Apple named Marketer of the Decade
Apple, which looks
poised to become an over $80 billion dollar per year corporation, and whose iPad may make it one of the
top three best selling personal computer vendors, has been named
Marketer of the Decade.
This award comes not for its technological prowess during the first decade of the 21st century, nor for beating back the Microsoft juggernaut and carving out tremendous sales volume and revenue, but for producing a decade of memorable TV ads:
- Dancing animations in iPod commercials
- Mac-vs-PC commercials
- more
As a telling testimony to Apple's success, yesterday
Microsoft's reigning Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, has resigned.
During this decade which ends with his 4-year reign, Microsoft Windows
flaws in Windows 7 and earlier versions have given rise to bank-account draining malware, Apple took over the mobile computing lead from Microsoft for first MP3 players then smart phones and finally hand held computers, and
Apple & Google joined Mozilla as the leaders of open standards setters for the world wide web by creating the HTML 5 standard and strongly backing SVG graphics and MPEG-4 videos while Microsoft meandered on the sidelines trying to catch up on HTML 4 and protects its waning proprietary web technologies (VML, ActiveX, etc.).
Throughout this decade, the Apple brand has been anything but obscure. None could argue honestly that it was.
If you use sales as your yardstick,
Apple is now 25% bigger than Microsoft and two times bigger than Intel. Apple has become the massive dynamic force of the computing field in the 21st century. Its ads have helped connect its leading technology with consumers.
That technology has made it a huge success. If people did not know about it, they could not have bought it. Word of mouth has helped it get the word out, but TV commercials have too.
Labels: apple, marketing, wins
friend bought an Apple TV and he really loves it
A friend of mine got himself an Apple TV as soon as the $99 model came out a couple of weeks ago. He really raves about it.
He said he still cannot believe he is watching smooth high-definition video over the Internet. Apparently, he really enjoys it.
Labels: apple, television
Apple stock prices reach record high for 5th day in a row
Bloomberg reported that
Apple has had a week of record-breaking days. People who own Apple stock are probably smiling a lot this week.
Glance at the 1-year stock charts and you will see they smile pretty much all the time.
Labels: apple, statistics, wins
New Software updates from Apple and they are huge
Apple released an update to OS X 10.6 and the iPhone & iPod Touch this week. How big are they?
They are almost half a gigabyte. This is going to be one very long, slow download and update process.
Looks like Mac owners with iPhones are going to have their computers tied up for a number of hours sometime this week.
Remember the old days when the operating system just occupied a few tracks on a 113 kilobyte floppy disk?
On the other hand, the state of the art for OS X technology has advanced another notch this week.
Labels: apple, iphone, macintosh, macosx, software
another computer user gives up on the Windows fray, joins the Mac flock
Someone had a poignant yet sensible story about how they deeply regretted their decision to save two hundred bucks up front by buying a PC running Windows instead of an Apple Macintosh.
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/05/yet-another-entry-in-the-great-macpc-debate/
After spending hundreds of dollars and losing at least a couple days' wages they are now enjoying their Mac and very happy for a change.
Labels: macintosh, mswin, snafus
Safari 5 has shipped with HTML 5 and many new features included
It is very safe to say that Apple has leapfrogged the competition these days with some crucial,
new features built into Safari 5:
- HTML 5 - giving it more security, greater interoperability, offline storage/validation for forms,
- faster JavaScript (faster language, faster JSON, etc.)
- faster page fetching (prefetches DNS addresses, etc.)
- built-in developer tools for diagnosing mistakes and things that are slowing performance, etc.
- closed captioning of video for handicapped people (or those in noisy environments)
- flexibility in choice of search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo are supported out of the box
- means for developers to quickly create Safari extensions visually and a Safari Developer Support program from Apple
If the Extension Builder is good, it might have leapfrogged what Firefox currently offers. Firefox has a way that makes it possible to create powerful extensions which users just love.
Firefox does not yet have an official way to make that process easy for developers, however. They have been working on at least one for a while. But it is not clear if it will get the nod from Mozilla management and get included as a standard part of the web browser.
Performance is usually an issue in web browsers these days, especially in JavaScript based rich applications like web mail, social web 2.0 portals, and so forth. Apple made improvements in a number of areas (DNS, JSON, JavaScript, web workers) that will speed this up.
