Opinionated

I have heard plenty of complaints from friends and colleagues, and seen similar things in the press, that they don’t see the benefit in the iPad because they’ll still need to lug around a laptop and a phone. So now they have even more stuff and another charger to cart around with them. They’re mistaken for two reasons; firstly this is the zero generation of these new devices and the apps and UX paradigm is not mature, but more importantly these people all fall into the 9% of the 1-9-90 rule.

The 1-9-90 rule is a shorthand way of making an observation about populations. In any given group of people doing something they’ll break into three groups; creators, power users and consumers. This applies to the arts (artists, patrons and theater goers), sports (athletes, superfans and normals), literature, politics, YouTube, etc.

If you are a producer of content you won’t be able to get away with only having a post-PC device. Eventually you’ll be able to do a tremendous amount of things with it, but you’ll also need some supplemental support. That support may be a very powerful device equivalent to a desktop or laptop machine with a lot of screen space so you can edit complex video or do graphic design or write code, or it may be additional input devices like a large keyboard so you can write prose or more easily manipulate spreadsheets. Sorry but for the foreseeable future you are correct and will indeed need more gear.

The other 90% is ready to move on.

Apple, Microsoft and Google get this. They all have things in motion. If you are a developer and have not yet made the transition from native applications to web/cloud/app development you are about to have a rude awakening. The move to the new paradigm of end-user devices requires a change in how we approach UX and development. The application is no longer tied to the device, it exists in the world (i.e. ‘the cloud’) and should be accessible from any number of locations. Only one app at a time has the focus of the user, and should therefore take over the entire available display area when the user is directly interacting. These devices are much lower power than what we have in desktops and laptops today, so heavy lifting needs to be done in the cloud and the local end needs to be power sipping.

These changes require a clean break from the past. The Mac/Windows paradigm is dead for these 90% devices. Apple has managed to do an end run via iPhone and App Store. Yesterday the other shoe dropped; not only is the next WWDC being billed as “The center of the app universe” and heavily iPad/iPhone centric, but they have already cut the Mac out of the Apple Design Awards. So Apple is wasting no time in moving on.

Microsoft has been preparing as well. They’ve killed off the old Windows Mobile platform in a single stroke. The evolution of .NET and WPF over the past decade has managed to put it in a good position going forward with regard to apps for this new platform. With the introduction of WinPhone 7 they can now offer compelling apps running on a low-power device.

Google has Android and ChromeOS in its quiver. Android is getting a lot of traction lately and there are a number of tablet devices coming with Android already.

That brings us to Palm and HP. WebOS is theoretically a very compelling platform for this new generation of devices. It was designed to run on phones so it can work in a low-power environment. The UX paradigm they’ve adopted is even more suited to the larger screen of a tablet. Most importantly WebOS was designed from the ground up to be a cloud computing endpoint solution.

That said, I have no faith in the ability of HP or Palm to execute, and the merged entity has even worse chances. Mergers are very hard to do well, and it will take brilliant leadership and flawless execution to pull this off well and quickly. I wish them the best, the market will benefit from some robust competition.

Assuming they don’t screw up execution of the device designs, pricing and technology stack, how successful these platforms will be in the end comes down to two things; The Cloud, and Developers.

It’s about the Cloud

Devices in this new paradigm are mostly endpoints for apps that live elsewhere. This should go for not just the apps running on the device, but for the entire device. It needs to be a portal into the cloud, not a device that happens to have cloud connectivity. To that end it should never need to be connected to another machine physically for any reason, nor should there be any software needed to manage the device that isn’t running on the device itself and in the cloud. This means; no tethering to a PC, no sync, no iTunes.

Apple is already losing that battle and it hasn’t even really started. For business reasons it may be unable to win that battle. Their own entrenched lines of business will likely prevent them from doing the right thing. However; they have been making acquisition moves that make it appear they understand they need to move their music collection to the cloud instead of being a download and sync proposition, so they still are in the race.

Google gets it, they were born getting it. ChromeOS is designed to be a next generation platform specifically for this type of model. Android has given them experience running an app store and got their feet wet with devices. They already own most of our important data through Gmail, docs, voice etc. They’re well positioned.

