Its Finally Finished…almost

I stumbled across an article on the Time online website recently entitled It Just Doesn’t Work: Why New Tech Products Are Increasingly Unsatisfying. It struck a chord with me because I’ve seen so much of technology delivered to market that was so obviously ‘half-baked’.

In the drive to get ‘mindshare’ products are being released to market in ever more rapid cycles. The tech just doesn’t have enough time to get fully baked.

The thing is the tech companies know that most ‘early adopters’ (read: unknowing beta testers) will find ways to justify the quirky behaviour of their shiny new toy even though most people would call it a piece of shit and return the unfinished mess to the manufacturer vowing never to buy another one of their products. Ever.

Its been an axiom of the tech industry that you never buy a product from Microsoft until it gets to Version 3 because the earlier ones just suck.

The article quotes a leaked email from HP’s Jon Rubenstein talking about the, now freshly buried, TouchPad. The part that interested me was:

Today we bring the HP TouchPad and webOS 3.0 to the world.  The HP team has achieved something extraordinary – especially when you consider that it’s been just one year since our work on the TouchPad began in earnest.  Today also marks the start of a new era for HP as our vision for connected mobility begins to take form - an ecosystem of services, applications and devices connected seamlessly by webOS.
 If you’ve seen the recent TouchPad reviews you know that the industry understands HP’s vision and sees the same potential in webOS as we do.  David Pogue from the New York Times says “there are signs of greatness here.” (I’ve included links to David’s review and others below.) You’ve also seen that reviewers rightly note things we need to improve about the webOS experience. The good news is that most of the issues they cite are already known to us and will be addressed in short order by over-the-air software and app catalog updates.  We still have work to do to make webOS the platform we know it can be, but remember…..it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

People don’t want to wait for ‘the next update’ they want it to work out of the box to the level of their expectations.

The TouchPad didn’t, neither did RIM’s Playbook or Vista or so many other technological balls ups.

Rubenstein also quotes some of the first reviews for Mac OS X in his e-mail:

"...overall the software is sluggish" 
"...there are no quality apps to use, so it won’t last" 
"...it's just not making sense...."
 It’s hard to believe these statements described MacOS X - a platform that would go on to change the landscape of Silicon Valley in ways that no one could have imagined.
Great pick up Jon!

That was 10 years ago.

Ten years ago people would accept stuff that won’t get out of the starting gate today.

You bet the farm on the expectation that people would patiently wait until you got it right while providing HP with another revenue stream. You lost.

Will Apple Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?

Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple they’ve just gone from strength to strength with a few missteps along the way.

iMac
iPod
iPhone
iPad
iTunes
MacBook
MacBook Pro
MacBook Air
Apple Stores
the upcoming iCloud that we hope launches better than MobileMe
the App Store

That’s a lot of winners.

Now Apple is making inroads into the corporate market, the potential to become a massively dominant player is within their grasp.

Will they ‘screw the pooch’? Sad to say that a very possible scenario.

If you look at the recent launch of Final Cut Pro X you’d have to say that was pretty comprehensively screwed up. Apple managed to piss off a vast majority of editors with that one. I know they’re saying just wait for the updates and all will be good, but people don’t want to wait for the updates. They want it to be good when they get it.

That’s kind of like buying a Porsche and discovering that the wheels are on a boat from Outer Mongolia so you’ll just have to wait until they arrive and THEN everything will be really good. Promise.

The truth of the matter is that Apple do not, and appear to never have, understood the corporate market. Sure they understand it better than the Gnomes of Mountain View, but they don’t get it like Microsoft do.

I talked about this some time back in this old blog entry at Anthill. Apple just don’t seem to get corporate customers, but, there is a chance that this may change with the Commonwealth Bank deploying 4000 MacBook Air laptops to replace their fleet of Dell laptops.

If they don’t screw things up at the Commonwealth and they can learn about what corporates want, they might, just might, figure out how to crack this market sector.

That being said if anyone can screw up a deal like this its Apple.

The Apple Double Play.

I just finished reading an article in PC Magazine that really got me thinking.

The piece was entitled ‘The Apple Product That Really Worries PC Vendors’.

It really got me thinking, especially in light of the fact that the Commonwealth Bank recently decided to arm their staff with MacBook Air laptops.

The interesting this about this was the following:

Branch visitors were free to use iMac, iPad, iPod and Asus touchscreen devices to browse foreign exchange rates, products, and to make appointments with CBA specialists – much like how Apple customers arranged to visit the vendor’s ‘Genius bar’.
The bank also planned to replace internal Dell desktops with MacBook Air notebooks nationwide, allowing employees to choose to operate on either Mac OS or Windows platforms.

Wow! I really mean WOW!

