In Tech, In Order for X to Win, Y Doesn't Have to Lose

While it's somewhat hard to imagine now, with Apple seeing incredible success, it was less than two decades ago when the company, facing a small market share, and minuscule developer interest, had to pull a rabbit out of its hat to ensure longtime survival. That surprise came from an unexpected partner - longtime nemesis Microsoft, who in 1997, not only gave the then-beleaguered company a much-needed cash injection of $150 million, but also promised continued updates to the then-essential Microsoft Office suite, required to keep Macintosh's hopes alive as a viable platform.

Amid the shocked faithful, who responded with boos over making Internet Explorer the default browser for the Macintosh, instead of the arguably more Mac-like Netscape Navigator, CEO Steve Jobs said the unforgettable phrase easy to forget in an environment where it's commonplace to pit technologies against one another:

“If we want to move forward, and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.” (Source: YouTube)

Turns out, as with many things, he was right. Microsoft, despite the company's many challenges, still is worth more than $300 billion, and saw income of more than $16 billion in the most recent quarter. When it comes to operating system choices, usually one picks Macintosh or Windows (and not both), or mobile OS choices, one could pick iOS or Windows phone (and not both), but both companies have managed to have significant places in the tech world for the last two decades.

Rarely does the winner take all.

Fast forward from Steve's words in Boston in 1997 to today - a world where big companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and others command significant visibility and influence - but comparably younger companies like Twitter, Dropbox, Tesla, Nest (pre-acquisiton), Uber and others manage to also carve out interesting opportunities and become big companies themselves.

It's often assumed that if one "wins", another has to "lose". If Facebook wins, does Twitter lose? If Android wins, does iOS lose? If Amazon wins, does Google lose?

As a user of these technologies, and someone who watches the market closely or writes about these technologies, I see lines forming - not just of people who prefer one technology or one company relative to another, but of people who also display an equal and opposite reaction, to strongly dislike the company or technologies less preferred.

Those decisions have odd echoes. It's assumed that if you like the iPhone, then you must prefer Apple Mail over Gmail. If you like Windows Phone, you must also prefer Bing search to Google search. And if you have a blog that covers the minutiae of Apple's comings and goings, that documenting any negative opinion about their perceived competition should be highlighted with equal or higher volume.

Simply stated: I disagree, and think we can do better. You can like one company's vision or products even if you purchase from another one. It can be possible that all the major players find a space where they are successful. And the best products are built when it's the users' values that are at the forefront, rather than a false battle started to strengthen the position against another player.

Larry Page, Google's CEO, addressed this point at Google I/O last summer, when he said:

"Every story I read about Google is 'us vs some other company' or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative isn’t how we make progress. Most important things are not zero sum, there is a lot of opportunity out there."

Recently, The Verge wrote a great in-depth piece about being a fanboy, asking "Have you ever loved something so much it hurt?" showcasing a number of examples of people so consumed about making sure people knew which side of these battles they were on that they were unforgiving in their tone with anyone else who disagreed. I believe you can have a strong preference, and can evangelize a product or platform, like I do often with those I enjoy, without having to cut down alternatives or those who've selected a different way.

The world is a very large place. There are many millions of people who haven't yet purchased smartphones, tablets or PCs, let alone decided on their favorite OS or apps. There is room for many small companies and big companies alike to innovate and do incredible things. There's room for us all to intellectually choose to be fair and review each new product on its merits and stand for those things we believe and like without needing to tear down alternatives. It might be fun, but we can do better.

Disclosures for transparency's sake: I work at Google, which makes some of my personal favorite products, like Android, Gmail and ChromeOS. It can be assumed Google occasionally competes with other market participants like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

(Images via Dreamstime, which is an excellent resource)

Developing for the Web or for Classic Mode

Apple's transition away from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X is more than a decade old at this point, which means an entire generation of computer users may never have been exposed to the "Classic" Mac OS, which launched in 1984 and evolved for the next few decades before being put out to pasture.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, my own delight at hearing the deliveryman knock on the door and leaving behind a package which contained a retail box with Mac OS X 1.0 on compact disc, which promised to completely change the way I interacted with my computer, bringing with it a new and modern look, a new kernel and more.

It Looks Great, But What About Printing?

Living on the bleeding edge by installing this first version of Mac OS X meant it had some obvious holes. For one, I couldn't print. For another, I couldn't play any DVDs. So while some of the features were exciting, it was clearly limited. These limitations, and general skittishness over new technology, led many people not to dive into Mac OS X right away - and some software developers, most notably Quark and Adobe, dragged their feet on committing to the new OS, waiting for the market to demand it. In the meantime, we users had to live in a "one foot in, one foot out" experience, with "Classic" applications launching inside of Mac OS X, displaying the traditional Apple menu bar, the traditional Finder and all other bits one would expect from an older Mac.

This awkward time had developers forced to make a choice. Would they create applications solely for OS X, continue on a path of developing for OS 9, or ship both and risk a gap in features? It's, pardon the pun, a classic dilemma of developing for a known and existing market, or preparing something for a future market. In time, Classic faded away, with Steve Jobs famously holding a burial for it at the WorldWide Developers Conference in 2002. All the big vendors, from Adobe to Microsoft, shipped for Mac OS X. Printer drivers eventually came along, as did the ability to run DVDs and do everything Mac OS 9 could.

The Desktop is the New Classic. The Web is the New OS X.

I feel we're at a similar crossroads now in development, at least on the desktop. As a fulltime ChromeOS user, I don't ever install proprietary software outside of my browser - but I also don't feel limited in what it is I can do. I can print, using Google Cloud Print to my Canon printer at home. I can play all my videos on Netflix or Google Play and my music through Spotify or Google Music. I can run all my productivity apps on Google Drive, edit photos in Pixlr and so on. Even at a time when traditional operating systems are the significant market share leader, I think we've reached a point where developers looking to reach the widest numbers of potential users are better off making a product for the Web than they are by picking a desktop platform - and in those very rare cases where I find out an application needs to be downloaded to even run, I'm surprised.

When you fight against the momentum of the Web, you lose. And while this doesn't mean every part of the Earth has ubiquitous high speed broadband - far from it - I do believe we are at an inflection point, like all those Mac developers were 10+ years ago, where one would need to choose between building for the platform that's known or to the platform that's unknown. And just like in the Mac OS X scenario, the Web as a platform may have a few holes, but the Web's modern browsers are becoming stronger and more robust at a pace I'd argue is outstripping improvements in our traditional desktops.

The Pixel is My Machine of Choice and It's All Web.

My Data Follows Me On Every Device.

In 2011, just after I joined Google, I talked about how I used Chrome all day long, and used multiple browsers to separate my business profile and my consumer ID. Since then, I've moved completely to ChromeOS and Chrome has debuted on both Android and iOS, so you can sync your data to practically any smartphone and never miss a step. Working closely with the Chrome Developer Relations team here at Google, I get to see the browser get faster, and become an even more robust platform for creating rich applications, with exceptional video and sound.

By living completely on the Web, as I mentioned last year in my post on the future of storage being none at all, any computer that has Web access is my computer. Hardware is simply a conduit for my access to my data and my preferences. Once I log in to my accounts through the browser, I should be able to pick up right where I left off, and I shouldn't be limited based on whatever client software or plugins may or may not be installed on this machine.

