Archive for June, 2008
The Daily Show Gives Us Some Insight Into The McCain Camp
June 26th, 2008
This is why I love The Daily Show:
How Microsoft Is Pushing Apple into the Enterprise
June 23rd, 2008
To date, Apple hasn’t made much of a move into large enterprises. Dell, HP, IBM, and others still dominate that space. However, enterprise adoption of the Mac platform is increasingly important to Apple if they want to continue to grow their market share. After all, the enterprise is where the big money is when it comes to computing. So, it’s only logical that Apple wants into this space but their push into it is surprisingly being spurred by longtime rival Microsoft.
Apple has realized that Microsoft’s inability to support the Office suite on the Mac is holding back Mac sales in the enterprise. Even the most recent version of Office 2008 lags behind it’s 2007 Windows counterpart. For example, Entourage lacks server synchronization of tasks and notes (on the Mac, these are stored on the local machine and not the server), a feature that many office workers use since tasks and notes sync with their Blackberries.
Personally, I’ve refused to use Office 2008 on my Mac because of compatibility issues with its Windows counterpart and instead run Office 2007 in Parallels. Setups like this are an ideal scenario for Microsoft since the user pays for both the Windows OS as well as Office whereas on the Mac, the user would only be paying for Office. However, this additional cost and the related complexity has to be hurting Mac sales. In other words, having an inferior product on the Mac has no downside for Microsoft (it actually helps their revenue) but has a large impact on Apple.
Apple’s big response which hasn’t garnered much media attention is in part Snow Leopard, the next version of their OS which will naively support Microsoft Exchange. In theory, users won’t need Entourage anymore since Apple’s Mail, iCal, and Address Book will directly integrate with Exchange (we’ll see about those tasks and notes).
All this sounds well and good but Apple’s going to have to do more than simply support Exchange in their current lineup. Outlook is incredibly powerful, much more so than Mail and enterprises often value power over simplicity. Pages, Apple’s word processing software pales in comparison to Word, as does Numbers, a competitor to Microsoft’s Excel. It’s going to take more than simple Exchange integration to convince enterprises that the Mac has a software lineup that can go head to head with Microsoft’s Office.
Apple’s other enterprise battle will be the iPhone which will have to beat out Blackberry. For that, they’ve taken a similar approach to Snow Leopard: Exchange support.
Long term, Apple and Microsoft will battle it out for the office desktop but don’t expect Microsoft to go anywhere. I think they’ll start focusing more on backend services that power enterprises like Exchange, something Apple probably isn’t interested in; at least not yet.
Sphere: Related ContentDear Thoughtless Masses: The New iPhone is More Expensive Than the Old One
June 9th, 2008
Steve Jobs today got up in front of a crowd of 5200 adoring fans and announced to the world the new 3G iPhone. He claimed that Apple has listened to the marketplace and decided to make the new iPhone more affordable and quoted a new price of $199 USD for the 8GB version (the old iPhone initially debuted at $599 and then dropped to $399). What Steve, and his adoring 5200 fans, have failed to note is that the price of the phone has actually increased given AT&T’s new voice and data plans tied to the device. The base AT&T iPhone price used to be $59.99 but according to a press release AT&T put out today, the new base rate plan will be $30 for unlimited data with voice plans started at $39.99 a month, an increase of $10 a month for the cheapest plan. Carry the $10 price increase out across two years and you’re now paying an additional $240 to AT&T which means the phone actually costs you an extra $40 over the two years. What’s even worse is that this price increase is tied to your phone plan and locked into a two year contract. At least if the price increase was tied to the device itself, there could be a chance that device could drop in price in the future. So much for more affordable.
I’m an Apple fan. I have a MacBook Pro at home with a big Cinema Display and use a MacBook Pro at work with a Cinema Display. And like any good Apple fan, I recommend Apple products to friends and family. However, Apple’s purposeful obfuscation of the new iPhone price is unacceptable. For a company that challenges itself and its consumers to think different, Apple appears to have joined the rest of corporate America by burying their real pricing and instead has put on a dog and pony show with the hope no one notices the reality of the announcement.
The fact more people haven’t realized this doesn’t surprise me. When it comes to Apple, the media and blogosphere seems to be more and more of an echo chamber with the attitude that Apple can do no wrong.
UPDATE [6/10]: I forgot to mention that Exchange support (ActiveSync) will be an additional $15/month and that unlimited text messaging (SMS) is no longer included in the plan (that’s extra as well).
Sphere: Related ContentAmazon.com Is Offline
June 6th, 2008
Amazon.com, my favorite e-commerce site where you can buy just about anything is offline. I’m not talking about the all to common Twitter outage these days. I’m talking about a cold down for the count outage. No pretty “we’re building awesome new stuff” maintenance page, no Bloglines plumber, just a very direct Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.
Ouch!
