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The Loop: “During the question period, Ballmer said Microsoft’s tablet will be made with Intel processors and Windows 7, instead of its mobile Windows platform.

“We’re coming,” he said. “We’re coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows.””

Sigh. Isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result? The reason the iPad is doing so well is that it's an entirely new take on how to interact with a device in this form factor, from the UI, to the application provisioning, to the administration (or more specificaly, the lack thereof).

A Windows based tablet inherits all of the faults of the Windows desktop environment. It's the user's responsibility to manage security, to manage anti-virus, to manage a firewall and so on. This will definitely appeal to the enterprise market with complete mature device management based on Active Directory, WSUS and internal software distribution tools.

But this does not represent the requirements of the general public. Up until now, they've been following the IT direction for the simple reason that it's what they were exposed to most of the time and learning how to manage an entirely new environment, be it OS X or Linux represented a serious investment of time and energy. The iPad does away with all of this with a UI that is immediately usable without any appreciable training requirement and zero management overhead.

The advantage of a Windows tablet environment is that it will be more "open" and flexible in that there is no gatekeeper on the software front, but for the general public, that's not necessarily a good thing since most Windows applications will not be optimized for this form factor since the mass of the Windows market is about the desktop. Which will make for an even worse user experience than Windows on the desktop.

So it's a given that there will be Windows and Android tablets for christmas, it's going to be interesting to see just how well they will sell into the general public. With any luck there will be at least a few credible competitors to keep Apple on its toes and pushing the envelope.

Next gen iPad?

There's been some rumors that Apple will release a new iPad with camera(s) for christmas, but unless another tablet maker hits one out of the park and forces Apple's hand, I suspect that we'll be seeing a repeat of the iPhone annual release model. iPads in the spring, iPhones in the summer, iPods in the fall seems to be a fairly solid structure at the moment that lends itself well to predictable internal development cycles and logistics development so that there aren't multiple massive product changes hitting the market simultaneously.

So then : what mystery product does Apple have slotted for the winter release slot?

I love stuff live this - it demonstrates just how disconnected the analyst community can be from the people that are actually out purchasing things. This one comes regarding the iPhone 4 launch and the associated availability issues.

“Consumers, questioning Apple’s supply chain management capability, have started looking for alternative devices." says Tina Teng at iSuppli

Uhhh - no, I doubt seriously that consumers are questioning Apple's supply chain management capability. Consumers are going to buy something that they've decided that they want and may be upset that there isn't one available to buy. In which case they are going to make a decision to either wait or buy something else and buy nothing at all. The consumer doesn't give a flying f**k about the supply chain, they only care about the net impact on their personal choices. Investors on the other hand are interested since these issues will place a ceiling on how many iPhones can be made and therefore sold. But investors and consumers are not interchangeable definitions.

Now she does go on to say that consumers are not satisfied with regards to the current response to reported reception issues with the iPhone 4, but that has absolutely nothing to do with supply chain management.

Sigh - why oh why is Apple doing this to me?

One after the other, they're launching products that I really want over a very short time period. First the iPad, then the iPhone 4 and now a Mac Mini upgrade with all of the features I've been waiting for: built-in HDMI, easy access to the memory, even more elegant design.

There's only one thing really wrong with this picture and that's the European pricing. In France, the new Mini starts at 799€, whereas the US price is $699. Even when you consider that the 799€ is taxes included, the difference is still striking. It looks like European customers are really getting the short end of the stick again, but this time it's even more flagrant. At least in previous iterations, the published price aligned with the dollar number, but over by 100€ out of the gate is really painful.

Here's a quick overview of the price spread for the entry level Mini and the server model across a few different markets:

I just noticed an interesting thing with my iPad and iPhone that are often connected to my MacBook Pro 13". It appears that only one USB port can be in full charging mode and that the order that you connect the devices is important.

If I connect the iPhone followed by the iPad, the iPad will not charge (or rather it goes into the trickle charge mode with the standard USB power draw). However, if I connect the iPad first followed by the iPhone, both devices will charge just fine.

