S’napple not happening

It’s good to see that John Dvorak hasn’t lost his appetite for baiting Mac users.

Managed copy meandering

In meeting with the HD-DVD promotion group yesterday, I discussed some mandatory features that the specification has that could be advantages, but perhaps not, if we see prolonged format war. One good outcome of the meeting was that there was no awareness of either the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray camps seeking to restrict licensing of dual-format drives, which seems like an inevitable outcome of the format war.

One reason that Microsoft and Intel claimed that they supported HD-DVD over Blu-Ray was the former’s support of “Managed Copy,” a feature that would enable consumers to back up movies to their hard disks to perhaps stream across home networks or “sideload” to portable media players. However, it turns out that the group that would be responsible for such a feature, AAAC, will not decide on the fate of Managed Copy until mid-October. All that the HD-DVD group has done has been to pledge support for the feature if it’s ratified, and then who knows whether studios will buy in. The Blu-Ray camp could include the feature as well, although BD+ would need to support it as well

“Get a Mac” ads evolving

Three new Apple ads recently broke. “Angel/Devil” is probably the least entertaining and does the least to highlight the Mac’s advantages. At this point, the commercials are starting to portray a kind of “Abbott and Costello” vibe with the PC character becoming less corporate and geeky and now just plain comically silly. This may be in response to more people identifying with and liking John Hodgman’s character. This is especially true in “Trust Mac,” in which Hodgman’s incognito antics are so silly that Justin Long cannot keep a straight face through the commercial.

When is a platform not a platform?

The Wireless Report asks whether advanced music phones will ever be able to compete with the iPod and comes up skeptical owing to the product’s extensive ecosystem. I’m more bullish on such products. Yes, we’re in the early days but we’ve already seen great strides forward and even Apple concedes that music phones are bound to improve, hence the empty admission that they’re “not doing nothing” in the space.

Something I haven’t seen much coverage about regarding the iPod is that, despite its increasing functionality, media support and vast range of accessories that have developed over the years, Apple has not opened it up to developers the way Palm did with the original Pilot. Want to develop a new game for the iPod? You can’t. One could argue that a platform or API didn’t really save the PDA in the end, but it continues to be important in the realm of smartphones, which could be the iPod’s future and is certainly one direction for portable digital music in general.

They build cathedrals in Cupertino

Via Digg comes an Infoworld article on the Australian LinuxWorld site (whew) regarding Apple’s retreat from OpenDarwin, its highest-profile open source initiative. The article claims that Apple was actually never all that cooperative with the open source movement. Perhaps they didn’t need to be for Darwin, but while the Mac version of Firefox is excellent, it’s a shame that there isn’t a full implementation of OpenOffice 2.0 for the platform yet.

It’s unclear why Apple open sourced Darwin; the InfoWorld article likely accurately describes it as “an experiment” even though NeXT engineers had plenty of BSD and Intel experience. Apple had issues with hackers trying to get the Intel version of Mac OS X running on non-Apple hardware, something that hasn’t become much of an issue since the OS started shipping there and may now be moot in light of Boot Camp and Parallels, so perhaps that led them to withdraw.

So, maybe the retreat from open source is “new,” but Apple’s embrace of proprietary design certainly tracks back to the company’s roots. Apple has little to fear regarding this:

Of course, there is a certain amount of hubris associated with such a top-down approach. It means that all the risk is placed squarely on Apple’s own shoulders. If the judgment of Steve Jobs and his lieutenants remains sound, Apple will doubtless continue its string of successes. If not, they will have no one but themselves to blame.

Or, to paraphrase Guy Kawasaki in a recent interview regarding Apple, the key to its success is hoping that Steve Jobs continues to think up great products. So far, his track record is pretty darn good.

“We three” kill E3

I indulge those who note that software drives the videogame industry — and it would certainly have been damaging to E3 if, say, EA and Activision pulled out of the conference — but the hardware oligopoly of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo deciding to pull out of the show is what really killed the major event. Next Generation’s analysis is guilty of the same kind of exaggeration that killed the conference itself; the list could stop at the second reason. Next Generation should also be careful to avoid any schadenfreude as its history has also been marked by a significant collapse and attempt to rise from the ashes.

In other coverage, News.com buys the association’s line and says that the 2007 show will likely be an invitation-only affair (let’s hope not) while Penny Arcade looks at the more emotional side of E3’s “evolution” in ESA’s euphemism, and a comic is worth a thousand words.

