A couple of days ago, I tweeted: "...is debating whether or not to keep Guy Kawasaki's tweets. Interesting bits but kinda spammy. Like a crowded flea market on a hectic weekend."

I had figured that if GK had searchbots monitoring the Twitterverse, he might pick that up. And he did: "@anguswong how about PBS with Telethons. And there is no spam in my tweets. You opted in to follow."

To which I replied: "@guykawasaki Agree; that's why I said kinda. Your content still winning but I'm not the competition so don't want to be driven crazy :-)"

Now, for the record, I agree that his tweets are not spam. And I did opt-in. It's just that there's so many updates from him. My flea market simile was meant to convey the concept of intermittently finding nuggets of useful stuff among a vast array of goods, and that's what I'm seeing with Guy Kawasaki's tweets. But there's also the barrage factor. To use an overused image: Drinking from a firehose.

Then again, it's all relative. I've also been accused of sending "spam" via email to family and friends, even though all of those "FYI" emails contained useful (and sometimes critical) information. And my recipients didn't even opt-in. I guess they didn't opt-out either.

So I'm thinking, maybe there should be a word to describe this kind of "communication." It's not exactly spam, but it's "kinda spammy." And guess what, my Japanese friends tell me "kawa" means "river" in Japanese. How cool is that?

So, folks:

Kawaspammy --Describing non-spam communication that is actually useful (and even highly useful), but comes at you like a torrential river.

(I sure hope Guy isn't offended by this. I don't mean it to be at all, but if he is, I'll have to see how offended and try to convince him that it's actually positive coverage for his "over the top" alltop.com viral marketing.)

Ever since Steve Jobs raised the bar for executive keynotes, I haven't really bothered to RTFM for any of Apple's products (two exceptions being Final Cut Express and the iPhone SDK). So I've been happily amused to discover two iPhone tricks on my own.

The first, which I submitted to the TipBITS sidebar on TidBITS, is the iPhone screen capture button combo:

"Press the Home button and Power button briefly at the same time, and an image of your screen will be saved to the Photos app..."

(search for "iphone screen capture" on the TidBITS website).

Another trick is declining incoming calls when your iPhone screen is locked. As you probably know, when the screen is locked and your iPhone is ringing ("Ring, ring!"), it appears as if you can only slide to unlock, and thus answer. But pressing the Power button twice will actually decline the call!

Usually this will just send the caller to your voicemail, but if you're on a GSM network that supports standard * commands, you can use the *67* redirect option to route your incoming call to a landline.

If you're not sure how that works, feel free to leave a comment and I will clarify, or try Googling for an explanation of GSM * commands

(This article originally appeared in the August 2008 issue of ATPM)

The Microsoft marketing team is on the war path to clean up “misconceptions” about Vista, with a massive advertising campaign reputedly gunning for Apple’s fabulous “Get a Mac” series. Well, I say, more power to the Redmond team. Really. If Microsoft has great products, then the world should know, and I say that without sarcasm.

I’m always amused by the propensity of (some) Windows users to simplistically label me a “Mac fan,” as if my choice of platform has less to do with technical practicalities than ethereal trivialities such as peer group identity or chromatic preference. Honestly, my criteria are much simpler than all that: the tools just shouldn’t suck. Now, I know that outside of BBEdit (if I recall, the original “It doesn’t suck” product) great tools might be hard to come by, but somehow there seems a greater number of them on the Mac than Windows, including the Mac platform itself.

This is not to say that I’d neglect to give credit where it’s due. Indeed, I am going to take a break this month from my usual pastime of conjuring up irreverent phrases to annoy the heck out of Microsoft staffers (which by doing so, I entertain myself and, hopefully, many readers). For this particular installment of my textual creativity, I would like instead to highlight choice offerings from Redmond that I’d be proud to be seen using. (The Zune isn’t one of them.)

To start, let’s look at something my fiancée says I spend way too much time with: the Xbox 360. Yes, we know that the Xbox franchise probably would not have gotten as good a start as it did without Halo. And we all know where Halo hailed from: Bungie, originally a Mac-only developer. But we should not discount the very real possibility that the Xbox would have eventually become quite successful even without Halo, primarily because Microsoft can leverage its extensive experience and working relationships with highly talented Windows game developers.