Pick the Platform for the Future.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and we have the benefit of history to fall back on, which clearly shows developers were right to present a fast track for migration away from the creaky OS 9 and start coding for OS X. While Apple's incredible success over the last six-plus years especially has been due to the company's work on iPhones and iPads, had Mac OS X never delivered on its promise, the company would certainly be a shadow of itself. The direction to a more modern OS proved to be the right one.

Now, again, we have a choice - to a more modern platform with more opportunity for a rapidly-evolving set of users for whom the Web and anytime access are a given, and for whom nearly all their time is spent in the browser. Making the leap as a developer to a lesser-known path may involve some risk, but unlike that time at the beginning of the last decade, you don't need the overwhelming majority of a small market base to upgrade and get to your product. Most of those online are already there - and they want your app.

Usual Disclosures: Yes, I work for Google. I work in Developer Relations and think about this stuff a lot. It doesn't mean I have any bias for or against any of our real or assumed competitors.

The Future of Local Storage Is Practically None At All

Stand Back or Your Hard Drive Is Going to Get It

First they came for our floppy drives. Then, they came for our CDs and our DVD drives. It won't be too long until the concept of a hard drive, or any local storage, beyond that needed for temporary offline use, is itself antiquated. After decades of dramatically increasing PC hard disks, from megabytes to terabytes, saving local data is more likely to put you at risk of loss, relative to remote backup, than it is to keep your data safe, helped along by many trends pushing toward cloud storage and applications.

In April of last year, I talked about how I planned to forego the purchase of physical media, disavowing books, CDs, DVDs and other printed materials, when digital would do, and I haven't looked back - getting to my media from any device that recognized my signed-in identity. Meanwhile, as chronicled, starting in early 2010, when I first got a MacBook Air, and accelerated as I've turned toward ChromeOS as my primary device, I have almost entirely stopped the use of desktop applications. If it can't be reached via web browser, it's probably not worth having.

Goodbye Desktop Applications. Your Time Is Past

May's introduction of the latest Samsung Chromebooks (see my review) left me using my Mac only once per day, for a specific task - synchronizing my FitBit. Until recently, FitBit didn't have a completely cloud-capable service, so each night around midnight, after a full day's neglect, I open the Mac, sync the FitBit in the cradle, confirm the data's gone through, and close the Mac again, until the next day. With the recently announced FitBit One series promising wireless syncing to iOS or Android, I'm just one device away from being done.

For the rest of the day, without exception, I am on my Chromebook, or my Android devices. All my music, emails, photos, documents and other web services can be accessed and managed on the cloud through the browser.

Knocking Down Lagging Apps One By One

The evolution of software and its intersection with platforms is an intriguing one. We Mac users in the 1990s and early 2000s occasionally had to make sacrifices, not having access to apps available only on Windows. Similarly, as iOS and Android increased in market presence, there was the occasional app missing from one platform or the other. But over time, practically all applications, or their equivalents, make their way to the top platforms, and while my move to Android more than two years ago came with some apps missing, all the ones I needed quickly followed me there.

No Seriously, Have You Seen Pixlr on the Web? It's Great.

Now the web itself has proven capable enough for almost any task, and reasons why not to go all Web are dramatically reduced, especially the improved capabilities of documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Google Drive, the release of high quality image editing software like Pixlr, and promises that popular desktop applications like Spotify are set to reach the cloud very soon now, to stream music in addition that which you can purchase from Google Play.

Time to Move on From the Desktop and File Mentality

With solid reasons to not go all Web rapidly eliminated, this evolution also brings up the opportunity to revisit old paradigms we've always taken for granted, as how we use our computers and mobile devices has changed.

Consider, for example, the desktop and files metaphor. Decades ago, we adapted our PCs to be similar to those environments we knew offline. The desktop, folders and files all hearken back to this original model. Even the hyperlinks of today's Web follow similar structures with directories and files owned by top level domains, and today's leading cloud storage vendors, including Dropbox and Google Drive, mimic a traditional desktop environment to bring ease of adoption to users migrating from local storage. But this shouldn't always be the case.

While clean directory structures once were enough for me to almost quit a job over a decade-plus ago, machine-generated links to content are good enough, and it's possible we just need to know how content relates to one another, or what you're searching - for example, email, and tags that generate metadata, providing you with what you need even if you don't know exactly where to look.

All Your Computers Are Mine. Seriously.

The notion of this being "my laptop" or "your PC" doesn't even make sense any more if you think about it. All I need is access to my "stuff", and that stuff is tagged to my identity, be it one that is affiliated with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook or any other provider. While Chromebooks have made it most clear that you can sign out of one account and sign in as another and retain access to all your things, the truth is that so long as you are using a leading provider of identity, you should be able to get to all your files, bookmarks, and media from any device with a modern browser. Go ahead, steal my laptop. I'll just get another one that will do the same things and be up and running in minutes.

Kids These Days... They Don't Need Hard Drives

Consider also that my children should never need to use or know about local storage. At ages 4 and 2, my children will enter elementary school in 1 to 3 years. They have been raised with web-connected TVs, tablets and smartphones, have an expectation of anytime access to data, and shouldn't be trained to store data that is tied to any single device. To them, every device has Netflix. To them, every device can get to Google, and anything they want to see, hear or watch can be found by asking Google for the right image or video, instantly - no buffering allowed.

Just two to three years is enough for us to see how rapidly USB thumb drives went from being the hot tradeshow giveaway to now seeming almost completely useless, with online sharing being the norm. Just two to three years was all I needed as a student attending Berkeley in the late 1990s to move from carting a floppy disk across campus to the computer lab for printing my freshman year, to instead email the document to myself as an attachment my junior year.

Oh. So You Don't Have Pervasive High Speed Wireless?

It's easy to sit in Silicon Valley's ivory tower and say that with pervasive high speed Internet, eliminating any dependency on local storage is a brilliant idea. It's easy to overlook potential power outages, cloud disruptions, dependence on third party services, and spotty web. Nobody likes being out of range for phone calls, let alone all your data, and nobody truly wants to be helpless if their account is compromised. Those are not minor and trivial concerns. But neither is ensuring data compatibility as the data is stored on multiple local machines, and backed up to temporary local storage which may or may not be less reliable than a service provider that serves millions or more.

Years ago, it may have seemed silly to move to web-based email instead of desktop applications, and the same could be said for other apps that have now become default on the web - including calendaring, address books, event planning and more. Digital media for entertainment, once the province of physical media delivered to your home or picked up at a retailer, is now accessible anywhere on any device. So too will be your photos, music, documents, and more. I even moved all my family's photos off spinning disk on an array of Macs from the last 4 years and put them on Drive.

The key to staying prepared for the next evolution of computing is to be willing to take a leap of faith - knowledge that you don't need desktop devices when a laptop will do, knowledge that you don't need to have DVDs in your living room when Netflix or iTunes have all you need, and that what you've been used to and taught over decades just might not be entirely the same any more.

Disclosures: I work for Google and yes, Google makes many services that provide for cloud storage and computing, as well as those nice Chromebooks, one of which I gained for free earlier this year and am using right now to make this post (as well as all the screenshots and images in the post, edited in Pixlr).

