Jobs’ life-long envy of “what it could have been” has just been put to sleep: Apple has become Microsoft. From the moment you start using the iPad, you become as aware of its wanders (the packaging, the minimalist interface, the user experience) as of its surgically removed potential, of its infuriating manipulated functional and hardware profile. It is cute, sleek and a pleasure to use. It’s also nothing like it could be, just a luke-warm projection of its potential.

But, what is it? Whatever it is, it stays away from threatening anything that Apple makes money on. Innovators are brave: the iPad is the creation of cowards.

As a phone, it fails because it doesn’t hold calls. As a media companion, the science-fiction thing that we all expected, it fails, because it excludes you from viewing 98% of all sites that hold that media, and it’s so obsessed with having you spend money in their store that its apps are manipulated as money grabs. As a computer, a 1980’s single-tasking OS will make you feel like if you were trying to type with boxing gloves on: another fail.

If you ask the castrati, I am sure they will love your assessment: the iPhone, the MacBooks, the iPods, can rest in their thrones, despite ever-shrinking innovation advantages. There, they can bask on the adoration of us, the fans, who have spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years on Apple. “A master move!” The castrati sing praises to each other, the app vendors take advantage of the confusion to ask for absurd prices (like $140 for the NYT for a year… would you please share the stuff you are smoking with us, the people?), the pundits congratulate each other.

Mmm… My assessment is that the castration is not only bad for innovation. I believe Apple is bleeding from it, and less and less people cares to see it go. Including us, the fans. I can give you many reasons why this is the death of the Apple we used to love, but let me just give you the two less controversial ones.

Good money after bad

Why protect business that are increasingly indefensible? Why protect an already inferior iPhone, or a mostly undifferentiated laptop business? To castrate the iPad just so that it does not cannibalize MacBook Pros is absurd in many fronts (except the castrati’s next quarter spreadsheet):

• Other players that are very eager to try the tablet business don’t have to protect anything. Thus, they can afford to create the tablet that could really be. Small companies such as Google. And no, the 140,000 apps will be no defense: they were when they costed $0.99 and you could whim your way through a few hundred ones. Not so when they cost several times more than desktop equivalents, if you price them by functionality delivered.
• Protective anti-innovation is what you do when you are Microsoft. Well, everybody knows that Jobs always wanted to be Gates, I guess he has succeeded.
• The businesses Apple is protecting deserve to die. No? You disagree? Ah, I see, you love to lug that laptop around… Or to have to wait two minutes for it to boot. Or carrying a car battery hanging from your left leg so that it doesn’t die in the middle of the movie. Come on! The laptop has been dead for years: we keep it alive through a battle of patents and… yes, protective moves. It takes you ten minutes using iPad to realize that not only the laptop is dead, but the tablet is its next evolutionary step. But wait, it can’t, because Apple has removed its balls. The device made by cowards…

About the iPhone, let’s face it, not even worth the ink to argue that it has fallen behind, is it? I never liked Google much (just another face of a common oligopoly), but I like them more and more because the Android beats the iPhone so many times over… coming from a company that never built a device!!! Can’t wait to see the second iteration: in the meanwhile my AT&T contract will expire… Can’t wait

The innovation cycle is working against Apple, not in its favor

Despite popular belief, Apple’s advantage in its markets has stopped being innovation a long time ago, and it has been packaging all along. Apple may not own the multi-touch interface, its OS may be a minor variant of BSD, the graphics advantage over other OS’s evaporated over ten years ago, and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t care, because its advantage is packaging of the right standard hardware and  functionality, at the right moment, with the correct marketing. Ounce per ounce, and dollar per dollar, a Sony Vaio or a Dell computer holds much more innovation than a Mac, and they do because they are much better at the margins game, not because they want to be good. But from the moment you open the box, “advantage Apple”.

How can Apple afford an integration-based advantage, when other companies can counterattack with lightening innovation cycles? Protective market manipulations is one way. Give you iPhone 3.0, which sucked really bad, until it couldn’t hold 4.0 (which sucked a little less) any longer, and then sold it back to you who has already paid for 3.0. By carefully manipulating its app marketplace (and the numbers: there is no such thing as even 70,000 apps if you remove the multiple apps instantiated through data segmentation – there is a soccer app that counts like 240 apps: because each soccer team has its own version– the apps that just don’t work, and those that flopped but obstinately remain around, and other tricks of the counting), Apple keeps the innovation trickle attractive, and leverages over and over our (the fans’) commitment.

