RIP iTunes

Last week Apple announced that iTunes will be being withdrawn (at least on the Mac). After nearly 20 years iTunes will be replaced by three separate media apps: Music, TV, and Podcasts. It's hard to remember what a game changer iTunes was when it was launched and how it changed the music industry allowing people, for a small cost, to download individual songs from the iTunes store. Combined with an iPod it changed the way we listened to music. However, in recent years streaming music services like Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music have accounted for 75% of music sales. Whilst, for those who want a physical copy of the music, vinyl album sales have soared. RIP iTunes.

Computer junk worth thousands!

This is a great story reported in the LA Times; a woman whose husband had recently died decided to clean out their garage. She found several boxes of computer junk, old circuit boards, keyboards, you know the sort of stuff. Doing the right thing she took it all to a local e-waste recycling centre in Silicon Valley. Some time later when the recyclers were sorting through the boxes though found an Apple I computer. They auctioned this very rare machine for $200,000 and are now trying to locate the woman to give her half the money. So if you have a father, grandfather or uncle with what looks like computer junk perhaps you should have a careful sort through it, you never know what you may find.

Apple's Knowledge Navigator

At last week's Gibbons Lecture Mark Apperley gave a fascinating history of human computer interaction and made a few predictions. As part of the talk he mentioned Apple's Knowledge Navigator a device which predicted the iPad and Siri decades before its release. This blog featured an item on the Knowledge Navigator back in 2012 when Siri was released. It's such a fascinating thing I recommend you visit that post and watch Apple's video.

Steve Jobs Unveils Mac at Boston Computer Society, Unseen Since 1984

It’s January, 1984. Steve Jobs, nattily attired in a double-breasted suit, is demonstrating Apple’s breakthrough personal computer, Macintosh, before a packed room. He speaks alarmingly of a future controlled by IBM, and shows the famous 1984 dystopian commercial based on that theme. Jobs' presentation, at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting on January 24, is the stuff of tech-legend. But, what’s not so well remembered: is Jobs did it all twice, in less than a week. Six days after unveiling the Mac at the Flint Center near the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., he performed his show all over again to the monthly general meeting of the Boston Computer Society. His host, Jonathan Rotenberg, was a 20-year-old student at Brown University who’d co-founded the BCS in 1977 at the age of 13. You can now watch this presentation in full for the first time. It features Steve Jobs at his charismatic best; or as he might have put it "insanely great"!
You can also watch an extended version on YouTube (in 84 segments).

Happy birthday #Macintosh!

Some days it takes a while to find what tech story to blog about, but not today. The iconic Apple Macintosh is 30 years old. If we want to push the birthday metaphor, we could say the cute little Mac is now all grown up with children of its own and holds down a serious job. Needless to say, the news is full of Mac stories today. The Guardian is running a great picture story - Thirty years of the Apple Macintosh – in pictures. However, in the interest of balance I'd also recommend you read Jerry Pournelle's article Why the Original Mac Just Didn’t Cut It. It's true the original Mac was woefully underpowered to handle that revolutionary operating system and interface. Waiting 5 mins for a program to save was not unusual, and anyone who tried to copy a floppy disc on the early Mac will never forget the experience and probably still suffers from a form of geeky post traumatic shock. Nonetheless, we love the Mac, it was a breakthrough.

30th anniversary of the Macintosh

January 24th will be the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Macintosh and an event to celebrate is being planned by the Computer History Museum and Macworld. It will be held at the Flint Center in Cupertino, CA. where the original launch by Steve Jobs was held. Many of the team responsible for the design of the Mac will be there and all proceeds will go to charity. More information and tickets here. I remember using a Mac in the late 80s (to make diagrams for my PhD thesis) and I find it amazing how far the technology has come but in some ways it has changed. The original Macintosh's DNA is still there in my MacBook Pro.

#Apple's wise maps decision

A year ago Apple was taking a lot of criticism for its decision to kick Google Maps of the iOS platform. I in a post titled "Apple's mapocalypse" took a different view - for competitive reasons Apple had to develop its own mapping and location services. It now seems that Apple (and I) were right; the Guardian in an article titled "Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won" shows that a year on Google has lost tens of millions of Google Map users to Apple in the US alone.

The PC boom is over

Back in April 2010 ,when Steve Jobs launched the iPad, he declared that we were now living in a "post-PC era." Many pundits disagreed and didn't see the point of the tablet - too big to be truly mobile, like a smartphone, and too hard to write on, like a netbook or laptop. Well, The Guardian reports research company IDC as finding that the PC market will never regain its 2011 peak and "it says that total shipments will fall by 9.7% compared to 2012, and will continue to drift down at least until 2017." A separate report shows that large screen smartphones, or "phablets," are particularly popular in the Asia/Pacific region exceeding the sales of tablets and laptops combined. It seems that, at least for personal use, Jobs was sort of right.

