Incremental Blogger

Just for fun, imagine if Apple bought Wacom. Yeah, it’s unlikely, but wouldn’t that be something?

Why would Apple do it? Well, Wacom technology is the number one hardware choice for drawing digitizers–a user market that Apple understands. Acquiring Wacom would also give Apple an edge in this market–particularly if it decided to treat Cintiq-like devices as monitor companions. Or what if Apple made a Tablet? Wouldn’t owning Wacom give it an edge others would love to have? At the same time it sure would put the Tablet ecosystem into a pickle, because I can guess that Apple wouldn’t give the best breaks to a competing market space.

Don’t worry this is all very unlikely, but it sure points out how precarious the digitizer supply is for Tablets.

I’ve blogged this before, but I just had to post it again. I just can’t help but nervously chuckle each time I think about it.

Patrick Scoble compares the Apple Newton and the iPhone (Video). Patrick’s winner? The iPhone, because he needs a phone. The Newton’s is good for drawing he says though.

As much as I love the iPhone and admire the new SDK, this is why I usually wind up developing around Microsoft technologies. Will Apple ever learn?

I hope Microsoft’s Apple envy isn’t successful enough to wipe away its advantages.

Warner Crocker’s declaration that the MID market race is over now that the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK has been announced may be a bit provocative, but I think he’s onto something. What do I mean? For the near term the iPhone/iPod Touch is essentially going to lead the MID market in terms of price, availability, developer community, quality of user experience, and funding of its ecosystem.

For Microsoft, this doesn’t mean much, because Microsoft isn’t playing in this game per se. Yes, there’s XP and Vista for some beefier units and I guess “CE” is a choice too. But let’s be serious here, for the near term none of these reach the platform model of the iPhone/iPod Touch. Sorry.

There are some Linux distros that are pretty slick that I’ve seen on some MID prototypes (at CES), but I don’t see these as major contenders either. Why? Because they are fragmenting. There’s not one single way to do things. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Nice efforts in some cases, but for the immediate future they are not going to lead the industry. They won’t condense into an industry. Sorry.

Where I think the big issue is, is not particularly in the OS “wars,” but rather in how essentially Intel’s MID initiative is left without a software partner. If Microsoft isn’t going to do it–if Linux isn’t going to provide a cohesive answer–Intel’s view of the MID world is going to have a tough time competing with the iPhone/iPod Touch family.

Actually, for Intel it probably doesn’t matter. I’m sure Intel will be quite happy if Apple switches to its CPU family and takes over the MID market. It doesn’t need the Intel-named MIDs to “win.” However, since it’s unlikely that Apple will ever license their OS platform to others to build like-minded devices, Intel will lose out in the total market it could achieve. So I’m sure Intel is struggling to figure this out.

As I see it there’s one possible software partner left–for the near-term–that could come to Intel’s aid. And that’s one that’s been quite good at filling holes left by Microsoft–Google. I don’t think it’s likely–just possible. Google could rework its Android initiative to make it MID friendly and this together with Intel’s hardware partners could possibly create an ecosystem that might have a chance at broadening the MID market. A chance. A thin one. But one nonetheless. I’m partially in doubt because of Google’s boardroom ties with Apple and Google’s lack of prior experience in this area. Besides they are thinking “phones” rather than MIDs at this point.

Note that in all of this I’m talking near term. Three, five, ten years out anything could happen. However, for the next year and possibly two Apple is in the lead and will most likely stay that way.

For all of you that are thinking I’ve fallen victim to the hype, let me encourage you to do a few things: First, get an iPhone. Use it and then tell me that it’s connectivity and form-factor don’t draw you in. Second, play banker for a minute. Where would you place your bets? In an unproven, fairly fragmented software market geared around an unproven family of MID products from hardware-based Intel and its partners or with Apple and its “iPod” family including the recent iPhone device that’s done remarkably well for its first year? And third, if you’re a developer, check out the iPhone SDK. Tell me it doesn’t have many of the things we’ve all wanted as rich-app, mobile developers. We’ve seen similar things before and beyond as well. But have they been so well packaged before? If you’re still not convinced, watch the demos during Apple’s SDK announcement event. And if none of this convinces you, I bet you’re not shaken by near term events, so no problem. I agree with you that in time the world will reach equilibrium and all will be well. What’s a couple years here and there among friends?

Yes, several years out, things will most likely be much different. And no doubt, there will be plenty of room for niche players across the board in the meantime. And Microsoft’s and Intel’s coattails are big enough to carry several efforts along the way too. But for the Kliener Perkins level break away products, I’ll be looking in the iPhone/iPod Touch direction.

As a Tablet/UMPC enthusiast and developer, I’m not going to dump what I’ve been doing and radically change directions, but you can rest assured that I’m keeping my options open. Like with the OLPC and Eee PCs I see an evolution occurring here and I don’t want to be left behind.