Steve Jobs: An Irreplaceable Icon

The world's outpouring of affection for Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is remarkable. In a time when scandal and tawdriness make headlines, and the foolish are revered, Steve represented something else - an intelligent, perfectionist approach to creativity, aimed at the greater good to constantly refine and bring value, through technology - and somehow won the hearts of the people. Amidst a world of awkward poor dressing techies, Steve exuded class and presented himself as being above the fray. His presentations were a masterpiece. His products were art. He took a world consumed with cutting margins and making it up in volume and made it emotional - a status symbol. He helped define a generation of computing and electronics in hardware and software, and became the man on a pedestal by whom all other CEOs and innovative tech leaders are measured - a tall task for the current crop and those to follow.

The last 4 or 5 years of uncertainty around Steve's health (and I feel like I know him so well that he should simply be referred to as Steve) were the unspeakable story - the deep hope that he could surprise us all - again - with "One more thing" and show that he had somehow beaten cancer and proven his immortality. All while fighting unspeakable challenges at home and in hospitals, he and his extended team churned out more and more products, hit after hit that built Apple into the highest-valued company in the world. Each keynote worried us that it would be his last. His very figure was dissected by cheap online tabloids trying to score a few million page views, and we rejected the opportunity to have this new shrunken image burned into our pupils, because we knew that despite his newfound frailties, Steve inside remained the lion we all knew.

For 15 or so years, Apple and Steve Jobs have once again been whole - practically synonymous. College students everywhere can't remember a time when Steve was not leading the company. But for those of us who suffered during the dark days of Apple, when the word "beleaguered" followed the company everywhere, and showing up with a Mac in a world that was going Windows was a conversation starter, knowing you were different.

It's not just that Steve did his job better than anybody else when he was on top. It was that he took a company in the middle of a very public suicide and turned it around, using the perfect mixture of humility when it was needed, and arrogance when it too was needed.

During the summer before my junior year in college, I remember my roommate, almost with a cat call, announcing that Gil Amelio, then CEO of Apple for a mere 500 days, had resigned. Yet another obvious example that Apple was doomed, and we would have to settle for something less than great for the rest of our computing days. Even I had almost given up. But this presumed bad news was the turning point that brought the original visionary who made the Mac what it was to the company that could make history again. Almost nobody saw it coming. Not even the geeky among us who said we would give up our Mac when you pried it from our cold dead fingers knew what was coming. Not even those of us who held our AAPL shares in the single digits and cheered when the company market cap passed $4 billion had any idea of what the next decade would bring. If we had, we would have put our life savings on it.

Why is the world reacting to the passing of Steve in the way that it has? Why has the President of the United States taken the time to remark on his passing just hours after Steve left us for what's next? Why did the leaders of practically every tech company on the planet express their heartfelt loss and appreciation for the man's accomplishments? Because Steve stood for something. He personalized the fight for the user so absent in a world of drab number-pushers unwilling to take chances. He personally stood for making change for humans that made products desirable. He was, to many, a hero - even to those who found themselves going against Apple in the market.

In the last few years, as we've all started to think about the inevitability of Steve's passing, as cancer doesn't give anybody any slack, writers have all had the chance to write their premature obituaries, to share their favorite stories of Steve - to tell their first experiences of the Mac or the iPhone or the iPad or anything else that made Apple have an impact on them. I now have three children who will grow up in a world without Steve Jobs, who will be forced to hear from me stories that make him sound like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford wrapped up into one. I have but the one blip of a memory of when I saw him at an early Apple Store in Palo Alto, when being his perfectionist self, he answered a support question I had. I am glad I saw a keynote of his at MacWorld in person a full decade ago. Even as some of my preferences changed in terms of my own computing and mobile choices, I never lost faith in Steve and his fight.

The world lost a vibrant 56 year old man. In a world where people regularly crest over 100 years old, and CEOs melt into their chairs into their 80s, Steve could not beat cancer. There were no karma points for being the best in the world for what he did and being an inspiration to all who saw him, knew of him, came into contact with him, and understood him. And this is just wrong. It is a major reason why underneath all the praise and wistfullness and sorrow, there is also anger, and frustration that a man who had already given so much, who had so much more to give, was taken from us too soon. This is unacceptable.

Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple team have an impossible task, to satisfy the millions of Apple fans and the tech world who has grown used to expecting the impossible from the company and seeing it exceeded. I have no doubts that Steve has trained his successor and management team well, that they know the right way to build products and make things beautiful and magical. But in a world of copycats, Steve remained without equal for decades, a cut above the rest. There will be no replacing Steve. Just an end to an era, and the start of a new landscape, where he moves into the history books instead of current events.

I do have a heavy heart tonight. I say it without melodrama, without a need for others to feel shared sorrow, but for reality. The whole world lost somebody special today, and we will never get him back.

Look Here, Macintosh...

Look here, Macintosh. I guess you saw my blog post and are a little mad at me. All I wanted to do was go to terminal, say "top" and find out just what was eating all the memory and CPU. And now you won't let me? Bring it on. I've got two Chromebooks over here saying you're no longer the king.

/via My Google+ Profile.

Lion's Big Bite Took the Air Out of My Sails

Like a good number of fast-moving Apple fans yesterday, one of the first things I did with my day was install Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). The update, weighing in at just over three gigabytes, downloadable from the Mac app store, delivered a crisp new UI, some nice new features including Mission Control and an iOS-like approach to finding all available apps and files, a new take on scrolling, and unfortunately for me, at least in my case, a ton of slowness. From what it looks like, my poor refurbished 2009-era MacBook Air simply wasn't macho enough to run Lion - even after I weighed my options and ran Disk Utility for the better part of two hours to ensure nothing nefarious was keeping the poor laptop down.

While my MacBook Air has become increasingly slow of late, and had already been sending me increasingly to my Chromebook as an alternative, Lion pushed it over the top. Warnings about Lion probably needing at least 4 gigabytes of RAM, while my Air has a pesky 2, look to have been founded, as the system often became unresponsive and bugs appeared in a number of the apps I tried, including the venerable Microsoft Office suite.




Needing to prepare a presentation for a new client this afternoon, I was working late last evening on the MacBook Air, with only PowerPoint running. All other applications were closed (to conserve memory) and even that wasn't enough. Seeing I was getting nowhere, I bit the bullet, and uploaded the PowerPoint to Google Docs. I closed the Air and then opened up the Chromebook to work from there. Despite my high use of Google's products, I've never used Docs for presentations, and the move wasn't taken lightly. You know I'm not a heavy Docs user, or I'd probably have already told you that some time. After years and years of PowerPoint training, I'm surely much more creative with Redmond's software, even if it's not my favorite.

I haven't opened the Air since. No doubt I will, once I man up and stop being frustrated with the machine, but it's a little maddening to be obsoleted in just under two years, feeling like what I really ought to do is give Apple just over $1,500 and upgrade again to the latest and greatest Air, with an even faster CPU, more RAM, and a greater capacity Solid State Disk (SSD).

I initially got the Air in January of last year, knowing that it would be a bridge to a more cloud-centric device, especially as the hard disk came with about 100 gigabytes less capacity than my previous model. Initially, I made all sorts of attempts to avoid putting native applications on the Air, but a Microsoft Office here, an Adobe Creative Suite there, and that plan was done for in due time. At last count, the device was about two-thirds full yesterday afternoon - not in bad shape, mind you, but a dozen or two gigs beyond what I had hoped.