#Blackberry calling it quits...

1st generation iPhone and a Blackberry

The Canadian smartphone company Blackberry, formerly known as Research in Motion, is calling it quits; or in their words, "We believe that now is the right time to explore strategic alternatives." Those "strategic alternatives" will include sale, break-up and perhaps closure. Remarkably Blackberry's market share has collapsed from close to 50% in the US in 2009 to less than 3% today. There's probably no coming back from that. So what crushed Blackberry? The answer is obvious - the iPhone released in 2007.
   Blackberry believed that their loyal business customers would stay with them, because of its secure messaging and push email functionality. President Obama was even an avid user. They believed that many people preferred a real (if small) keyboard to the iPhone's virtual one. They were wrong and they responded by eventually releasing Blackberries without a real keyboard and updating their operating system to support apps. But they'd missed the point. As I've mentioned several times before it's not about the technology, it's about the services the device offers. The iPhone is a platform that offers users access to music, their photos, games, books, the web and which now increasingly integrates with their other computers, TV and the cloud. Quite simply the Blackberry doesn't - at least not nearly as well. Amazon understand this, hence the Kindle and their Prime service. Companies in 2013 that focus on the technology at the expense of services will fail.

Douglas C. Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, dies

The New York Times has reported that a true pioneer of computing has died, Doug Englebart, who is credited with inventing the computer mouse and the graphical user interface that we still all use to this day has died aged 88. In the 1960s he had a vision of computers that could be networked together and used intuitively by pointing and clicking at icons on a screen. On December 9 1968, Doug Engelbart and his group of 17 researchers from the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The presentation has become a legend and is now called "The Mother of All Demos" - the public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. These breakthrough ideas were subsequently taken up by Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and then commercialised by Apple with the Mac.

Has Facebook lost its way?

We tend to assume that successful companies like Facebook get large, wealthy and powerful by making better decisions than everyone else. Consider Facebook's recent decision to buy mapping company Waze for a rumoured $1 billion and to hire ex-Apple mapping team leader Richard Williamson. Clearly Facebook has decided it needs its own mapping functionality and not rely on Microsoft's Bing, in it's desktop product, or Apple's maps on iOS and Google on Android. Is this a good decision? Well on the face of it yes, but really Facebook seems to be the last person in the room to wakeup and smell the coffee. As I noted when discussing Apple's mapocalypse back in September 2012 - location services are going to be really important in the future. Apple couldn't afford to gift this market to Google and Facebook can't either.
   Google became interested in maps back in 2004, when it bought the Australian company Where 2 Technologies. Now this is an example of a good strategic decision. Our computing devices weren't even very mobile in 2004 but Google invested heavily in mapping - this implies great long term vision. Apple's lauded leader Steve Jobs actually made a very poor strategic decision in 2007 when the iPhone launched. Google Maps should never have been invited on board; Apple should have had its own mapping service from the start. This they belatedly corrected in 2012 because they realised they had to.
    So where has Facebook been? Have they all been too busy playing Farmville! If Facebook really wants users to spend all their time online in Facebook, and with Facebook Home that is exactly what they want you to do. Why did nobody in their Menlo Park HQ think "hey guys, we like really need our own mapping app." This troubles me. The Facebook execs clearly aren't always that smart.

It's nice to be right

Back in February this year, and earlier in September 2011, I wrote a couple of blog articles titled "Are you selling technology or services?" These posts put forward my opinion that Apple's strategy of tightly integrating its hardware and software had a vital third component; namely the services that people used on their iDevices. I wrote that Amazon seemed to be adopting this approach with the launch of its Kindle Fire. The Software Engineering Services Blog posted last week a piece called "Suddenly everyone wants to follow Apple's integrated hardware-software model," which describes how Google,  Samsung and Microsoft are now also trying to follow Apple's lead  by offering a complete ecosystem of hardware, software and services. The blog post concludes by saying "Steve Jobs may be long gone, but his vision lives on and everyone suddenly wants a piece of it, but just because they each recognize the magic behind Apple's strategy doesn't mean each can successfully copy it or that the market will follow. And that is the real challenge these companies face." It's nice to make a prediction that comes true.

Auckland Museum solves mapping mystery

Detail from a 1908 chart showing Sandy Island
in the Coral Sea

There's been a lot of talk about the accuracy of maps recently, particularly with regard to Apple's iOS Maps application. In fact Richard Williamson, the guy in charge of the Apple Maps team, recently lost his job. Perhaps he can take some comfort from the fact that maps always contain errors and that cartography, even in the age of satellites, is not always an exact science.
    Recently a story surfaced (no pun intended) about the mysterious disappearance of Sandy Island in the South Pacific. The 26 km long island in the Coral Sea is clearly shown in charts dating back to the 1700s and is shown on Google Earth as a mysterious black lozenge. This year some Australian scientists set out to visit Sandy Island only to find open ocean.
   Auckland Museum has now solved the mystery by studying its archived charts. One of these shows that Sandy Island was discovered by the ship Velocity in 1876. But there is a note on the chart which warns: “Caution is necessary while navigating among the low lying islands of the Pacific Ocean. The general details have been collated from the voyages of various navigators extending over a long series of years. The relative position of many dangers may therefore not be exactly given.”  So it seems that maps always contain errors - perhaps Richard Williamson has a case for unfair dismissal from Apple.

