Technology Futures

It was inevitable....an iPad-compatible vest. I'm not sure about the "sophisticated" adjective used in the ad. "Nerd central" comes to mind, though.

This article from Cory Doctorow is similar to a couple of other contrarian articles that have come out in the past week--they all complain about the perceived "closed" nature of the iPad and/or say that the iPad is not going to save the publishing business.

Doctorow complains that there is little opportunity to hack the iPad; he is coming at this criticism from a hardware perspective. He wants to be able to open it up and do stuff with innards, and talks about how great the Apple II was because you hack that to your hearts content. But I remember those days, and did a fair amount of hacking myself. While it was fun, hackers back then were still a minority, and they still are today. It is pretty hard to make something that weighs a pound and a half that you can hold in your lap AND take apart and mess around with. If Doctorow wants to hack stuff, well, that's what the Arduino is for. I would have killed for an Arduino back in the Apple II days. I don't really get his complaint here, as there is plenty of stuff that can be nicely hacked, but that's not the market Apple is going after.

But I would argue that the iPad is very open--from a software perspective, and one only need look at the three thousand plus applications that already run on the iPad. Most of these apps are being written by small, wrote it in my bedroom, software outfits--the very kind of "hacker" types that Doctorow claims are locked out by Apple. Before the end of 2010, there will be tens of thousands of apps for the iPad, because Apple has created great software development tools that make it really easy to write software for the iPad.

Doctorow, like Jose Vargas and many others, also insists that the iPad is not going to save "traditional" magazine and newspaper publishers. I agree, but I think they are missing the point. The iPad is not going to help magazines like Time and Newsweek. But Apple's end to end publishing model that includes the iPad and the iTunes Store makes it possible for almost anyone to go into the publishing business. And so the big traditional media rags like Time and Newsweek and many newspapers will continue their slow decline toward irrelevance. But in their place, a host of new publications, with new pricing models, new editorial and writing models, and more relevant content will take their place.

The iPad is not going to save traditional media, unless traditional media wants to change to adapt to the times. Instead, the iPad is going to be a boon to new media, in many forms--the written word, the drawn image, the video, the TV program, the game. We will not know the full extent of the iPad's influence for at least a couple of years, but I think its effects will be more far-reaching than the iPod.

[Cupertino, CA, 4/1] Apple Computer announced today that it had purchased a majority share of the Microsoft Corporation by buying virtually all founder Bill Gate's remaining stock. Gates has continued to be the single largest stockholder, with approximately 56% of the outstanding shares of the company. The transaction, estimated to be worth $30 billion, still leaves Apple with a substantial cash reserve of at least $10 billion.

Gates, the increasingly reclusive founder of Microsoft, has not been actively involved in the management of the company for some years. He and his wife, Melinda Gates, have been spending much of their time on philanthropic work via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A spokesperson for the Foundation indicated that the Gates' had already indicated they planned to give most of the funds to the Foundation to help with the two keystone projects promoted by the Gates: malaria remediation in Africa and improvements in American libraries.

Gates himself has made no comment about the sale, but a short statement was released that said in part, "In recent years I have become increasingly embarrassed at the slow pace of innovation in Microsoft, and when I saw the iPad announcement back in January, I realized the company I founded had really fallen behind. I decided it was time to sell my shares and try to do some good with the money."

An Apple spokesperson said there would not be many immediate changes in the way Microsoft will be run, but did indicate that Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer might want to polish up his resume. Apple said the only thing the Cupertino firm intended to do right away was to eliminate Internet Explorer. Apparently, within weeks, IE users will be notified via the AutoUpdate software that a new Web browser is available, and when the update is run, Apple's Windows version of Safari will be downloaded and installed, and IE will be deleted. The Apple spokesperson said, "IE is and always has been nothing but a hack, and there are millions of Web designers whose lives have been significantly shortened, to say nothing of damage to their mental health, by having to try to make their Web page designs work with that piece of crap."

Apple also indicated that while Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint would be phased out in favor of Apple's word processing and presentation software, Apple would keep Excel for the time being. "We did some research, and we found most major U.S. corporations would collapse if Excel was phased out. You cannot believe how many bad Excel macros have been written by 27 year olds with brand new Wharton School MBAs. I mean, the spaghetti code we saw in Excel spreadsheets was downright frightening. I don't how those companies keep running."

When asked about the purchase, Apple said their primary interest was in what they called the "bitter clinger" market. "There are tens of millions of Microsoft customers still using Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. Ironically, using our virtualization software or third party virtualization software like VMware Fusion or Parallels, the 'bitter clinger' crowd can have a better experience running Windows on a Mac. I mean, Windows 98 kicks butt running in Parallels on a brand new 27" iMac."

On news of the announcement, Apple stock jumped $14 to a current high of $228, while a sell off of Microsoft stock has begun.

The FCC has rolled out the first look at its plan for broadband. The agency has set a goal of 100 megabit broadband to 100 million households in the next ten years, calling it "100 Squared." It's a good goal, and one that Design Nine has been promoting for many years. Our projects, like nDanville and The Wired Road, have had 100 megabit connections from day one, and we design our networks to support not only 100 megabit speeds, but Gigabit, 10Gig, 40Gig, and DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) lightpaths.