Category — History

IBM has unveiled a sneak peek of its new Lotus iNotes, a web app client for its Lotus Domino messaging server to bring email, calendar, and contacts to iPhone. The move fulfills rumors of customized iPhone support for Lotus Notes and demonstrates IBM’s evolving interest in Apple within the enterprise.

IBM expands Lotus Notes Mac support to iPhone (screenshots)
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Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple’s limited comments on Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X due in about a year, have opened the playing field for rampant speculation. Here’s a look at a series of myths that have developed around the upcoming release. The eighth myth of Snow Leopard:

Snow Leopard is Just an Operating System

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple’s limited comments on Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X due in about a year, have opened the playing field for rampant speculation. Here’s a look at a series of myths that have developed around the upcoming release. The second myth of Snow Leopard:

Apple is dropping support for 32-bit Intel Macs because Snow Leopard is 64-bit.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Regular readers will recall that when Safari for Windows shipped, I suggested Apple was likely looking to move its Mac OS X Cocoa development model into the Windows arena in order to broaden Cocoa’s visibility and adoption.

Over the last year, I’ve also outlined Apple’s efforts to starve Adobe’s Flash and AIR (and by extension, Microsoft’s me-too Flash plugin called Silverlight), at a time when pundits have insisted that Flash was a vital missing element on the iPhone and that Apple could/should/would be scrambling to port Flash to it. It might be a surprise to find that Apple’s air supply attack on Flash and its interest in dusting Windows with Cocoa are actually related.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Ever since the Intel Mac transition was announced at WWDC 2005, pundits have been seeding worries that Apple would immediately pull the plug on PowerPC Macs. In 2006, the rumor mill stated Leopard would be Intel only; will OS X 10.6 finally mark the end of PowerPC support?

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Following up on the previous segment, WWDC 2008: Predictions & What to Expect: Mac OS X 10.6, this article looks at how Apple differs from Microsoft in the hints it has dropped about the human interface concepts to be used in future versions of Mac OS X, and suggests some additional interface ideas for 10.6.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
WWDC is just around the corner, and rumors are flying about what might be revealed or released. Here’s a look at how reasonable the rumors about Mac OS X 10.6 are, along with some ideas for where Apple is headed in its desktop OS.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
While the United States prepares to elect a new president, candidates on both sides have made interesting comments about their affiliations with tech companies and their perspective on issues facing the tech industry.

Here’s a look at Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain compare, looking first at how each relates to Apple and Microsoft, how corporations are leveraging money and political power to shape public policy to fit their own interests, and followed by a look at each candidate’s stance on issues related to technology.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Throughout the 90s, Apple’s increasingly precarious business was hobbled and complicated by the albatross of the Newton. As Apple abandoned the sophisticated but unfinished and ultimately unprofitable platform in early 1998, Palm began selling its wildly popular PDAs while PC makers struggled to copy that success in the mobile market with clumsy WinCE based devices.

Ten years later, PC makers are still failing to understand mobile devices as Apple launches its game changing WiFi mobile platform. Here’s why PC makers will be similarly left behind in their fight against the iPhone in the market for low cost mobile devices.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple’s WiFi mobile platform, represented by the iPhone and iPod touch, appears to echo elements of the history of the company’s Newton MessagePad from a decade ago. This time, as a decade ago, Apple engineered a highly specialized device and integrated software while the company’s PC competitors lined up rival products that were largely gutless, impractical, instant eWaste units powered by software inappropriate for use in a mobile device. Here’s a historical comparison of the mid 90s Newton with today’s iPhone platform, leading up to what can be drawn about the future of Apple’s mobile WiFi platform compared to the Asus EEE PC and similar devices.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple critics have been working to push the idea that the company’s pricing models in iTunes are in trouble and that HBO’s recent deal to sell shows for $2.99 per episode will cause a stampede toward untenably higher pricing. They’re wrong, here’s why.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Inventory shortages of the iPhone appear to predict the launch of a new 3G model, long expected to be released this June around the first year anniversary of its debut. However, the rumor mill has recently kicked into overdrive to predict the arrival of another new device based on the same platform, either focused on gaming or serving as a tablet device. This is highly unlikely, for the following reasons.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Microsoft’s marketing of Windows Vista and the Zune have failed in large part due to the fact that Microsoft has not learned how to effectively sell consumer products. Consumers buy Windows and Office, but that’s because they have no choice, not because of the company’s marketing savvy. Microsoft only effectively markets its products to businesses, which represents a very different type of sales relationship.

Businesses are so used to disgorging overloaded language about facilitating and empowering that they don’t find Microsoft’s marketing of the same caliber all that difficult to swallow. Consumers are a whole ‘nother ball game, and Microsoft is striking out in efforts to reach them. This has big impacts on the company’s future prospects.

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Copying the self-serving campaigns run by SVTC and Greenpeace, the group Climate Counts has made Apple, Inc. the core of its latest press releases. The group says Apple “is not yet taking meaningful action on climate change,” and is a “choice to avoid for the climate-conscious consumer,” but then points out that its “action” metrics are all based on ineffectual political posturing. And the reason for the tough critique: Apple elected not to join the Climate Counts consortium last year and throw money at the group’s ineffectual efforts to “facilitate engagement.”

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Daniel Eran Dilger
Microsoft has been keeping awfully quiet about sales figures for its Zune, a product that many Windows Enthusiasts originally predicted would cause considerable grief for Apple’s iPod. However, despite a new model refresh last fall and plenty of advertising, Microsoft has been left to announce that its actual sales are still a joke.

According to an Associated Press article citing Jason Reindorp, Zune’s director of product marketing, the device has sold “just north of two million” between its debut in November 2006 and May 2008. Apple has sold roughly 76 million iPods during that same period, more than doubling the installed base of iPods since the Zune’s debut.

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