loser from this move by HP. Google has constantly taken criticism from the OEMs due to their lack of unity in releases and overall short roadmap. We have heard countless times how many vendors desire a better option than Android. To many of them Windows Phone provided an opportunity but now this void may be filled by webOS.

HP said they plan to continue to invest in the webOS open source project and will have dedicated team members involved with the open source community.

The move of webOS to Open Source is great news for vendors, developers and consumers and could quickly become one of the better options for OEMs who want more control of their designs and mobile OS user interface in order to help them differentiate themselves from competitors.

Related: Dear Industry – Dare to Differntiate

I applaud this move and although it is bold I believe it has the potential to benefit this industry greatly. I am extremely excited to see how the open source community, developers, and OEMs embrace this opportunity. This is perhaps one of the most exciting pieces of news of 2011.

Check out this small forum thread on HP’s website, asking them to release webOS to open source.

Open Source webOS: A Nice Gesture, but a Sad End

In the end, Hewlett-Packard could neither use webOS to gain a foothold in the smartphone and tablet market, nor could it sell the operating system it acquired as part of the $1.2 billion purchase of Palm last year. So it is giving it away, releasing the code and the application framework under an open source license. The sad truth is that we are unlikely to ever again see webOS in a commercially viable smartphone or tablet.

Sad face TouchPadFor webOS to have a real life after HP, some hardware maker would have had to snap it up. But the likeliest suspects, Samsung and HTC, already have their hands full with Android and Windows Phone, and perhaps Windows 8 too. Amazon was a rumored buyer, but it has little interest in taking on a major OS development project; it’s doing just fine with an old version of Android.

The problem is that successful mobile software has to be co-developed with the hardware it runs on. Of the current mobile players, the one pure software company, Google, is getting into hardware with the purchase of Motorola Mobility. And it continues to work intimately with its leading hardware partners on design. Microsoft gives its Windows Phone hardware partners very limited freedom in their design choices. Apple, of course, is the maestro of integrated mobile hardware and software, and it was in an attempt to emulate Apple’s success that HP bought Palm in the first place.

There’s a good reason for this. The mobile user experience depends to a huge degree on how smoothly the hardware and software work together. A huge part of Apple’s success is based on the fact that it and third-party iOS developers know every detail of the very limited variety of devices they write for. In that environment, the hardware and software become one, and this makes for happy users.

Attempts to develop mobile operating systems in isolation have a sorry history. Intel and various partners tried with Moblin, MeeGo, and Tizen and left us with nothing but a pile of odd names.  The LiMo Foundation had no greater success with its attempt to create a mobile Linux.

I’m sure open source webOS will attract a bunch of enthusiastic developers, who will succeed in getting it to run on commodity hardware. But if there were a real chance of getting a product out of this, someone would have shown interest in buying webOS for what I am sure was a bargain-basement price. Instead, they saw a pit full of Pres and TouchPads and 3 billion of HP shareholders’ dollars.

The sad end of webOS is a terrible shame. It was an extremely promising operating system that never really got a chance, hobbled as it was first by the financial weakness of Palm and then by the incompetence and lack of staying power of HP. It deserved much better.

How Microsoft Can Embrace the Post-PC Era

I truly believe Microsoft is approaching a fork in the road, where some of the decisions made in the next 6-8 months will set the stage for their long-term success or failure. Microsoft is a software company primarily, and many of the decisions that need to be made relate to their philosophy and strategy as it relates to software.

My observation with Microsoft so far is that they don’t actually think like a software company, rather they think like an operating system company.

My evidence for this observation is how Microsoft had withheld key assets from other OS platforms. A classic example of this was up until the latest release, their Office software for OSX lacked Outlook, the standard e-mail program for many businesses. One could argue Microsoft’s reasoning for this was because the Mac had very little enterprise adoption, therefore Outlook was not necessary. I believe, however, they withheld Outlook for the Mac in order to continue to make differentiate Windows and make it more attractive to corporate IT.

I am pleased Office for Mac now has Outlook. I don’t believe it is as good as Outlook on Windows but at least it is there.

Up until iOS and Android hit the market, I would have argued that thinking like an operating system company was good strategically for Microsoft. Now, however, I believe their software divisions need to begin to think about how to get all their key applications onto iOS and Android as well.

Just this week Microsoft released an iOS app for XBOX Live. A solid first step in my opinion, but one that should have taken place much sooner.

