The market for Apple's tablet "computer"

Following a fever pitch in marketing hype, Apple announced the iPad yesterday. (Note: perhaps if I’m ever in a humorous mood one day I’ll wax on the horrible name... is the low end version a “mini-pad” and the high end version a “maxi-pad?”) It appears that the majority of the reviews are positive but there are quite a few critical naysayers out there. Many continue to chew on the fact that many PC vendors have had Windows Tablets available for years. (I guess that’s like saying that Apple’s Newton was the originator of the handheld smart device... certainly didn’t mean much!) The fact that Dell and HP and others have had tablet devices and they haven’t taken the market by storm is supposed to, in the critics minds, mean that there is no market for the Tablet and that Apple will fail. One of the loudest critics has been Balmer and Company up North.

I can choose to sit idly by and not chime in on this debate -- and I largely refrain from adding my comments to the end of articles on the Computer and IT news sites because having an anonymous argument with a 12 year old always seems to end with “...no I didn’t!” “Yes, you did!” “No I didn’t!” “Well, you’re a poopy-head!” etc.

The reason that Apple succeeded with the iPod and iPhone is that they didn’t redesign their PC / PC-operating system into those devices. Instead, in both cases, they defined what the end user wants to do and designed -- from the ground up -- a system / solution / software / hardware to best deliver the functionality. OS X is good for a PC but not good for a phone. This is in direct contrast to Microsoft which continues to insist that Windows is the best OS for EVERYTHING. What part of fail have they missed? Windows is a horrible device OS.

The reason that Windows is a horrible device OS is at the heart of the reason that Apple introduced the iPad yesterday. There is a clear and definable market for a computing device IN BETWEEN the phone and the traditional laptop / netbook / PC. This is a device that let’s us manage our content but isn’t about content creation. A device that allows us to watch a video but doesn’t limit us to the screen of our phone. A device that let’s us look at pictures the same size as they were originally taken. A device that does simple things like browse the web, watch videos -- movies and TV -- and play games, without the limitations of a phone. What we don’t need is all the bells and whistles of a full blown PC OS. We don’t need the functionality, and the overhead costs, the pop-up screen. (Think of watching a movie from a laptop on an airplane... don’t you hate it when you’re all set up and the guy in front of you decides to recline his seat; crushing you laptop?)

The tablet allows me to bring up a recipe in the kitchen without firing up my expensive laptop. It allows me to browse the web while watching TV AND easily share that experience with others. (Note that last phrase! It’s an important distinction!) The laptop / PC experience is an individual one. The Tablet is a social experience that is easily shared.

THIS is the experience that Microsoft doesn’t understand; that past Tablet manufacturers don’t understand. This is why the iPad will succeed.

Restart

For those few who have followed my blog with earnest through the first half of 2009 and have noticed that I haven’t updated this space for a while please consider this a restart. I am again committing myself to update this space on a weekly basis with more of my technological observations.

First an update -- and full disclosure -- I am now VP of Marketing for a small virtualization company called ScaleMP. ScaleMP’s own technology would easily be a natural fit within this blog but I needed to make sure the full disclosure is present before going into further detail. I do have an interest in this technology -- both philosophical and financial -- so continue reading with that warning in mind.

Where all other virtualization vendors -- VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat among others -- have focused on using hypervisor / Virtual Machine Monitors to disaggregate server hardware (or desktop hardware) from operating systems in order to increase workloads on top of a single system -- also known as partitioning a server -- ScaleMP has a hypervisor / VMM that aggregates multiple servers into a single system with a single operating system. This may seem counterintuitive but storage vendors have been both partitioning and aggregating storage systems for decades. On one hand -- and as a parallel to what VMware, et. al does for a server -- customers have purchased large storage systems and partitioned them for multiple users and multiple purposes, customers have also purchased a bunch of small disk arrays (JBOD for instance) and aggregated them to appear as a much larger disk. ScaleMP’s technology allows customers to purchase far less expensive x86 servers and aggregate them together to create a large supercomputer with hundreds of CPU cores and large RAM / memory capabilities. These systems appeal to anyone with a high performance workload needing many CPUs or working with files in excess of 128GB but don’t want to pay millions of dollars for the system capabilities. Using off-the-shelf x86 servers and ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation aggregation platform can now assemble a 128 core, 4TB system running Linux for a few hundred thousand dollars.