Another way is mystique. What can I say, I hate to be censored by Apple, I hate to be milked over and over, by Apple and Friends alike, but what can I say, rather give Apple the money than give it to Microsoft… right? Well, not so right any more. Fans know they are being abused: even Jobs tells them so when he unwraps his gigantic ego in the next MacWorld and talks with zen (and medieval) zest about how the future is carefully planned and staged for them. The iPad may brake the balance for many of them. You mean that you don’t spend that extra 34 cents on a USB port just so that you can sell it to me for $29? Or that memory card reader, another awesome $0.65, so that … $29 AGAIN? You mean that I could REALLY work with this beauty, but you are going to wait to sell it to me as a non-upgradeable fix in the next version, and it will be just an OS multi-tasking unlock?

When fans feel abused, they start routing for the underdogs. Why do you think that the last SuperBowl was the most watched in history? Have you heard about the ultimate underdog, Google? Or ITC, who Apple is fending off through a miserable patent grinding lawsuit? Or that tiny company orders of magnitude larger than Apple called Nokia? These guys have no laptop to protect, no fans to abuse: they can only leverage their HUGE sizes and innovation pools…

Guess what: I can’t wait to see it happen. I wander what it would be like to be an ex-fan: it would be like leaving a disfunctional “family” once and for all, wouldn’t it?

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  UPDATE (4/6/9)

I just read an article in Boing Boing that expresses my feelings about the iPad quite well, specially as they relate to how Apple assumes the user to be (a) slightly retarded and (b) happy to just consume. Highly recommended…

Kudos to Cory Doctorow

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– UPDATE (4/6/9)

Umar Haque (another great thinker of the Enterprise and Media 2.0 space), brings his great analytical skills to the fore in his analysis for HBR of how Apple is shooting itself on the iFace [sic] by trying to support the revolution of media as a service, *as well as* the financial benefits of last century’s product lock-in at the same time. Industrial revolution and services economy in the same drive… Great thinking from a very articulate and insightful observer.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

iPad: a timid, luke-warm, defensive move from an Apple with no gonads

I am an Apple fan, and as a consumer probably in the 97 percentil when measured by reliance and expenditure on Apple for personal AND business computing devices. But I have started to be alarmed too, and despite all previous proclamations, have decided NOT to buy the iPad, and to seriously look at switching away from the iPhone.

When Apple decides to keep OUT of the iPad technology that has become ubiquitous, just to REDUCE and without arbitration curtail what I can do with the device, it goes too far.

It goes even further, waaaaaay too far, when it decides in a non-transparent way which apps I can buy or not. No, not apps that could drain batteries (miserable excuse to keep Adobe out of their devices). The decision is taken on CONTENT; in other words, a megalomaniac decides what I can see.

Not that I would use the iPhone to buy porn: the device screen is too small to enjoy it. But who the hell is Jobs to decide what I can do with a device I paid good money for, and which has as competitors wonderfully open devices? Fuck, I left my country of birth to leave authoritarian despots behind, I am not going to take it from Apple. It’s not a matter of motivation: whether the decision is taken to make more money on me or to control my thinking or whatever: it still SUCKS.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Apple becoming Big Brother, censoring you and I as well

In other words, the decision to buy it is already there, I will just need to think of a valid justification. Further, the decision is there because I have a lot of speculative reasons to buy it, but still the purchase will be compulsive. Hats off to Apple for getting me in this unconditional purchase mode…

In my defense, I believe that whatever reason I would concoct at this point (and believe me, I have read books worth of postings and discussions about this issue), by the time I am using it and depending on it, I will discover that, all along, I was blind to the most powerful reason to get it, and that such reason was the “naked emperor in the room”.

So, I thought, let’s commit to this blog the reasons I can think of at this time. We’ll see how I do in a few months, when I already have it and depend on it:

1. CAPTIVE ENTERTAINMENT – I spend a large enough amount of time captive in planes, trains, and hotels; I also like reading, movies and music (almost as much as my iPhone games) a whole lot. One-plus-one equals $500;
2. A GREATER WAY TO USE EVERNOTE – Everybody who knows me knows that I am a fanatic of Evernote. I have written in this blog a couple of times how, being able to maximize my use of only Evernote is a pet project. Well, I see the iPad as more portable than my laptop and more comfortable to annotate on (in the extended sense of what is a note for Evernote). Yes, I know that I will miss the camera, but I also know that the second iteration of the iPad will have it, and in the meanwhile the iPhone will fill in;
3. I LOVE WRITING BY HAND – Yes, I am an old f#rt, I still love hand-writing, and I believe that the gap between ink and interpreted ASCII text is quickly going away. So much so, that I have bought every reasonably different implementation of tablets, all the way from the three Newton generations, to the Nokia tablet (so close, yet so far), to the frustrating Windows tablet (which, if Microsoft had not been so anti-innovation, would probably dominate the category today) to the iRex e-readers you can also write on (very badly implemented by iRex, but intriguing). They have all fallen short, and I have complete faith that Apple will crack that nut open;
4. CONFIDENCE IN APPLE – I have for months told everyone who asked me about the iPad that when it came out, it would prove that it was a market creator, like other legendary Apple products were. It would do so by finding an activity that is not only compelling, but also unthinkable of in other devices (like, say, listening to music in an iPod, or playing a game in an iPhone, or similar). I would’ve loved it for Apple to make that application obvious in the pre-release, but that hasn’t yet come through; yes, we already know that watching a movie in it, or using the Calendar for appointments, will be something else… but not a category-creating experience. I was hoping that Apple had found a killer social app that would justify the tablet (if something new is about to happen, almost certainly will be in this domain)… I still have confidence that a killer app exists or will emerge soon: either Apple knows, and is not talking yet, or the brilliance of the engineering in the iPad will be so compelling that somebody else, an app provider probably, will create a new category (like Aldus on the first Macs).

