The more I sit and contemplate MobileMe, the more impressed I am of its sheer audacity.
Apple decided to suddenly unleash this product to the world whose purpose is to keep your data in sync no matter where in the world you are, no matter which machine you happen to be using, no matter which operating system you happen to be sitting in front of. Marketing aside, pushing this data all around is one pretty heavy feat.
MobileMe: just a slicker (but still broken) .Mac?
It's not an easy thing to do. Look at MobileMe's launch, which was plagued with problems for days (weeks if you include the email issues some users faced). Amazon's tried the cloud computing for a year or two now, and they've had some well-publicized downtime. Google's just starting its own foray into the market with Google AppEngine, and they've had some issues as well, possibly to a greater extent than Amazon due to its role as the newcomer.
The problem is that the classic SLA mentality that has stuck with web hosting for the last decade or so just doesn't mesh with the idea of the cloud. Your website goes down, it sucks for you and your visitor. S3 goes down and it sucks hard for you, your visitors, your competitors, their visitors, your favorite social networking site, all of its visitors, and so on. It's the classic centralized/decentralized problem: in a decentralized model the reliability of the system is unmatched, and in a centralized system you gain in terms of efficiency and performance. On top of that, MobileMe has a special consideration: if it bombs more than a beached failwhale and things like your phone contacts get lost on your iPhone, people are going to be pissed off. Business information is one thing, but with MobileMe tackling personal information — phone numbers, photos, calendars — some really important data is at stake.
Let's talk storage
So let's assume that MobileMe will sort out the kinks and maintain a relatively workable uptime. Once it gets reliable and Apple has the ability to scale and maintain the cloud, some really interesting things can happen. One of the most audacious is ubiquitous media. My 16GB iPhone can certainly hold a large amount of music (remember, the first generation iPod started at five gigabytes). But even with that amount of space available right now, it's going to be awhile until I can squeeze my nearly 300GB iTunes library onto one device. For the last three to four years we've been playing the scaling game. First we scale hard drives (jumping from 1st generation iPod's 5GB to today's 160GB iPod Classic). Then we scale flash memory (from a 1GB iPod Nano to today's 32GB iPod Touch). We've been so reliant on the increasing expansion of storage that we've missed sight of some other bigger possibilities. With Wi-Fi built into every Touch and Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity in iPhones, we're hitting the point where you really don't need to have all of your media in pocket as long as you can access it. Last.fm has pushed out a pretty innovative iPhone app that lets you stream recommendations to you (or stream your actual library to you if you pay for their premium service). Pandora also has made a perhaps superior iPhone app that also lets you stream recommended music to your iPod. Just today, Simplify Media released their app that brings you even closer to this ubiquitous ideal; set up their software and you actually can stream your very songs from your Mac or PC at home. It still could be quite some time before Apple could reach the point of supporting such a bold strategy, but the foundations are being built: Back to My Mac keeps track of your devices and lets you talk directly to them no matter where they (or you) are, iTunes is getting better at streaming between iPhones and iPods and Apple TVs and Macs, the MobileMe cloud is starting to be reliably scaled, and with iPhone 3G we can start reaching a state of ubiquitous high speed connections for music streaming.
At that point, it's not a big stretch to imagine video, documents, perhaps even scaled-down (or full?) applications running in parallel between an iPhone and a Mac at home. Why do you need to somehow figure out a way to sync your personal finance desktop app over USB with your mobile app when you could just shoot updates between the two over the cloud? We've been struggling for decades to hit some sort of thin client utopia, but seemingly no one could figure out a good way to make the jump into mobile. Bill Gates has been pushing speech recognition and the Tablet PC for at least a decade, and even though it has produced some cool stuff, we haven't nearly met the visions that Gates and Microsoft themselves had made for the late 1990's. For years, Palm was getting closer and closer... its platform was perpetually two years away from making the leap from business mobile needs to the normal consumer, thus bringing about a revolutionary new way of life. Never happened. Even today, hundreds of whiz-bang web 2.0 sites are struggling to fill this niche that everyone knows will be conquered but at the same time no one has the slightest idea how to go about it. Microsoft had the desktop but not the mobile device. Palm had the device but not the desktop. Today's websites have the cloud but not much else.
Bringing it together
Maybe Apple's in the best position to finally crack this nut. They seem to be holding or trying to acquire all of the cards. Their mobile device is fresh, new, and most importantly, selling. Their traditional desktop business is blooming, and even if their Mac business collapses tomorrow, MobileMe works on a PC, too. And MobileMe is the cloud that, while new, aims to unify everything else. You could make even make the argument that if MobileMe itself collapses tomorrow, Apple could still be in a good position to succeed here: those whiz-bang web 2.0 sites, while mostly harmless, are onto something big. MobileSafari (and WebKit, in a broader sense) is literally pushing web development every step of the way. If Google Apps ultimately win out, or Microsoft's forays succeed, or SuprCuilBetaSpaceAwesome 2.3 comes out of nowhere and takes the world by storm, Apple is still in a good position with a solid mobile browser to build on top of the winning platform.
IBM vs. Apple is dead. Apple vs. Microsoft is dead. Microsoft vs. Apple is dead. Microsoft vs. Netscape is dead. The early part of the millennium left us broke, stagnant, and without a Great battle. The browser wars were finished, search was just starting to get re-invented, and we were a bit shell-shocked from the blistering pace of innovation during the nineties. Even four years ago you could do some digging and find a general feeling of "oh, well, things are always interesting in the technology sector, but the glory days are behind us". We might not reach the days of the bubble again (for better or worse), but it's shaping up to be a battle of epic proportions: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, the countless bright-eyed entrepreneurs in the Valley and around the world. It's hard to count anyone out at this point. Each of those four companies + startups are the type of places that tend to attract the smartest, most energetic employees in the world. They're led by bright people that understand technology who have been through rough times before. It's not Xerox pissing away PARC redux or HP ignoring Woz and his invention or IBM not really caring about the implication of a couple of nerds selling some sort of OS.
