Category Archives: General

If you haven’t yet read the Innovator’s Dilemma, and you are involved in startups or high tech in general, I urge you to find a copy and get familiar with the concepts (here’s a summary at Wikipedia).  In a nutshell, the theory states that there are moments in business when following all the “correct” or apparent data will lead a healthy company or industry down the wrong path (check the above link for some good examples).  I believe the disruptive moment has come for personal computing.

The era began in the 80s, sparked with the combination of hobbyist (TI/94, Apple ][, etc) and work PCs (IBM, Compaq, etc).  Throughout the 80s using computers was really an adventure, as there was limited software, clunky hardware, practically no connectivity (thats right, not even Twitter!), and lots and lots of proprietary technology.  Apple’s Macintosh was marketed as the anti-Big Brother IBM PCs, despite the fact that Mac’s were closed systems and it was DOS that enabled openness, customization and flexibility.  At the time, the Mac seemed poised to grab a big chunk of the personal computing market share while PCs seemed destined for the office.  Consumers didn’t want the hassles of configuring home PCs, especially since the majority of the time they were just playing Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego anyway.

That is until Windows 3.1, then 95 showed up, both radically transforming the usability of PCs, while at the same time Apple “lost its way” with a series of ill-timed flubbed products.  PC manufacturers standardized around Windows, and consumers had a fairly reliable and easy-to-use computer in the PC, with the ability to pick and choose the hardware configurations they wanted.  The 90s also birthed the laptop, and as they reached mass consumption they too had massive flexibility, with some models offering literally tens of thousands of combinations.  Computers were fun, productive, (mostly) reliable, and enabled access to dialup, then high-speed, Internet services.

Fast forward to 2006.  PC makers began prepping their Vista launches, and marketed new models as Vista-ready.  The Microsoft marketing machine was at the early stage of a rumored Billion dollar push.  Consumers, for the most part, did not really know or care much about Vista, as XP (with Service Pack 2) was quite reliable and, most importantly, provided good Internet access. Vista launched, and Microsoft made a critical error by not mandating higher quality standards within the Vista-Capable program.  Basically, a massive launch of new PCs with terrible flaws hit the market, and this was noticed both by personal and professional computer users.  Virtually overnight the ability to easily purchase a reliable computer disappeared.

Meanwhile in Cupertino, Steve Jobs moved the Mac to the Intel chipset, and shipped OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”), but more importantly ushered in Boot Camp and third-party Parallels Windows virtualization technologies.  In a fairly rapid manner, not only did the Mac become the most reliable computer around, it also ran Windows (and ran it quite well). This opened up the ability for even the most Anti-Mac people (such as myself) to gain the confidence that a MacBook was no longer a risky, fringe purchase, but had all the old software PC people were used to using, just in case.

To add a third twist, ASUS introduced the eeePC last year, a “mini-notebook” that has now spawned a fairly large group of competitors.  I question the real size of this market, but it’s a key factor in our discussion of the disruption curve.  These computers run a variety of operating systems, and have virtually no customizable components.  Whether I’m right or not about the true market opportunity, PC manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon of ultra-small and/or non-configurable computers.

Now onto the disruption curve: I believe the era of customizing computers has reached an end.  I posted a few weeks back on why I think the MacBook will take on a huge market share, and I believe it’s not really because of Apple doing anything so “special” per se. I surmize that a transformative shift has already occurred, and whether by luck or by skill, they are poised properly for the next era of computer buying.

Consumers are speaking with their checkbooks.  They are buying computers that are (1) easy to use, (2) reliable, (3) recommended by friends, (4) let them do the one thing they really want to do the most often: get online.  The near-irony of the shift we are experiencing is we are closer than ever to the computing era of the 1970s, with terminal-server interaction as key.  It’s no longer about massive differentials in software availability, since the browser is the most important desktop application we use today.

I believe the PC manufacturers have ample opportunity to take advantage of this shift as well, but I also believe that most will not do so until it is far too late.  As with any moment of disruption, it must be incredibly hard for a PC OEM to stop making laptop ordering systems with 4 pages of configurable options and reduce it to a few controllable selections.  The current system works, even if growth has evaporated, and there is not a groundswell of consumers or focus groups pointing the way to introducing less choice (one of the biggest problems of focus grouping anything, btw – less is never more).

