The Wall Street Journal’s What They Know Tech section looks at online privacy issues, and how an increasing number of companies are working harder to track your activity on the internet.
Today Apple announced a new initiative for textbooks on the iPad. If successful, this could transform the textbook publishing industry and radically improve the way classroom materials are developed, published and used in schools around the world—a classic example of disruptive technology. They are proposing that high school textbooks be sold through the App Store for $15 or less.
Apple also introduced a new free application—iBooks Author—for creating this content and publishing it to the iBooks Store for distribution, so the tools are there to start making this happen now. You can download it from the Mac App Store here.
There’s a 7-minute overview of the whole thing here, and the longer keynote presentation video can be seen here.
For a fascinating illustration of the trend towards mobile computing, check out the short video (28 sec) below showing the history of some popular computing platforms, starting in 1975 and running up to the present. It includes some oldies like the TRS-80, Amiga, Atari, NeXT and Apple II as well as the now familiar Windows PC, Mac, Android, iPhone and iPad.
He’s talking about mobile virtualization—accessing a PC remotely from another device, like a tablet or smartphone, for those situations that require a full Windows machine. This is impacting PC sales as many users are finding they can do a lot of what they want on the other devices with less reliance on the PC.
Between this new cloud streaming of computer applications and improved remote access apps, there’s less incentive to buy a new computer. Instead, you can either get more mileage out of an old computer or “rent” one that’s available in the cloud. And either of these can now be accessed by a tablet or smartphone that’s far cheaper than a new computer.
PC sales are down, while tablets and smartphones are gaining traction with both businesses and consumers. And smartphone sales have already surpassed PC sales.
A Forrester report this week predicts CIOs will pour $19 billion into Apple products in 2012—$10 billion in iPads, $9 billion in Macs. This is up from around $12 billion last year, where the split between iPads and Macs was roughly even.
I think a couple of things are happening here, neither of which is unexpected.
For one, the device operating system (Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, etc) is losing relevance. It still matters of course, especially among most big companies that are heavily invested in the Microsoft toolset, but the new direction is obvious and inevitable. With the ascendancy of mobility both in the workforce and society in general, applications and data are gradually being decoupled from the old desktop OS frameworks.
Also, the so-called ‘consumerization of IT’ is really about a backlash from users who are tired of working with tools that are often second-rate in quality and reliability—like some cheap PCs running Microsoft Windows, and Blackberry phones that have not kept up with Apple’s iPhone or the popular Android smartphones. Increasing numbers of employees get better results with their personal devices, and have begun to demand something better at work. With cheap commodity technology you usually get what you pay for.
The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent.
This is the interesting subplot. Beyond building in some management and security tools in their devices, it doesn’t appear that Apple has made much of a directed effort at the corporate market. I think some of this has been due to Steve Jobs’ insistence on secrecy with regard to product roadmaps, and I wonder if Apple under Tim Cook might be heading in a more collaborative direction with corporate customers. There’s a lot of opportunity for them there.
Sometimes we do a web search because we want a bunch of results to look through, and this usually works pretty well. But sometimes we just want the answer to a question: we know there is exactly one correct answer to the question, and we just want that—not a bunch of useless “hits” and ads (aka sponsored links) cluttering up the page.
When the iPhone 4S went on sale recently, Steve Wozniak—co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs—was at one of the Palo Alto Apple stores waiting in line, and was interviewed about several things, including the Siri intelligent assistant software on the new iPhone. He made a really interesting comment about the current state of web search: he said that what we often need is not search technology but answer technology.
Rick Webb posted a typical example of search results for “gold price” on Google and also on Wolfram|Alpha (WA). The Google results are familiar—and not entirely useless—but the WA result is an answer (assuming that the search term means ‘what is the price of gold?’). The technology at the heart of Siri uses the WA services, among others, to find and deliver very specific responses to user input. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it is pretty amazing considering how relatively immature the field is right now. This is clearly the future of web search, especially on mobile devices.
Wolfram|Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine” that can provide an amazing breadth of data, sometimes cross-referencing several databases and calculating complex results on the fly. If you haven’t yet checked it out, start with the tour and see for yourself what this technology can do. Also, see the examples page to get an idea of the range of subjects where you can put WA to work for you. It’s free.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations. [...]
HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.
According to a recent IDC Press Release, by 2015 there will more users accessing the internet with mobile devices—smartphones and tablets—than with desktop or laptop computers. I think what’s really happening now is that the ‘computer’ as we know it is being marginalized because it’s not the device that matters—what matters is what people want to do, and the ability to do it wherever they happen to be.
“Forget what we have taken for granted on how consumers use the Internet,” said Karsten Weide, research vice president, Media and Entertainment. “Soon, more users will access the Web using mobile devices than using PCs, and it’s going to make the Internet a very different place.”
