Chuqui 3.0

Steve Jobs Health is a Private Matter.

Michael Gartenberg - Steve Jobs Health is a Private Matter.:

When it comes to Apple, the smallest, most minute details of the company are subject to the most intense scrutiny, which would almost be funny, if it didn't have an effect on their stock price. The bottom line is that Steve Jobs health is none of anyone's business. If Steve's health were to become something that would prevent him from running Apple as CEO, presumably we would know. Why? Well, it already happened once before a few years ago when Steve became ill. It was disclosed, the leadership team was put in place and Apple ran just fine.

For once, I disagree with Michael, pretty strongly. The problem here is the perception that Apple's success and future lives (and, ahem dies) with Steve. It is VERY true that Steve Jobs was the primary reason for Apple not dying back in the 90's -- pure and simple, if Amelio hadn't bought NeXT and Steve engineered his return to the company, Apple was toast. Period. Exclamation Point. No discussion. it is also VERY true that Steve is and continues to be a key driving point at Apple. Ultimately, he's the deciding factor in success/fail of products and features in many situations, and it's his vision, or his ability to choose which ideas come from others in the company, that drives the company's success. This means that Steve's ability and willingness to continue doing his job is a significant factor in Apple's future success, and that means that as Steve's health goes, so does Apple's stock. Any stockholder is going to be just a bit worried about their holdings if they think Steve might not be there at the helm, and it's a legitimate worry. Since Apple's success is so tied up with a single person, the health of that person is, in fact, significant and not private. Now, Apple can deal wit this in two ways. First: they can accept this and disclose. Assuming Steve is, in fact, healthy, that's fairly straightforward and solves the problem short term. I think it's the wrong solution, though. Because: Two: what Apple REALLY needs to do, and hasn't done a good job of, is convince the public and stockholders that Apple will continue to thrive once Steve DOES step down, and at some point, he will. Until Apple does this, his health is going to be nit-picked even more carefully than the Pope So my suggestion to Apple: it's time to start disclosing the succession plans (and the contingency plans they imply). Apple has put one hell of a management team in place, from Jonathan Ive to Tim Cook to Peter Oppenheimer to a really strong IT organization. I'm firmly convinced that the group Steve's got in place can keep Apple moving forward, with or without Steve. In many ways, they already are, and Steve is setting direction and making sure it's implemented to his vision and standards. This is a team that CAN survive Steve moving on -- not just survive, thrive (and god knows why nobody's given Tim Cook a zillion dollars to come run THEIR company, unless he's been promised Apple "some day"; he's my heir presumptive, FWIW) If Apple can show there's a succession plan and the right people in charge, and can start convincing wall street the plan is rational and will work -- then Steve's health stops being such a front-burner issue. But they haven't, and until they do, every time Steve sneezes, so will the stock. and frankly, it should, because Apple hasn't shown they have that contingency handled.

Earnings call takeaway: New products in September

Earnings call takeaway: New products in September - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

We had a good time speculating what new products/changes to the product line will appear in September (or in the 4th quarter, more accurately) in the liveblog and the press has joined in that speculation today. ZDNet thinks that products will be brought out at lower prices, so that Apple can drive volume and gain marketshare. Over at eWeek, they are guessing everything from a shift in microprocessors, to low-cost portables aimed at schools to revamped AppleTVs.

The general thought (or wish) in our chat last night centered around new MacBook Pros, lower priced Airs and revamped Minis or other headless Macs.

My personal speculation is that while I expect current line products to drop in price a bit (not a huge drop, but a drop), and think it is high time for a MacBook Pro redesign, I'm going to guess that new displays are part of the "transition." The Apple Cinema Display line is not only overpriced, it is long-in-the-tooth when compared to products in its pricepoint (or even lower pricepoints). OLED displays could be expensive, and it would certainly be technology that no one else is pushing.

the one thing missing from the various speculations on this is timing. September/October is the prime time for the christmas/holiday selling season; it's after back to school has finished, and before the holiday advertising blitz starts in early november.

To me, that means consumer, which doesn't mean it won't be a Macbook pro refresh, but I'd see that as more of a Macworld/January announcement. I also would tend to discount anything really revolutionary (i.e. tablets, or "macintosh touch" because the geeks would drool, but the consumer market would take a lot of selling and time.

So think macbook, apple TV, ipod. Things where you can get a big impact on announcement and sell quickly and easily to geeks without a long convincing process. The geek toys are probably going to come out in January, not September, when Steve can make a bigger splash and the selling cycle won't be so compressed or frantic.

1% of MobileMe members can't access their mail....

and unfortunately, I'm currently part of that 1%. sigh.

The good news is Apple's got a status system for things like this:

http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/

1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience.

The sad news is that status doesn't seem to have an RSS feed. Guys? someone dropped the ball here. No excuse.

update: my mail is back. the status still shows the 1% can't access. my guess is they're doing a rolling migration, so at any time some small percentage of users are migrating and can't access stuff. An indication they under-scoped the hardware needed for me.com, IMHO.