There have also been reports / rumors that Microsoft has plans to release Office applications for iOS. This again would be a great move for Microsoft and one that needs to happen sooner than later. Office brings a familiarity to many consumers and business and I believe it would be quite successful on other platforms, like iOS and Android.

One simple example of this is OneNote.    I was a heavy tablet PC user and OneNote was on of my favorite applications. This is an application that since day one of using the iPad, I believed belonged on that platform.   Even though Steve Jobs was adamant against a pen, Microsoft could have sold OneNote with a pen / stylus package that was just designed for note taking and document markup.  This could have been done very similarly to the Wacom Bamboo Pen and paper app. I personally believe Microsoft has a lot of expertise in this area that would bring incredible value to iOS and Android. I agree that a tablet computer should not require a stylus but as an accessory it could be quite valuable.

Although I believe Microsoft has many software assets to bring to iOS, they have even more to bring to Android. Android has a void of quality core applications. If Microsoft brought Office, including a renovated and elegant version of Outlook, to Android, I believe it would be extremely successful, useful, and perhaps even give Android tablets a needed boost. Given that Microsoft actually makes money on IP licensing fees on Android, it actually makes business sense for Microsoft to see Android succeed.

Microsoft needs to realize that they do not dominate the OS and software landscape like they once used to.  They may still dominate on traditional PCs but that is not where the growth is taking place.   It is key for their future that they embrace all platforms and bring the entire breadth and depth of their software expertise to every device, regardless of the OS.

This strategy or shift in thinking would, however, be entirely disruptive to Microsoft as a whole but it would follow where it appears the industry and their revenue is headed. Also in this case disruption is a good thing for Microsoft as they look to the future.

In this last quarter their business division, which makes Office and other key applications, grew 21%. Whereas the Windows 7 segment revenue was down 7% due to PCs in general trending downward.

I don’t see too much light at the end of the tunnel for the PC (non Apple) sector in 2012 either. With Windows 8 on the horizon, I expect 2012 to be a down year for PCs again as consumers wait to see what the new OS brings but also because many consumers are purchasing tablets and delaying the purchase of new notebooks or desktops.

This may very well be a continual trend, which is why it is critical that Microsoft begin to think more like a software company and bring existing application roadmaps to cross OS platform devices and create new applications and roadmaps and innovate with software in general for not just Windows but OSX, iOS, Android, and of course Windows Phone.

Again, this would require a significant change in philosophy at Microsoft. A change that would embrace a platform agnostic approach to software development. Where instead of simply trying to protect Windows, they went out and innovated and created new software experiences for every software platform.

The “app goldmine” is a massive opportunity that Microsoft has been missing out on but it is not currently in their DNA as a company. But I am convinced that the key to Microsoft’s future is to begin thinking about the role of software in a non-Windows world and begin to innovate and lead again by meeting the software needs of consumers on every platform.

My desire for Microsoft is that they create visionary software again, not just an operating system.

Part II: Best of Tech 2011 (Gizmos)

In last week’s episode we awarded “Best of 2011” honors to a bushel of Apples: The Macbook Air (portable computer), the iPhone 4S (smartphone), and the iPad 2 (best tablet). Although it wasn’t a category, Apple as a company wins the “Best Tech Company of 2011” honors. Apple doesn’t just dominate major categories in consumer technology; it sets the agenda for all the others, in almost every category it chooses to enter. The obvious question is if Apple can continue to dominate in the post-Steve Jobs era. My Tech.pinions colleague and longtime Apple observer Tim Bajarin makes a compelling case that Tim Cook-era Apple will be the No. 1 PC vendor in 2012, and Ben Bajarin writes that Apple is poised to reinvent television in 2012.

While Apple clearly earned multiple “best” title in the tech scene in 2011, and seems likely to win even more in the new year, my holiday wish for Apple is that it sets the industry agenda in even more areas: the health and welfare of the hundreds of thousands of workers who assemble its products, the environmental consciousness of its production processes and product lifecycles, and its corporate philanthropy for social and civic causes, which was moribund under Steve Jobs’s leadership. There are positive signs that Tim Cook is already beginning to make positive changes in some of these areas.

But back to gizmos and gadgets. The following is a continuation of my picks of “Best Tech Gear of 2011.”