There seems to be some kind of internal power switching decisions being made by the MacBook that will allow the 10W draw on one port, but it seems that the iPhone requests more power as well. Interestingly, external USB powered hard disks do not provoke the same behaviour. I can connect a hard disk, followed by the iPad and it will charge just fine.

In mulling over the various critical articles about the iPad I've seen that the discussion seems to have become an oversimplified view of the world that reduces the choices to creation or consumption. This binary view of things splits the computing landscape into the camps of traditional PCs, be they Macs, Windows or Linux PCs, and this new type of device like the iPad and smartphones, driven primarily by tactile input.

There are a few missing pieces in this argument though, notably that the primary purpose of the majority of home computer purchases are "to get on the Internet". The Internet means many different things to many different people, but for people outside of IT, it is a means being able to find and communicate information. There any many ways of communicating in this environment. For some it's being able to keep in touch via email, for others, it's using a consolidated tool like FaceBook. Real-time chat and VOIP offer affordable means of maintaining contact with family and friends dispersed about the world.

The vast majority of people will never open an IDE, will never parse lines of code, will never do any kind of document management more complicated than keeping a household budget on a spreadsheet or a list of addresses for a wedding. Their preoccupation with computers is as tools to accomplish tasks that are the digital replacements of what went before. Mail by email, iPhoto & Picasa for the box of photos and negatives, Excel for the graph paper, scanned PDF files of their important documents and so on. The more creatively inclined will use tools like Garageband and Brushes or possibly even applications as complex as Photoshop. In almost all cases, they will use one tool for the job, whether it's truly adapted for the task at hand or not simply because it's the tool at hand.

The common thread here is that these people are actively creating, managing and interacting with information. They use tools to do so and the underlying component that enables these tools is the computer. The difference is that the computer itself is not a useful tool. It is simply the enabler and the interface required - it's the toolbox and the work table. The difference here is that unlike most toolboxes, this one can be exceedingly complicated, cranky and requires considerable maintenance. For most people this aspect of their toolbox is not particularly useful to them, nor productive. When the toolbox breaks, it's exceedingly frustrating since their knowledge of how to use the tools is not necessarily applicable to fixing the toolbox itself. I could list off a pile of stories from my tech support days dealing with highly educated telecom engineers that can design protocols and switches that couldn't grasp the basics of their desktop computers. (Including those that unplugged it every night since nobody had thought to point out the Shutdown menu item...)

The appeal of the iPad is that it raises the bar in several unique ways:

• accessibility - it's always on, just asleep so it's immediately available when you need it.
• performance - the tactile interface reacts immediately - you are manipulating your information directly without mediation by a keyboard or a mouse.
• reliability - the iPhone OS, coupled with a curated application environment, is an exceedingly stable environment. In a worst case, troubleshooting consists simply of a reboot.

This is what many people have been looking for from computers for a while now: they want the tools, but without the bother of the toolbox that can misbehave or requires any kind of significant care and feeding. On the performance point, the distance between, "I want to..." and having the tool available is exceedingly small - home button and swipe to wake, tap on mail and I'm there.

Mediation and limitations

The other difference is the issue of mediation: the presence of the toolbox in the classic computing model is always front and center. Windows displayed on the screen are full of administrative trivia required by the interface. The iPad is magical in the sense that when you enter an app, you aren't opening another drawer on your toolbox, but rather the toolbox transforms itself into the tool in question. It becomes the screwdriver, the hammer, the vise-grips, the paint brush or whatever you need to work with. There is no visual clutter required by the toolbox itself.

The iPad is just the first salvo in the ability to bring these things to a larger public, without imposing the overhead that comes with traditional "computing". There is a considerable learning curve associated with getting computers to do what you want them to do. There is also considerable housekeeping required with any current desktop operating system, that is more or less demanding and potentially opaque to anyone who is not a "computer person".

Currently the environment is limited by the tools that are available to cross that creative/consumption divide, but much also depends on your definition of creation. Many in the IT world are still living in a document-centric world where anything that is not encapsulated in a convenient block of bits identified as a file is not considered with the same weight as other forms of information. I've had clients that refused to accept auto-generated html web site as documentation (accessible via local browsing) because it was a collection of little pieces, and not a "deliverable" since it wasn't all in a single Microsoft Office file format.

