An insight into Jobs…

People in the know speak about Jobs…

Recently on CNNMoney, 8 people gave a rare insight into Steve Jobs, and it makes enlightening reading – choice quotes are:

“He does it in a very black-and-white way, while the rest of the world gets caught up in the gray — or caught up in themselves.” – Andrea Jung

“It struck me that there wasn’t furniture good enough for Steve in the world. He’d rather have nothing if he couldn’t have perfection.” – Larry Ellison

“He set the performance standard for product thinking and product execution that all the rest of us should aspire to hit.” – Marc Andreessen

And this is why we don’t see a tablet from Apple – yet. Many tablets have been created – and rejected.

I’d rather have nothing at all, than a tablet-like product looking for a market to fit into.

Welcome back…

How many CEO’s get a standing ovation just for walking on stage, before they say a word?

Welcome back Steve, good health & good luck.

It’s all the more odd then to see the ever stranger posts by SJ’s alter ego, the bitter, twisted and let’s face it, just plain jealous Daniel Lyons at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

His posts are getting just cruel; and the way in which he keeps posting about Pogue & Gruber? he exhibits the behaviour of a stalker.

His angle on Jobs seems to portray him in an seemingly ever worse light, totally at odds with the YouTube clip above.

Maybe he has an axe to grind, maybe he’s having some sort of mid-life crisis. Whatever it is, he’s parading his psyche on full view – not sure I want to see that.

Safari 4 beta

Apple surprised everyone recently by announcing Safari 4.0. It’s released as a beta, put don’t let that put you off, it’s every bit as stable as the previous version.

Opinion is divided on some of the new features, with some people hating the fact that the tabs have moved to the top (as Chrome), the ‘Top Sites’ feature not being particularly useful, and the intrusion of ‘Cover Flow’ into bookmark & history browsing.

Other people love these features, but I think it’s a mixed bag. The feature that wowed me first was the ‘Top Sites’ feature, however this enthusiasm has faded as I realised I cannot seem to find it useful. Time will tell.

The feature that I hated at first was the ‘Cover Flow’ intrusion. I don’t like Cover Flow, I don’t use it in the OS, or iTunes, however it seemed to make more sense in Safari, because it’s better than what it replaces, and I’m warming to it.

The traditional way, by earching your history by looking at hundreds of similar named bits of text, is not user-friendly at all, however quickly skimming through thumbnails of those pages is much more intuitive.

Thurrott is having a bad time in finding anything to like in Safari 4 beta. This isn’t surprising, but he seems to blow lukewarm to cold on Apple, depending on whether he needs to up his site visits. I’m purposefully not linking to his article.

Everyone seems not to mention the speed. The stats seem incredible, and although they seem to be true and not exaggerated, (they have been independently tested and confirmed), the average surfer won’t see much difference.

The question for me remains, is why are Apple introducing more (albeit useful) eye-candy into Safari? It’s a browser, and shouldn’t it be lean, fast & mean?

It comes down to pushing the hardware. I do most of my personal surfing on a little iBook G4 and it’s beginning to show the strain. Apple need to keep selling their hardware, so they keep pushing the specs, to make you upgrade.

I’ve held off, because, like most I can’t afford to upgrade my hardware every time Apple releases new Mac’s.

I put it off for as long as possible, and I’m planning to purchase a MacBook when Snow Leopard is released.

It seems that Apple are heading towards Snow Leopard as the pinnacle of what they can achieve, after they threw away OS9 all those years ago.

Snow Leopard seems to be everything that Steve Jobs has been aiming for – a lean, mean OS, with no legacy code. A good foundation to build upon.

I predict that after Snow Leopard has been released, together with the hardware that’s designed to take full advantage of it, Steve Jobs will announce his retirement, with the knowledge that his job is done.

However it will be sad when SJ retires. To most new Mac users he has significant, but not irreplaceable influence.

When he does go, I’m sure that Apple will carry on, and be better off in the long run, but the Apple that I have grown up with (since System 6) – my Apple – will never be the same again.

Safari is all part of this, and it’s apparent that Apple are slowly putting the pieces together to make the Mac best tech-experience, bar none.

Macworld 2008…

So it’s been and gone. This year’s Macworld was amazing and slightly-less-than-amazing in equal amounts.

The problem that Steve Jobs faces now is that Apple announcements seriously affect the share price. This is partly Apple’s fault, but at one point in the past it was worse, because Apple attended various trade shows, the date of which was out of their control, and they had to have a ‘whizz-bang’ product at every one.

Now, at least, Apple has 2 main shows, the WWDC, which announces (generally) software and pro-hardware related items, and Macworld which (again generally) announce consumer hardware and software.

Notice that Apple announced the Mac Pro update, before Macworld because it doesn’t fit at Macworld. Notice also the ‘one-more-thing’ was just a musician, not a product.Steve has to back off from the hype that ‘one-more-thing’ has become famous for.

Product expectation at Apple from its users has now reached ridiculous levels and cannot be sustained in the long term, and believe me, Apple is in this for the long term. 