It’ll be interesting to watch how PC manufacturers react to their changing world.  I’ve been quite bullish on the Mac platform recently, but I don’t think it’s a done deal by a long shot.  I truly don’t think it has anything to do with Vista or OS X specifically, and has everything to do with understanding customers’ needs.  The irony here in my eyes is the fact that the “speeds and feeds” of PCs are more hidden than ever (as I learned from Ed Bott), as they’ve tried to downplay things like gigahertz and CPU caching.  In other words, they’re already marketing their wares based on the new reality, they just aren’t shipping the right wares.

Just a quickie – I’m changing mail servers (from GoDaddy to Google Hosted Apps) this morning.  Should be smooth, but in case there’s a bounce, please just try again later.

I saw an interesting blog post this week regarding how Apple is immune to the innovator’s dilemma (for those unfamiliar with the term). First, I don’t think the company is immune at all, I think that OS X and MacBooks ARE the innovation relative to Windows Vista and PCs. Second, there’ve been tons of recent articles regarding the company’s climb in market share. Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, I am personally a (small) AAPL stockholder.

Consumers are turning increasingly to their peers, friends, and family for recommendations of products. I’ve personally referred four people to purchase Panasonic plasmas after buying my own (of course, they all got the newer model, but no, I’m not extremely bitter). In each case my friends actually made purchases on nothing but my recommendation. That’s a pretty hefty price tag for a word-of-mouth referral. While there’s constant debate on the “power of influencers” there’s almost no question we all like to have a friendly opinion to back up a purchase decision.

Today, when buying a new notebook, I’ll make the following two statements that I believe are true:

1. Virtually all MacBook owners will recommend most MacBook models when asked
2. Virtually no Vista notebook owners will recommend most models from any given manufacturer when asked

The second point is probably the more debatable one. I’m not saying there’s *no* PC worth recommending. But, even a person happy with, say a Dell, cannot make a blanket statement “all Dell notebooks are worth buying.” Further, this situation worsens, not improves, over time. A year ago I’d have recommended a Vaio hands-down. Today I cannot (despite mine working quite well now – thanks again Ed!), because I simply don’t believe that all configurations are recommendable. So I’d have to say “Get model XX, with the YY screen and the ZZ video card” and even then, still leave a lot to chance. I wouldn’t be able to personally vouch for it, the cornerstone to any recommendation.

MacBooks do not have this issue, despite the occasional glitch here and there. They are almost completely recommendable, all of the time (although I’d never personally imagine buying the SSD version of the Air, but that’s more a budget/performance issue than anything else).

Also, I think there is a bit of a “trickle-down” effect happening. When I decided to make the switch, virtually all of my peers and industry thought leaders I read, know, and respect had moved to Macs. I had lunch with a VC friend of mine today, he confirmed that well over 90% of the startups who pitch him come in with MacBooks.

I truly believe this is a “perfect storm” for the MacBook (regardless of whether or not there are new models coming):

• Vista is just a disaster (I can count on one hand the number of people I know personally who think it’s a step up from XP), and there’s no solution imminently on the horizon.
• The PC manufacturer’s are caught in an Innovator’s Dilemma moment where the thousands of configurable options on a PC are what their customers have asked for, yet don’t truly want.
• The price point of an entry level MacBook is on par with a Windows notebook.
• Finally, and possibly most importantly, the introduction of BootCamp and Parallels have enabled the “tentative” customers to make the leap, knowing they can run Windows for anything they miss (Outlook!)

It’s not about the 3, 4, 6, or 12% market share they may or may not have across all computer sales. That’s almost irrelevant to address, since desktops have so many types of uses. But notebooks are much more telling of the shifting trends. Notebooks are for both personal and professional use, they have their place in the office and the home (and everywhere in between). Notebooks afford us more choice in the computer we choose to purchase and use.

Will I be wrong on the timing? Time will tell. Is this a slam dunk? Not at all! Can the PC guys do anything to stop it? Absolutely. But all the signs on the walls I read point to a very dominant iFuture.

Updated: a point I forgot to mention was production capacity (thanks yoshi).  As was stated there, it’s pretty unrealistic to think that Apple could possibly ramp production up to the capacity that would be necessary to accomplish the feat.  But then again, that’s what my friend Peter calls a “high class” problem to solve…

Overall (with one glaring exception, which I’ll write about tomorrow), it was a great weekend down in San Mateo for the 2008 Maker Faire. As far as events go, it’s almost the anti-CES. Instead of expensive, polished booths, most exhibits were on foldout tables. Instead of a team of well-trained booth staffs, the typical demonstrator was the individual or small group who personally built whatever it is that’s on display. Instead of overpriced, greasy, carnie food, we ate… oh, well, I guess some things are universal.

