Research in Motion announced Tuesday that it has released an upgrade to its BlackBerry PlayBook operating system, finally bringing a native e-mail client to its 7-inch tablet after nearly a year on the market.
Slow down there, slick.
This is certainly an intriguing possibility. Imagine being able to remove your phone from your pocket, and plug it into a computer, whereupon you have your entire setup ready to go. Canonical, the guys behind Ubuntu, want to make that a possibility. Based on Jamie Keene’s hands-on, I’d say it’s a great start. However, I’d obviously prefer OS X to Ubuntu.
Gruber thinks that this is the antithesis of cloud storage, but I see it as complementary. Imagine if your iPhone had an OS X partition which would automatically launch when docked. It could contain the applications and preferences, but the documents and files would be provided by iCloud. I think that’s a distinct possibility.
I love Flickr, and with the recent Yahoo! layoffs, I was worried that it was going to be shuttered. Good to know that my fears were unfounded, and the opposite is happening. I can’t wait.
Nick Bilton:
People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.
According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones,” or $250 to $600.
Seems like a lot to pay to look like a dork.
AAPL is up today by nearly $13. It’s yet another day of steady, solid growth as reflected by their shareholders. They didn’t launch a product today, nor win one of their many lawsuits. It’s just a Tuesday. That’s Apple’s corporate strategy in a nut.
Apple’s competitors see things a little differently. Google, for instance, doesn’t sell products. Rather, they’re an advertising company that uses products and services as advertisement vehicles, much in the same way radio stations have worked for decades. Where Google differs is in the targeting of ads. Radio stations follow a particular format, listened to by a particular demographic. Advertisers can guess at what those listeners might be interested in. Google builds up a silo of data gleaned from your email, web searches, friends on Google+, and videos watched on YouTube. A giant heap of personal information that allows Google to provide services for free which are, for the most part, decent.
Microsoft’s revenue is mostly generated through licensing their software. Around 25% of their revenue comes from hardware sales, which is not insignificant, but cowers in the shadow of Windows and Office. Since Microsoft doesn’t sell computers or phones, the majority of their revenue must come from licensing. Direct sales of their software are always going to be dwarfed by sales to equipment manufacturers.
By contrast, Apple’s business model is simple: make products and sell them. There’s no need for ads in web services because one needs to have an Apple product to make real use out of iCloud. There are no licensing shenanigans to worry about because Apple designs the whole product as a unit. That means customers will receive the same stellar experience no matter what iPhone they buy, rather than the disparate platforms one has to contend with in the Android and Windows Phone families.
Apple’s business strategy is not reliant upon a killer product, like some magic bullet. Every product is a killer product which is improved over time as new features are demanded by consumers. The iPhone and the iPad are both lines of products that have significantly contributed to Apple’s bottom line, but they are in a long line of killer products introduced since 1997. And that’s the big secret: a long period of steady improvement and steady growth, with great products as the backbone.
Earlier today, The Daily produced a photo of what it says is Office for the iPad. Microsoft immediately denied it in a statement to Mary Jo Foley, saying that what was pictured was not their software. The Daily has now countered with another photo of the icon on the home screen of an iPad, along with a tweet from Peter Ha:
[W]e did not fabricate either image. A working version of the app was demoed to us by someone at Microsoft.
Jesse Hicks:
By the end of 2011, RIM stock had lost nearly 75 percent of its value. It hit a seven-year low, even dipping below book value, or the total value of the company’s assets. RIM, the market was saying, would be worth more sold for scrap – buildings, patents, unsold PlayBooks – than it was as a functioning company.
A fascinating, well-researched look into the fall of RIM.
I’ve been using this for a few months, and it’s super. It’s very quick and so reliable that I’ve moved my library over to the beta.