I’ve been looking for an alternative to WordPress for some time now, and one of the problems has been the seemingly impossible task of making this blog port to another service.
I don’t want to simply throw away 2 years+ of thoughts, rantings and views so I’m glad to announce that the new url for this blog is:
http://techinertia.posterous.com/
Posterous is a great service that not only allows you to import a blog from another service, it allows posting by email, which for me is a great thing.
Their glorious leader comments on Google – ‘we’ll beat them, someday’.
Way back in Apple’s past, when money was tight, market share was none-existent, mind-share even less, the Apple-faithful and the wider tech-press looked to Apple for a solution to their woes.
Just what was Steve Jobs and Apple going to do to stop the downward spiral?
Steve’s answer surprised everyone, and in hindsight it’s the approach that has, in part, turned the company around, and secured their future – Steve Jobs said:
“For Apple to win, Microsoft doesn’t have to lose.”
Most of the Apple faithful balked at this comment, did they here that right? What was Steve Jobs on? Did he really know what he was doing? Surely Microsoft has to be crushed, stamped upon and erased from history so that Apple can ‘win’.
But Steve was right. One of the problems with Apple, was that they were obsessed with Microsoft, and it damaged everything they did, every effort, every promotion was measured against the impossible goal of toppling a giant.
What Steve Jobs did is refocused the company, allowed them to say to themselves, “it’s perfectly OK to have a small market share, there is room in this industry for everyone.” With that approach Apple could concentrate on what they were good at, and measure their success against their own watermark, not somebody elses.
Which brings us back to Ballmer. Wouldn’t it just be a breath of fresh air if Ballmer said:
“We don’t worry about Google – we relish competition, and there’s room in this industry for everyone. We don’t have to win all the time.”
I think the whole tech industry would breath a sigh of relief that at last, Microsoft was happy with it’s lot and concentrated on creating great products for us all.
Continuing the trend of leeching borrowing off Gruber’s ideas, his assessment of the iPad chimed with my thoughts as well.
Computers. Gruber thinks he’s seen the future of computers, and it is the iPad. “It’s really, really good,” he gushed. If you are sitting on a couch and you need a computer, most people are going to reach for the iPad, not the MacBook Pro. And that puts Apple into uncharted territory. For the first time since the original Mac replaced the Apple II, it has two overlapping computer products. And although it took a few years for the corpse to grow cold, the Apple II basically died the day the Mac arrived.
A very insighful observation which I think speaks of the future, not the present.
As Gruber points out, this is the same situation all those years ago when the Mac and the Apple II were side by side. The Apple II back then was the serious workhorse computer and the Mac was the novelty, the weird computer people didn’t take seriously.
The big difference now however is the iPad rides on the back of the success and investment of the iPhone. The AppStore and all its developers are primed and ready to launch the iPad with apps that just weren’t there when the Mac was released.
The Mac was an eventual success, the iPad with its thousands of apps? you get the idea.
I firmly believe that my children will be using the descendants of the iPad in their Graphic Design jobs, with fully envisaged multi-touch environments, instead of the mouse-driven Mac we all use now.
The big question for me is, what will Windows look like then?
