Great thinking

 Life  No Responses »
Jun 272010
 

I’ve recently been lucky enough to stumble across two excellent pieces of media that are extremely compelling. Both are to do with business, but not in a ho-hum boring way that you might expect. These really are quite interesting. Both were found via tweets that people had sent, which helped to reinforce how useful Twitter can be.

The first was a blog article by Don Cooper, called The Worst Thing You Can Hear from Your Customer. That worst thing is the word fine. If you think that sounds crazy, go read the blog article for an explanation of why it’s such a deadly word. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who I follow that tweeted this first one around, so I can’t credit it.

The real amazing piece of media though was Simon Sinek speaking at TED. I was lucky enough to see @markpollard tweet this when he discovered it. Simon’s piece was called How great leaders inspire action, but I think is best summed up by one of his key points:

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

It’s a staggeringly simple argument, and his logic is irrefutable when you look at how different businesses selling the same products can come and go while others thrive.

If you want to spend 20 minutes learning something really important, make sure you go watch Simon’s presentation over at TED.

 Posted by PMdG at 5:57 pm  Tagged with:

Julia for PM?

 Life, Morality  No Responses »
Jun 242010
 

The news sites are awash with stories about the leadership spill coming at 9am this morning in Australia. If even half of the media is correct, Julia Gillard will become Australia’s first female prime minister, and Kevin Rudd will become the first Labor prime minister to ever be kicked out of office by his own party before completing a single term.

Despite instituting policies that helped to isolate Australia from the worst of the Global Financial Crisis, Rudd has suffered huge blows in popularity over the last 6, and particular the last 3 months. This is in no small way attributed to the back flip over the emissions trading scheme that was originally touted as a central labor tenant in the 2007 election. It seems ironic that voters will take labor leaders to task over broken promises, but let liberal leaders get away with breaking any promise they want. It even led John Howard, our former and arguably most despicably divisive prime minister to come up with the term “non-core promise” to defend breaking promises. Not that the notion of “non-core promise” dissuaded John Howard from breaking core promises, such the promise that a GST would “never, ever” be on the political agenda.

Perhaps Australian voters expect more of labor leaders than they do of liberal leaders: the right can lie, the left must keep their promises.

Or maybe it’s a sign that Australia is starting to get serious about Green issues. That would certainly be reflected in the continual gains being made by the Greens in each state election, and the pathetic posturing by George Pell who recently bemoaned of the Greens: “Their program is explicitly anti-Christian.” (That’s funny, I’d have thought they were just trying to bring some balance to our already hopelessly religion riddled parliament, since the Exclusive Brethren sect has already demonstrated remarkable lobbying powers for a secretive organisation that claims to be above the voting process.)

If Julia Gillard does become Australia’s first female prime minister, I hope that she focuses on repairing some of the recent damage. Here’s a short list of things she could focus on:

  • Reinstitute the ETS – even token efforts are better than none. After seeing this coverage from The Daily Show, I can see the same pattern in Australia, and I don’t think I’m the only one tired of politicians putting problems off to the next generation – and the next, and the next. Guess what people? We’re that generation that everyone has been putting problems off to. Like it or lump it, we have problems we have to solve now, not leave for the next generation.
  • Negotiate on the mining tax – we need it, but we need it done in a cooperative manner.
  • Sack Conroy and drop the mandatory internet filter – I’m all for making the internet safer for kids. There’s these things called parents, and they can achieve the same effect as an internet filter by keeping an eye on what their kids do on the net. Putting up a Great Internet Wall of Australia is just a cop-out that is more about nanny-state politics and thought control than real concern for children.
  • Full rights for same-sex couples. It’s not about religious morality, it’s about real morality and refusing to have two-tiered citizenry.
  • Make it illegal for Tony Abbott to be seen in public in speedos. Really, we just don’t need that sort of sick shit in this world.

Fingers crossed at 9am we’ll start to see some real labor focus again.

[Edit, later that day...]

So Julia is our new Prime Minister, and I having seen some of the footage today of Rudd’s farewell speech, I must say he put a very human and personal face to the entire process. It’s easy to get lost in “I don’t like that X does Y”, but someone baring their soul as he did in that final press conference also goes to remind us of the personal costs that happen in these situations. Regardless of whether we agreed with everything he did, he put his heart and soul into the job, and we must always, if nothing else, be very mindful that it was Rudd who had the guts and the integrity to apologise to the stolen generations. I don’t think there could be any greater than a politician and a leader of a country could be remembered for than having the courage to apologise for past wrongs. In short: Thanks Kevin for doing the right thing and no longer allowing the stolen generations to be swept under the carpet. We owe you one for that at least.

