Apple, Google and Microsoft Have a Size Problem

A few thoughts on the disruptions for these three OS makers caused by Netbooks

Apple, Google and Microsoft's Size Problem

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Now That's Thinking

I just purchased an upgrade to Apago’s excellent PDF Shrink app, which does the best job I’ve found of any app for compressing PDFs. Going the Print to PDF route in OS X is super convenient but with image-heavy files (say PPTs) it creates very bloaty files due to how it treats images. PDF Shrink cuts them down to size much better than the Compress PDF function in Preview, retaining image quality far better.

Anyway, I got the email with the new license key, and in anticipation of having to paste it into a registration dialog once, I copied it into my clipboard. Once PDF Shrink started up, this dialog appeared:

Now that’s thinking ahead. Just click Yes and it’s all done.

Why didn’t anybody else think of that? (Hello Adobe… for whom I just had to type a 162 character registration code in one character at a time for CS4. OK maybe it wasn’t 162 characters but it was long.)

Buying Based on Ersatz Products

I love these mini model tents and sleeping bags at Target that show you what the full-size, real thing looks like. Since Target doesn’t have the floor space to set up a 6-person Coleman tent, they resort to these ersatz substitutes. I wonder how many people can make the conceptual leap?

Second, I recently bought a Belkin recorder to attach to my iPod Nano (it works well, but drains the battery quickly, FYI). It’s a very small device but came in a huge package. Part of the reason for it being so big was that there was a cardboard model of an iPod shown “attached” to the recorder, to give a more obvious sense of how it works. It’s actually well done and quite realistic, I did a double-take when I first got the package in the mail.

Happy 25th birthday, Macintosh

Twenty five years ago today, the Macintosh was announced with the iconic commercial that appeared for the one time only on the Superbowl.

I first started using a Mac probably around 1989 and have been using them continuously since then. That first one was a 9” black and white jobbie, used for running Adobe PageMaker (very slowly) to help produce the college newspaper. At the school they had an early Mac lab and one of the first laser printers, which some wag system administrator called “Godot” because you were constantly waiting for it.

A Powerbook 180 got me through grad school and writing my thesis, and that was actually a great little machine. An iBook joined me when I ran my own business. We then got a G5 tower for home, which is a work of art inside and out; servicing it feels like you’re taking apart an aircraft. And since then it’s been a string of Powerbooks and MacBooks Pros (one of which was a real dud, it has to be said, but my current one is great).

Here is a video of a very young Steve Jobs introducing the Mac to 3,000 spectators a few days before the Superbowl ad aired. As you can see, he has always been quite the showman.

This article at Computer World has a number of other videos to do with the launch, all interesting and quite humorous.

Here’s to twenty five more years.

Related article:
Computer Museum at the Grande Arche, Paris 

Smartphone Platforms Max'd Out

Over at O’Reilly Raven Zachary is speculating on what Palm’s announcement will be in January, and whether they will finally ship their Linux-based OS or jump in with one of the existing major platforms, which would just leave them with either Android or Windows Mobile as I can’t see Apple letting them have the iPhone OS…

Palm used to be a dominant platform with a vibrant developer community. It had mojo. Today, only iPhone and Android have mojo. Windows Mobile is still very popular, but it doesn’t have nearly the buzz or, from what I see clients asking for, the development interest. So there two dominant platforms and one secondary one. Two secondary ones if you count Palm’s ancient OS, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to Windows Mobile. So call it two and a half.

We see the same kind of pattern elsewhere. In PC OS’s there are 2-3 platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) and no room for any others. In social networking there are 2-3 platforms (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn) and while there’s lots of start-up activity at this point it’s hard to see how any will succeed in anything beyond a niche capacity; people just don’t want to have to invest effort in more than a couple of social networks, and app developers and advertisers will be focused on the ones with the most traffic. In gaming platforms there are 3 (Xbox, Playstation, Wii now making Nintendo a full-fledged member again). Developers don’t have the resources to work on more than 2 or 3, often not even more than 1. Customers tend to gravitate toward safer bets in dynamic categories, which reinforces the hegemony of the major players.

If you’re not in that top 2 or 3, it’s a better bet to swallow your pride and jump in with them rather than try to go it alone. (Note that this is primarily in a category that relies a lot on network effects — if you are in a business of products that are relatively independent then this argument doesn’t necessarily hold up.)

What will Palm do? They are in a pickle, with a lot of legacy apps to support, and a choice of staying with their former arch enemy (Windows Mobile) or going with a jury-still-out OS (Android). Unless they are able to pull off some Rosetta Stone miracle that unifies several OS’s smoothly, I can’t see a new Palm OS working out for them. If they’d got it out several years ago it could have worked, but today, no.

Related articles:

• Palm Treo Pro and Satisfying Needs