latoga labs

Today’s the big day, the big Apple announcement. Personally, I have been trying to avoid the rumor mills and gossip blogs over the past few weeks in order to focus on personal revenue generating activity (just in case I may want to purchase something from Apple in the near future). But this morning something on the radio news caught my attention, Apple will not be live broadcasting the event on the web. At first I thought this was strange, live broadcasts are the best way to engage clients online. But then my pre-coffee mind caught up, why waste all the money of live broadcasting it online? There is an entire battalion of Apple fans who will live blog/live tweet the event and make comments on today’s announcement for weeks.

This is the magic of both the Apple marketing machine and of social media in action…pay attention.

One other comment about today’s announcement, I hear so much media talk about today’s announcement to be a direct competitor to e-book readers. Without knowing if today’s announcement is a slate/tablet computer, one thing I do know for sure…Apple will not release a product that will compete with existing products in the market. They will product something that will help change the market or create an entirely new one. This is what Apple is great at, today’s announcement will not be just a way to compete on the e-book front, but likely something much more grandiose.

Oh, and by the way…there is a big Oracle/Sun announcement today too….in case you forgot.

Update: one other interesting point on the Apple announcement that some mentioned to me this morning is what does Steve look like. With all the rumors on his health seeing him at the announcement will be interesting. As well as reading between the lines with his speech; he should start messaging suscession plans so that analysts and public alike stop equating Apple with Steve jobs. The future of Apple has to be unlinked from Steve at some point.

Today was day 2 of major announcements in technology, Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Software Preview (video of full announcement should be up on that link soon).  For me, the past two days have been quite busy on multiple fronts with all the announcements being just one of them.  When days like this occur I end up finding interesting sites and leaving browser tabs open until my computer starts to scream “no more!”.  So I’m hitting things in reverse and posting some thoughts on the Apple announcements before I post my thoughts on yesterday’s Cisco announcement (then I can close some of my browser tabs).

First, if you don’t want to sit through the video of the Apple Preview, check out the archive of live comments from engadget (scroll to the bottom on work up) or Don MacAksill’s live twittering.

Second, I have to classify myself as a business-geek users of my iPhone and my comments will flow from this classification.  I use it primarily for business items like monitoring exchange email, moving between meetings in my exchange calendar, and doing more calls that I care to admit in a day.  But I love it for the fact that I can all my geek stuff on it as well because it is an application platform (much like my old Palm Treo was).  Using applications like a Twitter client, WordPress client,  Webex client, Netflix client, and others social networking clients allow me to interact will all the web services I want or need.  And then all the photo applications to allow me to extend my photography addiction to the phone.  All that being said, it’s the business side of stuff that really drives my use (not to mention pays the bills for the iPhone).

So, here is a list of the major pains that I was hoping would be fixed in 3.0:

• The ability to click on a phone number in emails and outlook calendar invites to dial a number!  Since copy/paste has never been available, I always expected at least this feature, especially considering my blackberry could do this…
• Landscape mode in email and all apps I need to type in.  I have fat fingers, the portrait mode keys on the iPhone are small.  And the spell correction can be annoying with the combination of both.  (Fixed)
• Fix the lag with larger Contact databases.  There are times when opening or working with my contacts just hangs.  When 2.0 was released I heard that it was because the system wasn’t designed for large contacts lists.  I work in sales, I have thousands of contacts in my phone and I never know which ones I may need.
• Fix the contact search feature.  This scrolling to find someone is such a waste of time.  The search feature works much better because after typing 3 characters I usually see the person I’m looking for (see previous bullet item).  But the search area scrolls off the screen.  Allow me to lock it to the screen so it is my default view.  My Treo excelled at this.
• Tethering:  there are still times when I need to have my laptop connected to the internet to accomplish something while I’m out and mobile (though less frequently now that the WebEx client is available), give me this safety net.

So, from what I can tell…25% of what I want is in 3.0.

Here are the other items I think are important from this release:

• Copy/Paste.  I don’t buy the excuse of “security was an issue” as to why it took so long to have this.  This has always been a black eye on the iPhone.  BTW:  I still want clickable phone numbers in calendar invites…and I want it to auto dial the passcode for conference lines (since I’m asking).
• Landscape mode (as mentioned above)
• universal search.  But what would be nice is if you could build search filters that could be linked to a button on the spotlight home screen.  Maybe I want to search just contacts and calendars when I type something in to cut the huge list of results.  Would be nice if I could just have a customized filter button below my search window..type the text and then my custom filter button to see my results.
• Voice Memos:  this is nice, but will need to see how this is different from other voice recording apps currently available (Jott, Evernote).  Now this is where Apple needs to be careful not ot add built in apps that will alienate their app developers.

I should be interesting to see how app developers use the new APIs and features..I can already see some interesting things coming with the peer to peer capability.  Can’t wait for the free upgrade.

Thanks to this morning’s live tweeting of an Apple announcement event in San Francisco by Don MacAskill, it looks Apple will be release iPhone 2.1 software update on Friday.  According to Don, this new release will cuase fewer dropped calls (something that I personally have witnessed an unacceptable spike in over the past week) and longer battery life as well as a number of bug fixes.

As a road warrior who lives on my Exchange email during the day, I have been meaning to write a road warrior’s review of the iPhone for a while.  Looks like I’ll have to wait till this weekend to see which of my annoyances Apple has fixed…

Yesterday I had dinner with a colleague from VMware. During our discussions he made a comment that surprised me and struck a realization for me. He was commenting on how the Macintosh laptops make ideal systems for running virtualization. The reason being that all the hardware on the MacBooks are standardized.

The key to virtualization is the ability to abstract the physical hardware to the operating system. This is the hardest part of any vituralization technology. Not only because of the complexity of that software, but because of the Quality Assurance testing that must be done. Every combination of possible hardware must be tested to ensure reliability. When you think about the combination of hardware possible with PC laptops, the QA test matrix becomes quite large. But, with the Apple laptops, you have a much smaller matrix to test.

We are starting to see serious projects around desktop virtualization (see recent articles How Merrill Lynch Plans To Virtualize Half Its Desktops and Desktop Virtualization Drives Security, Not Just Dollar Savings). When you consider the cost benefits for medium to large enterprises, I think it is clear that we are seeing the start of a wave for desktop virtualization in the IT industry. And that is ontop of just the start of data center virtualization.

Now look at all the variables in PC based business laptops and the complexity of testing all these variations with the virtualization technology, and there is an opening for MacBooks. Of course, this would also require a major change with Apple, they would need to start building an organization that could support enterprises. This means working with them a bit more instead of taking the consumer approach of “here are the options, take it or leave it”.

And then there is Microsoft and their upcoming virtualization technology, don’t expect them to just let such a invasion of MacBooks in the enterprise to happen.

Wow, it sounds like the main stream tech media might be catching up to what the users who have moved from Windows to the Mac OS X have been saying for a few years now: “It Just Works”:

• Business Week: Apple’s OS Edge Is a Threat to Microsoft
• Computer World: Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn

Not that this is anything new to a large number of people…but when a Gartner analyst makes a warning like that against one of the analyst industry cash cows…or was it just stating more of the obvious. When you read through the details, the Gartner analyst are essentially telling Microsoft to turn Windows into the MacOS.  Only Apple already swallowed the horse pill of starting from scratch and upsetting their development community 8 years ago.  It would be interesting to see how Microsoft handles the same situation (which it must).