Too Bad Apple’s Business Channel Blows Ass.
Apple has largely been a consumer-focused company and the B2B channel has always played second (or third) string in terms of market focus. My personal take on the iPad is: so-so for consumers, a pretty effing cool platform for business.
If the iPad is rugged enough, the applications can be nearly endless. A lot of people can see ways of putting the device to work. I’ve personally been looking for a solution very similar to develop applications on for business use. Laptops work, but are not very durable (unless you tack on a couple grand to the price tag). Laptops are also large, clunky, and difficult to work with in the scenario I have in mind. So the iPad would definitely fit the niche I want to work with. Not having touched one, the images I’ve viewed show that might well be near the annoyingly-sized piece of hardware that has trouble fitting in places it needs to go. But that has yet to be seen.
Yet I’m not without my doubts as you can already tell. My concerns are that Apple limits the software to Apple Store purchases – effectively rendering my ability to hack at it useless, the device would be incapable of multitasking – a huge part of what I need such a platform for (although I doubt the veracity of this issue), and the extended service plans are ultimately as much as the device itself.
Let me put it into context: I am looking at developing tools for the trucking industry that fit on a tablet and can manage a wide variety of needs. If any of you out there have laid hands on a Qualcomm box, you know there is always room for improvement in terms of interface design, speed and functionality. Hence, my idea that a tablet with cellular capabilities would fit a niche (with a few exceptions) and meet the needs of most drivers on the road. Most consumer laptops have issues beyond what most consumers are familiar with when put into a semi. You have to deal with increased dirt and grime, an environment that is punishing on anything with moving parts, laptop hinges that last weeks rather than years. Panasonic, Fujitsu and Dell all have ruggedized laptops with price tags that can easily make you faint. So a tablet, with fewer moving parts and no room for grime and dirt, makes for a plausible solution to my hardware problem.
But Apple’s focus on the business market is, well, lackluster – with the exception of the digital arts and production realm. Stray much farther than digital arts and you find a sharply dropping arc of use in terms of general vendors using the platform. Sure, Apple has been making headway in overall market share, but the crux of those gains are largely due to the consumer market.
Then there is the perception problem. Apple’s core marketing focus on consumers can make it difficult to breach the b2b/b2c wall. The iPhone is a consumer device, not a business device. The iMac is something you buy your daughter when she’s going to college, not where you sit down to draft that ungodly Powerpoint presentation you’re going to thrust on unsuspecting subordinates in the morning meeting. (note: the prior sentences are sarcasm in full force) Now, most developers I know love the Mac as their platform du jour. I like it. But getting the solution across the table without the wince from the buyer along with 1000 questions on compatibility, can be a problem.
The third curiosity is the level of control Apple provides developers. For better or worse, Apple appears to be of the opinion: “Here’s our device, here’s what you can do with it, don’t ask for anything else because it won’t happen.” For the device to be utilitarian in purpose, Apple needs to recognize that locking down parts of it is what will hinder its overall adoption for business purposes. For my vision of the software that would go on the device, I need granular control over the underlying system to give administrators the ability to lock certain aspects down, remove options and generally kill some features of the device. Is that nice? No. But that is the reality of the situation for the solution I want to deploy. And in my experience with Apple products, I’m not thinking I’m going to get the level of control I want out of the system.
Please know that my complaints are from a business perspective. I think the iPad will be a moderate consumer success, far above Apple TV but not as popular as the iPhone or iPod. Apple might just revolutionize a part of the PC business that has floundered (tablets). And just maybe fairly sophisticated business solutions will evolve specifically for the device. I hope they prove me wrong.
Osama bin Laden Chimes In… On Global Warming
Posted by colson in Uncategorized on January 29, 2010
Osama Bin Laden resurfaces to chastise the United States (and other economically successful nations) for… not doing enough about global warming. Next up, a power point presentation and Nobel Peace Prize…
Billionaire Idealists Are Part of the Problem
Posted by colson in Internet Business on November 1, 2009
There are only a few things that irk me in life – self-righteous, bible-toting, populist conservatives and green-religion, idealist, progressive liberals are two. A third is the topic of this post: liberal assholes with money (LAWM – cizzzoined!).