The shift from a document centric model to an information centric model

If your definition of creation is limited to creating files in Office formats then it's true that the iPad with the current application suite is not the best tool for the job. But we are moving towards a more information centric model, where information lives on servers in various forms like editable pages.

An interesting point in a recent Paul Thurrott article about the iPad not being useful in a business environment highlights a very specific world-view that is the outgrowth of the current PC model. He sees knowledge workers as people who's product is documents and everything about the Microsoft model is based on this point of view. Even their forays into the web world with things like Sharepoint are mostly just a fancy file server that uses http as the transport protocol and adds some additional metadata as a layer on top of the documents.

I disagree that as a knowledge worker my work consists of passing around files and commenting on them directly using Microsoft Office. The real work is done in my head, and the output is the synthesis of this reflection. The exchange of MS Office documents does happen to be the workflow in a number of business environments, but much of this is shifting towards better automated tools, where the document itself is generated by in-house tools that are used via web interfaces and backed by dynamic database applications. In these cases, the iPad is fully capable of participating with the other types of computing devices.

Going further, much of the job of a knowledge worker is ingesting massive amounts of information from various sources - consumption, if you will, but not the passive consumption of watching a film, but the active integration of new information in order to produce something new. In my workflow, the something new starts off life as a text file in SimpleNote, and may go directly from there to a message or a blog post, or it may go back to a computer for more intensive treatment of the presentation, but the core of the creation is happening on my iPad.

Just a quick note that there is currently a problem with the Calibre content server (version 0.70) publishing directly to Stanza 3.0. I'm currently unable to download any new books from the catalog interface (although the web page interface works). As always, doing two big upgrades at the same time isn't a good idea.

It looks like I'm not the only one, and its already been fixed in the codebase, and just waiting on the next release.

Update: And yes, the 0.71 release does fix the problem - all back to normal now.

Yay!

I just saw this update come along today on the iPhone, and I was worrying that with the Amazon purchase of Lexcycle, Stanza would be left to die quietly. Unfortunately, my wife took the iPad today to show off at her office, so I can't check it out right away.

A few of the very useful tidbits that make it (to me) more useful than iBooks or the Kindle is the fact that this version will also let you send it ePub files, so ePubs on your DropBox account or received by mail are importable directly without having to resort to iTunes.

Stanza remains the reference for dealing with non-DRM'd and Fictionwise ePub files, with useful features like linking directly to a Calibre Library, plus I find that the Stanza' metadata management tools are much more useful than those offered by iBooks or Kindle.

Other new features that I've found on the iPhone version is the ability to send an ePub file via mail, plus some other sharing options for Twitter and Facebook that just pass on where you're at in the book. The groups section now handles personally defined collections, and auto-generated groups based on meta-data type tags. One things that's missing still is automatic handling of series as a group and ordering them correctly.

Given that we now have a common version for both the iPad and the iPhone, something like the WhisperSync auto tracking of reading progress would be really nice since I do tend to switch back and forth between devices depending on where I am. I think that this could be implemented fairly easily by linking to an external service like DropBox to store and propagate a status file.

Taiwan cab drivers video chat and watch TV while cruising at Computex - Engadget Galleries"

I think these photos demonstrate clearly why mobile video chat is pretty much a silly idea. On the other hand, it would certainly go a long way towards encouraging people to trim their nose hair a little more frequently...

On further reflection, the iPad would be even worse since it's more likely to be held in your lap, making the angle even less flattering.

Wow - there's a huge pile of confusion in this article. A little judicious use of Google to fact check before writing would be in keeping for someone so well informed about search technologies... Is The iPad A Disappointment? Depends When You Sold Your AOL Stock. - John Battelle's Searchblog I hardly know where to start on this, so I'm just going to try and hit a few of the highlights. First off, his kick off point:

Sorry Apple fanboys, but the use case is missing, even if the thing is gorgeous and kicks ass for so many other reasons. Until the computing UI includes culturally integrated voice recognition and a new approach to browsing (see #4), the "iTablet" is just Newton 2.0. Of course, the Newton was just the iPhone, ten years early and without the phone bit....and the Mac was just Windows, ten years before Windows really took hold, and Next was just ....oh never mind.