Can’t wait to comment on this post four months from now…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

My iPad time capsule

• The MiFi is the killer enabler for netbooks-like computers;
• The netbooks have miniaturized to the point where they are becoming to use a keyboard and/or a good screen at the same time
• The Windows tablet is horrible, but an Apple one, with an iPod / iPhone interface would be awesome
• The iBlet (like the name?) is the drooling dream of anybody using iPods, iPhones, Macs, and quite a few Win-zealots

If it happens before September, send me a cookie. If it’s called iBlet, send me an email and I will send YOU the cookie.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Is there an Apple tablet in the way?

The fact is, I need to enable sudden, serendipitous posting, or this blog won’t get anywhere. Because I have twenty things to write about each day, but I just don’t stay put too long behind a desk (and when I do, I have a zillion work obligations to wrap-up). In Airports, traveling in the car (my wife drives most of the time), in coffee stores… that’s were I need to have access to the blog (Otherwise, I will just write a note in a piece of paper and NEVER write it on the computer).

The phone? Nope, too small, too hard to type. The computer? Yes, sometimes, if I have access and am comfortable (as right now, traveling north along the California coast, my wife driving and Satie’s music cranking). The Nokia N810 tablet? MOST certainly, all I need is access (the N810 and the wireless portable keyboard fit in a large pocket – and at 265 pounds of weight, believe me, my pockets are already huge). So, all I need is access. Not any more: I got a MiFi today.

In a nutshell:

• The size of three credit cards glued together back-to-back
• A wireless hot spot that goes with you wherever you go (like now, on the 405 in Ventura, many miles away from any place where I have ever connected from, in the car, at 80 mph)
• Up to five computers or PDA’s at a time can connect to it by just sharing a password
• Speed? I would say 5 or 6 times faster than an iPod connecting via 3G.
• Cost? Verizon service, barebones $40/Month, beefed-up $60/Month, no more than 5 GB a month, 5 cents the extra MB

Nuf’ said. This thing is awesome. Without even thinking, I was looking just for ubiquitous connection for my laptop, and in the process I made an iPod killer from my old Nokia N810 (bigger screen, more memory and processor, better –and free– apps). The only thing missing (THE PHONE!) is now in thanks to the MiFi connection and Skype or any other VoIP running on top of it     Haven’t tried it yet, so let me go off and try it. See you in my next post!

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Back thanks to the MiFi?

• Work — Split half/half between working from home or at the office. In both cases covered by wireless. In the case of the office, wireless is somehow hampered by a very strict corporate firewall (I will address that later). Also, I move around the corporate campus quite a lot (meetings, chats, the occasional nicotine fix, cafeteria), very rarely dragging my laptop with me (at least, since I use the N810);
• Week-day leisure — Mostly at home, errands, occasional eat-outs, mostly in an urban and stationary basis (I spent no more than 45 minutes a day in the car);
• Weekends split between travels (mostly to Santa Barbara to see Ona and the kids) and home pleasures: playing in the garage or the office, fixing things, helping clean, walking the dogs, cooking, music, movies and TV).
• Travel: Whether for pleasure or work, the laptop rarely makes it into the bag (even when the X61 Lenovo is very small and light).

So, fairly sedentary life, definitely not the road warrior I used to be. Interestingly enough, modern sedentary life shares much more with the road warrior life than it used to, because of this increasing addiction to things Internet… but that is a whole different posting.

So, how do I use it?

In the routine described above, the N810 has almost totally displaced my laptop AND my smart phones in every occasion when I am not on my desk: the laptop because it is impractical (large, heavy, slow to boot, absorbing, etc.) and the PDA/Smart phones because of screen size, speed and usability advantages.