BEST E-READER

Based on my observations on my daily Amtrak commute into the city, Amazon’s Kindle Touch is the 21st century’s best attempt yet at digitizing the paperback book. It’s not the smallest or lightest Kindle or, even at the deceptive base price of $99, the cheapest. It’s not the first tablet to have a touch-screen interface, and the 6-inch E Ink black-and-white display is not as responsive to touch as the (much more expensive) Apple iPad. It’s not much good for anything other than buying, downloading and reading books. But for buying, downloading (via WiFi or free 3G, depending on model) and reading books and articles, it’s the Goldilocks device: Not as small and cramped as a smartphone, and not as big and relatively bulky as a full-featured tablet or laptop. It can also entertain you with MP3 music and audio books. Is it the perfect e-reader? Not by a long-shot, but it wins the “best of” honor because of the combination of size, weight, functionality, price and simplicity.

BEST PORTABLE STORAGE

As a storage device, the $200 Seagate GoFlex Satellite 500-gigabyte portable hard drive is big enough to hold your entire music collection or favorite photos or a trip’s selection of videos, yet small enough to fit in your pocket. That’s cool. But then you factor in the built-in battery, the an 802.11b/g/n WiFi module and a built-in web server, and suddenly you can stream your digital library to your iOS portable device. Although it works with non-iOS devices including Android phones and tablets, it works best with iPads, iPhones and iPods. If you’re one of the folks who bought a 64GB iPhone and then agonized over which of your favorite artists and TV shows and home videos and documents to take with you, this portable cloud almost certainly solves your problem. Take them all! It runs four or five hours on a single battery charge, and there’s an AC power plug. I’ve had mixed results with Seagate hard drives in the past, but then, I’ve had mixed results with other brands of storage devices too. For now, though, this beautiful streamer is the best accompaniment for my Mac OS X and iOS portables. Let’s hope Seagate comes up with a seamless solution for Windows and Android users in 2012.

BEST AIRPLAY SPEAKERS

Normally I’m a grump when it comes to gizmos that require frequent polishing with white gloves and microfiber rags. But with the Klipsch Gallery G-17 Air, a relatively pricey ($530) soundbar speaker system that works best with Apple iDevices, the glossy black case is worth the occasional dusting. The whole assembly weighs about 8 pounds and seems built like a tank, but that results in the best sound these ears have heard from WiFi AirPlay speakers in any price range. (Caveat: Audiologists often say that it’s rare to find people with “golden ears” over the age of 40, and my ears, veterans of too many loud rock concerts back in the day, are hardly golden. Even so, the G-17s sound better to me than, say, the runner-up Bose Zeppelin Airs. Your mileage may vary.) Even cranked up to neighbor-annoying levels, the G-17 speakers didn’t rattle or buzz or distort appreciably. The ability to stream music from an iPhone to the speakers via AirPlay is thrilling.

Why Apple Had To Release Siri Half-Baked

Siri has been having a bad week. Gizmodo’s Mat Honan called Apple’s voice-response service “a lie.” Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, who rarely has bad things to say about Apple efforts, said it “isn’t up to Apple’s usual level of fit and finish, not by a long shot.”  And my colleague Patrick Moorhead tweeted that inconsistency was leading him to reduce his use ofSiri screen shot the service.

Hang in there, Pat, Siri needs you. I share the frustrations and annoyances of Siri users, but the only way she’s going to get better.

Here’s what I think is going on, with the usual caveat that Apple only shares its thinking with people it can legally keep from talking about it, leaving the rest of us free to speculate. Apple doesn’t much like public beta testing. Before a major release, Microsoft will typically make a new version of Windows or Office to tens of thousand of users for months,  allowing developers to find and fix most of the bugs. Apple limits beta testing mostly to internal users and selected developers. It can get away with this because the real-world combinations of Mac or iOS hardware and software are orders of magnitude simpler than in the Windows world.

Siri is very different. The artificial intelligence engine behind the service lacks any inherent understanding of language. It has to be trained to make connections, to extract meaning from a semantic jumble. To even get to the databases and search tools Siri uses to answer question, it first must contract a query from the free-form natural language that humans begin mastering long before they can talk, but which machines find daunting. (See Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land post for an excellent analysis of Siri’s struggles with queries about abortion clinics.)

The secret to machine learning is feedback. I expect that Siri carefully logs every failed query, along with what the user does next. And algorithmic analysis of those logs, combined perhaps with some human intervention, means that every mistake contributes to the process of correction. In other words, Siri learns from its errors and the more people use it, the faster it will get better. Benoit Maison has a good explanation of how this works on his blog.