Some might suggest Rudd’s legacy should more be helping to ensure that Australia was steered away from the worst of the GFC. However, that was a transient economic process. What he did with the GFC helped families and businesses now. What he did with the apology to the stolen generations was to help remove a stain on this nation’s soul.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:54 am  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Finance calculators: obfuscated UIs or just sneaky?

 Life  No Responses »
Jun 172010
 

If you want to look at obfuscated user interfaces, you rarely have to look further than finance calculators. These handy little widgets sit on a lot of online retailers and financial institution sites providing an easy mechanism for showing just how cheaply you can pay for something really expensive.

However, they rarely tell the full story. Since people usually accuse me of being so pro-Apple that I won’t say anything wrong about them, I’ll give Apple as an example of how finance calculators rarely tell the real story. Just to cover the other base, I’ll also call out Dell.

Let’s look at the Apple Australia finance calculator page. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s here. A grab of the relevant portion of the website looks like this:

Apple Finance Calculator Form

Apple Finance Calculator Form

Now, that looks cheap doesn’t it? Borrow $6000 to pay for some fantastic piece of equipment, and you only have to pay $195.61 per month for it!

Just so you know I’m not picking on Apple, let’s look at Dell’s financial calculator:

Dell Financial Calculator

Dell Financial Calculator

In neither case is it the full picture though. Most most online financial calculators fail to show is the total amount that will be paid over the loan period. This figure should be mandatory.

Why? It would help consumers understand what the real cost of the finance is. If you want financial reform that will stop people going into debt for more money than they can really afford, let them see upfront how much they’ll end up paying for something, right from the point where they start to play with the figures – which is what the financial calculator should be for.

So if we expand that repayment schedule, what the Apple Finance Calculator doesn’t tell us is that the final figure for borrowing $6000 is $9389.28. (Don’t forget the 28¢ – finance companies don’t, after all.) Similarly, Dell’s Finance Calculator neglects to tell us that the final figure from borrowing $6000 is $9871.68.

Suddenly neither option seems like a particularly cheap option.

Now a lot of people will look at that amount and do the calculation – I know I do, automatically, if something offers me finance (and it’s something I want), and I’m not only bad at math but I’m also usually off in la-la land when it comes to money. However, I’d be willing to bet 4 cores out of my Mac Pro that the average person – i.e., the majority of people using finance calculators, don’t calculate the total amount paid.

Nor should they have to. If a finance calculator is offered on a website, it should be required (by appropriate per-country Federal laws) to show the total amount be paid over the life of the loan. Not doing it isn’t a case of an obfuscated UI, it’s just a case of being sneaky.

Of course, there’s a lot of other sneaky tricks done by the credit industry – for instance, I get a long and uninterruptible spiel from Citibank about upgrading my credit every time I call, no matter how frequently I tell them no. With credit so easy to get, and the terms never fully laid out, it’s no surprise that today in Australia it was announced that:

Household savings improved in the June quarter, but credit cards overtook mortgages as the main form of debt in a survey of Australian households for the first time in almost four years.

(Original article from Sydney Morning Herald, “Credit card debt eclipses mortgages“.)

Given the overall global financial climate, it’s time we start demanding that financial institutions be wholly transparent in the costs of their services. After all, we demand it of so many other industries. Why should financial services be a law unto themselves?

 Posted by PMdG at 6:42 pm  Tagged with:

Am I the only geek who doesn't like Star Wars?

 Entertainment  No Responses »
Jun 102010
 

I really dislike Star Wars. Not just one or two of the movies or the travesty that was the prequel trilogy, but all six of them. That’s not to say I haven’t seen them all – growing up I watched episodes IV, V and VI ad nauseum, and I also watched the prequel movies a few times to make sure I wasn’t misjudging them. So you can’t say I never bought into the franchise – I just realised over time how much I dislike the movies.