The displacement of the laptop is not surprising, but that of the phone is. Both in my Sony Ericsson P900, 910 and 990, and on my Nokia N93, I have 90% of the functionality I get from the N810, and then some (synchronized PDA suite). I used to extensively leverage ALL features and applications in my phone, even when small screen and keyboard sizes, T9 typing in the N93, anemic memory and slow performance unavoidably frustrated me. But the biggest contention was screen size (both physical and logical). I find browsing on anything below 800×480 totally worthless. Even in the Sony Ercisson P990, at 320×240, browsing less than a paragraph at a time is just ridiculous. Particularly because, regardless of the paragraph you are reading, the browser still has to load the whole page to show it to you. Which, by the way, is the major lie behind the iPod commercial where the user brings up a web page, a full paragraph in view, and immediately moves on: what was it, a web page of only one paragraph? Can I please have the URL? 

And here comes one of the major killer features for the N810: the gorgeous screen. Reviews unavoidably compare bitmap (pixel) dimensions, and the comparisons become hubris very fast. The screen in the Nokia N810 is the exact minimum size and quality to be very different from others:

* Browse more than a single paragraph at a time, and let your eyers jump around the page (isn’t that a basic requirement of “browsing”?); this capability enables what, for me, is one of the most addictive features of the N810: Getting-Things-Done organization via browser and local file. What do I mean? I use monkey GTD, one of the smartest implementations of tiddlywiki by SImon Baird, to keep my to-do’s, with fantastic advantages:

* The file is available 100% of the time to me, either by accessing it from my laptop (when at work or at home, my N810 is 100% of the time USB-connectedto either my Windows laptop or my Mac) or on my N810 if I am out;

* The keyboard in the N810 is too small for typing long docs, but ideal for short notes;

* If a sketch is required, the N810 mostly obviates the need for paper that creates loopholes in the GTD system;

* If I land, say, in Costco, I always have my Costco context available for things I needed to get, even if I thought about them two months ago.

If you have tried GTD and failed, it’s almost certain that the reason you failed is because of too many recording devices, or the constant paper-vs-computer tension. Now just imagine that the file is (a) device independent, just a browser required, and (b) always available to you in your device, in a form factor that makes it usable…

* Read a 8.5×11″-paginated book or document on PDF, with the usual margins, with zooming set to “text width”, all of it without using a loupe. I didn’t realize what that meant until I had it available; with smaller screens, you go “hunting” small windows around the text, or you zoom it down to eliminate the lateral hunting and then it becomes unreadable. It doesn’t matter if you have a fantastic interface to move that reading window around the page, you will end up with a headache if you persist.;

* Play a game of medium-to-high visual complexity: this one is easy to defend as another advantage. Brain needs visual clues of any complex environment: reduce resolution and the clues need to be sacrificed, end up with boring, lame mind frames.

* Watch a video without squinting, and see the details. Same as with games: complexity requires detail, and eliminating visual complexity makes the watched piece boring. You just have to add compression artifacts and you realize that in smaller screens you end up listening to your videos more than watching them.

All of this ends up meaning that I use the Nokia N810 for visual pleasure and light work that doesn’t require multiple windows. Multiple windows are still the domain of the computer, as is very precise mousing and ultra-high-complexity visuals… but I will get to that in my next posting.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

How do I use my Nokia N810

I bought onto the Nokia Tablet concept early on with the 800, then the 810. Originally, it was just compulsive, plus professional interest on the tablet field itself. Like many other people, I have been buying into the convergence category for quite a few years (HP LX, Newton, PDA-Phones, Smart-phones, and now tablets).

So far, I had always avoided questions of return on the money, or ‘worthiness’, because the devices were little more than toys. Sure, PDA suites and synchronization with the PC bring quite a few comforts, specially for the mobile worker, but then again, that’s work, not life. On the other hand, desktops and laptops were nice for personal stuff, but had the same association with work that spoiled the fun altogether.

The Nokia 810 tablet has been quite a revelation, and I realize that the surprise is a combinations of changes in  me (i.e., changes in my habits are making it more worthwhile), the environment where I live (with increasingly ubiquitous wireless access) and a special mix of functionality… I don’t know how it applies to other people, but since I find myself to be quite an average common guy in many aspects (of course, inside well defined demographic and geographical segments — American middle class technology-aware white collar worker and a few more descriptors), I decided to keep exploring this event, with the hope of collecting my thoughts better.

So, I created a new category for this posts, let’s see where they take me.

The exploration map

I won’t list the specs of the device, they are readily available from the Nokia site, but instead follow a more personal path:

* What do I find myself doing with the Nokia N810? Why?

* What specific features/functions of Nokia’s Internet Tablet make those activities enjoyable?

*  What things *don’t* I do with the N810, even when I could? Why? Are there any ‘waiting for’ feature/functions that would get me to use them?

* How could it be improved, from the naggy to the grandiose?

So, I will start to write a few separate postings in each of the stages above, hopefully remembering to come back to this one and cross-link them. Further, I will also use the N810 to contribute some of the posting themselves, and we will see how it goes.

E la nave va…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

The Nokia N8×0 phenomenon