Good technology and good implementations deserve respect. And I’m treating the iPhone with such. Doesn’t mean my competitive instincts aren’t kicking in. Just means I’m very mindful and doing my best to do my best.

John Doerr of KPCB announced a $100M iFund targetted to iPhone and iPod products at today’s Apple event.

From the KPCB website,

KPCB’s iFund is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.

How much will KPCB invest in each business? Again, from the website:

The iFund will invest anywhere from $100K of seed capital to $15M of expansion capital in mobile application and services companies

Very interesting idea.

I wonder how this will impact the MID development market if any–which in my book is a product without an advocate. Oh, yeah, Intel is evangelizing the platform, but what about the software side? Is it going to be freewheeling open source projects? Or is Microsoft going to get behind it? Or maybe Google if Microsoft doesn’t. That sure would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Google becoming a premeir MID developer advocate. It might fit well into their mobile browsing focus. I’m not sure if Android can get them there or not. I haven’t looked at it. My 10,000 mile high guess is no. But that’s just a guess.

I look forward to seeing how all of this will play out. Do you feel the world spinning? I do.

First, the iPhone showed how popular multi-touch can be. Then the Air launched with this show-catching feature. Now Apple has added a multi-touch touchpad to the MacBook Pro.

Oh, the fun.

Let me see. How many “tech-leading” Tablet PCs have multi-touch? Oh, yeah. None.

This is getting old. Where is the defibrillator for the Tablet PC industry?

When it comes to mobility, several Tablet PCs have led the way. Remember the NEC LitePad? Lightyears ahead of the competition. But it disappeared. Why? For many of the reasons it was so good: It was super thin. It was super light. It didn’t waste weight on an internal CD/DVD player. Its processor was a miser, which helped save precious battery life.

Unfortunately, there were many voices online and offline that talked down designs like this. I heard reps from Best Buy argue, for instance, that no one wanted a system without a CD player. I argued it was much about education. People needed to see how things were migrating to the Internet–changing how systems were going to be used–and didn’t you want to be part of the future?

Of course, it’s true that some things have changed slowly. There isn’t as much online content as soon as I had expected. That’s changing now though. And opinions have been slow to change too.

Well, I see both making a move–and both are in large part courtesy of Apple. Yes, Apple. First, the success of iTunes is helping the content creators see a possible different future. There’s more room to go here, however, but things are getting better. My guess is that within the next year or so TV networks, major studios, and music providers will all realize that they can relax and stream content online–with ads–and make more money. Not less.

Anyway, there’s another part of this equation that’s changing too and that’s the acceptance of trimmed down machines. Intel is going this way with its processors, sacrificing performance for battery life. We are in a performance lull, which is benefiting the competitive landscape of mobile systems.

But it’s not really Intel that is persuading people that mobility is good. It’s Apple and its new Air. When the Air was first launched, there was much criticism. No CD/DVD. Few connectors. Limited battery capacity. Not enough horsepower. However, some realized that these were the design tradeoffs that a good mobile system is probably going to have. If you want a faster, loaded system, go elsewhere. There are plenty of machines to choose from. Well, it appears that this latter group is wining the conversation war.

I’m reading more and more about people proudly showing off their new Air laptops with resounding acceptance.  People like the lightness, the sleekness, the accessibility. The other stuff–you know the high performance stuff–is just not needed in this type of computer.

Yes, the tide it turning.

And my guess is that as thin and mobile become more “in” in the Apple world, so will it be in the Tablet space. And maybe, just maybe Tablets will make it back into retail. They’ll become cool for students to own. They’ll become acceptable as a lead laptop. The market will grow.

It’s unfortunate that Microsoft and its partners had to wait for Apple to fix this marketing problem, but it appears to be doing just that. Better late than never. And better Apple than no one else.

It’s an interesting lesson–at least in terms of what made marketing sense over the last few years: The big voices that needed convincing online were the journalists (who have led much of the Web 2.0 growth by the way–so by definition and by monetary gain they’ve been the leaders) and the young early adopters. Both groups have disproportionate voices online. At least for the last five years or so you couldn’t gain much success without their acceptance. The Tablet PC convinced a few, but not many. And–at least in my view–as Tablet designs went sideways and started becoming more like market followers than leaders–it lost more and more possible converts. It’s true, these designs became more acceptable to institutional buyers, but they didn’t help to persuade the online voice, which was needed in order to grow greater market acceptance.

Now the next five years may need a different marketing recipe. As the next generation of online innovation occurs, new powerful voices will emerge and maybe they’ll marginalize this 2.0 generation of trendsetters–we’ll have to see. But either way, I think we’re finally at the point where Tablets can actually be efficiently and successfully marketed.

Is this going to be one more thing?