It's going to be an exciting decade.
A week after WWDC and I'm still rather underwhelmed. I at least wanted to be a little whelmed.
There were three parts to WWDC this year: stuff that was recapped, stuff that wasn't unexpected, and stuff that was new. They weren't there in equal proportions, either.
What was irritating for me was such an emphasis on the recapped portions of the keynote. We knew about the SDK, we had been shown a walkthrough of Interface Builder, we knew people were building cool apps (Super Monkey Ball again?). These weren't rumors; they were shown at the last Apple event. Admittedly, it is the developer's conference, so a tech-centric focus was inevitable, but you can get so much more out of a smaller session than you can with paired programming in the Moscone Center.
Admittedly, part of the thrill of an Apple event is the surprise. There's nothing quite like a "oh, and there's one more thing" in the tech industry. The rumors sites had most of the details pegged: 3G iPhone (obviously), MobileMe (most of it), Snow Leopard (in and of itself a yawn right now). It takes a little bit of the fire out of the event, of course, but that's part of the game.
The problem was that when everything's said and done, there really wasn't much being offered here. iPhone now has GPS and 3G — likely enough for me to upgrade my own — and MobileMe has some cool aspects (web apps look gorgeous), but when you get down to it it's just a tweaked iPhone and a tweaked .Mac. On top of that, you can't get anything right now. iPhone's not for another month, likely the same for MobileMe, and AppStore's somewhere in there, too. Given their SDK launch event a few months back it sounded like WWDC would be the target release for AppStore. I am looking forward to both AppStore and MobileMe, but the wait kills the buzz a bit.
Hopefully this all means that the next event Apple does will be killer. Apple's hardware is where the real sparkle comes from, and it was mostly absent for WWDC. Throw some new radical design changes on the ancient (and tried-but-true) PowerBook and iBook designs and things will start feeling fresh again in a hurry.
So Apple released the MacBook Air, an ultra-lightweight notebook. In some ways it's the long-overdue replacement for the 12" PowerBook, and in other ways it's Apple forging a lot of new ground. And yet everyone's in super complain mode.
The problem is that most of these critics can't wrap their heads around the idea that there are other types of people out there. That's what it boils down to. You see this same idea rear its head in plenty of other situations, too, like user interface design. It's part of the fun of usability: trying to design something great that works for you AND everyone else in the world.
That's the problem here. With the MacBook Air (I already don't like the MBA abbreviation, as I instantly get confused), people see a seemingly overpriced notebook with less features. I saw more than one digg comment along the lines of "paying more money for less computer".
If I can borrow a colloquium from the nineties: well, duh.
The whole point is that you pay a premium to get a slimmer machine and increased portability. Most of these who run in geek circles see everything in terms of gigahertz and cores and processing power, for good reason since they're exactly the type who need it to push video around or compile code. But that's not the user base that Apple's targeting here. They're targeting people like business travelers, who will pay a premium for something that's measurably smaller than their current machine. The vast majority of usage by that target market won't use Firewire or more than one USB device or audio in or even user-replaceable batteries or hard drives. These are the types of people that very likely have desktops at home that they do their primary work on- this is why Apple added the Remote Disc functionality. The lack of optical drive really doesn't matter as much to these people.
Wil Shipley just penned a great response to much of this immediate criticism - from those who haven't used the product, mind you - in his aptly-titled post MacBook Air Haters: Suck My Dick. It's definitely worth a read. Towards the end he starts commenting on the transition of the computer towards the computer-as-appliance, which is clearly the direction Apple has been heading towards. (This idea of the computer-as-appliance was the clear goal of Jobs and company with the original Macintosh, interestingly enough.)
Some journalists get so close to the truth it hurts, yet miss the large print. "OMG! The unit is all sealed and self-contained like the iPod!"
Yes... the iPod. That huge failure. Also, the iPhone. Stunning disappointment that it was. I mean, jeebus, why would Apple make ANOTHER device incredibly simple? Clearly the market has spoken, and it wants tons of ports and screws and geegaws and flippers... no, wait, no it doesn't.
I think it's clear that Apple wants to push a number of its products more towards the computer-as-application sphere, and the MacBook Air is at the head of that group. And you know what? That's cool, even for techies. If you're in dire need of more processing power and flexibility, you can go with a MacBook Pro or even a Mac Pro, which lets you swap out and fiddle with pretty much whatever you'd like.
It goes back to Jobs' original four-panel market segmentation that he moved Apple towards at the end of the 1990's: you have one column for consumers, and one column for prosumers. The problem we saw today is that those in the second column tried to force themselves into the first.
I couldn't resist; I had to go see Leopard's launch at the Apple Store in Shadyside. Free t-shirts, free water, waiting in line with hundreds of fellow Apple fans... it was a good time. Got to play around with Leopard for ten minutes or so, though I didn't take a copy home with me; I have to wait until tomorrow morning to get my enviable student discount at the bookstore.
Thank you, 37signals: iPhone: Context over consistency
I had thought it was pretty odd to toss the icon over there, but it's nice to see some comments about the placement. I'm still hoping that the broad goal for that extra space to the left of the iTunes button is for additional apps, though; perhaps 3rd party apps, perhaps Apple apps... we'll have to see. The SDK rumor still lives on, after all.