When I got the CR-48 from Google as part of their field trial last December, the device seemed initially handcuffing, as I felt trapped in the browser. As the hardware improved with Google supplying new drivers, and Chrome got faster, I started taking the device everywhere outside the house, and have probably been using it the majority of the time inside the house of late, especially as the Air has slowed. Almost too conveniently, on the same day as my Air was being deflated with Lion, the Samsung Chromebook from Google I/O arrived on my doorstep, giving me a sleek alternative to the air with real hardware polish. Within minutes, I'd moved my Google profile onto the new Chromebook and passed the CR-48 to my wife.

It was this new Chromebook on which I gave today's presentation - the same one that I haven't had to plug in since I first turned on the device this morning, and promises more than two hours' battery life remaining with about 33% capacity. I honestly couldn't tell you how much RAM it has, and I know internal storage is dinky, but the near-immediate bringup, followed by a successful preso this afternoon, has me seeing that as beautiful as Lion is, the makeup may be caked on thicker than Tammy Faye Baker. Part of my Apple fanboy inside is crying out in pain as I hope in vain that the Air can get restored to its former vibrant self, but I have to think this particular system upgrade was too much for it. It's fantastic to have an alternative arrive on the doorstep that very day. Obviously, the price (free) isn't bad either, but I wouldn't have even touched it, let alone stayed on all day, if it didn't deliver when I needed it to. My Macbook Air and I, on the other hand, are going to have a nice long talk about the future - even if it means a clean install or a data wipe, which doesn't sound very Mac-like.

Obvious Disclosures: The CR-48 was part of a free pilot program. The Samsung Chromebook was delivered free to Google I/O attendees. The Macbook Air I paid for (and got reimbursed from Paladin).

When Life Hands You Fragmentation, Make Fragmentade

On Friday night, my 7 inch Samsung Galaxy Tab alerted me a software update was available. But not just any old software update - the much-awaited Gingerbread update, which would move the device from Froyo (Android 2.2) to its younger, hipper, brother, version 2.3. Having learned from previous experience not to dabble with unsupported Web builds, this was my first chance at Gingerbread, and the update has been without flaws. That said, it delivered a milestone of sorts, for now, officially, practically every device I have is running its own variance of an OS.

With the Android version number bump, the Galaxy Tab 7 is now on 2.3, while my Samsung Epic 4G is on Froyo 2.2. The Galaxy Tab 10 inch that came courtesy of Google IO is on Honeycomb 3.1, my Mac is on 10.6.8 (awaiting 10.7 Lion), the HP laptop is on Windows 7, the CR-48 is running ChromeOS, the iPod Touch is on iOS 4 somewhere and the iPads are somewhere in my kids' rooms, waiting to get charged. No devices I come in contact with are perfectly aligned.

With the obfuscation from handset vendors like Samsung and HTC providing their own custom skins to the Android development landscape and adding delays, the months following the first release of a build means I've practically forgotten whatever benefits I was supposed to look for in the first place. In older, more simple times, one could easily describe the benefits between version number upgrades on phones and computers, but not so much any more, lacking retail cardboard boxes and a unified release date, whereby recipients all get excited for simultaneous mass downloads and share their impressions, instead, waiting for the build to hit their phone, and even then, hope they are first in line for the serial Over the Air update crawl.

My "Laggard" Epic 4G is Chilling on Froyo 2.2.

Back when I was 'stuck' on 2.1 on the Epic seemingly forever, I couldn't wait to get my hands on Froyo 2.2, the main attraction being the option to download all my updates on Android Market simultaneously (or so I remember). But trying to preempt Samsung's release of Froyo turned out to be an "Epic" mistake - yes, pun intended. I had managed to get my hands on a build that was a dead end, one that wasn't supposed to be public, and one that couldn't go up, only down. I ended up eating my pride and going to Sprint to have the damage undone, reverting back to 2.1, and back up through official channels. So I didn't do the same for Gingerbread, having learned my lesson.

In addition to learning I should pretty much just play by the rules, the point by point upgrade system on Android has mirrored that of the Mac in recent years, whereby incremental upgrades are not much to write home about. I could barely tell you the difference between 10.5 and 10.6 as Apple patted itself on the back for "No new features" in Snow Leopard from Leopard, if you remember, so the sub-releases like 10.6.1 through 10.6.8 are scarcely worth mentioning.

Honeycomb, when it works well, is obviously a much better story. The 3.0 line of Android for tablets strongly deviated from the 2.0 line for phones, although, again, the bump from 3.0 to 3.1 was largely uneventful.

Looking back on some of the initial coverage around Froyo last year, it seemed the most anticipated capability was Flash in the browser - something I barely hit on my phone. Gingerbread 2.3.4 (what my Galaxy Tab 7 is running) is highlighted as having video chat in Google Talk, a cool feature I've already used, but oddly, something I'd expect through an application upgrade, not an OS upgrade. 2.3 also came with UI enhancements, a new keyboard, NFC support and some mysterious improvements on power management and app management. I'll take the upgrades of course, but if the improvements are so minor as to have to be researched, why then have we gotten so up in arms over the idea of fragmentation anyway? Either the product does what you expected it to and runs the apps you want, or it doesn't.

I absolutely agree, as does Google, considering their announcements at Google IO this year, that leading phone manufacturers should ship with the newest versions of software as fast as they can without mucking things up. The media and developer attention to fragmentation has definitely impacted their message and way of thinking. But as someone running different OS's on every device at this point, life's a lot less confusing than I thought it'd be.

Still Looking to Sync the World of Desktop, Mobile Devices

As an over-extended digital device collector, I have my unfair share of tablets, phones and laptops strewn about my office. My kids are practically tripping over them, each one having its own use or unique operating system. As I use each of these devices, I find myself seeing gaps in the way different applications share data - keeping user information local to the device and locking it away so I lose information when I switch. While the Web and the buzzword-heavy "cloud" are helping matters, we've still got a lot of room to grow.

As I move from device to device, I'm doing so making decisions based on what applications and data I will find when I get there. By using my laptop, I lose access to games and apps that run on my Android phone and tablets. By using my phones, I lose the desktop apps. While some are looking to Apple to lead the way by merging the OS X concept with iOS, less talk has been made of bringing these iOS apps to a touch-screen enabled desktop. Maybe the idea is not happening because it's a bad one, but some smart app developers have thrown caution to the wind and brought their content to practically every screen.

Take the ubiquitous Angry Birds franchise for starters. I can play Angry Birds on my Mac from the app on the Mac App Store. I can play it on Google Chrome on the Chromebook. I can play it on my Android phone and tablets. I can play it on the iPad and iPod Touch. It's everywhere. The downside, of course, is that I have to conquer all the same levels again on every device, with no central record.

A little better is how Barnes and Noble approaches its NOOK eBooks. Purchases I make on my NOOKColor may initiate there, but I can also read the same books from my NOOK app on the Galaxy Tab (7 inch or 10 inch) and there's even a Mac client. I just have to sign in to my account and my library is right there. Very cool. If I'm connected to the Web, it will even know which book I am reading and open to the right page. That's the kind of integration I am really looking for.