So since I’ve now lost the attention of a lot of Star Wars fans by clumping all six movies together in one pool of dislike, I’ll explain my reasons, in order of original movies – but with one prefacing comment that I honestly believe George Lucas may be one of the worst and most formulaic producers in Hollywood:

  • Episode IV – Star Wars: The least dislikable of all the franchise to me, my main complete is Luke being a whining prat even before his relatives are killed, and the overwhelming hickness of him. And don’t get me started on Grand Moff Tarkin. Tarkin exemplifies Lucas’ inability to create three dimensional characters, with the failing even worse when it comes to the “bad” characters. Tarkin is so one dimensional it’s amazing he was actually visible on screen.
  • Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back: OK, this one is fairly easy to nail – Mark Hamil’s acting. Mark’s acting is pretty bad in all three original movies, but it’s at its worst in Empire Strikes Back in that infamous scene where Luke has to scream “No!” in emphatic denial of Vader’s proclamation of parenthood.
  • Episode VI – Return of the Jedi: Ewoks crying. C’mon. Thousands of kiddies forever lost their happiness over that scene. But on top of that, the entire “Princes Leia as a pseudo bondage slave” probably explains why the average geek loves Star Wars, but struck quite the opposite chord with me.
  • Episode I – The Phantom Menace: Everyone jumps to the conclusion of “Jar Jar Binx” here, and they’d be somewhat right, but other failings include “Annie” (#FFS) and that entire pod race scene. Queen Armadillo’s costume changes in every scene (including, I’m certain, when running behind a tree) were impractical to the point of stupidity, as were the notion of a bodyguard pretend queen who actually made seriously important decisions. Then there’s the Natalie Portman factor.
  • Episode II – Attack of the Clowns: Continued “Annie” (#FFS). Count Dookie really carried the Tarkin torch and presented yet another excellently one dimensional villain. Then there’s the Natalie Portman factor.
  • Episode III – Revenge of the Sith: Palpatine. If every star in the heavens were to explode and the energy of that explosion was turned into bad facial expressions, you’d still not get worse facial expressions than those pulled by Palpatine during the green-screen fight scenes. Then there’s the Natalie Portman factor.
Palpatine's Constipated Facial Expressions

Palpatine's Weirdly Inappropriate Facial Expressions

I’ve mentioned for each of the three prequel movies the “Natalie Portman Factor”. If you’re wondering what this is, it’s very easy to explain: these movies were my first exposure to Natalie Portman, and they made me think she was as bad an actress as Hayden Christensen and Ian McDiarmid were bad actors.

Then I saw “V for Vandetta”, and I wept – and I still cry like a baby every time I get to the end of that movie. While the story and the cinematography in “V for Vandetta” is superb, the true hero of that movie was Natalie Portman. That she was done such a disservice in her role in the Star Wars prequel movies is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

I may be a geek, but that doesn’t mean I have to love Star Wars.

 Posted by PMdG at 6:29 pm  Tagged with: ,

What’s wrong about homophobia?

 Equal Rights, Life, Morality  1 Response »
Jun 082010
 

These days I try to make an effort to not call someone homophobic. Instead I settle for a simpler word – bigot.

There’s a very important reason why I do that. We don’t tend to call racists xenophobic, and usually when we do, it’s only because xenophobia sounds slightly more polite than racism. The simple fact is that ugly ideas need ugly words. Disguising ugly ideas as justifiable fears is at best a cop-out, and usually has far worse consequences.

Giving bigotry against the LGBT community a “…phobia” name is almost a spiteful act. It implies that it’s just a fear – something that can be joked about or casually mentioned in conversation:

“Oh, my wife is scared of spiders. I’m scared of poofters and dykes.”

And you know what people do to things they’re afraid of? They tend to attack them, and get away with it. No one gets in trouble for killing a spider, and way, way too many countries still let men get away with the ludicrous “Gay Panic Defence“. If you’ve not heard of it, it’s the notion that a heterosexual man, if approached by or feeling threatened by a gay man, is reasonably justified (or at least acting in a diminished capacity) in beating the gay man to death. Oh it’s not expressed quite that way in law, but the net result is the same: if you can claim “gay panic” then you can (quite literally in some countries) get away with murder.

If the “Gay Panic Defence” were a justified action, why isn’t there a “Sleazy Bastard Panic Defence”? That would be where women get to beat ugly men to death who try bad pick-up lines in bars – or wolf-whistle at them from construction sites. (Or if the “panic defence” can only apply for men, why isn’t there a ”Fat Chick Panic Defence”? That would be where a young handsome man gets approached by a portly woman. Instead of rebuffing her, he’d choose to beat her to death because it “panicked” him.)

Society wouldn’t accept these defences – they’re vile and disgusting notions. Yet somehow, because bigotry is permitted to continue under the guise of a fear (“homophobia”), otherwise intelligent countries still periodically allow “homosexual panic” to excuse someone from murder. These days it usually just sees the sentence reduced from murder to manslaughter (if proven); previously it would even get people completely off the hook after killing another human being!

