Demoting the PC, Promoting the Cable?

A month ago Apple announced at the WWDC in San Francisco that they are "demoting the PC".  A couple things are quite notable about this, and maybe not very obvious.  

First, they are beginning to use the term "PC" to mean either their traditional computing products or Microsoft-based competitors.  If you watch past releases, PC had been a deragatory term.  My belief is that they are trying to mainstream their products a little more, since they are now trying to appeal to the non-tech crowd more and more.  We've seen Microsoft go after the same market with the Microsoft Stores brand, and HTC is doing it with a female-targeted phone.  I don't mean to draw too many inferrences here, I just mean Apple is targeting outside the current tech market.

Second, they make it quite clear they are cutting the cord.  This is good, and actually shows Apple's hand a bit- the only thing that is common between all the products at this point are the cables!  You only need the cable for syncing movies & TV shows, since they appear to be outside the realm of the current updates.  Other than video media, you really only need the cable for charging.

Now think big, for a moment- really big.  We've had the same chargers on our laptops, phones, electronics, etc. for a long, long time.  We've heard rumors of small iPhones for a long time, and I think this is the direction they are going- two tiers of Apple products:

The Top Tier: This is the flagship product- eventually 4G/LTE, large screen, dual core CPU, high-res camera, and NFC.  Pretty much anything you can dream up is going to be in this phone.  It will remain similar to what you see today.

Second Tier/Green Tier: This will have a scaled back CPU, a camera similar or identical to the iPhone 4, maybe even the same screen.  What will be absent is the larger screen and other bobbles- what it will have to differentiate is a much more efficient design and a solar charger.  Adding that with advanced cloud-based syncing probably due in 2012, you would see a phone that never needs to be plugged in.

These are the general directions that the market is going, but I think Apple is poised to get there first.  I am still baffled why Samsung is not leading the market, in technology- they have all the bits to do this with Android, but the Apple competitors are just not showing the inspiration or vision at this point.

Google's Retreat & Microsoft's Miss

Last week Google announced that they would be ending their PowerMeter project.  To sum it up, this was a website that offered you the ability to:

• Read your power usage for the previous hour/day/week/month/year.
• Compare one period against another (this week vs. last week)
• Estimate your power usage

Google did this by either getting the data from your utility provider or from a 3rd party device.  Both worked ok, but for my provider (San Diego Gas & Electric), they had severe issues that caused long periods of data missing from the reports.  I'm pretty big on power savings & efficiency, so this was a cool product to me- and a deal breaker when I was working on my own products.  Here's what Google's product had problems with:

• The lag from when your utility posted the data to when it was available was inconsistent.  Sometimes it would show up in the middle of the night, and sometimes it would take 2-3 days. Sometimes it would not show up at all.
• The graph auto-scaled to the period you were looking at, and there was no way to turn it off.  So when my highest usage in a winter month was 30kWh for a day (!), it had the same spike size as a mild June day at 8kWh. This was because it was scaled in relation to the rest of the period.
• There was no data modeling capabilities.  Simply put, you couldn't line up that week in June against a week in December.  That may sound like an advance feature, but if you are actively working to reduce your bill, this is something you think about 10 minutes into the problem.
• Upon getting approved for the program, it took 3 months after signing up before I could get any data to show up.  I was impatient, and started my own.  More on that in a bit.

Now I mentioned Microsoft here, and that's because they announced their Hohm program shortly after Google announced PowerMeter.  I'm no Google or Microsoft fanboy, but just because a competitor launced a similar product, that's not a "me too" move, right?  Well it is if you cancel it when your competitor cancels theirs.  Microsoft's biggest flaw was targeting the Pacific Northwest- a green crowd I am sure, but they also enjoy some of the cheapest, cleanest hydro power in the world.  A $35 bill in Seattle can easily equal a $435 bill in California, so Microsoft had no idea who to target.

Now for the good stuff- why did Google cancel the program?

"Our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would have liked, so we have decided to retire PowerMeter."

