Post(s) tagged with "apple"

iOS is so responsive and so liberal with animations that it has a very tactile feel, and rather than thinking “tap this button to open” or “swipe across this box to share”, conceptually, you just move the things on the screen with your fingers.

The distinction seems subtle, but it’s important. Every action on the Surface feels deliberate. It feels like you’re using a computer.

The standard gestures don’t help, requiring many in-from-the-edge swipes that not only aren’t discoverable but also frequently conflict with scrolling. My gestures often didn’t work, and it wasn’t clear whether there just wasn’t a hidden context menu at that moment or I just screwed up the swipe.

Most of the animations also aren’t helpful, with minimal spatial consistency. Many animations seem arbitrary, not hinting at anything behaviorally useful. Microsoft has applied animations and gestures in Windows 8 about as effectively as they applied color in Windows XP and transparency in Windows Vista: they knew that Apple had been successful with these features, so they made a checklist and just applied them haphazardly. “Apple does animations, so now we do animations! Apple does gestures, so now we have gestures!”

An alternate universe – Marco Arment

Source: marco.org

29 October 2012 21 Permalink
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Microsoft Surface: Too Little To Late?

Microsoft is gambling a lot for a chance to fight with Apple, Amazon, and Google for the proximal (‘mobile’) device market. They are pissing off their historic partners, like Dell and HP, by making their first computers ever. The alternative might be to simply become an enterprise software company, milking Office, Sharepoint, and Yammer for the next decade.

I admit I like the keyboard cover idea, but I expect Apple will respond to that quickly.

But it may be too late, since the clients they want to attract with Surface and later products have already moved ahead with deployments of Apple and Android tablets:

With New Tablet, Microsoft Faces a Balancing Act - Nick Wingfield via NYTimes.com

Rich Adduci, chief information officer of Boston Scientific, a medical device company, has more than 20,000 PCs at his company using older Windows. But he has also deployed more than 5,500 iPads to sales representatives and other employees.

A day late and a dollar short?

Related articles

The New York Times

26 October 2012 24 Permalink
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40% of our thefts are Apple products

NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, quoted in Aspen, Colorado (via benedictevans)

16 August 2012 39 benedictevans Permalink
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Peter Kafka Knows Why There Is No YouTube App In iOS 6

Peter Kafka, Why Is Apple’s YouTube App Disappearing? (Hint: Think Ads.)

Here’s some insight from an industry executive who works with both companies, and suggests that you’ll increasingly see YouTube take control of all its apps, for the reasons discussed above: Ad dollars and user experience. “YouTube [has] decided they didn’t want third-parties building apps,” says my source. “Their strategy has changed. They want to control their destiny more.”

So, YouTube is doing exactly what Twitter is doing: they will undo the ecosystem of third-party apps, talk about a ‘consistent user experience’, and pocket the ad revenue.

7 August 2012 28 Permalink
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Horace Dediu on The Computing Renaissance

Looking at the decreasing numbers of Macs and PCs being sold obscures what is really happening: a wholesale shift in personal computing to tablets:

Horace Dediu, Perspective and Context in Personal Computing

Seen this way, rather than there being a crisis in personal computing, we have a renaissance. And as in the actual Renaissance, it’s a volatile and unsettling period.

Nowhere more so than in the changing of bases of power. Consider the following data:

A change in perspective leads one to conclude that Apple is the new leader in selling personal computers. Maybe this charting is putting too fine a point on it, but the data is beginning to make evident that which has been perceived subjectively by only a few.

And that conclusion would only be more evident if we included smartphones in the mix.

The steampunk era of personal computing — with a WIMP interface, and the desktop metaphor of files (documents), folders, applications — is being supplanted.

iPad is the pivot on which this renaissance is turning. And Windows is the grave on which we will be dancing. 

Apple is moving to merge Mac OS X and iOS — I expect an Air/iPad sort of hybrid in 2013 — where the keyboard is the cover, but which can be used as an iPad without hard keyboard, too. They will be able to make that trajectory work, but it’s harder to imagine Microsoft turning the corner. MSFT has a long way to run in a very short time: getting their mobile Windows 7-8-9 adopted, building a viable tablet, and crafting a future version of PC Windows that can merge with mobile.

Yes, there are still a lot of desktops and laptops running Windows, but a lot of the people using them are buying iPads, and their companies are shifting to BYOD (bring your own device). I think we are seeing the death of windows, and the transition of Microsoft to an IBM-like enterprise software company.