As I said, all this hype is Apple’s fault, but they can now be seen to be in the midst of managing these expectations.

On the one hand we have loyal users and bloggers in the media who whip everyone into a pre-event frenzy, but post-event are reasonable in their critique of the products announced.

However, on the other hand we have a group of rabid anti-Apple bloggers and journalists, who also whip everyone into a frenzy, but for different and more sinister ends.Witness the drivel that the likes of Enderle, Dvorak (who seems to have calmed down a bit), and the lesser known (globally at least, but well known in the UK), Jack Schofield who blogs for the guardian (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/).

They either bless us with faint praise (pretend to actually like Apple, but…), or (in Jack’s case) are still stuck in 1997 and are seemingly quiet when Apple has good news (no mention of their last stellar quarter), but all over us like a fly on sh*t when they can extract something negative out of say, the MacBookAir.

Which brings us to Macworld 2008.

Out of all the announcements the MacBookAir seems to be a ‘good’ product (not great). I think Apple purposely produce products like this that stir up differences in opinions.

Any publicity is good publicity Jack, so blog all you want please.

My stand-out product at Macworld however was the ‘Time Capsule’.

Of course, the likes of Jack Schofield remark that this product isn’t revolutionary, you can create it yourself with the right hardware and know-how.

Much as in the same way you can create anything that Apple produces, if you’re a narrow-minded Windows user with 10 years+ experience in how Windows and technology works.

But as we all know, that misses the point completely. Windows users like this cannot be reached with the ‘just plug it in and it works’ mind set.

The point here is that Time Machine ONLY works with Time Capsule. You can’t use Time Machine wirelessly with just any hardware.

This facility was present in builds of Leopard but was pulled at the last minute. Reasons for this are that Apple wants to sell a lot of Time Capsule’s, or that using third party hard drives just cannot be made to work reliably.

I think it’s a bit of both personally, but it comes back to the  ’just plug it in and it works’ angle.It goes beyond ‘plug-and-play’, because ‘plug-and-play’ actually means, ‘Install Drivers, Restart, Configure, Plug It In, Hope It Plays, If Not Try Again‘, at least on Windows, I know, I work next a Windows based IT department that do this daily.

I think I’ve just discovered a new buzz word for Windows –  INDRCPIIHIPINTA!

Don’t think it will catch on though, do you?

My thoughts on ‘thoughts on music’…

Steve Jobs’ unexpected ‘Thoughts On Music’ posting took not only the tech world, but the music world by surprise. If any one thing demonstrates the power that Apple have today it’s statements such as this. When Steve speaks, the world listens, when Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Rob Glaser, or other tech luminaries speak, the world barely glances in their direction.

The statement that Steve made, boils down to this:

For some reason, the wider media have assumed that the reason why the iPod and iTS combo have DRM built in to every item purchased from it, is because Apple desired it, and they desired it because it locks iTS software content, to iPod hardware. This results in the concept that the more content you buy from the iPod, the less likely you are to buy competing hardware.

This apparently isn’t the case.

iTS content is locked to the iPod, and does have the side effect of locking people in to the hardware, but what most, if not all, tech columnists fail to mention, is that this DRM is easily circumvented (and FULLY supported by Apple – no hacks required), by simply re-ripping the DRM’d tracks to CD and re-importing them in to your competing players’ software.

This sounds a little long-winded, but is a walk in the park compared to stripping the DRM from Microsoft’s DRM, which is all but impossible for the average user, and certainly isn’t documented in any way by Microsoft.

Somebody should really let the Norwegians in on this little secret, but I feel that they are perfectly aware of this already and are simply acting on behalf of a certain group of privately owned businesses – I wonder who they could be?

No, the reason why DRM exists on the iTS, is because the music companies demanded it, and not only demanded it’s inclusion, but also demanded that Apple actively fix it, should it be broken.

I myself (unlike the BBC), believe him (by and large).

There are a few questions however. If Steve is so against DRM, and the only reason he agreed to it was to get contracts for the iTS, then why does he not allow DRM-free music on the iTS from indie labels, who are quite happy to give contracts out (such as for eMusic), right now, with no DRM in sight?

Who knows. It could be that the contracts that were signed by the big four, specifically exclude DRM-free music such as this, but even I admit that I’m reaching here.

Or, more likely, Steve was quite happy to go with DRM-free music, but when it was forced on to him by the big four, he saw the potential to sell more iPods and could not turn it down. Don’t forget Apple is a public company and has a duty to it’s shareholders – you cannot turn down the chance of increased profits no matter what your principles.

So, I think that the reason why Steve did this was to clear up the blame for DRM, and to point out to certain European Marxists that it ‘aint Apple’s fault – they need to talk to the big four.

And also, as a little, tiny, eeny-weeny side effect (if this results in DRM being abandoned), it also completely destroys, from top to bottom and inside-out, Microsoft’s entire business plan.

Sorry Bill, what can we say, except ‘whoops’?