You can also see smart integration of user preferences in the way Safari on iOS has the same bookmarks as on your computer, or how Chrome bookmarks follow you from Google Account-enabled machine to machine.

But most of the time apps are not behaving this way. Android's default browser is still not Chrome (and this baffles many), so the integration isn't there. Meanwhile, if I play 9 Innings baseball on my Galaxy Tab 10 and get through 81 games, starting the same app on my Galaxy Tab 7 starts at game 1. Even if I buy in-app enhancements to the game (and others like Home Run Battle 3D), those enhancements are device-specific.

Now that we can have Web-centric user profiles and can back up our user content, history and preferences, the very least we can do is be sure that our activity is matched across similar mobile devices. I recognize that often coding for desktop and mobile can be very different, but as the devices blur between smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, a screen is a screen is a screen, and I want to get the same stuff everywhere.

Defaulting to a Web-centric operating system like ChromeOS is a start, of course, but it's early days for that, and not everything has yet made the trip. I'd love Spotify on my CR-48 the same way it's on my phones and tablets and Mac, but it's a major hole until it hits the Web.

One practically has to make a mental matrix to remember what content and services are available on which devices, and what one loses when they choose one screen over another. I'd like to see more developers thinking about eliminating these gaps and giving users what they want no matter what screen they choose.

Apple's Missed Identity Play: "Sign In With Apple"

One of the greatest tug of wars amidst leading Web companies today is that for ownership of your identity, through your personal profile, or pushing you to "Sign in with" their credentials. You may sign in with Twitter, Facebook, Google or OpenID, and enable those services to certify it's you. One of the most successful tech companies out there who never comes up in this conversation is Apple, and it's incredible to think how easily they could have converted its army of Mac loyalists (myself included) to "Sign in With Mac", carrying the Apple flag forward as a badge of honor. More than a decade after getting my .Mac e-mail account (and later signing up my wife to do the same), I am splitting my email activity fifty-fifty with GMail and haven't gained much reason on Apple's side to double down on Cupertino.

When Steve Jobs unveiled iTools at MacWorld San Francisco in 2000, one of the primary offerings of the then-free product was an e-mail address ending in Mac.com. Fresh off success with the 1998 launch of iMac, and still a year away from the debut of the iPod, the company still had its most loyal followers "Thinking Different", and sending people messages with my Mac.com account was cool. It told everybody who would get a note from me that I had chosen Apple. Even when I would have to spell out my e-mail address on the phone, I'd always tell people... "M.A.C. As in Macintosh" in case it wasn't obvious.



Steve Jobs Introducing iTools (MWSF 2000)

But for a variety of reasons, the Mac.com address wasn't especially capitalized on. The service, initially free of charge, controversially converted to an annual paid service by 2002, alongside tools such as iDisk and .Mac home pages, and later rebranded as MobileMe in mid-2008, pushing people even further away from the allegiance with Apple but instead to theoretically more personal Me.com address.

When Apple initially made the move away from free Mac.com addresses for all, the message was that the free mail service was being abused, which no doubt cost them money and headaches - on top of costs for iDisk storage. But of course it also decimated the potential audience of users, most of whom already had free email accounts from somewhere else, be it Hotmail, Yahoo, Netscape or their ISP. Using a Mac.com account almost seems like an artifact unless you're a clear Apple loyalist.

In parallel, while Apple put MobileMe/iTools/Mac.com/whatever on the backburner, the company experienced incredible success with the iTunes ecosystem. Every iTunes customer has an Apple ID (or signs in with AOL), and has trusted Apple with their credit card details, as iTunes expanded from its initial offering of music to music videos, TV shows, movies, books, and of course, mobile applications for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. So Apple's effectively sitting on one of the most actively spending user databases in the world, but one that isn't leveraged elsewhere on the Web. There's no "Sign in With Apple" on major sites like the New York Times or CNN. There's no "Sign in With Apple" on Amazon.com or eBay.

iTunes Knows My Apple ID, but the Rest of the Web Doesn't

The fight for identity relevance between the major players of the Web, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and others is critical, especially as signing in with one's identity brings additional privileges. Signing in with Facebook brings you your social graph and their history as you find what articles are popular. Signing in with Google is starting to bear fruit with their +1 initiative, but it's early days. Signing in with Twitter gives you the option to follow people on downstream sites if they have Twitter @Anywhere installed. But Apple's not playing in a place where they absolutely could have an impact.

Much has been made of Apple's perceived struggles when it comes to Web services. Those of us who have been watching Apple seemingly forever recall the false start of iReviews, where people could review Web sites on the Internet, the aborted launch of iCards for greeting cards through iTools, the lukewarm approach to .Mac Home pages, and the constant renaming of the email service. This is by no means discounting their fantastic success in hardware and some software, but they could be my identity. I, and many others like me, at one time and even today, want to tell the world we are Mac people, and we could sign in with Apple. But we aren't.

With iCloud to be presented at WWDC this next week, we're moving even further away from the naming of .Mac and what it meant to be a Mac person, especially if this product suite gets its fourth name in a decade or so. No doubt they'll keep shipping some great stuff, but even we Mac people are going to sign in with somebody else all around the Web.

The Android and iOS War Is Not Mac vs Windows Part 2

       
Over the last several months, I have seen scads of articles trying to equate the battle between Apple's iOS on one side and Google's Android on the other as a rerun of the famous Microsoft Windows versus Apple Macintosh battles that played out over the 1980s and early 1990s. In practically every case, Android is seen as Windows. After all, both operating systems have achieved market leadership (in most ways you could count leadership) through extensive partner relationships. In both cases, Apple fanatics look down on the alternative as being less polished. In both cases, the opposing non-Apple camp has the chance to revel in geekery, showing what's possible when you get to the system foundation, while looking down upon the more closed, possibly less flexible Apple option. But I would argue there's a different way to look at this conflict, and it comes down to apps - which flips the discussion on its head.

Microsoft Word 6 for Mac. The Pain Still Is Felt Everywhere.

As a longtime Mac OS user (and sufferer), I slogged my way through Apple's dark times in the mid to late 1990s, taunted by developers who would avoid Mac OS as a platform. Others, if they did choose to release for Mac OS, might do so well after comparable versions were issued for Windows. Often, the Mac version was a klutzy port of the Windows original, running slowly and awkwardly on Apple machines. While we had our own native apps that only ran on Mac, press and advertisers alike knew that Windows had the numbers - more users, more options and dramatically more software. Most of us Mac addicts were left to order out of catalogs instead of retail stores, quietly fixing our need like those with misunderstood fetishes, while Windows users gleefully got first-day shipments of PC titles with the latest games, office software, and multimedia. We begged for scraps, but our day eventually came.

In time, our once pitiful position, a mere blip in software sales next to the incumbent behemoth, changed. Under Steve Jobs' leadership the new Apple and Mac began to stand for something else - not just in quality, but in numbers. The popular titles that once were shipping Windows only started to ship for both Mac and Windows simultaneously. Large companies that once abandoned the Mac came back, or set up separate business units thad did a fantastic job creating quality software. The gap once felt in software has practically disappeared, and I can't remember the last time I felt longingly for a piece of software that ran exclusively on Windows, or found a hardware device that had forgotten to find a way to work well with Mac out of the box. I have an HP Laptop running Windows 7 (and IE) at home, but I've only had to use it to get into proprietary online meeting rooms that demand Windows. Otherwise, the notebook stays closed.

