
Statistics 101: Correlation is not causality.
Could it simply be that heavy users are also the people most likely to upgrade? They have a 4s BECAUSE they're heavy users, rather than being heavy users because they have a 4s?
20 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Feb 2010
The world is full of successful business leaders who got lucky, and led a company to greatness by being in the right place at the right time. Afterwards they move on and live overpaid lives where they achieve little more.
Apple, Pixar, NeXT (aka the tech that took Apple from their shares being suspended to biggest in the world)... To lead THREE companies from obscurity to household names. That's not luck - that's the stuff of legend.
Of course RIM are committed to the playbook... Most of the other tablet manufacturers have a day job which actually earns them money: HP can dump their tablet platform because it's pretty irrelevant to them. Samsung and Motorola could similarly walk away without regret.
RIM need a tablet because it's too close to their core business NOT to have a tablet. It should have been easy for them to make a "serious" tablet that hooked into their well established eco-system (don't forget RIM is still massively profitable despite the the bad press). So far they've failed because they tried to make an iPad, not a Blackberry.
If they don't get a tablet which works great with their phones, then people will buy iPads, and then switch to iPhones because they don't like being split across platforms, and there'll be no more RIM. Apple are just waking up to the idea (with iCloud) that your phone and tablet should work TOGETHER. RIM should know this already.
If they get it right, there's a huge market for a Blackberry Tablet (though perhaps not a playbook). If they get it wrong then they have to keep at it until they run out of money.
Officially there's no such thing as "X Windows". It can legally be called "X" or "The X Windowing System"... MS threatened them...
Other people can talk about interfaces that use "windows", but can't use "Windows" as part of their system title (even though at the time X was lauched "Windows" wasn't the household name it is today - DOS was still king, and MS Windows was hardly out of beta).
"App Store" is common parlance now, but three years ago the term was new, and popularised by Apple.
Should other people be allowed to have an "app store"? Yes.
Should they be able to describe it as an "app store"? Yes
Should they be allowed to call it their "App Store"? No.
been there, done that... Windows NT ran on Intel, Alpha, PPC and MIPS processors (they had to be little-endian as there was so much bad code in the OS they could never hope to sort it out for a big-endian processor)
The problem was windows only strength (even back then) was its legacy apps, which only ran on Intel. None of they key apps (including microsofts!) ran on the other architectures, so no one bought them, so no one ported their apps. Emulation was decent, but made the excellent alternative processors slower than their cheaper low end intel competitors.
They never nailed multi-cpu the way Apple did (good cross platform dev tools, fat binaries, good emulation and multiplatform install media), and the cpu support was dropped one by one.
MS so don't get it, if they think people want Office on their phones/tablets. Desktop+laptop != tablet+phone.
"Facebook can see technical information such as a person’s User ID"
When did your user ID (and by extension all your personal info associated with it) become "technical information". Sharing your user id is sharing PERSONAL information. Or is your credit card number and pin technical information too?
That's all nice and such, but what about the big announcement Apple said they were going to make today?
As I'm under 50 the Beatles means Mull of Kintyre, Linda McCartney Sausage Rolls, Imagine, hare krishna, The Frog Chorus, Give my Regards to Broad Street, Ebony and Ivory, and Thomas the Tank Engine...
Of which Thomas the Tank Engine has the most credibility.
Android ISN'T free to "no-name" manufacturers, except that they don't put their names on devices and hence avoid paying license fees to Google. And those chineese phones ABSOLUTLY don't provide a "good use" experience. HTC and the like don't put their own UI's on for the fun of it - they do it because those generic devices suck (anyone want to swap my "open" Android Tablet I got in China for one of their nasty closed iPads? - come on... It runs 1.6 but I'm sure you could upgrade it cause its "open"... thought not... didn't think anyone REALLY thought they were as good as iPads).
As for lock down - how is an Android phone OK because they're "hackable", but an iPhone not because you have to "jailbreak" it? Same approach by manufacturers, same effect on consumers, and same trick to get round the problem, giving the same result.
Yes - Steve should do better than trash-talking the opposition. It's no cooler when he does it than when Ballmer does it, but Android is not "open" to any usefull degree.
If you really want to show Apple's accent go back to 2000 when their shares were suspended, and they were on the verge of going bankrupt... I remember advising someone that if Apple got through the next 12 months they had a NeXTStep based OS that was going to enable them to produce great things for the next 10 years, and that they could be a good invenstment (d'oh! did I miss getting rich there!)
MacOSX was still in development then. While the iPod is important in end user mind share, it's MacOSX that's the engine - it made possible the shift to Intel, and 64 bit. iOS is a cut down OSX and shares much of the code. Expect iOS and MacOSX to get closer as laptops get touchscreens and iP*'s get more powerful.
Mac is the core platform, even if it made small profits - it sits in the middle of what Apple do, and is the most important even wqhen it's not in the spotlight. What to you plug your iP* into if you? Where do you do iP* development?
RIM et al don't like Apple's videos. Are they sugguesting they're faked? Apple have shown pretty convincing evidence that the other phones drop bars (and the one phone I tested dropped from 4 to 1 bar as Apple promised). Maybe the ip4 is worse, but Apple have made a good case that its not just their phone that you have to be carefull with.
The competition have made big noise that they're not happy about it - of course they're not, but if they could actually disprove apples claims they'd be showing hard evidence to the courts, rather than making press releases.
It's easy to laugh - but remember we've not seen them.
The NHS Apps sound great value for money - if the Stop Smoking app actually does anything useful, then it'll pay for all the others. If one person stops smoking, and as a result doesn't need cancer treatment, then a ten thousand pound app is saving money.
If a job centre app gets vacancy listings to a few people, and gets them in a job a few weeks sooner, that could also save thousands.
The total budget is less than making and/or airing a few TV commercials.
On the other hand they could be rubbish!
Once again the BBC trust steps in to investigate on the behest of the media companies. Kangaroo all over again... Delivering news in xml rather than html formats is clearly better for the bbc and the license payer. We pay the BBC for these services, and they would be useful so let them do it.
If our license fee goes to developing something from which we benefit, then who cares about "the market". Who is the trust there to protect? the public, or their rich pals in private media?