As virtualization for consolidation / partitioning was revolutionary when IBM introduced it over 25 years ago and took flight when VMware introduced the capability for standard Intel servers I believe the same will be true for virtualization for aggregation. The challenge for server vendors is realizing that forcing customers to rely on proprietary, expensive high end systems for exclusive workloads is counter intuitive and flies in the face of technological evolution.

This blog will not exclusively focus on a single technology -- certainly with Apple’s iPad tablet announcement looming mid-next week I’m sure that will result in commentary here in the not too distant future -- it is absolutely a certainty that virtualization will continue to be an underlying theme of many of my musings.

Couple of really interesting links

Thought I’d go light on the opinion and heavy on the content. I ran across the following really cool links this afternoon.

Ever wonder how a car can turn -- one wheel must turn faster than the other while both are engine powered? Anyone can say it’s because of the differential but how many of you really know how it works? Check out this old video for a really easy to understand breakdown of a differential. Video automatically starts 1:50 in...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4JhruinbWc#t=1m50s

Another very cool flash animation comes from USA Today and shows how the International Space Station has grown over the years. It’s also very cool:

http://i.usatoday.net/tech/graphics/iss_timeline/flash.htm

Enjoy!

Microsoft's Real Control Point

I was just reviewing a CNET article written in mid-July following Google’s Chrome announcement. Chrome as you may recall is Google’s new open source operating system. Having been down that road with Sun Microsystems and the Java Desktop System I rolled my eyes. Having also had an outsiders inside view of Microsoft over the years both as a competitive analyst and later as the marketing lead of an interoperability alliance with Microsoft I have seen much of the Redmond stack as threatening to a competitive landscape and the open source community. However I’ve dramatically changed my tune on much of what I think matters.

Over the years we’ve heard of many technologies labeled as architectural control points: operating system, browser (oh how wrong we were there), directory (think user authentication / password access), exchange (control email access) and lately cell phone ecosystem. Each one of these technologies held our attention for a while until something else came along proving the weakness in that as a control point. In many ways you can suggest that all of these technologies in aggregate controlled architectural flexibility and capability. But making that argument would be ridiculous as it remains true with any homogeneous system. The best news to come from Open Source is that there is a focused and strong developer base focused on creating competitive alternatives. Some are better than the proprietary, some are not. As the iPhone has proven, make something that people want to buy and their purchasing power alone is enough to move entire industries and markets. (Imagine the boring world of cell phones if Apple hadn’t pushed the capabilities and expectations for cell phones. It’s quite possible that RIM would still be selling B&W models of the popular Blackberry.)

However undisturbed is one Microsoft control point that we all take entirely for granted: the ubiquitous Office Suite. Having suffered with and been a proponent of OpenOffice I know that there are alternatives actively used by all sizes of organizations. However almost all of us use all or parts of Microsoft Office whether at home or at work. It is my contention as we view the increasingly web-based movement of applications that Office productivity tools will remain mostly on premise and will increasingly integrate cloud service capabilities and services to make application access, integration and synthesis more capable.

The biggest problem no one has solved is how to integrate multiple web services and SaaS applications for reporting, analysis and business intelligence. I recently ran across a company called Pervasive that has a solution to provide across cloud service integration. It appears to be complicated and expensive as a solution goes. But it clearly is targeting an end user need that will only further become exacerbated as more of our lives migrate online. For consumers think about how much of a pain it is to work in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. Now think how difficult it would be if you had to gather, analyze and report on data from each service regularly. For the enterprise it’s even worse. Salesforce.com, the leading online CRM tool, provides average sales reporting capabilities. Imagine how difficult it would be for someone using SAP ERP, Eloqua marketing/lead management and Google Analytics to create a cross service report for weekly review?! As someone who did weekly reporting across Google, Marketbright, Salesforce.com, Netsuite and Intuit I can tell you that this isn’t just a pain, it’s extraordinarily time consuming as well. I managed this for a company of 50. Imagine doing this for a company of 500 or 5,000!

Now to wrap this back to Office: Office remains a set of tools that we all know and we all have a local license to use. We all know how to use Excel and Powerpoint. We know how to create tags, worksheets and pie charts. Wouldn’t it be great to simply plug in web service content and have it integrate automatically in the spreadsheet we normally use for analysis and reporting? Wouldn’t it be great if that tag were dynamic and could automatically refresh as the web service is updated? Wouldn’t it be even better if we could update sales data in Excel and have that automatically updated in Salesforce? How easy and powerful would Office become then? I wonder if anyone at Microsoft has thought about how powerful Office could become?