Another thing Microsoft did right was the Xbox Live service. The Xbox Live infrastructure successfully enabled for the first time a highly convenient, easily accessible virtual universe of like-minded gamers, in the comfort of our collective TV rooms. No longer do we need to scour esoteric chat groups to locate other players for our choice of poison. Just turn on the box and go. (Good luck to Sony trying to replicate that experience for the PlayStation 3. That company hasn’t exactly been on top of any of its games, pun intended, in recent years.) Microsoft now has a strong position from which to battle the Wii, the PlayStation 3, and the Apple TV.

But the world’s largest software vendor is not best loved (or despised) for its gaming console. The Windows franchise is immensely more significant and profitable than Redmond’s entire entertainment division. So it is astounding that Microsoft managed to screw up the Vista roll-out so badly. In fact, it is precisely because of Vista’s poor reception that I find myself so impressed by Microsoft Office 2007. Not Office 2008 for the Mac, mind you, but Office 2007 for Windows.

Yes, folks, I am actually saying that I like Office 2007 and even dare to think it’s still the only serious office suite for the enterprise market, iWork included. And the reason for my opinion goes beyond just the newfangled user interface, but let’s talk about that for now. The Microsoft Office team has given Office 2007 a spectacular “geek makeover,” and it works for me. Take Word, for example. Even though there’s still Microsoft’s legendary feature bloat, Word 2007 is the first version of the program since Word 5.1 (released in 1992) that I’ve been excited about. The scribe sharing my corporeal footprint is very discerning about writing tools, and Word 2007 makes me actually happy to use the program and almost forget that I am on Windows (that part I am still unhappy about). In fact, I feel the user interface improvements of Office 2007 have achieved the rare combination of being both functionally efficient and aesthetically pleasing; the same sweet spot that we love the Mac OS for hitting. Office 2007 is ergonomically better than its predecessors and meets (or exceeds) human interface improvements by alternatives.

But the real pièce de résistance is OneNote 2007. I can almost hear the screams of NoteTaker and NoteBook fans that OneNote isn’t that much different from their choice of note-taking software. I agree, but Microsoft has nicely integrated OneNote 2007 functionality into the rest of the suite, and even with Internet Explorer, so capturing notes is quite seamless and convenient. OneNote 2007 shares the ergonomic refinements of the rest of the suite and has become my information-capturing tool of choice. That’s saying quite a lot, for someone who is so gung-ho about the Mac platform, and to be honest I wish I could use all of this on the Mac, rather than put my data at risk on Windows.

Which leads me to a very important point: To use this stuff, I need to run Windows. It’s the old “killer app” battlefield again. It’s the same reason Microsoft spent so much cash and time offing Netscape. It’s the same reason the Java wars were (are?) waged. If you own the user experience, you own the rest of the pie. But wait, there’s more.

Office 2007 is the only version of Office that gives me seamless, reliable compatibility with any older Microsoft office document format. This is the most important takeaway here. Even though it natively uses the highly controversial Microsoft Open Office XML format, you can set Office 2007 to default to the older Office 97–2003 format. For better or (probably) worse, the reality is Microsoft has a hard lock on the most ubiquitous business file formats in the world (except PDF).

I have not seen seamless compatibility with Microsoft office files with iWork (despite Apple’s claims), OpenOffice.org, or even the Mac’s Office 2008. While those alternative suites generally are able to load files from Word and Excel (and, to a lesser extent, PowerPoint), from what I’ve experienced, there are oftentimes spurious formatting problems that make the transition less than perfect between the platforms and tools. That might be acceptable for personal or academic documents (or environments where you do not exchange files with Microsoft Office users), but it’s a deal breaker for the business world. I wouldn’t, for instance, want an extra carriage return somewhere in an official press release, or a misaligned caption on a product’s datasheet.

So while Apple has been winning numerous battles against the old regime in the “Computing World War Two” of recent years, I feel this is a key area that has yet to be seriously contested. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been quite adept at defending its turf, as can be witnessed by its victory with the OOXML specification.