Microsoft is learning fast. WinPhone 7 (and the Kin which has already been introduced and is based on the same technology stack) is designed to be a cloud endpoint solution. No tethering, sync and backup is to the cloud. They are moving fast with a hugely scalable cloud backend infrastructure. Very exiting looking devices are coming from a number of manufacturers, including new player Dell.

Developers Developers Developers

It all comes down to developers in the trenches. It always has.

This battle will be fought mostly in the cloud, but there are local apps as well. Google knows this and has been fighting to get HTML5 to be very compelling. If native apps have any edge at all it complicates things for them greatly, so they have hedged their bets with a native programming interface for Android, and will likely be forced to do so for ChromeOS as well. WebOS and Chrome as similarly situated with the developer stack being essentially the same as what would be used to develop any browser-centric web app.

Apple is saddled with technology that is rather tired at this point. Objective-C has always been an oddball platform and the tools are 5-15 years behind Microsoft depending on the area you look at.

Microsoft has an edge in local app development because of the maturity of their tools and the up to the minute capabilities of the languages they have on top of the .NET platform. They win the developer tools fight hands down on technical merit. Large portions of the developer community still treat Microsoft as being evil because they haven’t been paying attention to what has happened over the past 8 years. Whether Microsoft can really pull off being a serious contender going forward will be a hearts and minds campaign. They have to iterate very quickly, updating the WinPhone platform every six months, execute on their version of an app store flawlessly and more permissively than Apple has done. And they’ll need to reach out to the developers who think they love Ruby simply because it felt so good to stop being abused by Java.

All of this is the next phase, these battles will be fought and won or lost over the next 3-5 years. After the initial splintering caused by the different app platforms, at the end of it we’ll have moved to a deeper phase of compatibility as more and more of the essence of the applications moves onto the cloud and browsers become able to present ever more expressive and performant UX.

In the end everything is a commodity.

In 10 years when we look back at the shape of the computer industry, 2010 will mark the clear start of the post-PC era.

The PC as the primary computing device is dead. They won’t go away, but they won’t be the main way that the average person interacts with data any more. It has taken a surprisingly long time to get here.

Everyone who is remotely serious about computers knows the silly prognostications that have been knocked down thoroughly in the past. The president of IBM who is famously mis-quoted as saying that he thought there was a world market for maybe five computers. Or the other famous mis-quote from Bill Gates that 640k ought to be enough for anybody. Well here is another silly prognostication; in 10 years you will no longer care about RAM, storage capacity, CPU Speed or resolution.

Continue reading Welcome to the Post-PC Era

A lot of ink and pixels are being spilled this week about announcements made at the Facebook conference this week.  Many of the new things announced are already live.

Facebook is still lacking in one major area, and until this is fixed I and a lot of other people will remain uncomfortable. We need to be able to layer our social circle like an onion. We know lots of people, close family, distant family, close and casual friends, friends from the ‘old days’, close business partners, associates, people who you want to get to know better, the variety may be endless. At a minimum there is family, friends and business. For years I’ve made an effort to at least keep business and the rest separate, keeping business to LinkedIn. It looks like the Facebook future is being forced upon us anyway and things are about to get messy.

Having a social graph is useless without some degree of control over who gets what. I’m sorry, but everyone can’t be my ‘friend’.

Continue reading The Innovation Facebook Failed to Make

Update: Google has fixed the problem with their site not handling iPad correctly.  You can now configure up to 25 calendars from your Apps or Gmail account to sync to your iPad calendar.

There is a bug/oversight currently affecting calendar sync with the iPad.  If you have already been a user of Google sync in the past on your iPhone or iPod Touch you know how great it is to have access to not just your calendar but all the other calendars you have configured as well.  For myself I’m able to see/edit not just mine but also my Wife’s, the ‘Family’ calendar, and others such as a ‘Notes’ calendar I maintain for things that aren’t necessarily actions or appointments.

The problem is right now when you configure your iPad for sync you’ll only get the default calendar. At first I thought this was an iPad issue but quickly realized it was a problem with the sync configuration.  Now the fun starts.

There isn’t any way that I can find to configure the sync settings from a desktop browser.  Or the iPad browser for that matter since Google currently treats iPad as desktop in the case of the sync area, though it maddeningly it treats it as a moble browser in some other properties.  This will no doubt take awhile to settle down, so in the meantime if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can configure the settings from there, with one caveat. (Info on other means in the note at the end).

