February 14, 2010 – 11:45 pm
Once again, Apple, or, getting to the point, Steve Jobs defies common wisdom. This time it’s about communication, positioning, propaganda. Never let others take control of the story, don’t let anything go unanswered, ever. (Well, almost anything, there is the ‘When did you stop beating your wife’ exception.) The recent and still on-going –raging might [...]
January 31, 2010 – 5:19 pm
Let me start with an important caveat. For this I’ll refer you to a post from my favorite high-tech blogger, David Pogue. “Don’t pass judgment until you’ve tried it!” Wise counsel: three years ago, industry sages “knew” Apple had no business making a phone. Normal humans voted with their wallet.
Customers come in two categories: [...]
January 17, 2010 – 7:46 pm
Legends die hard. In the pre-Web days, they got printed and reprinted, told and retold and so became official, like spinach being good for you because it held the iron your red cells needed. After decades of the disgusting veggie inflicted upon young kids - I remember, a scientist went back to the bench and [...]
November 1, 2009 – 11:26 pm
Literally, Droid is the new Motorola phone sold by Verizon and running Google’s latest Android 2.0 release. The early reviews are good and, cleverly, Google issued a new turn-by-turn navigation application for the platform, also well received, complete with voice control and street view pictures. The Droid starts selling later this week, on November 6th, [...]
October 25, 2009 – 7:44 pm
Lots of earnings reports this week, mostly good ones. Apple did better than expected, even by the most enthusiastic earnings seers, so did Amazon whose shares went up 26.8% today, adding more than $10B to its market cap in one day. I’m happy to see a quality company, one that treats its customer better than [...]
October 19, 2009 – 9:10 am
This is going to be a busy week. Monday we have Apple’s earnings and, later in the week, Windows 7’s release. The deafening noise will make it hard to understand the real, lasting consequences of these events. Fortunately, deep into the bowels of a server, a smaller happening, a bit flipping from 0 to 1 [...]
October 5, 2009 – 3:47 am
“Free”, as a business model, is a figment of the imagination. In itself, “Free” is not a business model, it is only a component of broader revenue system. Unlike Chris Anderson, author of the book “Free” ($18.00) — a bestseller not a bestfreebie — I happened to actually practice the free “model”. Between 2002 and [...]
September 13, 2009 – 8:43 pm
I’m quite fond of kremlinology, the metaphorical one, not the literal sort. For me, it started as a hobby and ended up making me decades of fun and money. Allow me to explain before we proceed with an attempted decryption of recent Apple events and statements.
Working in Paris in the seventies, I struck an acquaintance [...]
August 9, 2009 – 11:54 am
It was long overdue: Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO) finally resigned from Apple’s Board of Directors. Usually, these resignations are handled in the smoothest of ways: Thanks for the distinguished service and the like. This time, Steve Jobs issued a pointed statement: “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome [...]
If you went on vacation and renounced Internet access for the duration, you might not have heard the latest rumors concerning the iTablet a.k.a. the Jesus Tablet, Apple’s eagerly awaited entry into the putative bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook segment. I’m avoiding the n-word: for Apple, this is the no-book category…
As [...]
We have yet another standards battle on our hands — you might say screens, as it concerns Web video. Or we might watch our wallets, as the fight is about who gets the biggest share of the money spent delivering multimedia on our computers, smartphones and, soon, TVs.
My money is on HTML 5, co-opted and [...]
Saint Peter offers a choice of hells to a recently dematerialized high-tech tycoon (pick your favorite sinner) with a long list of transgressions. The basic one, fire, floggings, and the premium one, plenty of music, drink, food and other pleasures of the flesh. Said tycoon picks the fun venue, Saint Peter pulls a lever, the [...]
April 26, 2009 – 12:55 pm
Today, let’s have a little fun with Microsoft’s latest attempt at countering Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign. Their premise is simple: for the same amount of computing power you pay more for a Mac, you pay an Apple Tax. As Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, puts it: You pay $500 to slap an Apple logo on [...]
August 11, 2008 – 6:31 pm
by Jean-Louis Gassée
Simple is hard. Easy is harder. Invisible is hardest. So goes one of the many proverbs of our computer lore. As Apple found out last month with the MobileMe launch misfires, the lofty promise of “Exchange for the rest of us” translated into a user experience that was neither simple nor easy — [...]
Contrary to what I expected, the dust hasn’t settled yet. A week later, people still queue, 2h30 Friday morning before being admitted to the sanctum sanctorum in San Francisco. Besides the long lines, there were glitches: activation problems, trouble with the new MobileMe service, with getting access to software updates for the “old” iPhones. [...]
No, no, not Steve Jobs but an even higher entity smiling upon the company. As I hope to show, Apple’s hard work years ago is now about to pay huge unexpected dividends on the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out of Steve Jobs’ quasi-divine hands in January 2007, it was a hack, the [...]