Source: asymco.com

6 August 2012 7 Permalink
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parislemon: cnet: Here’s Apple’s e-mail thread about a 7-inch iPad Not surprising at all. It shows Apple’s execs aren’t above common sense. It *is* a good size. And it will be for the iPad.

parislemon:

cnet:

Here’s Apple’s e-mail thread about a 7-inch iPad

Not surprising at all. It shows Apple’s execs aren’t above common sense. It *is* a good size. And it will be for the iPad.

CNET

5 August 2012 37 parislemon Permalink
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Apple Should Buy Twitter

Rumors are flying around about Apple investing strategically in Twitter.

Apple Is Said to Discuss an Investment in Twitter - Evelyn Rusli and Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com

Apple doesn’t have to own a social network,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said at a recent technology conference. “But does Apple need to be social? Yes.”

Twitter and Apple have already been working together. Recently, Apple has tightly sewn Twitter features into its software for phones, tablets and computers, while, behind the scenes, Twitter has put more resources into managing its relationship with Apple.

Though an investment in Twitter would not be a big financial move for Apple by any stretch — it has $117 billion in liquid investments, and it quietly agreed to buy a mobile security company for $356 million on Friday — it would be one of Mr. Cook’s most important strategic decisions as chief executive. And it would be an uncommon arrangement for Apple, which tends to buy small start-ups that are then absorbed into the company.

But such a deal would give Apple more access to Twitter’s deep understanding of the social Web, and pave the way for closer Twitter integration into Apple’s products.

Twitter has grown quickly, amassing more than 140 million monthly active users who generate a vast stream of short messages about their lives, the news and everything else. An Apple investment would give it the glow of a close relationship with a technology icon, and would instantly bolster its valuation, which, like that of other start-ups, has languished in the wake of Facebook’s lackluster market debut. In fact, word of the talks comes at a time when some are asking whether expectations for the potential of social media companies have gotten out of hand, and shares of Facebook, Zynga and other companies have wilted.

Apple should take $20B and buy Twitter.

Twitter otherwise could spiral off into being a media company, pouring its energies into competing with HuffPo and Mayer’s Yahoo. Or worse, being acquired by Yahoo, AOL, or Microsoft.

Apple needs to bake social into a future version of all its OSs, before Google does.

The New York Times

28 July 2012 30 Permalink
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When one of the young developers of MSN Messenger noticed college kids giving status updates on AOL’s AIM, he saw what Microsoft’s product lacked. “That was the beginning of the trend toward Facebook, people having somewhere to put their thoughts, a continuous stream of consciousness,” he tells Eichenwald. “The main purpose of AIM wasn’t to chat, but to give you the chance to log in at any time and check out what your friends were doing.” When he pointed out to his boss that Messenger lacked a short-message feature, the older man dismissed his concerns; he couldn’t see why young people would care about putting up a few words. “He didn’t get it,” the developer says. “And because he didn’t know or didn’t believe how young people were using messenger programs, we didn’t do anything.

Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant - Vanity Fair

The same observations about the use of AIM status updates led to Buddy Gopher, an app that consolidated the away field of your AIM buddies on a single page, now long shut down.

Microsoft completely missed the rise of social networks, but amazingly so did AOL, who had AIM as a great starting point.

I wrote about possibly building something cool on top of AIM based on the Buddygopher experiment, way back in 2006, and I was contacted by people reporting to Jim Bankoff, a VP at AOL. We set up a project to build what would have been a very cool app: project name Nerdvana. My partner, Greg Narain, and I were pushing at content curation through a stream-based, open follower architecture leveraging the 400M+ AIM accounts then in use.

Alas, Jim Bankoff, now CEO of SB Nation, left AOL after Randy Falco joined AOL. The project petered out without serious sponsorship, the budget pulled away to other AIM related projects. We never even got to build the prototype.

But Microsoft and Yahoo also failed to try to make the transition from disconnected buddylists to a unified social network. Likewise my client Jabber, who opted to not build a social network solution on top of its distributed protocol, and is now a part of Cisco.

You can say that these ideas were too early, but these are companies that had all the motivation in the world to experiment ahead of the wavefront.