Does this mean that the Mac ever caught up in terms of the vast number of software titles? No. But no Mac user today feels the same way that we Mac users did eight or twelve years ago, because everything we can do on a PC, we can do on a Mac, and there are many different things possible on this platform that can't be done on Windows.

Top App Developers Are Coding for Android and iOS

This brings me back to Android. Apple's iOS has more applications than Android. It has a smart, well-organized, high quality store design that presents new and high quality apps to users for iPhone, iPod and iPad. The Android Market is close, but not perfect. iOS has a good number of applications that are iOS-only, which do not exist for Android, namely favorites like Instagram, Path, Flipboard and more - many more.

But, as I've predicted over the last nine or so months, since changing my mobile OS preferences, this is changing, just like the Mac issues of the past. The gap in software is closing in terms of the number of applications. The polish of Android is improving relative to that of iOS, as Google improves with each iterative release. The amount of software available is increasing to fill needs that were previously unserved. Soon Android users, if we have not gotten there already, will feel like the Mac users of today, where every need is served, and there is no lingering desire for anything on the other side of the mobile software divide.

You can see the dominoes begin to fall as iOS-only applications, like Path, publicly promise Android versions soon, while promising to wait and deliver an amazing experience. You see applications like Ninua start as Android only, and games developers deploy for Android while ignoring iOS. (See: Bionic Panda Games) I believe only the most ardent of iOS fanatics will stay single sourced in the long run, just like BBEdit has never strayed from its Mac-only approach (and boy do we love them for it).

For when it comes to the mobile applications piece of this skirmish, Apple is not Apple of the 1990s. It is playing a role more similar to that of Microsoft, who had more titles, more developers, and a seeming guise of invincibility. This is not a replay of that battle, but a new one where the challenger is now the dominant one, and behaving much like a dominant player would. What I like more about this specific discussion is that this time, in my opinion, both sides are great. I would take a market battle between Apple and Google any day over the frustrations and issues that took place with a dominant Windows of yesteryear. I still love my Mac and the iPad has transformed mobile computing. But let's not be so naive about the world of Android software. Developers, users and the entire Android ecosystem are going to be benefitting from continued progress and growth - in quality and quantity.

A Cloud-Centric Web Makes Device & OS Switching Easier

There is a tug of war going on in your mobile devices and your desktop OS - between the world of apps and that of cloud-based Web services. The applications, usually designed and optimized for your particular environment, serve as familiar tools for you, and improve your productivity, bring you news, enabling you to do new things or they may simply entertain you. Not all those applications are on every platform, and the more you choose to purchase on one device, the more it is assumed you have some share of "switching costs" or, in a more antiquated word, "lock-in" to your selected OS.

In parallel, one sees a rise in Web services and apps that tap into cloud-hosted data, without demanding the data be stored on your local device. As applications become increasingly cross-platform and feature equal, this, in combination with the mass migration of data to the cloud, is reducing vendor lock-in and making it easier for consumers to make radical switches in their desktop or mobile environments - be it by operating system or the device itself.

If money were no object, I would be delighted to have desktops with the latest Windows, Mac or Chrome OS installs at my disposal, surrounded by mobile phones and tablets bearing logos not just of Android and Apple, but BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7. The rise in importance and prevalence of cloud data, and access to the true Web on all these devices (for the most part) makes their core differences less dramatic than in years past. Meanwhile, most application developers are executing in tandem for the top operating systems in desktop and mobile, meaning you can find your apps in a new place, should you choose to switch.

(See also: BetaNews: Laplink Switch & Sync -- posted tonight)

In 2010, I first switched mobile operating systems, and then switched phones on that OS. The first move took some effort and app discovery, but most my data was in the cloud, especially including all my email services, contacts and browser bookmarks. Switching between phones was even easier, as on Android, I was able to redownload all my paid apps from the Android market, free of charge. By the end of the year, I also had my hands on the ChromeOS-based CR-48 notebook, the most radical change yet, foregoing local apps for cloud-based ones, and making the Web browser the center of the universe. And yet, I've survived, going back to the MacBook Air for archived email and heavy-duty apps for Office and photos, but keeping pace on the Web.

A year ago, I called for OS and App neutral data, which removes the ownership of my content from the service providers themselves and gives it back to me. Recognizing mobile providers' core offerings, I started my migration to the cloud in earnest when I first picked up the MacBook Air. I've failed somewhat in keeping apps off the device, out of necessity, but most rich media gets moved off to the local Time Capsule, and from a 128 GB hard drive, smaller than my last laptop, above 50 GB are left. Clearly, I have more cutting to do.

The move to the cloud means I am no longer a Mac person or a Blackberry person or a Google person, but instead a Web person. So long as I can configure the device to find my information elsewhere, it is less necessary to be concerned about the hops needed to try and switch or test out a Windows Phone 7 handset, or what would happen if the Blackberry Playbook entered my life. Similarly, migrating from the Samsung Galaxy Tab to a Motorola Xoom would be extremely simple - just like my move from EVO to Epic in the fall.

Asymco says for every iOS device, be they iPhones, iPads, or iPods, users have downloaded more than 60 apps on average. No doubt have we exceeded this number ourselves, but also on the Android platform - some of which are duplicates of the other. I purchased MLB At Bat for iPhone, iPad and Android, and would probably get it for the Mac App Store if it was there too. But the availability of the top apps on most of the top platforms makes my loyalty to any one particular device or OS a temporary one. If I've put $200 or $300 of my money into apps on iOS, and about $200 on apps on Android, it's a one-time allotment of sunk costs, no greater than a prepayment penalty on one's mobile phone contract. But the technical hassles between devices are going away as the cloud becomes the center of all we do.

The ChromeOS CR-48 Experience: Fast, Promising, Early

While the tech elite gained notifications early in the month that their Google ChromeOS-powered CR-48 notebooks were on their way, and thousands of others flocked to submit their names to become one of the lucky chosen 60,000 few to get access to what could be the first version of the next big operating system, my e-mail box remained empty. I must have groused about it enough that my wife finally took to her blog to lodge complaint with Google (somewhat tongue in cheek). Come Christmas morning, the last surprise for me was that she had subsequently conspired with some well-thinking Google staffers to make the device available for the holiday (along with some fun Android figurines). While I had to scowl at her end-run which delayed my access to the notebook, I finally put my ego aside and have been using the CR-48 intermittently for about a week, and have found it to be filled with intriguing promise, even if this is clearly not the final package.

The major hypothesis of the ChromeOS plan is that the future is the Web. Web sites, Web services and Web applications. As such, the main differentiation between the ChromeOS powered notebook and that of more traditional laptops running Windows or Mac is that there is very little of the desktop metaphor, with a local hard drive to save all of your documents and run your software applications. Running ChromeOS is much like a terminal that only runs the Web browser. Like the Hotel California, you can try to quit the app, but you can never truly leave.