[Via www.thredr.com/apple.html

I think I’ve found my favorite way to browse the Tablet PC/UMPC conversations list: on an iPhone.

My first stab at it was less than satisfying. The page was too small. Turns out there was an easy fix. All we had to do was add the following meta tag to each html page, which tells Safari how to scale the page in relation to size of the screen:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=320″/>

With this simple addition, pages now scale nicely so that by default the text is readable. I just tried taking some pictures of the iPhone showing the conversations list, but I don’t have a good setup yet, so instead I’m using the iPhoneTest.com iPhone emulator here and taking screenshots from it. (Be sure to use the Safari browser for best results.)

Here’s the Tablet PC list as of this evening much like it appears on the actual iPhone:

The Tablet PC conversation list is currently the default page on the server, but it’s also available as: http://www.thredr.com/tabletpc.html.

What’s really cool and convenient is setting up a home-screen icon for the page so you can get to it with a single tap after powering on the iPhone. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Safari browser from the home screen by tapping on the Safari icon.
2. Tap on the url edit box in the browser and enter:
http://www.thredr.com/tabletpc.html.
3. Then tap on the plus sign at the bottom of the screen and in the pick list that appears select the “Add to Home Screen” option.
4. You will then be asked to give this bookmark a name. I use “Tablet PC,” but any short name will do.

That’s it. Now when you go to the home screen you’ll see an extra icon that looks like a bit of zoomed out text with the bookmark name that you entered in the last step.

Now when you want to check what’s going on in the Tablet/UMPC world, you just pick up your iPhone, wake it up and tap on your custom icon. This brings up Safari with the conversations list ready to scroll through. Did I mention it’s addicting to use your fingers to flick through lists on the iPhone? Well, it is. At least for me.

Now as I’ve mentioned before, we’re working on a couple other custom micro-conversation lists too. There’s one that tracks Apple talk at http://www.thredr.com/apple.html. It looks like this on the iPhone:

As you can see in this screenshot, the conversation threader supports YouTube videos. When one appears you can tap on the link to watch it–although on the iPhone not all videos are available because they have to be re-encoded for the iPhone video format. There’s no Flash as of yet on the iPhone.

Well, here’s one other list that I have added to my iPhone home screen: http://www.thredr.com/msdev.html. It tracks a wide variety of Microsoft-oriented developers. (We still have many more to add to the watch list, but there are some good ones already.) Anyway, what better way to monitor what’s going on with Microsoft developers than on an iPhone :-).

What makes the iPhone so great for checking a list like this? It’s quick and easy to get to it. Waking up the iPhone or powering it up from a cold start is fast and getting to the page is only two or so taps away. The slow part will be downloading the content if on the EVDO network, but for the most part that’s not too bad. Plus it’s easy to flick through the content by sliding a finger up and down the page. And if the content is too small, it scales up nicely in landscape mode. Just flip the phone sideways.

Now wouldn’t it be cool if you could flick the page side to side to switch topics :-). (Probably would be too slow on an EVDO network, but it would be cool.)

PBS’s Cringely writes: “I still expect we’ll see an Apple tablet this year, for example, and it will use this same Intel CPU [as the MacBook Air].”

Despite some interesting new products, there was a collective “huh?” rumbling across the blogosphere yesterday after Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote. Why? Much for the same reason that many give Apple kudos for–the secrecy.

Here’s the thing. Apple has done so well delivering some innovative products over the last couple years, such as the iPhone, that people expect a lot from Apple. Lots more. In fact, they are ahead of the Apple curve in their thinking. Why? Because with all this secrecy Apple is unable to set expectations. And even if they did try to set things straight by leaking some details here and there, who would believe them? There’s so much fake leaked material racing across the Internet. It’s become a favorite 15-minute fame game. Who can Photoshop the most realistic Apple subnotebook? Who can list the specs of the as of yet next gen iPhone? The noise level is getting awfully high–and messy.

There were some differences this year though that may have played into this. It appears that many of the prime products mentioned in the keynote had been leaked before the official announcements–at least in part. We didn’t know the specifics, but we’d learned that there was to be a new thin, 13″ notebook. We had learned that Apple was going to rent out movies. We had learned that the iPhone was going to get a refresh.

Maybe it was partially the fact that these details were leaked that many started dreaming further. There was chatter about a Tablet Mac. There was talk about 3G and WiMax. There was talk about a sub-notebook. All of these would have been leading, ultra-cool products. But none were to be found, which created a deflating sigh of disappointment.

This is the problem with keeping things secret–or should I say semi-secret. People dream. And rarely can you surpass the expectations of those dreams.

Remember when Microsoft’s Origami was pre-announced via a sparsely worded website? People dreamed. And the dreams raced past what was to ultimately arrive.