Homophobia is wrong from the ground up – not just the concept, but the word itself is flawed. It’s an anachronistic hangover from the days that homosexuality was classified as an illness, and it needs to be replaced with the ugly word that describes the ugly idea: bigotry.

(You may also be interested in Why I rail against the (extreme) religious right.)

 Posted by PMdG at 7:54 am  Tagged with: , , , ,

Why I rail against the extreme (religious) right

 Equal Rights, Life, Morality  2 Responses »
Jun 062010
 

Explanation

I recently was questioned on why I call the extreme religious right hate-mongers and bigots. The temptation was to simply reply “because they are, end of story”, but in reality it needed a little better explanation, so I took a few days to think about it and composed a reply to the person who asked me.

Since sending the response, I’ve been thinking about the reply further, and thought it would constitute a good blog article – particularly since it’s almost full circle, given the very first websites I ever tried to setup on the net were coming out resources. So I want to put those thoughts down here now, in order for people to get an understanding of what motivates me. The only edits in my response are adding hyperlinks where appropriate, and a note in the second paragraph.

Why I rail against the extreme (religious) right

So, the question is whether the christian right are hate-mongers and bigots – or rather, whether I see them as that.

(I wouldn’t ordinarily say that an email [edit: or blog post] from me should have background music, but you might want to have a listen to “Chain Reaction” (1990) by an Australian legend, John Farnham. That song was released just as I was entering senior high school and as much as anything taught me to stand up and be heard.)

There’s a few things I’d like to explain that may help you understand my point of view. First, I don’t think all christians, or even all right-leaning people fall into that category by a long shot. Several of my closest friends even happen to be religious, and we even maintain a perfectly agreeable truce – I don’t try to convince them of the merits of atheism and they don’t try to convince me of the merits of religion. What I do vehemently disagree with though is the extreme religious right – and they are people who I won’t hesitate to call bigots and hate-mongers if they espouse such values. That comes frankly from a mix of being an atheist and being gay. And for what it’s worth, I don’t hate them – I feel that they must be terribly lonely and emotionally crippled to need to strike out so vehemently at others, and while I struggle sometimes to find it, I usually feel pity for them.

I’ll start with a personal story. Mine is no different from millions of others over time, and comparatively I had a fairly easy time, but I grew up in a small country town that was modestly religious in its population. I first realised I was gay around the age of 13 or so. I then spent the next three years loathing myself –  not just a mild wish to change, but a vehement despair that I even existed. Never to the point of suicide, but suicide amongst the LGBT youth who find themselves isolated is much higher than their heterosexual peers. One day I managed to snap out of it, realise that I was born who I was and had no reason to hate myself. What changed funnily enough was finding a book in the local town library called “Living in Sin? A bishop rethinks human sexuality“. It’s a book I’d thoroughly recommend, written by John Shelby Spong, a (now retired) episcopalian bishop from the US.

What drives that sort of self loathing period that most LGBT experience growing up is entrenched societal attitudes – usually these have bled down into their parents as well, making home life at least usually uncomfortable. What drives those attitudes is an extreme right view of “if it’s not like me, it’s wrong”. That comes from the side of society most mirrored by the extreme right – regardless of the religious convictions of that right view.

There’s a parallel, a very strong parallel, particularly in the United States, and that’s race relations. Swap “gay” for “African-American” in speeches and views espoused by the extreme religious right and suddenly they don’t sound like people just espousing their point of view, they sound like they’re card carrying members of the Klu Klux Klan.

Take Westboro Baptist Church, one of the most vile and inbred associations of hate that has existed in decades (made worse by their defence that it’s their god that hates, not necessarily them) routinely pickets funerals with signs saying “God Hates Fags”. OK, so what if they started picketing funerals with signs saying “God Hates Blacks?” (Or picking even less politically incorrect words for African Americans … after all, “Fag” is hardly a nice alternative to “Gay”.) There’d be outrage, because America wants to believe that race is becoming with every step less of an issue. (I’m not criticising the US on this – personally I think the US has come a lot further than Australia on that front – we only apologised to our original indigenous inhabitants 3 years ago for just some of the transgressions done by our original settlers.)

