We wonder how many people thought the real CES was in California this past week. Aside from Cisco's foray into the consumer space, there was not much new news from Las Vegas. Dell did announce a new luxury brand, Adamo, and a new line of netbooks, but frankly, it is all pretty much the same old thing.
The model does not the computer make
In our opinion, here is the revelation of the week even though it really should not be much of a surprise:
Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.
Apple explained this back in December: Apple Announces Its Last Year at Macworld. It seems the rest of the industry missed the memo. Dell and the others won't be able to compete with Apple until they get a SIM card into netbooks/laptops and mobile carriers start to bundle everything into subscriptions sold through thousands and thousands of mobile phone retail locations. Prepaid, recyclable computers are also coming. After all, it is easier to upgrade the operating system on most computers by just purchasing a new one. Big changes are coming to market, but we did not see much of that at CES. Apple is still way, way out front.
The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!
11 comments:
you two have been talking about the _rest_ of the *experience* (as in user) for years and it seems like nobody else cares or understands. we all hope you figure it out so we can ALL participate.
Yeah, I heard that Microsoft is throwing around the idea of influencing PC makers to toy with the idea of prepaid computers that follow the same sales/support model as mobile phones. I for one will certainly will not go down that path!
Commodore is dead, long live Commodore :-)
BB & RV,
The manufacturers have understood the consumer space for a while. The problem is that you have too many managers who don't understand the user experience in charge of product management, hence products like the many mp3 players that mysteriously never stick around long, or the netbooks with the horrible Linux UIs that go by the wayside.
What I wanted to see from Cisco was them leveraging their Linksys brand to tightly integrate their many disparate projects (PBX, Voicemail, Blade Servers, routers, firewalls, switches, and security) more tightly together for the SMB market.
Cisco is one of the few companies with enough in-house technology to really cause a shake-up with the SMB market, and the one with the most brand penetration. They are either too scared to potentially cannibalize their lower end router market, or waiting for other companies to fail.
Otherwise, that Freescale/Pegatron netbook announced with the ARM chip will fail if it doesn't have Flash.
i dont use flash :)
@mbpark
Freescale will apparently have Flash Lite bundled with it, but considering our experiences with it (it doesn't support ActionScript 3 etc.) it's actually fairly useless in the incarnation we tested it in.. 90% of modern, useful sites just don't work.
I'm not sure what advances they made with it, or if Adobe decided to open up the Flash 10 SDK to backport some features or others.. but something will be there. At least it will play YouTube videos if they don't update too much at YouTube..
Matt,
Flash Lite is useless. Flash 10 is what they need to support for any decent new features of ActionScript 3, including proxy support. Adobe has been more open with it lately.
The "netbooks" with Intel Atom chips have it. Apple will have it with the next generation of iPhones.
As always, assume Google will change things just enough to mess up Flash Lite.
@mbpark
We told them this already a year ago :D
The Prepaid PC market will probably be similar to automobile leasing.
While there are large numbers of autos leased, there is still a huge market for auto sales.
Nortel is Dead! Long live Nortel!
"Throw away computers" sounds horrible for the environment. Come back from the dark side of the Force.
Why not cut a deal w. THTF on the LimeBook since Max Seybold goes w. some Atom-thing for CherryPal's plans?
We had a deal with THTF.
Read All About It!
Unscrupulous business practices are what any company working with these folks can expect. We wasted time and money supporting them. They never had any intention of fulfilling their written agreement which followed the referenced Letter of Intent.
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