Still broken: Dear Yahoo! If anyone is left there, please fix it so your system accepts @me.com addresses

Chuqui 3.0: Dear Yahoo! If anyone is left there, please fix it so your system accepts @me.com addresses:

Try setting up and validating a @me.com address onto your account, so you can, say, use it with yahoo groups as your subscribed address. Yahoo tells you foo _at_ me.com isn't a valid email address. which until a couple of weeks ago was correct

Just checked. Still broken at yahoo. And for those that were asking, yes, I tried to find a place on the yahoo web site to report this problem, but they hide it amazingly well. I did find a friend at Yahoo still at yahoo, and he filed a bug internally on it the other day.

But it's not fixed.

And yes, @mac.com still works. and no, I don't want to use an @mac.com address here. I'm moving my email to chuqui@me.com, and I might as well leave the subscriptions where they are rather than move them to @mac.com then move them again.

So yes, this has been reported.

MobileMe feature request

I'm down here in SoCal dealing with estate issues with mom, which means it's time to catch up on tech support for her computer. One of the things that allows me to do is get caught up on updates and the usual stuff.

It's also allowing me to clean up the changes involving the .Mac -> MobileMe transition.

that's actually going pretty well, but I've run into a situation where I think Apple needs to add a feature:

I have a family account for MobileMe. right now, it has two accounts on it: cvonrospach (the master) and chuqui. The reason cvonrospach is the master instead of chuqui is historical and mostly braincramps on my part, but I've been using cvonrospach for my .Mac account for a while, but the .Mac account I used at Apple and attached to my iTunes and etc is my original one. With MobileMe I've re-activated that and I'm moving all of my stuff there, but since Back to My Mac was set up on my mom's box to cvonrospach, I was hesitant to try to redefine all of that remotely.

So that's now fixed, and I've now synced me stuff up to MobileMe on chuqui@me.com just fine. But I'd like to also set up mom's mac onto it's own family member account so I can sync her data there separately from mine.

Unfortunately, I ca do one of two things:

1) set up Back to My Mac between my computer(s) and hers.

2) give her a MobileMe account to sync

I can't do both. it'd be really nice (hint hint, Apple!) if Back to my Mac were extended to work across all accounts tied to the same family account, not just machines tied to a given MobileMe account. That way, I could set up my stuff, Laurie hers, my mom hers, my sister here's, all tied to my family pack and still be able to remotely log on to fix things as needed. As it is, I can't.

well, I'll bet there's a hack that would allow me, but I'm trying to avoid hacks in this situation. So apple, please: if it's a family pack, extend back to my mac to all macs attached to that family pack. thanks.

The New Apple Walled Garden

TechCrunchIT » Blog Archive » The New Apple Walled Garden:

The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.

Which is actually continuing proof that DRM is not by itself evil -- evil DRM is evil.

If you exclude the edge of the bell curve types who simply see any restriction of any sort as evil, the reality is this: if the DRM allows a user the type of usage they want to have with something, they don't mind (or even really notice) the DRM. The DVD is a classic example; for all a small percentage complains and cracks, pretty much everyone else just uses them and doesn't have many problems.

Ditto iTunes and Fairplay. the DRM exists, but it stays pretty much out of the way. Users use their content without really noticing the DRM. It works.

the problem that's gotten DRM such a bad reputation (and deserved) is that media companies turned to DRM to try to force users to use content on the media companies terms, and that created the conflict because users weren't able to do what they wanted -- there wasn't the necessary compromise between what both sides wanted out of the deal.

Apple's been the only company so far to fight to get media companies to compromise and allow rational use of the content; DRM is the tool they use to get the media companies to even allow ANY licensed content, but they've done a pretty good job of convincing the companies to set the restrictions to things that users find acceptable. And like a tar baby, once that's done, it's hard for the media companies to lock down restrictions further, the long-term reality is that those restrictions are likely going to loosen as the business models change and adapt.

Without DRM, ipod/itunes/etc, most legal online music, most legal online video, etc -- simply wouldn't exist. it's a compromise made by both sides of the equation, and as long as that compromise is fair to both sides, then it works. Where things got bollixed up was where the media companies decided they could use DRM to re-define usage patterns, and where the edge of the anti-DRM folks felt they could simply fly a finger at the media companies and ignore their investment and rights in all of this stuff (and ultimately, napster and friends got slapped for it. won some battles, lost the war).

Just defining DRM is evil is wrong; DRM is a tool which can be used badly, and bad DRM is what causes the problems.

Apple's Joswiak dishes on missing features

Macworld | iPhone Central | Apple's Joswiak dishes on missing features:

When asked about cut-and-paste support, something that many iPhone users—ourselves included—have clamored for, Joz said that the feature simply didn’t make—if you’ll pardon the expression—the cut on Apple’s priority list for the latest software release. There’s nothing against cut-and-paste, Joz claimed, it’s just that other features were determined to be more in demand.

