Thanksgiving for 10 blunders Apple didn’t commit
Thu, Nov 27, 08
It’s Thanksgiving again. Time to reflect and count our blessings. For those touched by Apple’s products and weltanschauung, an opportunity to give thanks to Steve Jobs & Co for not doing what was so vociferously advocated by the usual suspects: analysts, pundits, naysayers and the anti-Apple corner over the last few years.
In no particular order, we give our thanks because Apple did not:
- become a MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) to sell the iPhone. A few years ago everyone was convinced that any sufficiently recognizable company could peddle mobile phone services by slapping its brand on a MVNO to leverage a carrier’s network. Remember Amp’d, Helio, Disney, ESPN…? ‘Nuff said.
- start selling a TabletPC before its time. There’s been a highly vocal contingency who’d pay a premium to get Apple’s take on TabletPC, which has been an unmitigated revenue disaster on the PC side. While various iPhone and notebook technologies may converge into a TabletPC-like form factor in Apple’s product line someday, such a device, even running OS X, would have been a dud in 2006.
- open up iTunes. Apple has been under tremendous competitor pressure to license its FairPlay DRM and also allow competitors’ formats like Windows Media and Rhapsody to run on its iPod/iTunes/iPhone ecosystem. The iPod saved Apple and this free-for-all would have killed it.
- drop the iPhone name for its upcoming phone when everyone thought the company was crazy and foolish to challenge Cisco’s trademark. Can you think of the iPhone as anything but the iPhone today?
- panic when iPod/iTunes integration via FairPlay DRM was challenged in Europe, most notably in France, Germany, Denmark and Norway. These attempts have been misguided and unfair to say the least.
- license OS X to cloners. For the we-don’t-grok-hardware+software+service-integration crowd this hope will never die, business models be damned.
- bend on iTunes policies when major music labels were pushing Apple to rely more on full-album (and less on singles) sales, raise individual song prices, institute price hikes under the guise of “variable pricing,” track users via DRM to stem file sharing and various other initiatives designed to recapture their lost dominance of the digital music industry. To its credit, Apple has been mostly able to withstand its ground even when the labels withheld content and NBC altogether walked away from iTunes.
- lose perspective on Apple TV by heavily promoting it even as the environment for efficient delivery of high-resolution video and broadcast content in the U.S. is simply not there yet. Steve Jobs labeled it as a “hobby” which pretty much describes the current state of affairs.
- parter with AMD instead of Intel for the transition from PowerPCs. Many analysts and pundits couldn’t understand why Apple bypassed what appeared to be a line of faster and more efficient chips. Jobs’ appreciation of Intel’s volume manufacturing, pricing and product roadmap, especially for Apple’s bread-and-butter non-desktops, proved to be on the spot.
- select a lesser OS for the iPhone. The mobile device is destined to become Apple’s primary revenue generator going into the next decade and Apple avoided a land-mine by not adopting a garden variety embedded OS grafted on top of a glorified iPod. This may yet prove to be one of the most important decisions ever in Apple’s history.
What are you thankful for things Apple did not do?
Daily question: Is it just a game?
Thu, Nov 20, 08
Here’s Monopoly, one of the most well-known and popular board-games of the last few decades:
And here are a few more distant board-games as listed at Bibliodyssey:
Il novo et piacevol gioco del giardin d’amore (The new and enjoyable game of the garden of love) — Published by Giovanni Antonio de Paoli in the 1590s, the board features two rows of game squares, the outer one displaying the virtues and the one closer to the central garden with game numbers on pairs of dice.
The Swan of Elegance (A New Game Designed for the Instruction and Amuseument of Youth) — John Harris published this linen-backed, hand-coloured etching in 1814. Each of the game board’s compartment shows a child engaged in a moral or an immoral deed. A twelve page rulebook had four lines of verse explaining each scene. The medaliions in each corner represent Apollo, Minerva, Wisdom and Genius.
German print – game-board — Untitled anti-British World War II propaganda shipping race board game published by F Westenberger in about 1940.
Got any examples showing we haven’t hopelessly lost the art of board-game design?
Daily question: What’s the word?
Wed, Nov 19, 08
In March of 2003 The City Club in Cleveland decided to give the Citadel of Free Speech Award to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Then something funny happened:
CLEVELAND (AP) – Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia banned broadcast media from an appearance Wednesday where he will receive an award for supporting free speech.
The notion of “burning the village to save it” has been in our lexicon since the Vietnam war days, continuing today with the attempt to “nationalize banks to save free markets.” There remains something perplexing, utterly counterintuitive and recursively intriguing about that.
So pardon my (inverse) “burning the village to save it” moment when I saw this:
Yes, a Flash editor to generate SVG. Like writing Windows apps on a Mac. Dieting on bacon fat. Being cool with a Zune.
What is the (dialectical) word that describes the use of something antithetical (Flash) to describe the thesis (SVG)?
Daily question: Forest. Trees.
Mon, Nov 17, 08
From Running the Numbers art project where cognitive distance is stripped from pedestrian statistics: every 30 seconds 106,000 aluminum cans are consumed in the U.S.
Will you drink less now?
Daily question: Can your browser do this?
Fri, Nov 14, 08
Exactly ten years ago the state of the art looked like this at Netscape.com:
Ten years later, what one can visually do in a browser just with CSS and JavaScript without using any plugins like Flash is pretty astounding. For example, Projective texturing here uses only the 2D canvas tag and JavaScript to achieve interactive distortion and rotation in 3D:
Reflection.js adds reflections to arbitrary images with controls over various attributes:
Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery, capable of generating graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side:
Not shabby for a browser that only a few years ago could barely render formatted text!
In 1998, did you think that in less than a decade the browser of that day could evolve into what it has become today?
