Category : Apple

in Apple, Cloud, Competition, Economics, Futures, internet, Networks, Platforms, Strategy

The Laws of Platform Economics

The eco­nomic evo­lu­tion of com­put­ing plat­forms appears to be guided by a num­ber of ‘Laws’ that are inde­pen­dent of any spe­cific under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy. These ‘Laws’ help explain the evo­lu­tion­ary tra­jec­tory of mature plat­forms and can act as a pre­dic­tor for the tra­jec­tory of emerg­ing plat­forms and behav­iors of those that con­trol them.

The first three laws of plat­form eco­nom­ics are: Value always migrates up the stack, Value gets inte­grated over time, Those that con­trol plat­form evo­lu­tion get to define how value is extracted. A def­i­n­i­tion of each of the ‘Laws’ is pro­vided below: Con­tinue Read­ing

in Apple, Cloud, Competition, CompSci, Economics, Futures, Intel, internet, Microsoft, Networks, Oracle, Platforms, Strategy

Economics and Platform Architecture (Part 3)

Part 2 of this series of arti­cles looked at how tran­si­tion­ing from scarcity to an abun­dance of fun­da­men­tal com­put­ing resources enabled the his­toric one-to-one rela­tion­ship between oper­at­ing systems, applications and under­ly­ing hard­ware to be bro­ken. Part 3 will exam­ine how the abil­ity to decou­ple hard­ware and soft­ware evolved into a new strat­egy for man­ag­ing IT sys­tems — sav­ing company’s mil­lions of dol­lars in the process — and laid the foun­da­tion for today’s cloud com­put­ing archi­tec­tures. Con­tinue Read­ing

in Apple, Cloud, Competition, CompSci, Economics, Futures, Intel, internet, Microsoft, Networks, Oracle, Platforms, Uncategorized

Economics and Platform Architecture (Part 2)

Part I in this series of arti­cles out­lined the impact that the eco­nom­ics of scarcity has had on both soft­ware archi­tec­tures and the struc­ture of the com­puter indus­try over the last forty years. Part II of the arti­cle will dis­cuss the tran­si­tion from the eco­nom­ics of scarcity to the eco­nom­ics of abun­dance and how pro­foundly that has altered — and con­tin­ues to alter — the com­put­ing land­scape. Con­tinue Read­ing

in Apple, ARM, China, Competition, Futures, Intel, Microsoft, Platforms, Policy, Strategy

Microsoft’s Pivot — A Plan to Dominate “Devices and Services”

We are cur­rently wit­ness­ing a major pivot in Microsoft’s core busi­ness model. It is start­ing to become clear that — as Steve Ballmer recently announced — Microsoft is deadly seri­ous about becom­ing a global leader in con­sumer “Devices and Ser­vices.” Suc­cess­ful exe­cu­tion of this strat­egy will require the com­pany to con­trol every­thing from man­u­fac­tur­ing, dis­tri­b­u­tion logis­tics through to retail.

The com­pany appears to be focused on exe­cut­ing a ‘Leader’ strat­egy in the devices busi­ness which would give them even greater con­trol than Apple famously does over the end user expe­ri­ence. In addi­tion the com­pany is likely to repur­pose its online ser­vice invest­ments to add value to this new device-led strat­egy.  A-la Apple, con­sumers will have no choice but to use Microsoft own ser­vices when using a Microsoft mobile device and com­pe­ti­tion author­i­ties will be pow­er­less to pre­vent it.

If cor­rect, this pivot will has pro­found impli­ca­tions for the struc­ture of the com­pany, share­holder value and for the entire mobile tech­nol­ogy indus­try. Con­tinue Read­ing

in Apple, ARM, Competition, Futures, Microsoft, Strategy

Why Microsoft Shareholders Should be Very Concerned

This weeks Partner’s con­fer­ence has once again exposed Microsoft’s com­plete lack of any cred­i­ble con­sumer strat­egy. On the one hand Ballmer claims he’s going to leave no “stone unturned” com­pet­ing with Apple. Yet on the same day he also states that Microsoft’s own Win­dows 8 hard­ware “Sur­face is just a design point.” Note to Steve: Those are two mutu­ally incom­pat­i­ble objectives.

If Ballmer really is seri­ous about com­pet­ing with Apple then Microsoft will need to con­trol its own hard­ware des­tiny — in pcs, tablets and smart­phones — and be com­pletely com­mit­ted to that strat­egy. Unfor­tu­nately that will also require a will­ing­ness to throw the OEM part­ner com­mu­nity under the bus. Pro­tect­ing OEMs while aggres­sively com­pet­ing with Apple are incom­pat­i­ble strate­gies. A text­book case of the Inno­va­tors dilemma.

Share­hold­ers are likely to pay a very high price if Ballmer con­tin­ues to believe the fan­tasy that he can accom­plish both these com­pet­ing objec­tives and still be suc­cess­ful in the con­sumer business.

in Apple, Culture, Microsoft, Uncategorized

When Apple Became “The Man”

This week­ends prank­ing of the future Apple store in Ham­burg shows just how far per­cep­tions of Apple and Microsoft have changed. This puts Microsoft in the posi­tion of being the scrappy com­peti­tor fight­ing against all the encom­pass­ing dom­i­nance of ‘The Man”. If we’re not care­ful the act of putting a lit­tle Win­dows logo in the rear win­dow of your car may become the very def­i­n­i­tion of geek counter-culturalism :-)

in Apple, Gadgets

Fix for iPad ‘Error 14′

[Updated with Win­dows 7 File location]

The update of my iPad to ver­sion 3.2.1 of iOS failed last night. iTunes reported that an ‘Error 14′ had occured (Not very help­ful) Sub­se­quent attempts at un-docking and re-docking resulted in iTunes try­ing and fail­ing to restore the device. Here’s how I fixed the prob­lem.
Con­tinue Read­ing