If Apple had announced the iPad first, then I agree that there is a high likelihood that it would have ended up being another Newton, despite the elegance of the execution. Why? Because a fully touch enabled interface was too much of a change. But we now have almost 3 years of people using iPhones, with simple and effective advertising that offer an education in how to use this kind of interface. So we've already tackled the worst of the learning curve associated with a new technology and UI.

But where he's really out there is his mythical use case. It seems that he has such as specific view of how people use and interact with technology that he's lost touch with how the "Normals" use their computers. Most people use their computers as communications conduits: mail, chat, web and light document work.

Culturally contextual voice recognition and such are still a long ways out and despite everything, not ideal for manipulating on screen objects. Until we have some kind of true AI for interpreting speech, it's just not going to happen. And the horsepower required will mean that it certainly won't show up in mobile devices as their first port of call.

Two million sold in two months would seem to say that it's filling some use cases out there.

What I missed, at least in my initial prediction, was how entirely hermetic and "un-weblike" the iPad would end up being. Like many others, I was surprised at how complete Apple's disdain is for traditional computing models - including its own Macintosh. The iPad would not be an open development environment - instead it adopted the iPhone model of command and control. The iPad would not allow you to run Mac applications - only iPad/iPhone specific apps approved by Apple would work, and that meant no Microsoft Office, thank you very little. The iPad wouldn't even let you cut and paste - an innovation Apple pioneered - and worst of all, it seemed, the iPad wouldn't use Flash - a proxy, as it were, for "the rest of the web that Steve Jobs didn't quite like very much."

I think that there's a lot of stuff going on in his head that doesn't quite make out past the keyboard here. I'm not sure how the iPad (or any computer, for that matter) is web-like or not. And in any case, it has the a best in breed WebKit based browser built-in, and other browsers are starting to make it past the App store gatekeepers like Opera, Mini Browser Pro, Pro Browser... So how can you say that it's not weblike or at the very least web friendly? From a practical aspect, it's the best web browsing experience currently available, including desktop computers.

As for disdain, he's entirely missed the point, not to mention a lot of recent history. Apple doesn't disdain the traditional computing models, it's a matter of the right tool for the job. We've seen just how well Windows Mobile has succeeded in porting the desktop metaphor to mobile devices. The successes in this arena come from taking a fresh look at how best to interact with a mobile device at various scales. We can see clearly that the iPhone OS is better model for this job : witness Android, WebOS and Windows Mobile 7 who all use similar models.

On the Office front, I see a very nice suite from Apple, plus various competitors like Documents To Go and Office2 HD. If Microsoft chooses not to play, that's their call before it becomes Apple's. From a practical perspective, Apple has no interest in blocking Office, since the additional level of compatibility means the iPad is even more attractive to consumers. And at the end of the day Apple is a hardware company that sells to the mass market.

Where is he getting his information from? There are 2M of them out there and he hasn't yet checked with anyone to confirm that cut and paste works just fine on the iPad?

So let me ask you one question, right now: Can you link to an app on your iPad? And I don't mean a link to download the app on iTunes, folks. I mean, can you create an ecosystem of links, deep into your iPad application(s), links that connect your particular activity stream inside that app with other streams, other links, and other intentions across the web? In ways that create new values, both predictable and unpredicted?

The answer is no. Anymore than you could link to pages deep inside AOL, back when it was a walled garden.

Umm - actually, yes you can link to an iPad application and applications can send information back and forth using registered URLs that contain messages. However, they are not attempting to recreate the web. We already have the web for that. The new values that we're seeing from this platform are all about innovative ways to interact with information, whether it comes from the web, your internal Oracle Business Indicators, or entered by the user. (Note: the Oracle suite haven't yet been upgraded to fully iPad native - they're still iPhone apps).

OK - here I am almost one week in with the iPad (16Gb Wifi) and a few general thoughts on usage.

Dock or not?

As expected, using a touchscreen positioned like a regular monitor is tiring and inefficient. The iPad dock is great for use with an external keyboard, but without some kind of pointing device, any on screen UI interaction is a pain.  In hindsight, I probably didn't need to buy the dock. Keeping your arm elevated for this kind of use is really really tiring (or maybe I need to go to the gym more often).

