[Update: Apple is able to remotely deactivate software. I don't remember Nokia needing to do this with Symbian.]
As a disclaimer, I now have a Mac notebook. I like it, but it’s been a learning experience. For a Mac to work, you need to give yourself over to it completely. You don’t save pictures; you use iPhoto. You don’t save MP3s; you use iTunes. You don’t install Acrobat; you use Preview. And so on. Apple’s built these things itself because there were a limited number of options for the Mac, and because it can integrate them better.
For a long time, Microsoft won the desktop wars because they were “open” to applications. You could write whatever you wanted. Everyone chose a PC because that’s where all the games were, that’s where all the apps worked. Developers shunned the Mac.
Then two things happened.
The Mac switched to Intel chipsets, allowing things like Parallels and dual booting to support Windows. Add a few networking drivers and support for Windows networking, and you had a respectable corporate citizen, at least for the marketing iconoclasts.
Desktop variety became irrelevant with the Internet and SaaS.
These days, the desktop is arguably less good at everything — an aging jack-of-all-trades that can’t compete with consoles, tablets, PDAs, and so on. Desktops are good for workstation tasks like graphic design, but not much else.
Most of the world’s Internet devices aren’t computers. We live in a bit of a bubble in North America but the rest of the world already knows this. (I crunched population and cellphone ownership from the latest data I could find, because I’m a nerd, and the results are at right. Canada and the US are near the bottom.)
My wife and I spend a lot of time online. The other day, I lent her my notebook for a few minutes mid-surf, and she quickly went over to Reddit. As it turns out, most of the links I’d opened were the ones she wanted to read anyway. Over at GigaOm, Om’s been reflecting on Facebook for some time now. And this got me thinking.
Surfing is increasingly a social activity. Think of news aggregators as questionnaires: “Which of these stories do you find most interesting?” If we are what we surf, then the people with whom we have the most in common are likely to have similar surfing patterns. This notion alone isn’t particularly revolutionary, and it’s driving innovation in fields like web analytics. But apply it to Facebook Connect, and it opens up a whole new realm of social networking.
Want to see a great example of monopolistic practices? It’s playing out in Browser Wars 2.0.
Most of us have by now realized that much of the web’s innovation is happening within the browser, as part of the migration from desktops to in-the-cloud computers. Adobe’s Flash already has close to 100% installation on browsers. But with AIR, the desktop version of Flash, they’re really mowing Microsoft’s lawn.
So it’s war, and Microsoft is attacking Adobe’s Flash plug-in in return. Redmond needs to own the video and Rich Internet space, and to do that, it has to defeat Adobe, replacing Flash with Silverlight.
Playing around with Slideshare as a way of uploading my Pitfalls of SaaS post, I came across this latest from Morgan Stanley. Mary Meeker always has an enlightening view of the world.
OK. Everybody, repeat after me: The Rules of Google Do Not Apply To Me.
(Yes, yes, unless of course you happen to, you know, work for Google.)
I refer to this mistake as The Google Fallacy - namely, that the ins and outs of what makes Google tick can be generalized to every web site if not the Internet as a whole. The problem with this assertion is that Google’s challenges are unique to Google. Unless you to have a few million servers to administer and $4.2B/quarter of revenue coming over your web site with a 45% year-over-year growth, extrapolating their issues to you just doesn’t work.
Most of the web operators we talk to have some degree of visibility into what goes on within their applications. But many lack a complete picture of their site.
There are hundreds of tools available to show what’s going on with a production website. But the problems arise when people try to use the wrong tool for the job, which often leads to bad conclusions. In my experience, operational questions fall into four major categories:
What did my users do?
Could they do it?
Why did they do it?
How did they do it?
There are four classes of tool that answer these four questions. But they’re all similar enough to cause confusion. Here’s a clarification.
Just completed a presentation for Ryma (who make Featureplan, a product marketing application) as part of their product management webinar series. This one was on making products viral.
Viral marketing is a tremendously appealing way to gain product adoption. The basic idea is that you let your customers do your marketing for you, because they help spread your message. Hotmail is often cited as the perfect example, and Facebook is following suit.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as Hotmail made it look. They were able to get 12M customers for just $500K in marketing spending. Unlike web-based e-mail, many products need tweaking before they can have successful viral marketing campaigns. This presentation looks at what makes things infectious in nature, and what we can do to create products that also spread easily, with concrete examples from a range of product categories.
Bitcurrent is part blog, part analyst firm, and part resource site for web operations. We're a loose federation of pundits and entrepreneurs with experience in networking and technology.
These days, the desktop is arguably less good at everything — an aging jack-of-all-trades that can’t compete with consoles, tablets, PDAs, and so on. Desktops are good for workstation tasks like graphic design, but not much else.