I think Joswiak and Apple are being a bit disingenuous here, but for all of the right reasons. There's a deeper issue that needs to be examined here, but it boils down to a few key points: 1) Once you implement something, it's really hard to throw it out and replace it with something better; Apple's more willing to do this than most companies (think, for instance, the "new" iMovie in iLife '08 -- and the whining that happened; personally, Apple was right, IMHO, but that's a different blog entry -- but most of the whining came from folks who honestly should have moved to Final Cut Express long ago and were pissed when Apple took iMovie back into being a "my mother can use this" entry level app) 2) One of Apple's core values is "do it right". 3) Something as core as cut and paste isn't shipping until it passes the "Steve test"; and Steve is not big on "well, it'll do". 4) it's easy to do cut and paste badly on an iPhone. Or even do it in a "hey, this doesn't suck" way. But doing it the Apple way? Basically, I think the real reason this doesn't exist is because Apple knows once they implement it, they're stuck with it, and so they'd rather not do it at all until they do it right. And they're right. It's a lot easier to fix "we don't have cut and paste" than "damn, but cut and paste sucks". but it's a lot easier politically to simply say "hey, there are other priorities". to a degree, he's right; the priority he's implying but not explicitly bringing forward is "we want to make sure it works like an Apple product and doesn't suck" first. And that's why Apple sold a million of these buggers already; because they are careful about core functionality and compromises, and the geeks know it. Few companies are willing to play the "better to not do than do badly" game, much less Apple's "... than do so-so" standard. As an aside, since the Xbox 360/Netflix agreement has brought it forward again: this is why Apple hasn't done a PVR or PVR software for the Apple TV. There are so many factors out of its control -- anyone who's hooked one of these bastards up understands -- that building a PVR that "works like an Apple" is somewhere beyond difficult and towards impossible (which is why so many of us would love something like this; it solves a problem nobody's really solved, even Tivo, where interfacing to random cable boxes in random ways is still a bit of a horror show) FWIW, I like the Xbox/Netflix deal. It's impact on Apple and iTunes is less than most people think, because it really comes down to whether you prefer a subscription model (netflix) or a pay per view model (Apple), and neither model really matters for online video until both platforms fix the "there's no freaking content" problem -- the amount of downloadable content on Netflix is still a tiny proportion of it's library, and bluntly, Netflix's real value is in its library, not its technology. Which is why, everytime I talked to someone in the iTunes group when I was at Apple, I used to harp on "we have to buy Netflix" until they finally told me to just shut up... But iTunes with a subscription and PPV model and Netflix' library depth and an Apple TV is one hell of a business proposition... Still is, but Apple never showed any significant interest in it, even though some of us wandering the project and its peripheries thought it was a killer combo. But that's ultimately why I haven't bought an Apple TV (or a Roku) -- neither gets me access to much of the content I want, which is the library beyond the last 3 years of hit movies. Talk to me when I can stream, as, Big Chill or Season 5 of M*A*S*H to my Apple TV on PPV prices.

Dear Yahoo! If anyone is left there, please fix it so your system accepts @me.com addresses

This is kinda sad -- mentioned it yesterday here, still broken. Try logging into your yahoo account. Try setting up and validating a @me.com address onto your account, so you can, say, use it with yahoo groups as your subscribed address. Yahoo tells you foo _at_ me.com isn't a valid email address. which until a couple of weeks ago was correct. I'm amazed Apple hasn't beating the crap out of someone over there over this, or maybe there's nobody left that can fix this and cares? (hey, people at Apple who read this, shouldn't someone be 'encouraging' Yahoo! to get this taken care of?) Having this broken last week as me.com was fully rolling out -- would have been annoying but somewhat understandable. That it's still broken now? But Yahoo! stopped being able to execute well a while back, no? At this point, I'm going to be curious how long this stays broken.

Starting the migration to me.com

Now that Apple seems to have the birthing pains of MobileMe under control, I'm starting to migrate my "stuff" off to MobileMe. First thing I tried, because if there are glitches the world won't end: moving my Yahoo Groups subscriptions to me MobileMe address. Guess what? Yahoo doesn't see me.com as a valid domain name; evidently it's caught by their spam/garbage traps. I can understand why they did this at one point. I can't believe it hasn't been fixed. Yahoo guys, you have a patch you need to issue... Go ahead, try to add a "acct@me.com" to your yahoo valid emails. acct@mac.com works fine, of course. So it looks like there are going to be glitches beyond Apple's here, but wow, this one should have been caught and fixed by Yahoo already. (oh, for those wondering: chuqui _at_ me.com -- of course)

The MobileMe rollercoaster (turn off .mac sync for now)

The MobileMe rollercoaster - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):

MobileMe has been up and down since late last night like so much rancid Chinese food. We know just about as much as you do: we're getting tips that it's up -- no, wait -- it's down. And now it's back up! And now it's down.

If you're one of those people using .Mac Sync for your information (address book, calendars, etc), you might want to set your syncing to "manual" in the system preferences. This morning I got a notice that sync wanted to delete 300+ entries from my keychain, which I obviously cancelled out of and then turned off auto-syncing.

that was likely an isolated case where the system was either trying to come up or go down, but in any event, until the transition shakes down, you probably want to not trust syncing with the systems.

Update: safe to come out, turn syncing back on. I've been that way for a couple of days just fine.