First impressions with the Chrome OS are very smart. After taking a photo with the bulit-in Webcam to take your profile photo and finding the nearest WiFi point, you connect with your Google ID, and the service pulls in bookmarks you may have synchronized across your Chrome browser. If you are a person who lives on the Web, you're practically set. Theoretically, all your e-mail, your social networks, your favorite Web sites, and even your documents (if you use Google Docs) are right there. What more could you possibly want?

The hardware, the less revolutionary but still nice to have, half of the equation, is extremely minimalist. Black all the way around. Quiet. Very quiet. It wakes up quickly from having the screen closed, and is quite smooth. After years of seeing my keyboard YELL AT ME with letters in full caps, the Google CR-48 is soothingly lower case. Even the CAPS LOCK key is gone, replaced with a search button - not that I found myself using that any more than just typing a word in the browser bar and hitting return if I truly wanted something. The trackpad is not the best in the world, but you can get used to it.

For someone raised in the desktop metaphor with applications, the feeling that I can't get out of the browser and "get to my files" is a bit disconcerting and takes some rethinking. Jokingly, I saw it as if a person had been placed on house arrest. Sure, you can still watch TV and get food from the fridge, and maybe even have visitors over, but you can't do anything outside beyond looking out the window. The lock-in seemed forced, even if I understood why. It's something of the nature where it's assumed Google knows best for me, even if the user is left wondering if its their own best interests that are being served, or that of the company.

At the early stage of ChromeOS's life, it's tempting to list those things you can't really do. You have a Webcam, but it doesn't work to take photos for some Web services, as neither Brizzly and Facebook could recognize it, while Gmail's built in video chat could. You can download Zip files from e-mail attachments, but not unpack them. Taking screenshots looks like an impossibility.

That brings us to the Chrome Web store, the accepted place to run applications in the browser. Nicely laid out, reminiscent of iTunes, there's a great number of options there, but it's early days, so for every well thought out app, there are others that just serve as shortcuts to existing services, or lower-quality apps. Believers will have to be patient as the iTunes Store was not a huge winner back in 2003 either, and it will take time for developers to learn how to code for Chrome OS.

Included with the CR-48 notebook is embedded 3G wireless from Verizon, which makes the device very appealing for mobile computing. In the interest of not adding another 3G bill beyond that from my two Samsung Sprint devices, I did not enable this, but obviously could see the value.

Like many of Google's products, the device and the underlying OS is very useful from day one. It's clean. It's fast. Its battery is very good and the compatibility of practically all sites and services on the OS is very good. But also like other Google products, to fully adopt the direction takes something of faith, that improvements and compatibility with more hardware and more flexibility is on its way.

To have consumers purchase Chrome OS laptops, once they hit the market, serious efforts will need to be taken to convince people why putting everything in the cloud, and abandoning (for the most part) applications they know well, will help their lives. It's not just enough to built an intriguing device, but to also successfully sell the story around the device. For the thousands of brave souls who have access to the CR-48, getting the new laptop is fun, but also free. In parallel, we will need to see growth in applications and services to take advantage of ChromeOS, to ensure confidence we can close down our Macs and our Windows machines and go completely Google.

Pretty. Functional. Frail. My Macbook Air Hinges Fail.

Earlier this year, I switched from my MacBook Pro to a new MacBook Air, aiming to move more of my content to the cloud, and have a less bulky device to take with me from office to office and trip to trip. For the most part, the experience has been very good, and if I can help it, I don't want to go back to thick laptops again, with their spinning hard drives and clunky optical drives. But the beautiful design and thinness of the machine also has made it susceptible to failure. For more than 18 months, MacBook Air's first and second generation customers have complained about defective hinges which are a design flaw with the machine, requiring potentially expensive replacement. Now, mine too have fallen victim.

The front of my MacBook Air with the very obvious crack...

A few weeks ago, when visiting partners with Barak Hachamov, my colleague at my6sense, he opened his MacBook Air, and we both audibly heard a cracking sound. The frame had a horizontal crack through it, and the screen became very wobbly, needing to be supported by something to lean on. He took his laptop to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, and as he resides in Israel and I am local, I was asked to pick it up. A week later, after taking his laptop home, my own MacBook Air decided to join the club.

Without any odd behavior on my part, without requiring any exceptional level of force or falls, or even knocking against anything, my own Air frame is cracked and the hinge has practically come apart at the base. Solidarity with Barak's machine? Perhaps.

The Rear of My MacBook Air, Hinge Askew...

So last night, I was back at the same Apple Store, telling them of my sad story. The folks at the Genius Bar commented on the relative newness of my machine (though not the latest and greatest) and said they see this problem frequently. The good news was there would be no charge, but they didn't have parts on site, so I'll be headed back at least two more times - first to drop it off, and later, of course, to pick it up.

Even without the cost of replacement, for which I am grateful, the interruption is definitely annoying. Assume perfect service, I should be without the laptop for a few days, and there's always the outside chance data could be lost, so I am backing up like a mad fool (again). But it has me thinking as well. By always demanding thinner products, lighter housing, and shinier form factors (See the iPhone 4G for example), are we increasing the chance of breakage? It seems there is an inherent design flaw that affected each of these MacBook Airs, one so prevalent that Apple's own tech support note on troubleshooting them says it could be repaired, even if out of warranty:

"You can take your MacBook Air to an Apple-Authorized Service Provider or Apple Retail Store for evaluation and repair if necessary, even if your product is out of warranty. If you previously paid for a repair for hinge-related issues that were not caused by accidental damage, you may be eligible for a refund. Contact Apple for more information."

Diving deeper, it seems this issue has been hitting Air owners for more than 18 months. About 150 people have contributed to a thread started in February of 2009 on the hinges breaking during normal use. Ars Technica covered the spike in complaints back in March of 2009 and Engadget in late February of 2009. But I didn't buy my own laptop until early 2010. Although it was refurbished, saving me some cash, I would assume the issue was known and examined.

While at the Apple Store, I got my first chance to see the newest MacBook Air devices - both the 13 inch and the 11 inch models. It's tempting, of course, to get this one fixed, wipe the drive, and sell it on eBay or Craigslist, just to move to the next generation, but I would have to warn the recipient that I couldn't guarantee the integrity of the device. It's pretty. It's functional. But it's broken.

20 Halloween Scares to Put Fear Into Every Apple Fan

20. Wowed by IE 9 for Windows, and to tick off shared rival Google, Apple abandons Safari in exchange for promised browser development by Microsoft.

19. Apple products deemed security risk to carry on planes by TSA, must be placed with checked baggage for all flights.

18. Apple abandons USB and 802.11 and forges their own standards body, reporting to themselves.

17. Apple actually acquires Facebook for $40 billion. Mark Zuckerberg said to ascend to CEO position by 2012.

16. John Gruber of Daring Fireball is to be added to the company's board of directors.

15. MobileMe to be replaced by a new messaging system built on Apple's social network, Ping, accessible only through iTunes.

14. Riding a wave of over-confidence, thanks to the recent string of successes, Steve Jobs reintroduces the G4 Cube, the Dalmatian and Tutti Frutti iMacs, and yes, the hockey puck mouse.

13. During a company board meeting, Al Gore asserts that he did, indeed, invent the Internet. The other board members, swayed by his amazing charisma, agree Apple will backpay Gore royalties for each machine, dating back to the early 1990s, which had Web connectivity.

