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?
Gruber speaks here on one of my favourite topics, Apple’s venerable MobileMe service.
Mobile Me. It’s great for syncing your iPhone to your Mac, but what’s the point of Mobile Me’s Web apps? If you’re at your computer, you use Mail and Calendar. If you’re out and about, you’re supposed to use the iPhone. Gruber has a sneaking suspicion Apple put apps up on the Web because “that’s what the kids were talking about.” It’s like the lounge singer, he says, who grows long sideburns after Elvis Presley arrives.
I think the point he’s missed is that MobileMe’s web services are for when you don’t have your computer with you, or you don’t have an iPhone, but I take his point – that doesn’t happen very often now, why would you leave home without your iPhone?
I’ve written long into the night concerning my love-hate relationship with Apple’s syncing service.
I now feel that I can recommend it, however it still seems as a whole, to be lacking a certain cohesion.
Certainly when adding up all the separate parts, it is very good value, but there are still some gaps.
A decent notes sync for a start. I won’t go into the shortcomings, and half-assed attempt by Apple to give us notes syncing, but it’s certainly not up to scratch.
The workaround I have is to keep all the notes as text files on my iDisk, and then edit them on my Macs with a text editor, and on the iPhone with an Office app that allows creating, editing and savings files to your iDisk over wifi & 3G.
Back To My Mac that actually works. I can’t get through my workplace’s arcane Windows server, so BTMM is a non-starter for me. I don’t see why it has to be this way. As a back-up I use the free ‘logmein‘ website, so I can log into any Mac on my network, remotely, with no configuration whatsoever – it just works. Why BTMM needs special configuration of the router is beyond me. Actually it’s not, I understand what need to be done, I just don’t see the reason why it needs to be done.
Coming back to the cohesion problem, MobileMe seems to be a good range of separate ideas, but they don’t gel together.
You have the web apps, the iPhone apps and the Mac apps. Some sync together (iCal, Address Book), others do not (Notes). Some exist on one platform (Notes on the iPhone and in Mac Mail), but not the other (no web apps for Notes).
To me ‘the cloud’ concept isn’t clearly being followed through. Apple need to have 3 clear clients:
Each app needs to be comparable to that platform, so if you had the iWork app ‘Pages’ on the Mac, then there is a comparable app on the other devices (as feature-rich as the platform allows).
Any new app is released on all platforms simultaneously – that is absolutely vital – true cloud computing, your content, anytime, any situation, anywhere.
And most importantly – they all need instant sync between each other, pulling from the cloud.
That is a MobileMe service I’d be willing to pay for – maybe even a bit more for.