Of many major tech events from the ’90s that have faded away — Comdex, PC Expo, summer Macworld and now E3 — one most wonder if another is on the chopping block. CES continues to grow out of control, but it would require a much stronger coordinated effort to bring down that show — Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Philips, Samsung and LG would all have to walk, and yet you’d still have big booths from many other exhibitors including HP, DirecTV, Creative, Intel and Microsoft — not that my feet would mind seeing CES scaled back a bit, or at least having its growth slow. CEA has just done a better job of diversifying the exhibitor base.

Zune exploits the iPod’s weaknesses

Microsoft officially announced Zune today and, despite some assurance that Playsforsure will continue – the message to its hardware partners couldn’t be more negative: do as I do, not as I say. I can only imagine what implications this may have on other Microsoft platforms. What if Microsoft isn’t satisfied with its smart phone market share? Will it provide its own? And Napster and the like won’t be the only ones feeling the heat of competition. What about MSN Music? Does it support the home team or the new castoffs?

In any case, in addition to the dubious headline-grabbing strategy of buying out the music purchases of iTMS customers, Microsoft is going after two areas where Apple has not pushed forward -Wi-Fi and recommendations. Yes, the iTunes Music Store has a variety of ways to discover music, such as iMixes and it’s “Just for you” recommendation engine, but the sum of it isn’t as effective as the recommendation engine on even, say, Yahoo! Music. I’m a bit skeptical of community recommendations like the kind Microsoft is promising, but they’re more effective if they’re explicit rather than implicit.

As a way of transferring music, Wi-Fi has some convenience advantages, but the intereting application comes from music sharing. The nut here is that the users will have to have music subscriptions — still a tough sell — for this to be effective.

Microsoft musical musings

Make no mistake. Microsoft can do hardware right, and its list of PC hardware innovations and successes is long if imperfect. (CNet has a surface-skimming retrospective that includes the fictional iLoo, a subject of some elaborate toilet humor. It should be noted, though, that MSN TV actually uses RCA-branded hardware.)

There’s also no disputing that there’s room for innovation in the portable media player market, but it sure doesn’t sound as if the company has anything up its sleeve dramatically more compelling than what its partners have developed, or the iPod for that matter. Count me among those who think this will do more to hurt Microsoft’s hardware partners than Apple. And Microsoft would have to cap the alleged reimbursement on songs purchased through iTunes. For heavy iTunes users, such compensation could certainly exceed the price of the player. My colleague is more sanguine.

The best thing Microsoft could do with its player would be to introduce a slew of accessories that no other Playsforsure device has been able to muster because none have reached critical mass — speaker docks, car chargers and integration kits and the like. Microsoft’s hardware partners have been talking about the need for a dock connector to compete with Apple’s for a long time and are apparently working with CEA to make it happen, but such a standard has still not surfaced. Microsoft could jump start that with its own player.

There’s anothing thing it could do that might make a difference – advertise it on television a lot.

Apple sounds off on Boot Camp

Apple today expanded its "Get a Mac" campaign with three more amusing ads in which the Mac character gently jibes his anthropomorphized plaform rival."Work vs. Home" and especially "Out of the Box" (we're flattered) include great punch lines, although Macs now come with some heavyweight trialware of their own from Apple (iWork) and Microsoft (Office).

The weakest of the ads, though ("Touché"), is the most revealing. Apple is now advertising nationally that Macs can run Windows, elevating Boot Camp to more than just a technological curiosity and virtually assuring that it will address Vista compatibility in a timely fashion. Well, at least something about Vista stands to be timely.

In addition, greater numbers of Mac users using Windows means that one of the principal companies involved needs to step forward to support this configuration. Apple won't. Microsoft should.

eBook subsidization has limited potential

I'm quoted today in an MSNBC story regarding electronic books. I recently blogged that the iRex approach of targeting B2B applications was a better market introduction strategy than offering products such as the Sony Reader at retail, but this article raises the possibility of subsidizing the device's through the established subscription model for newspapers and magazines. That has more potential than, say, subsidizing MP3 players through subscription services such as Napster or Audible.

Still, while the electronic ink in this generation may offer a leap forward, it's a poor fit for colorful magazines or even newspapers, the static editions of which compare poorly in timeliness to the constantly updated Web. We'll need more mainstream wireless data usage before we see the dynamically changing stories in electronic newspapers such as those in the movie Minority Report.