I don’t know if the internet is really going to be a ‘very different place’ but I see a few related trends with the move towards greater mobility.
Optimized web content. More websites and web applications will be designed specifically for viewing on smaller devices. This should force designers and developers to optimize systems for mobile use and faster network performance.
Location-based services. GPS and other tracking technologies will likely grow due to the mobile nature of internet access. (Last night my daughter ran out of gas on the freeway, and as I was driving over to find her I thought it would be really useful if I could pinpoint her location on my iPhone’s maps app so I could find the best point to get on the freeway. I’m sure there’s a way to do this now but I haven’t looked into it—probably Apple’s Find My Friends app will do it.)
Secure the data, not the device. Security is a huge concern in the enterprise and a lot of time and money is spent ensuring that mobile devices meet security standards for accessing sensitive data. One result of this is that fewer devices are approved for use—iPhones and Blackberries, for example, can be remotely erased if lost or stolen because that technology is built into the device management. Data encryption is one strategy that could mitigate the hardware concerns and reduce administration overhead.
More public wi-fi. Many restaurants and other public places are bringing up free wifi networks to attract the digerati. The network, like its users, will be ubiquitous.
Improved battery technology. Faster processors, expanding functionality and frequent network access on these devices requires increasing amounts of power to keep it all running throughout the day. The battery technology has already come a long way and I expect a lot more innovation here to give users more time away from the charger.
Cloud-based services. This is one area that is really beginning to mature now, and should grow enormously both for consumers and businesses as users want access to their data regardless of the device being used or its location. This is what Apple is doing with the iCloud service, for example: the data on your iPhone (email, documents, photos, contacts) is synced (optionally, user decides) to offsite storage, and then syncs back out to your other devices (iPad, laptop, desktop). Dropbox and other similar services are doing this now with cloud-based file storage.
Fewer corporate data centers. The maturity and reliability of cloud providers will eliminate the need for many companies to have their own data centers. They do it today mostly because of security and control concerns, not because they want to manage hundreds of servers.
You’ll never have to enter your Dropbox account info into a third-party app on version 1. Instead, you’ll approve access using the official Dropbox app on mobile or via the web at dropbox.com.
And this.
Version 1 adds support for apps that can only read or write to a single folder in your Dropbox.
Authentication is not sent to third party apps, and you can selectively limit access to a single folder which prevents exposing all of your Dropbox data. Hellofax is one example of this kind of integration—they offer the option of receiving faxes as PDFs that can be routed to a Dropbox folder.
New York Times article today about how some companies are implementing a BYOD (Buy Your Own Device) policy at the office—i.e., giving employees a stipend and letting them buy the computers and smartphones they want rather than the cheap crap usually found on a company’s short list of supported standards. (‘Standard’ is usually corporate-speak for ‘cheap commodity item.’)
“We heard from people saying, ‘How come I have better equipment at home?’ ” said Mike Cunningham, chief technology officer for Kraft Foods. “We said, hey, we can address that.”
As it turns out, people are happier and more productive using the tools they like rather than ones the bean counters think they should have. This is why bean counters and most upper-level management should stay out of technology decisions and work on the things they understand.
A similar B.Y.O.D. program at Citrix Systems, a software maker that also helps its clients implement such programs, saves the company about 20 percent on each laptop over three years. Of the 1,000 or so employees in Citrix’s program, 46 percent have bought Mac computers, according to Paul Martine, Citrix’s chief information officer. “That was a little bit of a surprise.”
It’s been called the consumerization of IT but it really just means that people are willing to spend a little more of their own money on the good stuff, and they’re tired of their employers equipping them with second-rate technologies at the office. And you know all that money the company saves buying those cheap devices? They’re spending most of it on the back end trying to maintain them and fix them and patch the security holes and update the anti-virus protection and, in most cases, pay Microsoft a fee for the privilege.
I understand that corporate IT departments can’t support every device out there while also maintaining security and stability and high quality user support—it’s a harder job than most people realize and there has to be some middle ground between what the user wants and IT’s responsibilities to the organization.
The ideal scenario—it’s happening now, to some extent—is a collapse of this outworn distinction between ‘business’ and ‘consumer’ devices and the emergence of tools that do both equally well. I know quite a few people who are buying iPhones for work, out of their own pockets, rather than accept a free Blackberry from the company. A few are even carrying two devices—the smartphone they want to use and the Blackberry that the company requires them to have. Absurd.
When the iPhone 4S went on sale recently, Steve Wozniak—co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs—was at one of the Palo Alto Apple stores waiting in line, and was interviewed about several things, including the 
Wolfram|Alpha
