iFixit.org — The People Who Are Fixing the World — is a new project by the talented and helpful team at iFixit.com, the ‘free repair manual you can edit.’ I have used iFixit to get detailed instructions on upgrading our Macs and it’s been a really useful resource. You can find repair guides for all kinds of things—including game consoles, automobiles, cameras, household items and more. They have a free repair manual app for iPhone and iPad so you can download guides right from your mobile device.
On ifixit.org, we’ll be writing about the problems caused by our throwaway culture. [...] We’re going to profile repair gurus and share why people fix things.
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.
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.
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.
Shortly before 2pm today Apple surpassed ExxonMobil in market capitalization to become the most valuable company in the United States.
Apple Inc.’s stock gained 3.4 percent to $365.10 Tuesday afternoon, bringing the iPhone and iPad maker’s market capitalization to about $338 billion.
Exxon Mobil Corp. shares, meanwhile, were trading at $69.23, down 1.4 percent. That gives the oil company a market cap of $337 billion.
Other big-name corporations, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and General Electric Co., don’t even come close.
[...]
In its latest quarterly report, Apple said stronger iPhone and iPad sales helped more than double its net income to $7.31 billion and grow revenue by 82 percent to $28.6 billion.
This is a phenomenal level of performance in a little over a decade. In 1997 Apple was nearly bankrupt when Steve Jobs returned to the company as ‘interim’ CEO as part of the NeXT acquisition. Ten years later Apple revolutionized the mobile industry with the iPhone, and followed that up three years later with the creation of a totally new product category with the iPad. Not to mention the first widely-adopted online digital media store—the iTunes Store—that surpassed 10 billion downloads in 2010.
Here’s an interesting bit of mobile innovation: EasySign.
It’s an iPhone app that lets you set up digital signatures and then apply them to documents (PDF, Word, Excel, JPG, etc) right on your phone, then send the signed doc wherever it needs to go. It eliminates the need to print the doc, sign a paper copy, scan the signed doc and then send. You can also insert dates and other custom text.
I like the EasySign concept a lot, but what I don’t like about the current model is that it requires server-side technology for inserting the signature into the document, which means it goes to their servers for processing and is then sent back to the user. Their FAQ states that they are looking into other ways of handling this. Ideally it would all be done locally within iOS and never leave your device until you send the finished product.
Today Google introduced Google Wallet—an ‘app that will make your phone your wallet.’
A blurb from the Google blog post describing the service:
You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC) [...] Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.
Initially it will only work with one phone (Nexus S) on one network (Sprint) with one credit card (Citi MasterCard) so it’s a very limited rollout.
I’ve recently read that Apple is working on something similar for the iPhone, and I wonder if Apple’s approach will be compatible with Google’s. Adoption of this technology will take much longer if we begin with competing technical standards and protocols.
I also wonder how much more of my life I want to put in a device that’s capable of tracking my location pretty much 24/7 already—now it’s going to track my spending, too. Not only will Google have a near-monopoly on our search data, but now our financial data to analyze and sell to advertisers as well?
Good iPhone tip from this Lifehacker article on how to enter a phone number with an extension.
From the article:
You may not have noticed it, but when entering a phone number into a contact on your iPhone you can press the +*# button on the dial pad to get a couple of extra options. One of those options is “pause,” which inserts a comma into the phone number and serves as a friendly pause when dialing. This is very useful when dialing a phone number with an automated answering system. That pause will let the main number dial, wait a moment, and then dial the extension so you don’t have to. This is a great little trick to save you some time and effort when calling office directories and customer service lines.
Evernote—the cloud-based service for capturing/organizing/finding/storing a variety of data—just reached the 5 million user mark. Yesterday they had 22,130 new users join. I’ve been using Evernote for a little over a year, and it’s a terrific app that I use most every day. Works great on the web, my Mac (desktop app) and iPhone and iPad (mobile apps). Also available for Windows, Android and Blackberry.
The chart below shows how quickly they’re scaling per-million-users.
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