External keyboard?

The onscreen keyboard in landscape mode is shockingly good. To the point that much of my daily note taking and text input is now done via this keyboard. The portrait mode keyboard is also pretty usable, but not as comfortable to use.

For whatever reason, my old white Apple bluetooth keyboard refuses to pair with the iPad, but it's been through a lot so I'll check that out in more detail later.  In any case, if I'm going to imagine a workday with the iPad as my primary device, I'll want to invest in a newer keyboard since this one won't fit in my computer bag.

eInk vs LCD

As was mentioned by many, the iPad in bright sunlight is a non-starter.  You either see reflections or fingerprints. It's not meant for the beach. That said, even when the screen is horribly covered in fingerprints, they disappear the moment the backlighting comes on.

Au naturel or covered up?

The Apple sleeve or equivalent is a must-have. The slight inclination provided by the back flap when inserted into the catch makes it perfect for working on a flat surface, and posing it on the shorter side is ideal for presenting slide shows or watching video content with the iPad on a tabletop. Using the iPad "naked" or with a simple protective casing provokes the issues of hand fatigue that all of the pundits were complaining about.  With the sleeve, it's usually sitting on my lap or on the table. Even for reading, just like a hardcover book, the bottom is posed on something and the hand is just for keeping vertical which isn't tiring at all.

Where does it fit in my daily life?

Having an adjunct autonomous screen next to the computer is exceedingly useful in ways that I hadn't appreciated. It's hard to explain, but having my mail always open on another screen and interacting directly without changing context on the computer is really useful. In addition, it's perfect for keeping reference material available while working on the computer. Working through some Cocoa and Ruby tutorials based on ePubs purchased from The Pragmatic Bookshelf is a charm.

Also when working through some problems, having Colloquy open beside the computer is a better fit than cmd-tabbing constantly.

It's become the preferred device for my daily commute in the train.  Much better experience than the limited screen size of the iPhone and lighter and easier to cope with than the MacBook. Mail, news, books, TV shows, films...it's the perfect public transportation commuting accessory.

At home, I keep up with the news and play light games like Scrabble and Pinball HD.

For the moment iTunes media like podcasts remain synced to the iPhone since it's more convenient with the headphones, but I have loaded a number of iTunes University videos and other video podcasts on the iPad.

Portrait or Landscape?

I find that long document reading like books and Instapaper and such works best in portrait mode. Bite-sized information like Twitter and NetNewsWire really benefit from having the context and navigation options onscreen in the left column while in landscape mode.

The ultimate thin client?

My original predictions about use as a thin client may have been slightly premature. There's going to be a shakedown in this area, finding the best way to marry the capacitive touchscreen with the precision requirements of a traditional desktop OS. So far, I find that the approach taken by Wyse PocketCloud with the precision mouse works very well, but keyboard input lags a lot. The Citrix Receiver works better for reacting to keyboard input, but the lack of the precision mousing make it difficult. Their implementation of the iPhone as a trackpad is genius, but not as smooth as some other remote trackpad products like Air Mouse Pro (which I highly recommend). One difference is that with a product like Air Mouse, you tend to be holding the iPhone in one hand and navigating with the other. With Citrix, you're more likely to have the iPhone lying on it's back where the curved surface makes it wobbly. Maybe the new iPhone design will correct this...

I expect to see refinements coming along rapidly from both companies. Other than these two, most of the VNC & RDP clients are pretty rough and not worth buying. I'm still in sticker shock with all of my recent App purchases, so I haven't yet tried out some of the more expensive ones like iTeleport. Oddly, nobody has yet come up with one that can access the native OS X Screen Sharing without having to activate the traditional VNC option with a single password for the computer. At least I haven't found one yet. Bonjour auto-discovery is hit and miss and mostly missing which is too bad where most environments are using DHCP without fixed reservations for anything other than servers.

One of the comments made by Steve Jobs at his interview at D8 struck a chord with me since I was trying on a very similar metaphor to try and explain the iPad and where it fits in our current computing ecosystem.