There are quite a few LAWMs out there. Most of them tend to be leftovers from the dot-coms of the turn of the century that ejaculated an idea into the world and then bailed. Now to be fair, if I had a grandiose dream of a company that skyrockets in value – I’d be the first to sell out. There’s nothing wrong with that. You built your dream, made a mint in the market and now you’re out.
But what I hate most about the LAWM is that most tend to create foundations and promote those foundations for the express purpose of disavowing the same system that made them their fortunes. You see, the LAWM wishes to force you to live by their idealized fantasies because they will generally not be subject to the burdens of their public policy initiatives they love to promote. Like what?
Like healthcare. When any of the LAWMs step up to advocate for public healthcare, they tend to do so from the position of least effect. Yeah – they’ll might pay heftier taxes in the long run. But for the most part, they don’t really have to give a shit about healthcare in the first place because they can already afford to go above and beyond what the public would be subjected to.
At the same time, these douchebags play the “we’re so nice” card while not recognizing the basic problems of the positions they advocate. By creating more bureaucracy and sucking more money out of the private market, it ensures that at least one person out there with a great idea won’t find money to pursue his idea – the same kind of ideas that made the LAWM a ass load of money in the long run.
So if these condescending twits really want to help save the world, maybe they should put their money where their mouths are and just give up all of their money instead of hiding behind a pussified, political foundation hell bent of fucking the rest of us out of our liberties.
Yes, I’m looking at you Pierre Omidyar.
Unfettered: Cure for global warming
Posted by colson in Uncategorized on October 31, 2009
Emma and Bit discuss a fix for global warming
(and damnit, I know about the typos and the box problem. not sure why its an issue here but not at stripcreator)
Email Is Not A Chat Client
Posted by colson in Uncategorized on October 24, 2009
Jeff Atwood writes an excellent and well-needed post on my least favorite technology: email
Coming out of corporate america, email is, above all, the most misunderstood, poorly executed communications medium available. In fact, I’d rank email below Twitter. Or maybe Twitter is getting bumped up higher because of its restrictive nature.
So, let me be clear:
Email has a use. I use it when I need to convey information in writing that might generally be too long or complex to write out in a chat client or when I need to formulate a response that can’t be given immediately that will take more than a sentence or two.
Whenever I see an email that consists of one or two lines, I cringe. When I have someone ask me if I read the ‘email’, I cringe. I cringe because it adds weight to Jeff’s point. It also reinforces my long standing habit of *not* reading email *unless* someone asks me about it. Why? I find it much faster to actually use email. I can sift through my email when needed rather than as a trained monkey pulling a lever.
Now, in corporate American, if you really want to anger a boss make him or her constantly ask whether you got the email. They hate it. But that one second of asking saves me countless hours non-productivity. Instead of wasting precious time organizing, managing, and cleaning up, I just wait until it is asked. I call it Just-In-Time-Annoyance-Email.
Let’s just say this approach is *not* an efficient approach *at all*. But I’ve been witness, and party to, using email as a chat client – something it is clearly not designed for. I think anyone who has worked in a production capacity in an IT shop knows what it is like when something blows up. Emails start flying everywhere. You have someone who changes the subject or fails to follow a protocol in the subject line and then you have a gigantic mess on your hands. Then you have streams of conversations that become circular – or even worse, conversations that break off into their own little world where nothing is communicated at all. Add on to all of this the massive FAIL committed by someone abusing mailing lists and you have one fine mess.
I’ve even thought about setting up a mail filter that works much like a challenge-response system for spam. Basically, you have to pay me to read your email unless I manually override it (i.e. you tell me I need to read the email). This would get me around people sending me useless emails devoid of any substance because an actual, tangible cost is incurred in the form of money. Now that would be cool.
Now Testing Twitter
Posted by colson in Uncategorized on October 18, 2009
Despite my recent claims of ill-fatedness and pointlessness, I’m testing out new Wordpress plugins and one of those is Alex King’s Twitter plugin.