Sphere: Related ContentLos Angeles Suing Time Warner Cable For Awful Service
June 6th, 2008
This is the last I write about Time Warner Cable for at least a couple weeks, I promise. According to the LA Times, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has filed a lawsuit against Time Warner Cable claiming the company made false and misleading statements to subscribers and failed to provide service levels outlined in their franchise cable agreement with the city.
Maybe there is justice in the corporate world. The big question is should the city win, will the subscribers see any money out of all this or will we continue to pay outrageous prices for sub standard service?
Sphere: Related ContentComcast One-Ups Time Warner Cable
June 5th, 2008
Not to be outdone by rival Time Warner Cable, Comcast has announced their new bandwidth cap policy and it makes even less sense than Time Warner Cable’s. Instead of charging customers for overages, Comcast will simply scale back network throughput to customers who use a lot of bandwidth. At least Time Warner Cable’s tax is arguably in place to pay for infrastructure enhancements. Comcast’s strategy is to slow down power users and drive them from their Internet service. I’m not sure alienating power users is a good business strategy. The power users are the ones that the aunts, uncles, grandmas, and grandpas go to for advise when selecting an ISP. Since when is alienating influencers a sound business strategy?
These companies just don’t seem to get it. Increased bandwidth usage by virtually every subscriber is inevitable. Digital delivery is here to stay and bandwidth usage is only going to increase. Instead of trying to keep users on their current infrastructure and punishing them when their use causes the system to groan, Comcast and Time Warner Cable should be focusing on updating their infrastructure like their competitors, the telcos, are doing.
Sphere: Related ContentTime Warner Cable Taxes Bandwidth: You Lose, They Lose
June 3rd, 2008
On the same day Starbucks rolled out free Wi-Fi to customers (purchase required), Time Warner Cable also rolled out Internet bandwidth overage fees. The two companies actions couldn’t be more different. Starbucks has realized that instead of charging for Internet access, an annoyance for users, free Wi-Fi will attract more customers and keep them in their stores increasing the chance of purchases. Time Warner has taken the opposite approach by taxing users who consume more bandwidth than Time Warner Cable likes. Their executive vice president of advanced technology, Kevin Leddy, explained that he believes “it’s the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure.”
I don’t use Time Warner Cable for Internet access but they do provide me with cable TV for a modest monthly price of $103.11 (digital HD with HBO is expensive — don’t let their ads tell you otherwise). I decided to figure out how much this new tax would cost me if I used them for Internet access given my current bandwidth usage.
Checking my Tomato router logs, I downloaded 44.36 GB and uploaded 33.22 GB in May 2008 which reflects a pretty typical month for me. A large majority of this bandwidth is due to my Vudu box which is constantly transferring movies over a peer-to-peer network (it’s legal of course) but a significant amount of it is also probably from iTunes purchases and watching TV shows at ABC.com and Hulu.
Time Warner Cable’s new fees reflect total amount transferred (in my case 77.58 GB for the month). Their new pricing is $29.95 for a paltry 768 Kbps transfer rate and a 5 GB monthly limit and $54.90 for a much faster 15 Mbps with a 40 GB limit and $1/GB over the limit. I’m currently an AT&T High Speed Elite subscriber for which I pay $34.99/month and get close to a 6.0 Mbps downstream with a 768 Kbps upstream with no known limit. Let’s compare that to Time Warner Cable’s fees:
- AT&T High Speed Internet Elite: cost per month $34.99
- TWC 768 Kbps Package: $29.95 + $72.58 overage fee = $102.53
- TWC 15 Mbps Package: $54.90 + $37.58 overage fee = $92.48
With those prices, AT&T is almost a third cheaper any way you slice it.
It’s too bad Time Warner Cable is moving in this direction. Digital distribution is really starting to hit the mainstream with devices like the Vudu, AppleTV, and Roku’s Netflix Player. I fired up iTunes and selected a random movie, 27 Dresses which is 1.25 GB. Do you really want to have to think about paying your ISP an extra $1.25 when you rent a movie for $3.99 (that’s almost a 24% tax which would be even higher for an older movie)? Hopefully we’ll see consumers leave Time Warner Cable for other ISPs and Time Warner Cable can continue to deliver sub par cable TV until they find themselves obsolete when everything is delivered over IP.
Sphere: Related ContentUniversal Studios Burns While Fox Advertises Theme Park
June 1st, 2008
I woke up this morning to news of a huge fire at Universal Studios which six hours after it started is still burning. The size of the fire is pretty scary considering they have 300+ firefighters fighting it in the middle of a giant backlot. Luckily, injuries appear to be minimal except for one firefighter who has been taken to a nearby hospital.
After reading about the fire online, I came across the local LA Fox affiliate who was streaming live coverage online from their helicopter. I loaded up the site and was watching the video when I glanced at a Universal Studios ad to the side of the video and realized the page was covered in them! A slightly awkward placement if you ask me :).
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