The server-based learning creates a very different situation from the troubled handwriting recognition that helped doom Apple’s Newton 15 years ago (and to which some critics have compared Siri’s troubles.) Newtons were products of a preconnected age, so there was no way for the community of MessagePads to learn from each other’s mistakes. And the extremely limited processing power memory on the Newton itself made the claim that it would learn from its errors an empty promise. The Newton could never get past “egg freckles.”

Now, all of this said, Apple’s approach to Siri is a distinct departure from its usual practice of under-promising and over-delivering. It properly labeled Siri as a “beta” product. But, at the same time, it is using the half-backed feature as a major selling point for the iPhone 4S, hitting it hard in commercials. This is a disservice to customers, who have learned to expect a high polish on Apple products, and has saddled Siri with unreasonably high expectations that now are inspiring a backlash. Apple had to release Siri prematurely to let the learning process go forward. Let’s hope that Apple did not do the service permanent damage with its hype.

 

 

Let’s Stop Classifying the iPad as a PC

Last month, Canalys reported that “Apple is on track to become leading global PC vendor”. That would be a tremendous accomplishment, given that no reports had Apple in the top 5 at the end of 2010. How will Apple accomplish this? Well, according to Canalys, they will do it with iPads. You know, a “PC” without physical keyboards, trackpads, or mice. This re-classification got me thinking, what is a PC and how wide does this definition go?

I must point on very early that I am not debating here if the iPad can duplicate, replace or augment certain usage models a PC can do. I know first-hand this is true because I use my iPad now in circumstances that two years ago I would have only used my PC. A few examples are airplane trips and at Starbucks. I am not alone. Respected journalist Harry McCracken wrote a piece on Technologizer  entitled, “How the iPad 2 Became My Favorite Computer“.  That is NOT what I am asking. I am asking about the industry classification of the device.

I’d like to propose a few tests and run a few products through to see what filters out. A PC today must have or be:

  • Electronic: a PC must run off some kind of electric power, AC or DC.
  • Operating system: a PC must run something above BIOS or machine code
  • Personal: the PC is designed for one or a few people, not many. In other words, it’s not a multi-user server. (Clarification: It could serve many people, but isn’t classified as a server.)
  • Portable: a PC can be moved
  • Apps: a PC must be able to run an application above the operating system level
  • Storage: a PC must be able to store personal data, settings or content
  • Customizable: a user can change the PC’s settings
  • Input: a user can input data so that the PC will react to commands
  • Display Output: the PC will visibly show data based via some visible display technology

So, this seems fair, doesn’t it? Well, what products then are “personal computers” by with this definition?

Echo Photo

           

Is this fair? Some of the items above even have generally accepted industry designations like e-readers, consoles, watches and refrigerators. Well, so does the iPad. IDC, Gartner, and Forrester already designated the iPad a “tablet”, so it seems there’s precedence.

We all know the iPad isn’t a computer; it’s a tablet, so why do we all keep pretending? It is fun, I know, even I’m amused when writing this. So what is a PC?

I believe a PC has all the nine characteristics at the top of the page but with the following conditions:

  • display greater than 5″
  • physical keyboard
  • physical mouse or trackpad
  • light enough to be picked up by an average age adult 
  • open application environment where users can load, side-load without having to jail-break

While there will always be exceptions to the rule and definitions will evolve over time, I suggest this definition could help the industry to simplify and better educate.

Does any of this classification debate anything?  While I agree with Tech.pinions colleague Ben Bajarin when he says, “Consumers don’t care nor think about it.  They just hire products to get jobs done”, I do believe it matters a lot.  Companies, investors, developers and consumers are influenced by classifications.  Classifications get used to describe market share, which then impacts financial analysts, which then could impact the stock price of the company. This is also a factor that comes into play with technology investments. “Should I develop this piece of technology for the PC or tablet market”?

My final thoughts are on the future.  The way technology is headed in the future, calling the iPad a PC will set precedence that will only lead to even more confusion and misinformation.  I believe there’s a scenario where the smartphone has a chance to dethrone the PC.  If people change their usage models and start adopting it widely, should we re-classify the smartphone as a PC in a few years?   If the answer is “yes”, then let’s also be prepared in 2015 to announce, “Timex could become the leading PC maker in 2016″.  Let’s stop classifying the iPad as a PC, it only serves to confuse people.

I’d love hear your thoughts. Do you believe an iPad should be classified as a PC?

Also see: Who Really Needs a PC Anyway?

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