I spent the bulk of the days at the Bug Labs booth, where we were showing quite a few demos of the BUGbase and modules in action. Our plan was to spend much of the time creating new gadgets, but there were so many visitors that the team only created a small handful of new applications. I really liked the “digital level” application, because it was such a great conceptual explanation for the power of the crowdsource-enabled gadgets. The digital level on its own worked just like any other (although Angel, a Bug Labs engineer, coded it in about 8 minutes using the motion sensor/accelerometer module!), but it’s the future of many “connected digital levels” that is so interesting. Still not making sense? Think of it as a globally connected, yet distributed seismograph. Again, not necessarily important on its own, but its the concept that is so important.

The show was a lot of fun. Much bigger than I was anticipating, I heard over 100,000 tickets were sold! I saw some amazing demos and products, including an open-source version of Rock Band, a digital foosball table (yes, I played, and managed to beat the guys who built it – sweet), a killer room of Lego town, warring battleships, DIY everything, geekdad.com RC airplanes, a homegrownremote control R2D2, and, of course, BBQ chicken on a stick. Check out some pix from Laughing Squid and Scoble’s video too. My pix are all here, but these are some of my favorites:

And, the most important photo of all…

Last December we organized our first “Geeks Doing Good” event at the SF Food Bank.  We had a good time, and more importantly, did a lot of good (especially by inspiring others, such as Robert Scoble). We’ve since set up a Facebook group and my colleague Andrew Kippen has done a phenomenal job pulling together more activities and volunteers.

Not exactly sure why, but compared to things like FriendFeed we aren’t getting nearly the responsiveness we’d originally anticipated.  That said, the word did make it around the world to Cameron Reilly in Australia, who did a 30 minute podcast with me a few weeks ago.  I think a lot of people have a lot of preconceived notions about volunteering.  It certainly doesn’t seem “sexy” or “cool” to spend the day working in the SF Food Bank.  It’s true, it isn’t really “cool” but a quick recollection of the “cool kids” I knew back in high school places them today working at the local TJ Maxx and/or something that involves using packing tape many hours per day (not that there’s anything wrong with either job – but they aren’t quite the expectations those kids probably had back in the day when they were being very cool), so I’m all good with not being cool.

Which brings us back to this weekend.  Andrew & co have organized two more shifts at the Food Bank (morning and afternoon).  I personally won’t be able to join this time around, but maybe I can get one LIVEdigitally reader per shift to sign up and volunteer on my behalf?  I know there’s lots of other things you can do this weekend but I will promise you this – none of them are quite as rewarding.  Knowing you’ve contributed to making the world a better place feels great (yes, even better than calling in a helicopter in COD4!).

When Ed Bott first told me he wanted to get a look (so to speak) under the Sony Vaio’s hood, I have to admit, I sorta snickered. Not because I didn’t think it would be interesting, but because I was pretty sure the situation was so hopeless. He’s had a few days with it now and it turns out he’s making some impressive progress. So impressive that I might not be able to write snarky headlines like this one anymore! Highlights:

• Before shipping the machine off to me, Jeremy noted that he had wiped out Vista and installed Windows XP. Ironically, the machine with XP installed was practically unusable. (jt: yes, this I can attest to!)
• With a clean install of Vista Business and enough custom drivers to enable all installed hardware devices, the system was a rocket. Boot time to the logon screen was 33 seconds. (jt: zomg!)
• With that hardware and a clean copy of Vista, there’s no slowdown to be noted. (jt: wow!)

Ed will go into the nitty gritty of how he waded through the Sony murk and mire to accomplish this in a future post, but I do recommend reading his report so far. Especially the part where he’ll be talking to Sony reps, I’m very curious about their feedback.

Since I’ve never really talked about it, I wanted to clear up one potential misconception of “me vs Sony”. As I blogged about back in 2006, I loved my last Vaio. I told *the world* about my Vaio (literally, as that was the year I notched about 180K miles). I raved and raved. When someone wanted a reco, I said “buy-0 a Vaio” (not really, I’m not quite that corny). So when mine got stolen and I replaced it with the newer model it was as a previously very satisfied customer.