There’s no actual difference between racism and homophobia – both are expressions of hate and intolerance based on how someone was born. There’s no choice in being LGBT, the only thing you can choose is to not hate yourself over it. I’ve known enough married men who struggle with their sexuality to know that forcing themselves down an “easy path” to avoid social intolerance and attitudes just leads to decades of self loathing and a near constant feeling of failure. You have kids, right? Imagine loving them, but regretting every decision you made in your life that led you to having them. I know people in that situation. The closer description to their life-outlook is misery. Enduring misery for the sake of others’ intolerance? I can’t accept that. Sure, endure misery as an act of heroism or self sacrifice if you have to, but not because you fear the intolerance of others. What a dreadful life. What a dreadful life I see people I know and care about living.

I rail against the extreme right (which just so happens to be closely aligned to extreme religious views in many places) because I think back at how I grew up, and I wish that I was the last generation that it happened to. But it’s not – it still happens. New crimes of the ilk of what happened to Matthew Shepard still happen across the world because people blithely say that others are entitled to their own beliefs. Yes, they are – but not to the point where they have to espouse hateful views and incite others towards violence. Not to the point where they are able to inflict emotional or physical damage on someone who they feel is different.

So that probably leads to your last point – does that make me as intolerant as them? Some might argue that it does, but I see it as very different. I don’t care what they believe in – and I don’t care how little they think of me in the privacy of their own house, but I won’t accept that they are entitled to shout those views from the streets or indeed even from the pulpit. That’s the sort of “tolerance” that leads to new versions of the Klu Klux Klan.

I can’t change who I am. (Nor would I, for a moment, want to.) I may not even be able to change the views of the extreme right. But I sure as hell won’t allow them to preach, unchallenged, their message of hate knowing the emotional and physical damage it does to people who are different and are struggling to find their place in the world.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:39 am  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

One week with the iPad

 Life, Technical  1 Response »
Jun 052010
 

Exactly 8 days ago today, 2 beautifully packaged iPads arrived at my house, having pre-ordered them for their May 28 release in Australia.

“Pah”, you say, “I can already see he’s an Apple fanboy! Who cares about packaging?”

Many consumers actually do care about the packaging. This is one thing where Apple indisputably does better than any other consumer electronics and computer company. Their packaging, without the slightest doubt, is beautiful. Simple, elegant and bespoke to each product, Apple’s packaging inspires a gasp of admiration from many designers and regular consumers alike who happen to care about the aesthetics of their product.

The iPad doesn’t have the best packaging of an Apple product. I’d say that still goes hands-down to the Magic Mouse, but it’s still pretty damn elegant.

Moving past the packaging though, I need to talk about the sort of week I’ve had with the iPad. To help you understand though, I’ll first describe an average day without the iPad. Or rather, the average evening. Of a night time, I tend to haul my laptop out, put it on an Ikea laptop stand in front of me, and let it mostly dominate my evening. For the most part, while the laptop is occupying a chunk of space in front of me, I’m mainly using it for web browsing, chat and the occasional email. It’s hardly stuff that requires oodles of processing power.

On the other hand, the iPad fulfils all that functionality at a fraction of the space and sits comfortably in my hand, meaning I can sit wherever I want of an evening, rather than being constrained to a single lounge chair. Without even thinking about it, I’ve got 7 days without using my laptop of an evening – I used to struggle going 7 minutes without using my laptop of an evening. I’m not saying I’ll never get the laptop out again of a night time, but what the iPad does, at the very start, is give me some personal space back and let me relax without a traditional computer. That’s liberating.

Onto the pretty pictures. Without a doubt, the iPad is truly beautiful. The screen is crisp, clear and has a fantastic viewing angle:

Home screen

Now I know that some techos insist that the functionality of a device isn’t governed by its aesthetics, but I’d argue contrary. If you want to see me come close to having a fit, make me work at the computer of someone who has filled up every single space on their desktop with hundreds of icons. Clutter drives me nuts. At least once a week on both my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro I end up having a cleanup session and eliminate documents that have built up on my desktop. Just like I have difficulty concentrating with a highly cluttered desk, I similarly struggle to concentrate with a highly cluttered desktop. So for me, the aesthetics aren’t about “ooh, I have to have a pretty interface”, they’re about “I have to be able to concentrate”.

