The End of Special Purpose Handheld GPS?

As a follow up to my story last year on how Google and Apple's iPhone are making Garmin irrelevant, it looks like the broader market is coming to the same conclusion. Although the touchstone on this story is Google's announcement about their turn-by-turn navigation software showing up on Android, the same software will no doubt make it's way to the iPhone as well. In short, the life of the special purpose GPS unit that keeps all of its maps locally is coming to an end. The ability to auto-update a map is just extremely important. For the situations where speed or lack of network access are concerns, better and better cacheing comes to the rescue.

iPhone Voice Innovation?

Jeremy Wohl asks where the voice innovation is on the iPhone. I'd imagine Apple's contract with AT&T might be a big culprit here.

Lars Brownworth in the Wall Street Journal

Lars Brownworth (12 Byzantine Rulers / Lost to the West / Norman Centuries) just wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal entitled A Soap Dish That Changed History.

Microsoft's all new Apple Store

First you ignore them, then you fight them, then you give up and copy them.



Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

The Internet's New Pricing Model: Set Your Own Price

I was intrigued by yet another in a line of "set your own price" products, this time a game called World of Goo by 2D Boy. I'm not a gamer but I actually bought this game because of the pricing model. Between now and October 25th, World of Goo is available for whatever price you want to pay, even if you want to pay nothing! I paid $2 which seems to be slightly below the average. (am I cheap?!)

This model gets serious play in the media while it isn't all that common but I would caution that this impact will lessen with time. It is interesting though because the model seems to combine real-time market research with sales. Your customers can give you real-time "worth" feedback as they buy. It also keeps the company clearly focused on delivering what the customer wants because they can't rely on, for example, the pain it would be for a customer to move to another solution.

The heart of this model is essentially a renamed "donate" button. By calling it the "price" of the product, you imply that it must be paid. Allowing the customer to set the price rather than the merchant truly makes this a "market economy" type of model. Maybe it is a bit too far for some products, especially those with high development cost, but then you could always just let the merchant set a "minimum price" and let dedicated customers pay more if they want to. I would probably have done that for some earlier U2 albums that were worth to me far more to me than the price paid.

I think this could easily become the prevailing pricing model for the Internet. If your distribution system doesn't significantly cost on a per unit basis, this kind of a model becomes possible. I can easily see a big move to this model amongst the independent content production industries on the Internet. "Pay what you want", after all, seems to be the Internet's version of a pricing model.

Thinking back to Radiohead's "In Rainbows" album which was among the first to use the "pay what you want" model, I'm struck by the fact that the music industry might actually have been in front of the market on this!

Isn't it interesting how "give the customer what they want" actually turned out to be a good idea?

Netshare and DNS on the iPhone

If you got Netshare during the short time was available on the App Store, you are very lucky. For tethering on the go, it is clunky but works great. (I'm posting this story while on a ferry across Long Island Sound) Things are fine with Safari, but Firefox and other apps seem to get stuck without resolving DNS queries.

Some have noted that there is a strange lack of information about how DNS is to be configured when using NetShare. What you need to know is that a SOCKS 5 proxy (which NetShare implements) can also forward DNS requests but some proxy clients (such as FireFox) don't do this by default. (This is because FireFox chooses to ignore the system-wide proxy settings and rather manages things on its own.)

The secret in FireFox is to go to about:config in the URL bar and search for network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and set that to true and restart your browser. I have no idea why the default is false but there we are.

Happy tethering!

Can't Write iPhone Prefrence Lists

I was confounded by an issue writing a plist which worked fine in the iPhone simulator but didn't work on an actual iPhone. The issue was one of permissions. You can't write like this:

NSString *file = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Settings" ofType:@"plist"];
[dictionary writeToFile:file atomically:YES];

on the iPhone but you can in the simulator. Technically, writing here violates the sandbox paradigm on the iPhone.

However, writing to the temp directory of the sandbox works.

NSString *file = [NSTemporaryDirectory( ) stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Settings.plist" ];
[dictionary writeToFile:file atomically:YES];

This was somewhat obscured in the Apple documentation because the plist documentation was originally written for OS X programming so it is hard to separate what examples are applicable to the iPhone and what isn't.

HTML5 Video Support

If you have followed me at least casually, you will know I am no fan of Flash. With the HTML5 spec including native video support, I see the only reasonable use for flash falling by the wayside. When big sites like YouTube start rolling this out, not only will videos play smoothly without dropping frames, but I will be able to finally delete the most pervasive plugin on the Internet from my browsers for good.

I wouldn't feel this vehemently if Adobe got off their butts and properly threaded video in Flash but the general annoying misuse of Flash doesn't help either.

Will Windows 7 Succeed?

Much is being hypothesized about the potential success or failure of Microsoft's soon-to-be-released Windows 7 operating system. Despite being a fan of Apple and their growing marketshare, I don't think Macs represent the biggest challenge for Windows 7 adoption. Far from it, actually. In my opinion, two things stand in the way of Microsoft's new offering - Windows XP and apathy. Or maybe they are one and the same thing.

Windows XP runs on untold millions of computers around the world, likely chiming in at 80% of the market. Despite even dropping support for it, Microsoft couldn't dethrone the XP juggernaut when launching Vista. Aside from the battering it received in the press, apathy to upgrade from XP was probably Vista's biggest enemy.

Amongst the lower rungs of the market, operating systems aren't so much chosen as they are included with what you get when you get a new computer. Windows is squeezed somewhere between free and just under a low pain threshold in a very price conscious market. I would argue that the people in the position to make an operating system upgrade decision on the vast sea of computers running XP just doesn't care enough to do anything about it. Vista's reputation only hurts Microsoft's chances of breaking through, even if Windows 7 is truly a better product.

Microsoft is selling operating system licenses. By contrast, Apple is selling hardware units. Its important to remember that Microsoft is concentrating on winning the marketshare game while Apple is focusing on the profit game. Over 90% of the above $1,000 laptop market belongs to Apple so it would seem Microsoft has relegated itself to the low margin business. This is a direct result of the difference in corporate focus between the two companies. I would even go to say that it is a direct reflection of the CEOs of their respective companies. Jobs vs. Balmer. Quality vs. Quantity.

My prediction is that Windows 7 will do better than Vista but never reach the pervasiveness of XP. In other words, it won't quite slay the XP dragon. But nor will that matter. Until the corporate marketshare focus issue is addressed, Microsoft will continue it's seemingly inevitable slide into irrelevance. Marketshare is something you get after you have a great product. In other words, its a lagging indicator of where you once were and says little about where you might be headed.

Norman Centuries Featured on iTunes Homepage

Lars Brownworth's new Norman Centuries podcast is featured by Apple on the iTunes Podcast Homepage. This is great timing for us because we will be releasing some commentaries and Episode 2 within the next few hours.

View Screenshot

Lars Brownworth became popular with his previous podcast called 12 Byzantine Rulers which was featured by the New York Times.

Don't forget to purchase Lars Brownworth's new book, Lost to the West, available in bookstores across the United States and online at Amazon.com.