Perhaps this failure to attempt to design speculatively is another proof of Ven Rao’s Manufactured Normalcy Field: the sense that the present will last a good while into the future, instead of the continuous creative destruction mindset, where the present is being relentlessly consumed by the future, which is only a few weeks, days, or minutes from now. But the bigger the company, the more likely they are to act as if the present is eternal, and the future is retreating as fast as they amble forward.

That’s why Microsoft has fallen so far, to the point where Apple’s revenues from the iPhone alone are more than Microsoft’s entire top line. That’s why AOL has fallen like a meteorite, vaporizing on a death trajectory toward the center of the Earth. That’s why Yahoo has lost its mojo. They stopped speculating, and tried to treat the future as the back porch of the present.

Source: vanityfair.com

4 July 2012 37 Permalink
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Microsoft’s developer problem – Marco.org ⇢

Marco Arment doesn’t actually say that Microsoft Surface or Windows 8 smartphones are doomed, but he cuts to the chase pretty fast: Microsoft is in real trouble because they are starting with next to zero apps, and app developers — like Marco — have migrated off Windows onto Mac:

Marco Arment via Marco.org

By 2005 or so, most of those developers were working on web apps. The web was the platform for that kind of work for most of that decade.2

And during that decade, almost every such developer I knew switched to the Mac if they weren’t already there, partly because it was better for developing web apps.3

That’s one of the biggest reasons there was so much pent-up developer interest in the iPhone before the App Store opened: these consumer-product developers were all using Macs already. As the dominant consumer platform shifted from the web to apps over the last four years, most talented consumer-product developers built products for their app platform of choice during that time: the Apple ecosystem.

Many Windows developers were upset that iOS development had to be done on a Mac, but it didn’t hurt Apple: the most important developers for iOS apps were already using Macs.

But the success of Windows 8 and Windows Phone in the consumer space requires many of those consumer-product developers, now entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, to care so much about Windows development that they want to use Windows to develop for it.

How likely is that?

Anything’s possible, but that’s going to be an uphill battle.

Actually, I don’t think that anything’s possible. But Microsoft might be able sway some developers by subsidizing development of critical apps, as reported by Bijan Sabet. I don’t think that will be enough.

25 June 2012 16 Permalink
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Windows Phone 8 to go head-to-head with Apple's iOS 6 - Phillip Elmer-Dewitt via Fortune ⇢

I feel like Elmer-Dewitt is writing an alternate reality scifi novel in this piece, where he makes it sound like Microsoft is still the worldbeater company of the last century, and Apple is the tiny upstart:

Phillip Elmer-Dewitt via Fortune

As predicted, Microsoft (MSFT) took the wraps off its next generation smartphone strategy Wednesday at the Windows Phone Developer Summit in San Francisco.

With Apple (AAPL) expected to introduce a new iPhone in conjunction with the scheduled release of iOS 6 this fall, the stage is set for a holiday face-off between these two long-time rivals in the battle for second place after Google’s (GOOG) market-leading Android smartphones.

Once again, Microsoft will be trying to stretch its lead on the desktop by taking a version of Windows into the mobile device marketplace. Apple, meanwhile, will be playing into its strength in devices that operate smoothly together in an easy-to-use software ecosphere.

Let’s clarify things:

  • Apple is the dominant player in smartphones. The iPhone revolutionized the industry, and Android (which is primarily Samsung) is ahead on unit sales, but Apple is catching up.
  • Yes, Samsung has sold more units: 43M to Apple’s 35M, with Nokia a distant third at 11.9M (mostly Symbian) and falling fast.
  • Samsung and Apple together get about 90% of all the profits in the smartphone market.
  • Apple posted record sales of the iPhone in q1’12, with 35M units sold and $24.4B in iPhone profits for the quarter, up from $10B a year before.
  • Microsoft is the provider of some Nokia phones, but Windows 7 is a tiny, tiny blip.

I don’t really see what Elmer-Dewitt is up to, but Apple is the clear market leader in the high profit laptop >$1000 sector. Who cares if Dell or no name manufacturers are selling bazillions of $450 laptops with $15 of profits?

Apple has the money and vision to create amazing products, and that’s not from selling badly designed, low-cost phones, laptops, or tablets.

And I am sure that Microsoft would love to perceived as going head-to-head with Apple. I think Windows 8 — what I have seen of it — looks cool, and might develop into a viable platform. But the characterization of Microsoft and Apple as side by side in the starting blocks for a race against Android is simply fiction, not analysis.

21 June 2012 9 Permalink
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Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. (More.)

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