When you go from really loving something to finding its replacement utterly terrible (much like Crissy on Three’s Company), there’s a true feeling of betrayal. I am like a woman scorned, and plan to tell everyone in the world as such until I feel it’s been made right. Ed has very generously offered his time to do this “Vaio Speedup Challenge”, but frankly I feel that Sony “owes” me. Is that a fair feeling, probably not. I feel much of the same angst toward Microsoft right now, as a 15-year Windows veteran I am not happy with the fact that I felt I had no choice but to go Mac. It’s all a little irrational, but spending 8-16 hours a day with a computer over my career pretty much implies I’ve spent more waking hours with Windows than I have with my wife so far! That’s quite a relationship to burn.

Back to the topic at hand. I am very excited to see the new & improved Vaio. The Dell I’ve been checking out has performed very well (we had a minor snafu with a mouse we hooked up, but it turns out it was a negligible error that was fixable in minutes), and it’s refreshing to see a Vista experience that is leaps and bounds above what I’ve experienced so far. And huge thanks to Ed for taking the time to do this!!!

My friend Mark Evans wrote a blog post today entitled “Are MacBooks Just Trendy?” and I thought I’d write a completely unwarranted perspective myself. In his article, Mark ponders the value of the budget laptop buyer, who can pick up a lower-end Windows laptop for ~$500. He continues with…

Before the MacNation starts clamoring about how Macs are more stable, elegant, better designed, etc., the question that should be asked is whether the “regular” computer user needs a Mac to do what they need to do (browsing, e-mail, writing documents). In other words, can you avoid buying a Mac, and still have a satisfying computer experience?

The answer, I think, “Yes”.

First and foremost, while I did convert to the Mac last year (because the Sony Vaio VGN-SZ460 is such a wretched use of silicon it made the Foleo look like a good idea), I don’t consider myself a fanboy just yet (I even chastised them during CES a few months back). That said, however, considering the state of Windows Vista, I simply cannot endorse ANYONE buying a new machine that doesn’t run either XP or OS X.

The real question to me is what are you getting for your money, and I’m going to use the one example I have the most hands-on experience with: my mother. She bought a lower-end Dell last spring for ~1000, it has all the right speeds & feeds (dual core, 1GB RAM, DVD burner, etc). She hates it (possibly more than me and my Vaio!) because everything is slow, she gets alert messages all the time which make no sense to her, and even after I installed Picasa she has trouble managing the photos on her computer.

Again, I’m going to blame this on Vista, not Dell per se, but it doesn’t matter. My dad has a year old PC, his Logitech webcam crashes every third or so time he uses it. My mother-in-law just got a brand new budget PC, her Internet connection is no longer reliable. Even the Dell I was sent by Ed Bott as an example of a “good” Vista installation is unable to recognize two generic USB mice I tried (although it did boot in about 40 seconds, which was very impressive).

Is the MacBook trouble free? Absolutely not. For example, iMovie ’08 crashes on me everytime I run it unless I manually remove files from my preferences folder – a task my parents would be completely unable to do on a regular basis. MacOffice is still a far cry from Office XP/2003 (I’ll spare the discussion of Office Vista/2008). It isn’t perfect by a long shot.

But, it is reliable, and if you use OS X the way it wants to be used (because the other way around is a no-no), the MacBook is the best bargain computer on the market. For $1000 you get the same specs as a mid-range Windows laptop, except you get a computer than runs better and faster, all the time. It even tends to run Windows about as well as any Dell does, just in case you need to. The extra $500 is well worth it in the long run.

And as to the question of “is it trendy?” and the obvious “yes” response, there’s a reason for it. Look around Silicon Valley and many of the thought leaders you see have switched to a Mac. And they are happy they did. Further, there’s unquestionably a “trickle down” theory of high tech. As fashion starts in New York and moves West, technology starts in San Francisco and moves East.

The only other “trendy” PC I can think of is the eeePC. Oh, wait, and those red Dells. Because there’s nothing I want more than a bright fire engine red laptop sitting demurely on my desk. The real “question” in my eyes is this: what can Microsoft and the PC manufacturing industry do collectively to make a trendy Windows-based computer?

Does anyone have an answer? Bueller?