Think about this in terms of the the information from Canalys that I mentioned in this post ‘Wintel Market Share Slips’.

The Commonwealth Bank, the guys who hung on to OS/2 for years past its expiry date are doing a widespread deployment of Apple MacBook Air laptops. This is astounding news.

Here’s the really amazing potential - lets assume that they replace all 4000 Dell laptops with the MacBook Air. Here’s the really interesting maths:

4000 copies of Windows 7 Entreprise, even at the best possible price couldn’t be less that $175 a copy, lets call it $150 just to keep the calculations simple. Lion is $31.99.

That means a saving on OS upgrade costs of $472,040.

Half a Million Dollars saving on an Operating System upgrade!

Where would you want the half million, on your bottom line or on Microsoft’s?

Careful of your answer, your shareholders are watching.

Wintel Market Share Slips

I noticed an interesting piece today about market share.

It seems that Apple shipped 20+ million smartphones in Q2 2011 an increase of 12 million over Q2 2010. This eclipsed Nokia who shipped 16+ million smartphones in Q2 2011. Interestingly, if you look at Nokia’s results they’ve only been able to move this many by shaving their margins to the bone. If they were making their regular margins it looks like this number would have plummeted.

To make matters worse Samsung shipped in excess of 19 million smartphones for the same period.

To put some context on this Nokia has lost over half of its smartphone market share in 12 months.

The other interesting fact that came out of the article was the following assertion by industry analysts Canalys:

“the share held by “Wintel”, which it defined as “any PC running any version of Windows in conjunction with any x86 architecture”, fell below 82 percent, its lowest point in more than 20 years“.

I know that falling below 82% doesn’t sound that spectacular, but, its an earth shattering statistic. Not that long ago the Wintel market share was well above 90%.

Something’s happening and its big.

Think about it. if we look back 20 years people were running Windows 3.0. The first really stable version of Windows released. Prior to that people were running DOS. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 were released in 1992 and the Windows juggernaut really took off once Windows 95 hit the market in mid-1995.

So these guys are saying that Windows market share has slipped to where it was when Windows 3 first saw the light of day. If this is actually the case then I'd be sweating it if I owned stock in Microsoft. Imagine if Coles or Woolworths suddenly saw their market share slip back to where it was 20 years ago the Daily Garbagewrapper would be screaming it was the end of the world, or maybe even worse than that!

Back in those days a Windows release was greeted with as much fanfare as a new iPhone. People would line up at midnight to be the first to buy a copy of Windows 95 from Harvey Norman.

I’m not going to have a discussion here about the pros and cons of lining up to be the first to buy anything at midnight let alone an Operating System but lets just think about this for a second, Windows market share has fallen below 82% since it became a stable operating system that could be used in the everyday corporate world.

This fact is even more surprising when you consider that each new PC shipped from everyone except Apple includes a copy of Windows.

Are people giving up on desktops for tablets, and I mean of any flavour?

Is everyone buying a Mac?

Are people going in Linux in droves?

I don’t have any answers, but, anecdotally I can say this; as I go from company to company, client to client the questions that I keep getting asked is ”How do we use Linux servers in our business and we also want to use Macs, iPads and iPhones as well as our Windows machines?“

One client asked me ”How come Apple can sell a new operating system for under $50 and Microsoft want to charge me over $400?“

Is this a taste of things to come or have the analysts screwed up their numbers?

Does John Dvorak think Microsoft has jumped the shark too?

I came across this post on PC Magazine's website. Its an interesting take on what's happening at Microsoft and given my thoughts on what's happening there I thought I'd add the link here:

Wintel, Death by a Thousand Budget Cuts

Here's the link to my piece on this topic:

Has Microsoft Jumped the Shark?

Here we go down the Yellow Brick Road because there's a Pot of Gold at the end of the Rainbow

This is the first in a series of many posts on the changes that are happening at the site of one of my clients based in Brisbane.

They have been successfully running a mixed environment of UNIX (AIX and BSD), Linux (Red Hat), MacOS X, Windows XP and 7 for a few years. Kept their costs down while keeping the availability up.

The company has 10 sites on the eastern seaboard of Australia and about a hundred and fifty users.

Recently their Group Financial Controller convinced the company management to ignore the advice of their in house IT guys and move to a Windows mono-culture. The reason she did this was because in her extensive experience with IT this was the only environment that worked and would deliver huge benefits to the business, short and long term.

They asked me to get involved and help 'guide' the in-house IT guys with the change.

Now personally I don't think this is going to be a smart idea, or a cheap one or that it will deliver any of the huge benefits to the business that she's claiming. That being said I think its going to be an interesting journey for us to follow.

So lets saddle up and see where the yellow brick road is going to take us.