12. International trade strife between China and the United States flares up, and Apple's subcontractors discontinue making new iPhones, Macs, iPads, and more. Suicides actually increase.

11. After so many MacBook Air owners realize their hinges break shortly after their warranty expires, a class-action suit bankrupts the company.

10. HP bundles next generation Palm devices with every desktop, laptop and server sold. Palm becomes new mobile standard.

9. Windows Phone 7 is Really Really Really Good. No wait, Really.

8. Apple retail store insulation found to contain asbestos. Even worse, Steve Jobs demanded it be included.

7. Adobe copyrights the word Flash and extends the word to contain all Flash drives. A settlement mandates all flash drives come preinstalled with Flash.

6. With the introduction of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, Outlook becomes the standard Mac client and Apple Mail is retired.

5. Entertainment industry colludes to deny Apple access to music and films on iTunes store. Only Disney/Pixar and indy offerings left.

4. Tim Cook leaves Apple to take the CEO position at Dell.

3. SCO rolls back to life, and somehow obtains an injunction against Apple's Mac OS X, due to its UNIX underpinnings, stopping all Mac sales.

2. AT&T announces contract to extend iPhone network exclusivity through the end of the decade.

1. News breaks that Steve Jobs actually perished during liver surgery in Tennessee in 2009. What you have seen in the last year-plus has been a zombie.

iVI Brings More Web Video to iTunes, iDevices

If you purchase all your Web video from iTunes, having those shows and films available to your Apple TV and iPhones is pretty simple. But video from other sources, be it through camera and smartphone recordings, or even BitTorrent downloads, can sometimes be a challenge to get into the iTunes ecosystem. A simple piece of Mac software, called iVI (short for iTunes Video Importer) can bring all those videos from all those places and bring them back to iTunes, complete with cool extras, including season and episode data for TV shows, and standard or high definition content into one file.

Despite Apple's success in the video downloads market, the reality is that many people still tap into peer to peer networks to get individual episodes of TV shows, or even full-length feature films. Often, even after these files are downloaded, it can be difficult to find a way to even play the files. iVI converts many different file types, from the standard .mp4, mpg and .mov files to other less Mac-friendly options, including .3gp and .avi and makes them iTunes ready.

iVI Hard At Work Cranking on TV Shows and Films to iTunes

Getting files to iVI is billed as being as simple as drag and drop. It recognizes if files are movies or TV episodes. Later, if instructed, it can scan for new video files in regular directories, and will go so far as to suggest TV show episode and season information if not automatically applied.

Files from iVI In SD/HD In My iTunes

Many people are turning away from the TV set and their DVRs to the computer for videos. For some, the solution is Hulu or other sanctioned outlets, while for others, BitTorrent and other networks continue to reign supreme. iVI looks like it does the hard work to make the data meaningful and get it on all those Apple devices built to play video.

I've already tapped iVI to pull the 3GP files from my HTC EVO into iTunes so I could build a new iMovie project for posting to YouTube. (See Matthew Walk to the Store With Me) iVI simply works, so check it out from South Pole Software.

Descending Into a Nation of Bloggers: How Steve's Right

Steve Jobs, unfiltered, seems to be the most attractive interview in the tech world, bar none. That's why his opening up at AllThingsD last night continues to make waves in the tech news world, as his every word is dissected, repeated and spun. The extremely quotable Jobs dropped a number of interesting insights and remarkable candidness for the leader of the technology industry's largest company, and arguably one of the most successful, with legions of loyal customers, and a similar number of would-be competitors. One of his most remarkable quotes regarded the challenge of supporting high quality content, and an editorial press, contrasted with what he saw as a descent into a "nation of bloggers".

Rather than react in an emotional way, pounding out paragraphs to pooh-pooh Jobs' dismissiveness of an entire craft - of which I am obviously part - one has to understand his perspective, and how Apple is impacted by the world of blogs, to see how he could come to his conclusions.

In a world when many many businesses are becoming more open, sharing short updates on Twitter, single paragraph announcements and events on Facebook, and regular posts from thought leaders and executives through blogging, Apple seems to be on the outside looking in. They are notable for their continued closed approach, one built on secrets and surprise. Of late, Steve Jobs has opened up a bit, acting as a one man social media machine with e-mails to customers and bloggers, and penning longer notes on the Apple.com Web site, like that on Flash from last month. But Apple not only doesn't really need to participate in this world, but honestly has not seen much benefit from the army of Mac bloggers. It's no surprise that Steve has the opinions he does about bloggers, and the company needs them less than many others do.

The funny thing about Steve Jobs is he's been doing this for a long time. He was on the cover of Time and Fortune, BusinessWeek and Newsweek decades before the first blogs. His return to Apple in 1997 came as the Internet was ascending, but the term blogging was practically unknown. This was two years before Ev Williams and team started their blogging software at Pyra Labs, and two years before Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal. In his time at Apple, Steve Jobs and his team has never really suffered for a lack of news. The mainstream media, from the aforementioned press to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and others, have been available to review the company's products, to report on their news, and to dissect the company's typically rosy financial results.

Meanwhile, for the most part, Apple and Mac coverage on blogs can be divided into three camps - Apple fans, Apple haters and Apple rumor seekers.

Those who love the company and its products are almost mythical in their obsessions and loyalty. Those who hate Apple are similarly entrenched, if not always as vocal. And those who are constantly seeking to undermine Steve and Apple's launch schedule and product roadmap have expanded from a once-niche industry to something much more mainstream. And in many cases, Apple has had to take aim against blogs to protect their positions.

Apple's conflicts with bloggers have been well documented. Apple sued anonymous posters on AppleInsider for leaking product photos, including the G4 Cube, before their time. Apple sued the then anonymous author of Think Secret, for discussion of an unlaunched product, called "Asteroid", a new audio interface for GarageBand users. And of course, most recently, Gawker Media paid to gain access to a prototype next generation iPhone which may or may not have been stolen. And yes, Apple is going after those guys too. (This doesn't even go into his latest e-mail trading with Ryan Tate at Valleywag, a coworker of mine from a decade-plus ago.)

As far as Apple is concerned, in contrast to what they see as professional and respectable coverage of their products in the still much read mainstream media, the bloggers have really been nothing but trouble, with the drawbacks and amateur approach outweighing any potential benefits from consistent fandom selwehere. The Macintosh rumors industry, which I have largely ignored of late, is in constant flow, since Mac OS Rumors kicked it off in the mid nineties, and it's no wonder why Apple has taken this approach to not trust the industry as a whole.

Can one separate the term "blogger" from one who blogs, and not feel like Apple and Steve Jobs are slamming an entire informal industry? Of course. There are absolutely some very well written, professional, editorially focused blog networks out there. There are a lot of individual bloggers who do a great job expressing their thoughts on Apple and many other companies. But for one of the world's best Marketers, blogs are little help at all. Of course Steve Jobs wouldn't want the nation to "descend" into one full of "bloggers" who target his company with falsehoods and borderline criminal activity. Of course he would like to control the message and keep the element of surprise.

Steve's comments don't mean that Apple wants sites like The Unofficial Apple Weblog and The Apple Blog to go away, but Steve is calling for decorum that he just isn't exposed to. Steve Jobs and Apple don't need bloggers. They have operated above the fray, and are calling for something better than what they have seen - something that delivers them value.