Kodak's first digital camera - 1975

In the week that Apple released the new iPad Mini and Microsoft released Windows 8 and its Surface tablet my colleague Bob Doran pointed me back to the future - 1975 to be precise. Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, invented  the digital camera in December 1975. In a Kodak blog post written in 2007, before Kodak went bankrupt, Sasson explains how it was constructed: "It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like."
   We all become mesmerized by the new and the shiny but this reminds us that being first or being an established powerful company doesn't inevitably result in long term success. Sasson ends his post with, "The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.” - how did Kodak get it so wrong.

iPad Mini - was Steve Jobs wrong?

The unveiling of the iPad Mini with its 7.9-inch display has many pundits referring to Steve Job's talking about the wisdom of making a tablet with a screen smaller than the iPad's 10-inch display (for example this article in the Register). It's true that the iPad Mini is a "gap filler" aimed in particular at the Amazon Kindle Fire market. Apple seem to have reasoned, "why shouldn't we make a mini tablet? We make iPod's and MacBooks in all sort of different sizes and specs."
    Yes, it makes no sense logically - if I want a device that fits in my pocket I've got an iPhone; if I want a device that fits in my bag I've got an iPad. Why would I want something in between? But it seems some people do want a device this size and Apple aren't about to gift this market segment to Amazon and Google. I expect the iPad Mini will sell well, despite being technically underwhelming. It will certainly appeal to people who are already committed to the Apple ecosystem, and will make a good eBook reader being about the size of a small paperback.

AI - Apple's next killer product

Eric Jackson in a post in Forbes makes the case that Artificial Intelligence "will be the horsepower that bridges the gulf" between our expectations of what apps can do and their current performance. He argues that Apple has "the time, the right AI people, data and money" to make this happen. I would argue that Google is in a similar position; after all Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig, co-authored the standard AI teaching text (AI: A Modern Approach), and Google has both data and money.
    Despite this though I don't agree with Jackson's thesis. When AI works it becomes invisible, people are unaware of it, therefore it will not be the "next killer product." AI may well make the next generation of smart devices work better but most users will be unaware of it.

The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983

A few days ago a "lost" speech by Steve Jobs to the  International Design Conference in Aspen in 1983 has surfaced and was posted online. This was a year before the launch of the Macintosh - Jobs refers to its predecessor, the Lisa, several times. The speech and the Q&A that follows is remarkable. If you had any doubts, or were one of the people who subscribe to the view that Jobs was just a good salesman and a deal maker, then this will change your mind. His intellect, knowledge and passion for computing comes over with force.

    Some of his predictions for the future are uncannily precise. I particularly liked his opinion that in a few years people will be spending more time interacting with personal computers than in their cars. This is the reason why computers need to be well designed (both hardware and software) since we'll spend so much time looking at them and interacting with them. Does this explain Apple's obsession with design?

Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak on Kim Dotcom

With the Kim Dotcom saga (or farce) continuing to lead the the news I was reminded of this Interview Steve Wozniak gave towards the end of July in which he comes out firmly in favour of Dotcom. 

Woz was in the local news again today with a story suggesting he may be planing to move to New Zealand to live.

#Apple's mapocalypse

Well that's what some journalists are calling it. By a coincidence just a few days ago I blogged about how much effort Google has put into its mapping service. not just effort in terms of satellite imagery and street view, but physical human effort in terms of correcting mistakes and ensuring the overlaid information is correct. Thus, it's no surprise if Apple is finding it hard to hit the ground with a product of similar quality in iOS 6.
    So many people are asking why did Apple remove Google Maps from iOS 6? The answer is simple. Providing location services is so important going into the future that Apple could not abandon this segment of the market to Google. It has to become a major player in mapping and the provision of location sensitive data and services. If that means Apple has to spend a few billion dollars and lag behind Google for a few years it's a price worth paying - mapocalypse now or armageddon latter, that was the choice.

Unseen 1983 #Apple commercial

We're all familiar with the iconic "1984" Apple TV commercial that only aired once during a break in the Superbowl. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked on the Macintosh team, has posted an unseen Apple promo for the Macintosh from 1983. It shares much in common with some modern Apple ads that feature people like Jonathan Ive eulogizing about their latest product.