Quoted from Macworld:

PCs are like trucks: While talking about the iPad and whether tablet devices are bound to replace the laptop, Jobs resorted to an analogy involving motor vehicles. “PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them… This transformation is going to make some people uneasy. The PC has taken us a long way.”

I was on the route of using a similar idea. The iPad is the souped up motorcycle enclosed in a protective bubble. It's small, light and fast. It gets you where you're going in a fun experience and does the job it's designed to do really well. However, it shares the road with cars and trucks that can haul a lot more stuff, more people etc. Your regular computer is that truck. Its got space for a ton of stuff that you might never use, but hey, if you need to help a friend move apartments it sure comes in handy.

It all comes down to use cases. If you're commuting to Paris daily on one of the busy roads, you want the motorcycle to squeeze in between the cars (you can do that here). The iPad goes places that a regular computer is unwieldy, but I'm not going to be encoding video files on it.

If you want to stretch the metaphor even further, then you can go back to the introduction of the automobile and all of the attendant disruption. It reminds me of computer gurus at the beginning who didn't understand the concept of the home computer since a computer was something for calculating ballistic trajectories. Why, it would take up a whole room in the house! Why in the world would you want something like that?

The iPad and the iPhone are Apple's execution of the communications appliance. There will be lots of others, with their various advantages and disadvantages, just like the variety of motor vehicles out there that fill a variety of needs. The current state of home computing has been driven primarily by compatibility and coherence with the choices of IT who put lots of computers in front of people. Now there's an option that aligns more closely with a large portion of the population's primary use cases, but that doesn't come with the same baggage and learning curve.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Corporations and Emotions

I think that Tim hits the nail on the head here. An outpouring of vitriol directed solely at BP does nothing to deal with the underlying issues of the industry as a whole. I suspect very strongly that there are no big players in this industry with their hands completely clean of the kind of mismanagement and regulatory manipulation that BP has been accused of.

Boycotting BP does nothing but give market advantage to the other players, but nothing at all to motivate them to change their ways.

Tim's closing paragraph says it best:

Hating the company has the potential to distract from a larger problem, the immense number of other poorly-regulated oil platforms in the Gulf; is it 4,000 or only 1,500?

And it’s bigger than that; both the current spill and the whole Gulf problem, the more I look at them, seem like symptoms of a deeper disease. You have to treat a disease’s symptoms or they might kill you, but suing BP into oblivion (a good idea if there’s a decent legal case) isn’t going to reduce the big-picture damage contingent on our addiction to unrealistically-priced fossil fuels.

And hating the company, or any company, will just reduce the quality of your life.

I think that we're really starting to hit a watershed with the use of SSD and DRAM based storage arrays. Witness the latest announcements from Violin as published over on the Storage Architect:

Enterprise Computing: Violin Memory Inc Release New All-SSD Array: "

The Violin Approach

So what happens if you can remove the cost issues and buy an SSD-based array for the same price as tier 1 storage?  This is the route Violin Memory are taking to market – make the SSD storage array as closely priced to tier 1 arrays as possible.  Remove the thought process and complications of determining what to place on SSD by making the price argument irrelevant.

In reality, Violin haven’t reached that price parity yet; prices are quoted around the $20/GB mark, which is around double what I’d expect to see for tier 1 storage (depending on volume).  However it is in the order of magnitude where organisations can look at those troublesome applications that decide that the cost of additional servers, disk spindles or re-writing the application is outweighed by simply moving the application to a Violin SSD device.

I think this is the ultimate tipping point for SSD use; where the cost of improving application performance is exceeded by the cost of moving to SSD, then SSD will win.  Where improving application performance is justified by increased business advantage, the business case is written.

(Via The Storage Architect.)

I can say that this describes a portion of the work I've been doing with server virtualisation using Hyper-V, ESX and XEN. A few years ago, CPU performance and density were a limiting factor in the amount of virtual machines you could load into a server. As a consequence, there was a lot of effort expended in building analysis tools to determine server eligibility and sizing so that you could evaluate your existing physical park and know reasonably well how many servers you would need in order to consolidate them and ensure sufficient margin for failover and planned growth.