Apple is making fast implementations of existing standards, not making wildly incompatible ones and this is a nice touch on their part that is very consistent with how they operate most of the time.
Labels: apple, application, browsing, html, safari, software, web
Firefox adds client for its browser to iPhone
Mozilla said they will be releasing a new iPhone app that gives you convenient access to the bookmark keywords and titles you have saved in Firefox.
The pages will then be rendered by the Safari web browser in iPod/iPhone/iPad, since Apple insists on the Safari WebKit web view pane being the only web rendering component in the system.
Understandable, because if you look at the statistics, you would not want Opera or IE based rendering components in the system because they are unsafe even in their own apps. Someday things might change. But it does not look like it so far.
This new app could be a great convenience and a nice way for Firefox users to save themselves a lot of typing effort on iPhone when they browse the web.
Labels: apple, application, browsing, firefox, iphone, software, web
Tech blogs slipping into murky world of underworld crime?
I do not think all tech blogs are bad, but lets face it, some of them do not have the ethics or code of conduct of 20th century journalism institutions. So it is sad to read almost back to back articles about how reporters are being laid off at some of these warning institutions, while their nouveau replacements at blogs have sunk to new lows.
Take for instance the case of a tech blog that allegedly paid $10,000 for a prototype phone device a third party claimed it "found" and must have been lost by the owner.
The blogging company, rather than returning it, dissected it.
The Guardian, a UK news organization,
analyzed that conduct from the standpoint of the California legal code. It sounds like that was an illegal way to handle lost merchandise.
And that assumes it was lost and not stolen - in which case we all know a lot of additional laws that were broken by virtue of watching California cop shows and reading the news.
There are some really good bloggers out there. Just like there is some really good software out there. But there is some software that puts the integrity of your computer, privacy, and data in jeopardy. Likewise, patronizing some unprincipled news outlets instead of the more respectable ones jeopardizes the quality of news you will be receiving in the future.
Labels: apple, blogging, california, crime, iphone, theft
grammar checker in Mac OS X 10.6 could use some work
I have the latest version of
Mac OS X, Snow Leopard (10.6). Its system-wide grammar checker is a nice touch.
However, I find it not nearly as good yet as the one that has been in Microsoft Word for over a decade. I am puzzled that the one in OS X does not recognize very common, simple sentence structures. I am not complaining too much, though. It pointed out a mistake I made in this short post.
The system-wide spelling checker on the Mac, on the other hand, is extremely nice. I hope the grammar checker catches up soon. It is a harder thing to do, but not that hard. Parsers and dictionaries have been around for ages.
Speaking of which, if you ever want an extremely complete and extremely intelligent dictionary for some program, take a look at
WordNet - it is amazing.
Labels: macintosh, macosx
Shocking discovery about Windows made; expect Windows prices to be slashed in future
An astute analyst on the Internet noted recently that the
cost of Microsoft Windows is only about $0.27. Microsoft has charged a premium for MS-Windows system for years.
For verification, look at the Microsoft Windows license agreement that came with your computer. It clearly states it is only worth the price of the media it came on. That media is only worth a few cents.
Therefore, in light of the actual cost of Microsoft Windows, the aging software vendor is going to need to cut its prices quite a bit.
This could lead to prices on PC's tumbling by ten or twenty percent. Most PCs have been cranking out the same hardware design for years, so there is little to them but the price of the hardware components.
Windows has not changed much either since 2001. Now that Microsoft has made back all of its minor software development investment for Windows, the price of Windows PCs can be deeply slashed.
It turns out that many PC hardware makers also charge a premium for their systems. Actual cost of their components is far less than the price they charge for products. These companies do not design their own CPUs or system software. They just sell Windows; in many cases, extremely old versions of it, it turns out.
This opens the door for deep cuts on their part. Perhaps 20% or more. Combined with the fat in the hidden fees tacked on by Microsoft Windows, the price of these systems might be ripe to drop by 30% or 35%.
While the value of antiques increases with age, aging hardware designs and old software clearly does not. This is a huge opportunity for a "give back" to the PC-buyer community.
Labels: computing, economics, humor, mswin, technology