Ideally, we would be free of proprietary format and protocol locks on our data (including the rendering of the raw data), and be able to choose front-end tools based on their independent merits. But for the time being, Microsoft has a stronghold in the enterprise and can probably withstand a very long siege, even with a growing population of Macintosh hardware clients (which can’t completely get away from running Windows).

As for Web 2.0-based Google tools and iPhone-Exchange interoperability, Microsoft still has a weapon-of-mass-deployment with the Office suite, and seems to be so focused on honing this advantage that the company’s actually produced a quality product, impressing even moi! Microsoft knows that so long as it owns this area, it can always recapture lost ground. I don’t know what Microsoft’s done with its development teams in recent years, but if it could apply the same level of kaizen it had with the Xbox 360 and Office 2007, to its other offerings, maybe many of us would be less unhappy about its dominance of the computing landscape.

As it stands, the saga has yet to play out. That’s the nature of world wars.

http://www.atpm.com/14.08/apple-talk.shtml

Some folks are trying to pick a winner between Android and iPhone, but it's pretty myopic to think the world market isn't big enough for both. Different segments anyway. Tinkering geeks on the one hand and mainstream hipsters on the other. Maybe a third category for folks-who-don't-care-either-way. Besides, isn't it blindingly obvious that GOOG and AAPL are probably even more buddy-buddy than MSFT and INTC ever were, and that they both have the same entity in their crosshairs? While this entertaining bit of indirection is going on, I think the folks who really should be worried are the cell phone manufacturers. It's funny to see them race each other getting Android kit to market. Not sure they are going to like the post-race party. It's going to resemble the history of the computer sector, with a two- or three-horse race between OEMs selling basically the same boring hardware and trying to one-up each other with different shades of lipstick and blush. Instead of "value add," think "slim margins." You can also throw the word "attrition" into the mix.

The iPhone landgrab should be happening right this moment. Any serious mobile platform developer had better grab the SDK (good luck though; the URL Apple sent me doesn't work. I suspect servers are overloaded) and start tinkering away so product is ready by June. In particular, all the PalmOS-based folks with great Palm apps had better take time off from the day job to code, if they want to be front of the line so they can make a "first mover" impression on the target market before the signal-to-noise ratio gets out of control (probably already there).

[Update: Looks like Apple's keeping the developer party tight. Well, if every line of source code needs to be vetted, then of course resources are going to be very constrained leading up to June's "iPhone app parade."]

(This article originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of ATPM)

The more things change, the more they stay the same. At Macworld Expo, the event that the rest of the world calls the annual gathering for the Cult of the Mac, Steve Jobs unveils what Apple has been hiding, and the world celebrates by drawing lines in the sand.

We’ve come a long way since January 7th, 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. Wall Street commemorated the momentous occasion by closing AAPL at $4.375, down from $4.4675 the day before. Obviously, the financial analysts weren’t impressed by this move. Not very many of them were raising price targets like they have been doing in recent years.

Warp to January 15th, 2008. Steve Jobs announces, among other things, the MacBook Air, Time Capsule, iTunes movie rentals, and added iPhone and iPod touch functionality. AAPL closes at $169.04, down from $177.72 at the open. Certain media “pundits” complain about “lackluster” announcements and the absence of iPod growth numbers. PC users slam the MacBook Air, pointing to underpowered specifications.

So what else is new?

OK, so the current price of AAPL probably has more to do with the overall market malaise concerning subprime mortgage issues and recession probabilities than any specific news item from Steve Jobs’s keynote. But increasingly, a new digital divide is becoming apparent: those who have a clue about Apple, and those who wannahave. Long-time Apple watchers will understand when I say that Apple is not conducive to superficial analysis. It’s true that you have to be somewhat of an “Apple follower” to keep track of the company, not so much in the sense of blind-faith that the clueless keep accusing us of, but in the manner of buying and using Apple products over the years, and observing how various personalities and policies influence Apple’s direction at key turning points.

