November 15, 2009 – 6:48 pm
Last Friday November 6th, the much-awaited Motorola Droid came out. Powered by the latest version of Google’s smartphone OS, Android 2.0, the new handset is exclusively distributed by Verizon. The carrier backs Motorola’s handset with an aggressive marketing campaign on its website and on TV ads.
For such a “gifted” (Motorola + Verizon + Google) product, [...]
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 – 3:46 am
In the US, if Apple gave up on the AT&T exclusivity, the iPhone’s market share would double. So says Morgan Stanley’s anal-yst Kathryn Huberty. See this PC World piece here. And a CNN/Fortune Magazine piece here.
Let’s not throw stones at Ms. Huberty but, instead, question her bosses’ wisdom, work ethics or wakefulness. Is anyone editing [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
by Jean-Louis Gassée
AT&T can’t seem to catch a break. A couple of weeks ago, at All Things Digital, an industry conference, Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s Chairman, got the audience to snicker and roll eyes. The conference is held by the Wall Street Journal, led by its digital guru, Walt Mossberg and, “by invitation only”, $5K a [...]
April 26, 2009 – 12:55 pm
4:00am. I find myself reading an interesting story covering Portfolio’s web site – on my iPhone. As sleep comes back, I reflexively reach for the “save” (for later reading) button that is on every iPhone news application. But I am reading from the magazine’s site, as opposed to running an app on my smartphone; [...]
April 11, 2009 – 12:09 am
Micro-payments are an old idea, some say a bad fantasy. Chief, we’re rich: I found a way to get a millicent per page view…
So far, not much has happened. Unless you look at a tidy, not tiny, little billion-dollar business called iTunes. Three years ago, in February 2006, 1 billion songs served, sold, cashed in, [...]
You the attentive reader might ask why VCs like yours truly are interested in netbooks. Hardware made in Taiwan, running Linux or Windows, low prices, even lower margins…Where are the opportunities for entrepreneurs, and for those of us who invest in their creations?
This is a different question from: Why are netbooks successful? We know the [...]
February 1, 2009 – 7:40 pm
I’m quite fond of Bloomberg’s iPhone application. My insomnia companion is my iPod touch, used as an alarm clock, and as a convenient bedtime newsreader. And the Bloomberg app is my favorite: good navigation, a simple bottom toolbar (News, Markets, MyStocks, StockFinder). In the News section, stories are shown as they are published and each [...]
September 15, 2008 – 8:27 am
by Jean-Louis Gassée
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Revelation or revelator? I’m referring to the iPhone, of course. We’ll quickly skip over the revelation part, enough praise (and some well-deserved barbs) already. Instead, we’ll look at the light the iPhone sheds on the cellular infrastructure and on the culture of operators.
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The symptoms: spotty 3G coverage, bad reception, ‘bandwidth’ (meaning download speed) [...]
August 17, 2008 – 10:40 pm
Steve shimmers into a bar, materializes next to Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO, crying in his mojito and whispers: I can fulfill your fondest dream. You’re the Devil, go away! No, I’m merely Steve Jobs and I want nothing to do with your soul or your chiseled body. Relax, it’s just about money.
A [...]
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 [...]
News publishers remain obsessed with the question: what will be the main distribution platform for their contents, and what will be the subsequent business models? For clues, let’s zoom in the iPhone’s recent performances as well as its immediate prospects.
The smartphone introduced a year ago by Apple has become the tool of choice for news-hungry [...]