Yes, there was a great spike of traffic at the time. There was a lot of news coverage and chatter. However, I’d argue it all led up to a collective sigh. It wasn’t that the product was bad. It was that people got ahead of it. That’s the challenge.

In an interview with John Markoff and David Pogue, Steve Jobs explains why he doesn’t think Kindle will do well:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

I don’t know the numbers, but I’m guessing that Steve Jobs is suggesting that 60% of American adults haven’t picked up a book at all in the last year. Could be, but then what’s he really saying here? That Amazon can’t make a business of selling books because too few people read them?

Hmmm.

This is their market after all. My guess is that of Amazon’s customers a large portion read and buy books. So what’s going on here with Kindle is that Amazon is selling a premium product to its customers. Seems as a reasonable upstream approach for them.

Time for some numbers. There are 300+ million people in the US. Of those, I think I’ve read that about 70% are adults. So that’s about 210 million. Now taking Jobs’ 40% number, that gives a market of approximately 80 million adult book readers. From these, let’s say a third are avid enough readers that they’d be interested in a Kindle type device. So now we’re down to 24 million or so.  And then let’s figure that 2% of these people each year might actually purchase one–that’s about 500K units a year. At $400 each that’s a couple hundred million a year in revenue. Not bad.

Of course, Amazon can go the other way with this calculation and start with its number of top book purchasers and take a percentage of them to see if it’s a big enough number. To me, I’d take the risk even if it weren’t. But that’s just me.

I keep thinking about the limited number of connectors on the MacBook Air–a headphone jack, USB connector, and a mini-DVI (for external displays and projectors). It reminds me of the new generation of MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices), which only have a minimum number of connectors too.

I like the mini-DVI connector. That’s a good idea. VGA connectors are too bulky on notebooks as it is. Good move on Apple’s part.

The single USB port I’m not so keen on but I guess it’ll pass since the MacBook Air includes most of the things that you need in a device anyway, such as a webcam. EVDO is the one big thing not in the computer, but a USB EVDO will do OK, although it will eat up the battery–which by the way how do you change if you need more than five hours of run time??? Is there an external battery extender? Where’s the connector for that?

Now as to the headset connector. That’s OK, but since there’s no mic in jack, this means you may want to use a USB mic for podcasting and the like. I guess USB mics are getting more and more common so maybe this isn’t a big deal. However, using the USB port for a mic means using EVDO connectivity at the same time which is going to be problematic, though not impossible to get around. I’m guessing a USB hub will work.

So is the limited connectivity on the MacBook Air a thing of the future? In some ways I think it is. As more devices are built into the base unit and devices get smaller and smaller we’ll see fewer connectors. Another possibility is that we’ll see more smaller specialized connectors, like the mini-DVI connector on the Air.

Oh, and one more thing: The MacBook Air also shows that all notebooks don’t need CD/DVD players. The Tablet market had this right to begin with–they didn’t include integrated CD/DVD players at first. Sure it’s fine to include DVD players in some units, but I don’t think most Tablets need them. Part of the problem was that retailers thought they couldn’t sell Tablets without optical drives. Kind of makes sense when you consider the premium Tablets have been selling for. However, I really, really think the OEMs should have held their ground and gone the other way–towards thinness and lightness.

Apple has it right. It shows the MacBook Air next to a thin envelope. That’s the correct imagery. Ever seen an add where a Tablet was marketed this way? Me neither. 

Oh, how I wish NEC would have keep going with the NEC LitePad.  

To almost no one’s surprise, the new MacBook Air, introduced today at Macword, supports multi-touch gestures similar to that popularized by the iPhone.

The display doesn’t include a touch sensor, however.

Instead, an enlarged touch pad supports the new gestures. What gestures are supported?

There’s the two-finger pinch gesture, that can be used in iTunes or a photo-album app, or Safari to zoom in and out.

There’s the swipe new three-finger (yes, three finger) swipe gesture supported in Safari to navigate forwards and backwards among pages.

Also new is a two finger rotate gesture.

Some other gestures include a screen zoom (hold the control key down while sliding two fingers up or down), tap, click and drag, click, drag and lock, and two-finger clicks. Not bad.

I couldn’t help thinking that Apple is positioning the new MacBook Air in part as a business notebook–not specifically in words but particularly in the imagery being used.

For instance, in the online demo video, there are references to Mac Office. No focus on iLife here. And there’s Apple’s new commercial which shows the MacBook Air being pulled from a business-sized manilla envelope. And then there’s the classic business look of the device itself.

It’s not all business, of course. There were shots of a family friendly photo album and the like shown on the Air’s display. However, I can’t help but think that Apple is moving one small step closer to the IT world with the MacBook Air.

Yes, there are some big IT limits to this device. Is that an embedded battery? And not many ports for access. No direct ethernet. No expansion dock. No easy expandability. Hmm.

But still, one small step.