figure 1: Munir Kotadia of ZDNet Australia.
The good folks of MYiTablet found an article from ZDNet Australia where Munir Kotadia lambasts “greedy Apple users” for trusting anyone.
“There is no evidence to suggest that this particular jailbreak utility is at all malicious but how long will it be before copycat sites appear that have less honourable intentions?”Read the rest of this entry »
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, gave a great talk today. His talk actually dovetails perfectly with what I wrote last night, that all of these “walled garden” methodologies have got to go. My notes from the talk have been posted up; you’ll see them refined into a story at BerryShack and Crackberry soon enough, I’m sure.
I’ll dig a bit deeper into his talk later today, but the highlight for me is that Moskovitz knows that as computers get smaller, they’ll eat into mobiles. Mobiles will have to become open like computers, or people will start using computers instead of mobiles. As computers miniaturize, that’s just going to be a fact of life.
figure 1: this image from Moskovitz’s talk shows the nature of the computer world versus the nature of the mobile world. In the mobile world, everything is locked. Carriers try to monetize various kinds of data over their own network, the OS is locked to everyone, and the hardware is similarly locked, which isn’t what people really want (witness the energy put into hacking openness into the iPhone). The locked-in aspect of the mobile world is also what leads to people thinking of their mobile phone as jsut a landline that they can take with them wherever they go, instead of a mobile computing device. This is a barrier to smartphone adoption.
figure 2: this is Moskovitz’s picture that depicts the collision that’s going to occur in the mobile world as the computer world miniaturizes to the point where the computer hardware makers can put their software and services onto mobile-sized devices that have full computer power.
The other great part is that Moskovitz gave a warning to everyone attending: open up your platform or become obsolete, either by Apple’s hand or Google’s hand. Pick your poison, really. Both of them are looking to either destroy or warp the industry, and to do it from within.
figure 1: various logos of CTIA. It’s probably supposed to show multi-facetedness and diversity, but it’s a lot more like untreated schizophrenia.
There is something seriously wrong with the wireless industry. The CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment is emblematic of the issues that plague the wireless industry. It’s seriously like a microcosm of what’s broken in the wireless world.
We just finished watching the day 1 keynote by Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO), and Dieter has posted the details up on WMExperts.com. It was a fair keynote; Ballmer was better in person than I thought he would be. His stage voice and personality are both ridiculously brash.
He had a lot to say about Windows Mobile, this of course being a mobile conference. He didn’t have a lot to say in regards to competition with the iPhone. Windows Live Search, Microsoft’s one-stop app for personal searches, crashed on stage. The presenter handled it quite well, there will be no horror stories of 5 minute waits for devices to reboot, etc.
The biggest news of his keynote is that Microsoft is bringing all of the parts of Windows Mobile phones further into their domain network structure. Windows Mobile devices will be further managed by the network administrators. They can push applications out, settings, practically the entire phone experience. It looks like it will be quite popular with the enterprise; but not by any means at the cost of the iPhone. No, this isn’t a shot across the iPhone’s bow. It’s a direct hit on Blackberry. I’ve said over and over in our Treocast podcasts that RiM plays a very dangerous game in the mobile space — they compete directly with Microsoft, and their job just got a lot harder.
It’s curious to me that Ballmer never really even mentions Google. Thinly-veiled insults are hurled their way a fair amount by both Ballmer and former Seahawks player / former U.S. Representative / current CTIA president Steve Largent, but Microsoft curiously has the decency to mention Yahoo!. Anyway, we’re off to the show floor. I’ll be posting more later.
Update: Of course, it goes without saying that Walt steals his best content from us. Case in point, Dieter ranted about this way back in February. Really, though, we’re just glad that Walt (or at least Katie) is reading us on a regular basis.
Pre-eminent technology writer Walt Mossberg excoriates the mobile carriers in a recent article he posted to the Wall Street Journal and his personal site, All Things D. In terms of rants, his cup runneth over. Ranging from comparing the mobile carriers of the U.S. to communist-era “Soviet Ministries” to acknowledging the iPhone as the first U.S. cellphone to break the current mold, he throws many darts and hits the bulls-eye every time. Well, almost every time. He does gripe about the lack of official third party applications on the iPhone, which strikes me as impatient. Walt knows as well as anyone that third party apps should be available in February, so the ding against the iPhone there seems a bit disingenuous. It takes time to put an application developer’s toolkit together; especially when the device itself breaks so many new grounds. I’d be surprised if Apple was even done with the SDK they used internally; it’s likely still a work in progress. But, I digress. It’s a fantastic piece of work, and if regulation (or the threat of regulation) is what it takes to get mobile carriers to clean up their collective acts, then I welcome it. The money quote, or perhaps his thesis statement:
“A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer.”
Highlights from a report from a report by Strategy Analytics:
Having owned a RAZR and been frustrated with the poor software shipped on it, I will do a little dance when it’s no longer #1.
Changewave released information from their latest survey, and the iPhone is tops again. 2% of the 3654 people surveyed have iPhones. Of the people that have iPhones, 82% are “Very Satisfied,” up 5% since the last survey in July and tops in the list. The only company with “Very Satisfied” ratings above 50% is RiM with the Blackberry series. Best yet, the iPhone is set to capture a bit more than 2% — Changewave reports that a full 16% of all people surveyed intend to purchase an iPhone within the next 6 months. Quoth Tobin Smith, founder of Changewave:
There’s no longer any doubt about the staying power of the iPhone. The continuing embrace of the iPhone by the public is a stellar example of how a new product can forever alter its own playing field.”
It’s unfortunately kind of a high and low quote; he’s right about the ‘alter its own playing field’ bit. But show me anyone who thought the iPhone was just going to go away.
The Onion, one of America’s finest satirical newspapers, has a funny article on the impending backlash against Apple. Mark your calendars!
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster notes that the iPhone sales have tripled since the price cut. There’s also a fun trail of percentage errors, too. It’s like following bread crumbs! Business2 has already fixed their error, but information week hasn’t yet. So let me show you Eric Zaman’s error:
Now that Apple has posted their sales numbers, some analyst doubters are poking their way out.
First up is Ted Wallingford of downloadsquad, who forgot that the 10 million mark goal is for the end of 2008, not 2007, and he’s just not excited about the hype anymore. When the sentence read this:
In order to achieve this feat now, he needs retail to sell 9 million units in four months
I could understand the premise of the article. But when it’s changed to this:
In order to achieve this feat now, he needs retail to sell 9 million units infour16 months
ZOMG! They’re going to have to sell an extra two million at the same rate in the next year and a half. The comments there are worth a read.
And this sales analysis article is crud too, as noted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball (I’m pleased to note that we’re sponsoring his RSS feed this week). I would also hope that a stock analyst can work with graphs that are something other than linear. Otherwise… it may be time to find a new analyst. Here’s a hint, they don’t call it the “demand curve” for nothing.
  
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The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