With the latest generation of hypervisors and the Intel Nehalem class and newer processors, there is so much consolidated horsepower that the cost of doing this kind of study for a small company is prohibitive compared to the ultimate hardware and software investment. In fact, the only limiting factors that we're seeing are memory and storage performance. Fortunately, memory is an easy calculation to determine requirements for. Storage performance analysis remains a bit of a black art and this type of product can easily solve those bottlenecks when they start popping up.

It's obviously too expensive to put everything on this type of storage, but with the simplicity of Storage vMotion, you can easily migrate the log VMDK of your database virtual machine over and see what the results are immediately. Storage optimization that you can test on the fly in production to alleviate performance issues that would otherwise require a complete overhaul of your storage infrastructure is a huge deal. When the cost of the analysis is higher than the cost of the solution, people will go the easy route.

In some ways it reminds me of a desktop support policy in a company I worked for. You try debugging the issue for 30 minutes - if it's not solved, you just dump the master image down to the workstation. I think we'll start seeing this kind of empirical approach to solving storage performance issues as the price drops on this kind of equipment.

That's just insane. We're talking about a run rate of close to 25 iPads per minute being sold. To top this off, I can point to significant anecdotal information in my immediate entourage of people that are planning to buy one, but were just waiting on mine so they could play with it first. :-)

This 2M is not just the early adopter geek crowd, but a much richer and varied consumer base. I'm seeing considerable interest from general consumers that are looking to upgrade or replace their current PC/Mac/Netbook that is used for primarily web surfing and mail.

Key interests expressed outside of the bundled applications:

• IMDB
• Kindle
• iWork (Keynote, Pages & Numbers)

On the non-geek front, Twitter is a complete non-starter, but there's interest in low-intensity gaming (Scrabble, Strategery, Pinball HD...)

From the geeks NNW, XBMC Remote HD, Instapaper, Citrix & Wyse PocketCloud are big draws.

Silicon Valley Insider has some interesting numbers that put this into context. Definitely worth reading.

Key takeaway is that outside of the geek set, many people have computers at home for basic internet and communication tasks that they purchased because their simply wasn't any other viable alternative. Several have proposed the idea of selling their current machine and replacing it with an iPad. I think we're just at the beginning of something really really big. A key component here is that they don't want the overhead that comes with a computer which points me to Windows 7 based tablets being considerably less attractive even if they are competitive on tech specs. A safe, reliable, consistent experience has value to the general consumer.

Android remains the wild card in the competition equation.

Hmm - I'd love to get some more statistics on the situation. Given that it's insanely hard to actually delete a Facebook account, I wonder if there aren't simply lots of folks that have simply decided to set privacy to maximum and not visit or post very much any more. I spend more time on Facebook blocking annoying applications than anything else and I've always had the privacy set to maximum so my personal profile hasn't changed much, but given the usage I see from friends I'm not your average FB user.

Irony abounds:

Mark Zuckerberg: Nobody Is Quitting Facebook Because Of Privacy Issues:

For all the uproar around Facebook's privacy missteps, the company says it had no material impact on the number of people using the site.

In a press conference to announce simpler privacy settings for the social network, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, 'We've seen no meaningful change on the stats on any of that stuff,' in reference to people quitting the site.

He added, 'Whenever we make a change, the net promoted score always goes down, immediately. Then eventually it will go to a higher place than before. After F8, our net promoter score went down. We thought it was because of the privacy issues. It turned out it wasn't. It was because of changes to the News Feed.'

The 'net promoted score' is a measure of brand, or how people think of Facebook. It's like asking, would you recommend Facebook to a friend.

While Mark Zuckerberg stressed that he is taking the issue of privacy seriously, it seems apparent privacy issues did not cause any exodus from the site.

See Also: 26 Amazing Things You Didn't Know About Facebook

Join the conversation about this story »

(Via Silicon Alley Insider.)

A very nice update that should be on the download immediately list of anyone currently using Fusion. I just pulled it down for a seamless update (looks like they're using the sparkle update library so it's painless).

On my MacBook Pro 13", my Windows 7 virtual machine has always been pretty sluggish, even when I don't have all of the graphics goodies activated and the Fusion 3.1 update makes a huge difference. Even before the OS loads, the startup Windows animation is now snappy and indistinguishable from a physical machine.