A Ghost in the machine

Having worked in some form of alternative desktops for many years -- from alternatives to Windows, Linux-based desktops and applications, thin clients and most recently desktop virtualization solutions -- the other day something very different caught my eye: G.ho.st or Globally Hosted Operating System.

So there are two unique and newsworthy angles with this story. I’ll start with the one that seems to have gotten the most press: the company is based in Israel but all the programming and code jockeys are Palestinians working in the West Bank. In other words, these two traditional enemies have teamed up to create a really cool technology software offering although most have not been able to meet face-to-face. My guess is that they have purchased some very expensive video teleconferencing equipment and work virtually. I do hope that some very smart marketeers at Plantronics or Cisco have provided them with either free or seriously discounted hardware because this angle to the company is not only unique but would make a tremendous success story. Hopefully the Israeli government will also notice that working together is a whole lot more economically conducive than fighting -- or, in this case, limiting travel between the two regions. Considering neither the West Bank nor Israel is very large I’m sure that the Palestinian contingent isn’t physically more than a few miles from the Israeli half of the Company. It’s too bad they can’t physically connect.

With that said, the truly interesting part is that they have done so much virtually maybe the lesson for the rest of the world is that you really don’t need the physical barriers that we have come to take for granted. The G.ho.st solution -- and I’ve only done some cursory trials with the software provide a very unique and quite capable approach to virtualizing a desktop. They have virtualized the entire GUI, application and file base to a cloud and have optimized the delivery to run fairly well over an internet connection. In other words you can access your true desktop with a desktop experience (as opposed to a file or application experience) from a web browser. You get file to device synchronization (plug in your cell phone or MP3 player and it will synch content), access to applications and drag and drop file management right from the web interface. Oh, and by the way, the web interface looks an awful lot like a Linux GNOME desktop. (For those of you not familiar with GNOME just replace what I just said with “Windows desktop.”) There are many companies looking to control the desktop and it’s functionality by moving the OS and applications back to a server but this is the first that actually delivers a full Windows replacement as a web service.

We hear so much hype around Cloud Computing -- and interestingly not much about its greatest challenges such as analytics or cross platform BI -- but I’ve not seen an alternative to the entire client delivered via Cloud Computing until now. Unfortunately you’ll always need some kind of hardware platform to deliver access but I can now see a future where that platform becomes as vanilla and general purpose as a Netbook has promised but not yet delivered.

For more information check out: http://g.ho.st/

How big is a Trillion anyway?

Making the news over the last few months is the term “trillion.” As in the budget deficit has ballooned to $1.5 trillion dollars, and the budget debt has grown to $12 trillion dollars.

The thing I’ve noticed in the tech industry is that we tend to the micro and nano; there is so much value in making something smaller and cheaper... thank you Gordon Moore and, quite frankly, Sony for driving this point home.

I’m a huge fan of visualization technologies as a tool to better understand and communicate the esoteric. Thankfully some smart people have now given us new ways to visualize the enormously large “trillion.” Consider:

A million seconds is 12 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
A million minutes ago was – 1 year, 329 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes ago.
A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ.
A million hours ago was in 1885.
A billion hours ago man had not yet walked on earth.
A million dollars ago was five (5) seconds ago at the U.S. Treasury.
A billion dollars ago was late yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Treasury.
A trillion dollars is so large a number that only politicians
can use the term in conversation... probably because they
seldom think about what they are really saying. I’ve read that
mathematicians do not even use the term trillion! 
Here is some perspective on TRILLION:
 Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000. 
The country has not existed for a trillion seconds. 
Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds. 
One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.
Thanks to Tysknews for this wonderful illustration. This was taken from: http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Taxes/million.htm

Want to SEE a trillion dollars? Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmxU2IqhnjM&feature=related

Update on pico projectors

Last week I wrote about the evolution of the presentation projector and how cool it will be (one day) to see projectors as a native part of a cell phone. That day is far closer than even I thought. Nikon just introduced a camera with a built in projector:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/nikon-crams-projector-into-compact-camera/

Very small step from there to the cell phone!