Continue reading iPad/Google Sync Calendar Workaround

As soon as things started looking pretty grim in late 2008 I knew it was time to be thinking about starting new companies. At the time it was mainly intuition, and the knowledge that the majority of great companies in existence today were started during down cycles.  I also believe in the platinum rule of “Invest where there is pain”, which is an unpleasant philosophy on the surface but when you dig down it is about faith in humanity’s enduring ability to bounce back, to fight through adversity.

Consider what the environment looks for at a startup during ‘normal’ economic times:

• Money is hard to come by and may come with unpleasant impact on founders and growth strategy of business (that’s a whole article there)
• Startups are more nimble than established players and so may be able to seize opportunity other overlook

During a ‘boom’ time for startups things are perversely worse.

Continue reading Recession: Just like any other time for a startup, only more so

New startups and ‘seed stage‘ funding are the absolute underpinning of our entire economy.

As I observed in my post months back on health care reform, the vast majority of new jobs created in the US are at small and new companies. The easiest way to understand why this is the case is to look at the psychology of established companies vs. startups. Established companies already have their nut, they have successful products or services and are mostly engaged in protecting what they already have. Startups take risks, they disrupt, in doing so they shift or create markets. This phenomenon is only amplified during tough economic times like we are facing today.

The best way to stimulate an economy is to create new jobs. That makes new dollars enter the system, they spend money at existing businesses, they pay new taxes which can be spent to improve infrastructure. The cycle grows upward. It is not just the best way, it is really the only way out of a downward spiral.

What can we do to stimulate new startups?

Continue reading The Seed Matters

Please take a moment and read this message from the Grameen foundation, a cause I strongly support:

Last year, we kicked off a global campaign in hopes that our supporters who believe in the power of microfinance will help us share its importance with their networks.

On the 27th of each month, we ask our supporters to make a donation of $27 to let the world know that poverty is unnecessary and one person can help change the lives of the world’s poorest.

Today we can double our impact! A group of friends of Grameen Foundation has pledged to provide a dollar-for-dollar match until we reach $200,000.

Why $27? In 1976, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus planted the seed that created Grameen Bank by making a loan of $27 to a group of Bangladeshi women out of his own pocket. This small action was a catalyst for the global microfinance movement that has since provided millions of women around the world with the microloans they need to help start or improve a small business, provide for their families and escape the cycle of poverty.

Three things you can do:

1. Give a gift of $27 to this movement. Visit: http://tinyurl.com/give27 .
2. Change your LinkedIn status today to: Today is the 27th! Let’s celebrate the first $27 microloan. Support Grameen Foundation http://tinyurl.com/give27
3. Change your Facebook status today to: It’s the 27th of the month, and I’m giving $27 to help the Grameen Foundation end global poverty. $27 was all it took for Muhammad Yunus to give his first microloan. Join in: http://tinyurl.com/give27 and DOUBLE your impact because generous donors are providing a dollar-for-dollar match until we reach $200,000! Your $27 becomes $54!

Micro-lending is a very important way to help improve economies around the world.  You can have a large impact for a small number of dollars, please take this opportunity to lend a leg up to an entrepreneur in the 3rd world.

When the iPhone came out it was amazingly great and obviously stupid at the same time.  No cut and paste? No changeable battery?  No slot for expansion cards?

Now the iPad will have a similar growth curve.  The software that is initially shipping with it suffers from being 1.0.  And Apple 1.0 versions suffer further from not receiving wide beta testing.  Congratulations early-adopters, you get to beta test the iPad extensions to the SDK.  This device will lay the groundwork for a great future in tablet shaped devices, and this initial device will be fondly remembered but not with the martyrdom of the Newton because this one will be supplanted by improved devices instead of being abandoned.

The netbook just died, it hasn’t stopped moving yet but netbook sales are about to fall off a cliff.  I’m sure this drove the $499 price point.

This will be the device that makes eBooks real.  Kindle was a side show, there will be more iPads in peoples hands than Kindles only a couple weeks after launch, and in a year there will be some serious numbers.  The people with these devices in hands also just happen to be the people who spend real money on media.

There are hints of impending perfection:

Continue reading Perfecting Imperfection