Because Apple is such a hot news item these days, lots of people are writing about the company. It almost seems not to matter that the analysis is wrong, only that hot Apple-related keywords are included so that the publications get reader traffic, and financial analysts get paid for “saying stuff.” To be fair, there are also many good writers and analysts out there, but for this month’s article I wanted to do a little exercise and see if we can’t get away with being a clueless analyst. You can also try this at home with family and friends. Let’s begin:

To start, I’m thinking we should completely dispense with what we honestly think. Since the objective is just to spew out controversy and get read, it’s better to be all negative. It’s easy to be negative. Like Sam Rayburn said, “Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.”

So, here’s how I really feel:

• The MacBook Air could be the hottest computing item of 2008. So hot that, in fact, I bought one (really!). I expect long wait times ahead in the next batch. The key thing about an ultraportable is not so much its size but its weight (in my opinion). If I am happy carrying around a small stack of paper (and I often do), then the MacBook Air should be no problem. It’s not for Final Cut Studio. Just lightweight business and daily tasks.


• iTunes movie rentals are the killer application for the Apple TV. This is so obvious I feel embarrassed to even mention it. I expect Apple TV sales to start taking off now, limited primarily by HDTV penetration but the prices of the latter consumer item are coming down and becoming increasingly affordable. Decoupling Apple TV from a Mac is genius. Think how many iPod owners use the device with a PC.


• Time Capsule is a great idea, but I need to be sure its wireless storage mechanism is flawless before I give it five stars. It seems expensive, but actually pricing is very good, considering everything you get with it.


• The iPod touch and the iPhone are set to keep morphing into the silver bullet gunning RIM and Palm. RIM is really going to feel the heat and Palm is already as good as dead.

And since we’re going negative, we need to take these four points and turn them around, even if we don’t actually believe any of the following crap that I just made up:

• The MacBook Air is a dead-on-arrival dud. Its screen is too large and the specs are too wimpy. While Apple has been doing well in the higher-end notebook segments, it is missing a great opportunity in the subnotebook segment. Executives will prefer the ultraportable form factor of a smaller computer with the familiarity of Microsoft Outlook on Windows.


• There is still no compelling story for the Apple TV. It remains an interesting Apple experiment and won’t sell beyond a constrained group of early adopters who buy anything with an Apple label on it. People who can’t wait to watch a movie will go to the cinema. Those who want to watch it at home will buy it on the day of the DVD release, not wait 30 days. Finally, those who are sufficiently savvy to hook up and configure an Apple TV and muck around with digital video formats will just as likely get their fix from BitTorrent and watch the show on their PC.


• Time Capsule is a solution looking for a problem. It is overpriced for what it offers. Other vendors are giving the market much more affordable 802.11n gear, and very few home users need gigabit Ethernet. If they are using “n” then why would they bother with wired LAN? Wireless storage is also reported flaky and unreliable by users.


• Apple’s upcoming SDK and the enhancements mentioned at Macworld for the iPhone and iPod touch are gimmicky. The real market is the enterprise, and executives are extremely happy with their BlackBerry devices. Microsoft will never make it easy for Apple to connect to Exchange, which is the cornerstone of enterprise e-mail.

So, what do you think? Good enough? I hope I sounded fairly professional and critical. It’s so easy to slam things.

Now, to wrap up the negative piece, we need to say something bad about Apple in general. So we need to pick some low-hanging fruit. A cheap shot, if you will. How about sales numbers? It’s always easy to go negative on sales numbers. Much harder to go out on a limb and be bullish. So, just scramble together some more crap and we get the following:

• While the iPod has been a major (even primary) catalyst for Apple earnings growth, it is becoming evident to this analyst/writer/blogger/paid shill that the market is at risk of being saturated and growth acceleration is not likely to sustain. With unimpressive product announcements from Macworld Expo, our/my/my dog’s near-term outlook for Apple is unclear.

Translation: A lot of people have bought iPods (duh!). Saying something is “at risk” is saying nothing (markets are always “at risk” of something), and besides, who really knows what the saturation point is? We are not talking copper sulfate in chemistry class. And as for outlook, we have no idea how these new products will do in the market (duh!).

So, whaddya think? Good enough to sound like we got a clue, when we actually don’t?

http://www.atpm.com/14.02/apple-talk.shtml