Navigating the start menu is now responsive without any hesitations, and it seems like applications are loading faster. In short it's become a usable environment, even with the latest Windows OS. Prior to this I was only using Windows 7 for those applications that really needed the environment, and dropping back to an XP virtual machine most of the time. Now I can realistically start using Windows 7 in a VM on a daily basis.

Another nice touch is the new USB mapping options that will prompt you when you insert a USB device to see whether it should be mapped to the Mac or the virtual machine and whether you want this to a permanent or temporary behaviour. A very nice touch.

My only beef is that when you apply the update, it seems to automatically upgrade the hardware of your virtual machines and I got an Genuine Windows error on the first boot, but reapplying the authorization seems to have fixed that. Not really Fusion's fault since it's Windows being trigger happy about any hardware changes.

Kudos VMware!

This is a very interesting take on the different business models that Apple and Microsoft use. Don't forget that:

• Microsoft competes in a lot more markets than Apple so their R&D investment is spread out across a lot of very different technologies.
• The Microsoft approach has often been much more scattershot, throw lots of money at lots of ideas and see what sticks at the end of the day.
• Apple's approach is much more focussed, but with this comes a higher risk in the event of a failed product. If the iPad wasn't selling like hotcakes, the impact would be much larger than a similar sized failure at Microsoft.

What I find astounding in this mix is that Apple's R&D investment is in the same ballpark with Dell's - and DELL doesn't have an operating system with multiple variants, SDKs and developer tools to maintain in the mix. I'd say that goes a long way to pointing out the robustness of OS X as a core technology that can be adapted to different tools. Apple's getting a lot more bang for the buck with their core OS development that Microsoft is from Windows.

A point I keep having to make to many people is that scalability is a two way street - you have to be able to scale down as well as up, and so far OS X is the only consumer based OS that has been able to scale meet to the requirements of a mobile, portable, desktop and server OS. Granted that the server OS side is less rich that the Microsoft offering, but it's not currently targeting the same kind of enterprise-sized structures.

(Via Silicon Alley Insider.)

CHART OF THE DAY: Microsoft Spends Eight Times As Much On R&D As Apple (MSFT, AAPL, GOOG): "

Apple has done an incredible job growing while remaining fiscally disciplined, SAI contributor Steve Cheney wrote in a post we published yesterday. One of data points Steve used to bolster his case is Apples low R&D spending as compared to its rivals.

Weve charted it out, and as you can see, Apples R&D spend is the second smallest in the land of tech giants.

There have been a bunch of articles recently reprinting the estimation of the RBC analyst who has pointed out that the current run rate of iPads exceeds that of Macs.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious :

• It costs half the price of the cheapest Mac
• It does what most people require of a computer (and then some)
• It comes with a proven, discoverable touch based UI
• It doesn't come with any of the baggage of a "traditional" computer

What's not to like?

I posit that the initial sales came from the usual suspects: the early adopter hyper gadget addicted über geeks, but that as "regular" people have been exposed to the iPad in real life situations, they realize that they've been buying computers that are vastly more complicated and overkill for what their real day-to-day computing requirements entail.

It's also worth noting that the current sales rates are in one (granted, very large) market and that the international sales are just getting ready to start (May 28th here in selected European countries).

The big question will be how are sales doing 6 months and a year from now, but somehow I'm not terribly worried for Apple on this one.

 

I just found this via the ilounge rss feed and it answers the question I've been asking myself for a while now about the value of the 3G iPad vs the Wifi only model.

Up until now the only real missing feature for me on the Wifi iPad (on order!) was the GPS.  Not that I have a decent way of mounting it in the car yet, but that should make for an interesting DIY project. But the question remained - if I wanted GPS connectivity, I needed an external GPS and as it happens I have the TomTom car kit that I use with Navigon on my iPhone. Unfortunately the car kit is very precisely designed to hold an iPhone and not an iPad.

Now with this cable, I can easily connect the car kit to the the iPad, no matter what bizarre setup I end up using to mount the two at the same time.

This also opens up the whole collection of iPhone specific docking devices that can't be used with iPads because the form factor doesn't work.  Finally!