Cogfactory Guide to Government: FTC
Posted by colson in Government on October 11, 2009
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is a government body designed to ensure the complete failure of commerce and act as an arbiter between parties when disputes may arise because courts are for weaklings. You see, instead of allowing the courts to do what they do best, the FTC is here to save you from yourself while also doing what the FBI was designed for (investigating interstate crime), or generally allowing anyone and everyone to contest the way you do business.
While masquerading as a consumer safety commission, the FTC gives you access to useless forms that are most frequently responded to with canned answers. The canned answers essentially refer you to the civil court system if they can not resolve the dispute. They also manage a giant database to prevent telemarketers from doing their business to protect you from the annoyance of having to say a single, one-syllable word when they call.
Don’t want to take my word for it? Even the FTC alludes to it:
When the FTC was created in 1914, its purpose was to prevent unfair methods of competition in commerce as part of the battle to “bust the trusts.” Over the years, Congress passed additional laws giving the agency greater authority to police anticompetitive practices. In 1938, Congress passed a broad prohibition against “unfair and deceptive acts or practices.”
You see, the ‘trust busting’ was a political movement derived from the demands of early progressives, through the valiant efforts of muckrakers, on the assumption that monopolies are bad and they stifled competition. At the same time, the FTC knows the joke is on you, the private citizen. What else would explain:
unfair and deceptive acts or practices.
They put it in quotes. A lack of quotes would imply that they believe in such a thing – that “unfair” is not an ambiguous word that “deceptive” has an implicit meaning. To use quotes permits the FTC to dwell in ambiguity and serve as the judge of a court that does not exist when and if they desire to take on cases.
The FTC gets to make rules. Congress gave them the power to do so. These aren’t just any old laws – they are laws created by a panel of unelected persons, often with political motivation who serve at the behest of the political beast. Don’t let the guise of consumer protection fool you. These are not servants of the most noble intentions. They are very human and prone to human responses to incentives.
You see, when Congress doled out the power and took a step into adding more regulation, they created a beast that can regulate speech and determine rights simply because you might be behaving in a manner that might benefit yourself. See, once you step into the world of potentially profiting from something – whether by cash, favor, product, etc. – you are now acting in a manner that falls under the wide powers of the beast. You can be hunted down and you can be taken down like prey simply because you dared to act in your own self interest and it crosses into FTC territory.
Some believe that the FTC only does what it does to keep big business in line. However, the true power of the FTC is that it can keep anyone in line if you transact with another person. If bloggers are repulsed by the power of the FTC to flex its muscle in their affairs: welcome to the real world of government power.
Dear Stacie…
Posted by colson in Uncategorized on October 10, 2009
Over at Marginal Revolution, I ran into an ad linking to a site demanding healthcare reform by pointing out the nice salary (and house) of the CEO of United Healthcare as evidence that we need reform. One citizen, Stacie Ritter, gives us her story of just how hard it is for her and her family.
So Stacie, this post is for you. It must be hard. Having a daughter (or daughters, couldn’t understand if it was one or both) or any child with cancer can be a traumatic event. I have sympathy insofar as cancer is a disease that often appears indiscriminate and it is especially sad when children are afflicted with it.
But the world is one where we are forced to make choices. Choices to have children, choices to raise them, choices to be their caretaker, the choice to be their teacher and their guide through their early years. Yet demanding that insurance companies cover the expenses of your children and child raising is a tough pill to swallow for a lot of Americans.
Insurance companies are not medical providers. Insurance companies provide a means for shifting the burden of risk at a cost. With this cost are certain limitations the insurance companies impose on the risks, and treatments, they will cover. In your case, the required growth hormones are not covered by their services (from the details you provide).
Your husband’s insurance doesn’t provide for the treatments. It is not the fault of the insurance company. It also is not the fault of the executives you lambaste to stoke your anger. The executives and the insurer didn’t give your child(ren) cancer. The executives and insurance companies abide by their contract. Their role is not one of charity. To shame someone for circumstances far beyond their control is not only offensive, it is repulsive.
You should be embarrassed. Not only for you, but for your children who you eagerly put in front of the camera to further your point. If we strip away the children and look at your demands for what they are – they are those of a rent seeker. Unfortunately, I have no sympathy for rent-seekers – those who leverage government to serve their own self-interest.
Linkage