I think this is probably true, but deceptively vague.  Here's why power savings is a tough market:

• It's hard to target a market of folks who want to spend less money.
• The data is really not complex- warm climates' usage goes up in the summer, cold climates go up in the winter, and everywhere goes low in spring and fall.
• The data is noisy- especially from folks who are tweaking their use or trying new things.
• They have enough data.
• There is a diminishing return on power savings.

I'm not calling Google a liar, but power savings is tough- and I am sure they are looking to clean up and narrow their offerings or focus.  Of all the cool features it should have offered, Google PowerMeter only did some basic things- but required HUGE infrastructure on the utility's back end, or required homeowners to get awful close to their 220V mains lines- which are deadly.  Sure you might think that was necessary- but it's not.

I replaced PowerMeter with an Excel spreadsheet.  Furthermore, I have more reporting- better granularity and better individual support than PowerMeter ever had.  Here's an example from Powermeter for the year:

That's cool and somewhat useful- but even through it talks to SDG&E, it doesn't get rate information from them.  I plug data into my own spreadsheet and I get data that ends up looking like this:

Now I've never tried to make this readable by anyone else but me, but I think this is a very useful graph- This tells me how I have done with power costs over the last 2 and a half years, and how I am doing so far this month.  I think it's pretty cool- but how does a non-programmer make a spreadsheet that scales better than Google?  It's because Google doesn't get it.  I think they will be back.  Microsoft?  I am not sure they ever really, really cared about this.

Magical Datacenters

It seems to me that no one else asked a fairly obvious question about the datacenters Apple announced at WWDC. What operating system(s) do they run?  Apple loves to take a run at Microsoft whenever they get the chance, but I'm guessing there's still a fair amount of Microsoft software in those datacenters. Here's my guess on what they're running.

• Cisco iOS (assuming they aren't using Juniper or some other embedded network OS platform)
• Windows (I'm guessing that they're running Exchange for messaging.  Apple folks still need to schedule meetings, right?
• NetApp or EMC (again assuming they aren't using a bunch of Mac Minis for their storage of all your stuff)
• Linux (this is a hedge assuming they don't do all their business apps on Microsoft's platform)

Running retail stores requires a huge amount of programming and business application infrastructure.  I love Apple products, but they are trying to sell the concept that they own the entire vertical.  They are kicking ass on the consumer-facing side, but they have a great deal to do for large businesses.

On the other hand, Harvard Business Review seems convinced that America's only real growth is in startups.  

It's been a constant source of humor for Gruber & Benjamin on the Talk Show podcast.

Companies, Hide Your CEOs

I try not to repost stuff too often, but this is why companies have marketing & PR firms.  To be brief, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle is suing his neighbor to cut down a tree that has grown to block part of his view of the San Francisco neighborhood.

I'm no enemy of Oracle, but I do consider myself a friend of the great redwoods, which grow nowhere else in the world. 

Brand Allegiance Part 2

I really do like Dan Gruber's writing and podcasts, but I think he's looking through poop-colored glasses when he looks at Microsoft.  Here's a key example:

"...Apple not only uses iPod Touches for retail point-of-sale, but they distribute dongles from Square that let everyone do so too. Imagine if Apple made consumer and business platforms."

It's worth noting that Apple has has three different kinds of payment systems over the last couple years:

1. Windows CE-powered devices from Motorola.
2. iOS-powered devices that are a combination of a custom app, an iPod touch and a card reader sleeve.
3. Dedicated card/check readers.

You have probably seen #1 and #2 frequently if you've bought something.  But what Dan doesn't realize or doesn't share is that #2 here frequently has issues reading cards.  It's probably not the iPod, they are indeed great devices.  But that sleeve reader is what frequently goes out, and to comply with the card processing security requirements, I don't think employees can change them out themselves.  This means that employees have to frequently go over and use a different device to process transactions.  This leaves me with two points:

• Apple has not replaced the Windows-powered devices with iPods- they have replaced the Windows devices with dedicated readers (look for them hidden on one side along a wall).
• Apple's security requirements means that even employees trusted to crack open your iMac to replace proprietary parts aren't trusted to repair their own hardware.

Claim chowder?