The first thing you might notice looking at my home screen is that I see my iPad as a productivity tool. Even with only a week of using it for instance, I’m in love with the iPad version of Pages. Sure, it’s not going to be something that I’d construct an 800 page book on, but it’s also not just an advanced note-pad either:

Pages on iPad

Having used Pages for the Mac quite a bit, I’m astounded by the amount of functionality Apple managed to get into the product on this tablet. Pages also retains all the elegance of the desktop package whilst making use of the multitouch interface:

Pages on the iPad

You’re probably noting that so far, all my screen shots have been of the iPad held on its side; this to me constantly seems like a more natural position. I can still hold it comfortably, and I can also type at a fair pace – particularly if the device is sitting down rather than being held. Two handed I’m assuming, when comparing against my normal touch typing speed on a regular keyboard (around 120wpm) that I’m easily hitting 60wpm when I get into the zone. Sure, it’s not perfect – no touch screen keyboard will be – but it’s as good if not better than a lot of netbook keyboards I’ve experimented with over the years.

From an entertainment perspective, the iPad is limited only by the imagination of the developers who are coming up with applications for it. For instance, a friend recently pointed out an (iPhone compatible) application called Air Video. This cost me $3.99 AU, and allows me to stream video from any Mac or Windows PC (not that I have any of the latter) running a free video server. It even offers on-the-fly conversion to maximise playability of content, and when you’ve got multiple cores sitting idle, that’s not a challenge:

Air Video

(Of course, Air Video offers full screen video as well.)

It’s obvious that on an entertainment front alone, Apple has done an end-run around all the conventional entertainment device companies – Sony, Nintendo from a gaming platform, and just about any other company that does say, portable DVD players, have all been caught with their pants down over this. From a gaming perspective, iPad games give fast gameplay and quite simply, it’s like holding a PS2 (or better) in your hands:

Dungeon Hunter HD

I’m the first to admit that my gaming is pretty limited most of the time – I tend to stick mostly to RPGs, though the iPhone allowed me to discover the tower defence category of games, and I’ll admit that I spent some time conquering Angry Birds once I got into it. But I’m hardly a hard-core gamer. But I did have a PS1, I do have a PS3, I did have a PSP, and I can safely say the iPad takes hand held gaming to a whole new level as far as I’m concerned. For the parents out there, you better be prepared to give in and buy the kids an iPad – they’re going to be all the rage. Not only that, extending the same experiences that people have with the iPhone and iPod Touch, why would you spend hundreds of dollars on a dedicated hand held gaming machine where you then have to spend serious money for each game when the average iPad game is just a few dollars, and the “expensive” ones are still under $15? Dungeon Hunter HD (shown above) cost me $12.99, and it easily competes with the RPG games I had on the PSP – and wins.

Going back to something I wrote on my main blog a while ago (iPad = iManage), I think the iPad is going to help Apple even more than before break into the enterprise market. (And I’m not the only one who sees the change coming.) Even compared to a netbook, an iPad is a lot less intrusive, and certainly a hell of a lot less intrusive than a full size laptop sitting on a desk. What does that mean? Meetings, geeks, meetings. If you’ve got one of those days where you’ve got a series of meetings, or your just going to be in a lengthy one, an iPad is going to let you conveniently and non-disruptively (at least after the initial hubbub of having one has died down) keep monitoring systems or check details without having to leave the meeting. This mightn’t look like much, but here’s the VNC functionality of iSSH being used to connect to a VMware Server guest for console access:

VNC access to VMware Server Guest

I felt confident in asserting even before the iPad was released that it was going to be a game changer – that there’s room for a device that sits between a smart phone and a regular computer (laptop or desktop). My view on that has changed – but only to get stronger. If you want evidence, I think you’ll see it in HP’s acquisition of Palm. As the HP CEO said only a few days ago, they didn’t buy Palm for the phone business, they bought them for the IP. There are now effectively three platforms out there which will help to define a new level of portable computing – Apple, HP (webOS) and the Android eco-system. This in itself is going to create excellent competition in an emerging market – something that will help push the market forward by there being a variety of choices.

Any vendor who isn’t either (a) writing custom management apps for their devices or (b) ensuring that their web consoles are fully functional in a standards compliant way (i.e., HTML5 rather than Flash) is not only nuts, but is, like Sony and Nintendo, bending over and asking their competition to take advantage of them.

When Apple sold more than two million iPads in their first two months, it should have been clear to anyone that the game has changed. Blithely running around insisting that it’s just a toy, or that it’s a walled garden is ignoring the simple fact that consumers see the potential of this device to free them from a conventional approach to computing that requires some level of technical training. For those consumers who have a slight fear of computers, the iPad is going to be a liberating device. For those of us sick of carrying around laptops regardless of whether we need the full horsepower of the device or not, the iPad is going to be a liberating device. For me – neither fearful of computers nor shy of having excess CPU and memory horsepower, it’s still a liberating device.

 Posted by PMdG at 3:36 pm  Tagged with:
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