A collection of links, articles and stories.
This is a great article over at Kotaku, echoing the talk the author, Ben Cousins, gave back in March 2012.
I’ve viewed Ben’s presentation many times since March last year and every prediction and assumption made, as far as I’m concerned, is accurate. I see the mainstream future of gaming as mobile, with Valve taking up what’s left. And I like how the future looks.
I’ve said many times before that I think Valve has a huge potential to win the living room gaming market. Gabe Newell, Valve’s CEO, seems to share a similar opinion.
He acknowledges Apple TV’s threat, but I agree with him — if Valve makes some smart decisions, the living room could be a huge win for the company, taking them from hardcore gamers to the exploding casual market.
John Moltz quotes Dan Frommer in this really short piece. I wasn’t expecting to be left quite so speechless after reading it.
Check out the quote from Steve Jobs, shortly before he returned to Apple. As Moltz says, mission accomplished?
Microsoft’s been in the news a little recently. Here’s my take.
This analyst roundup suggests sales for the Surface RT in the last quarter were somewhere between 230,000 and 1,000,000. No matter how you look at it, those numbers aren’t great. For comparison, Nokia sold 4.4 million high-end Lumia smartphones in the same time. (Apple sold 23 million iPads.)
What might be even more worrying than the-not-very-impressive numbers is that Microsoft didn’t announce any numbers themselves. Those Surface figures quoted above — between 230,000 and 1,000,000 — are pure analyst speculation. The numbers from both Nokia and Apple were reported directly from the respective companies. Officially. Not so with Microsoft. Not giving away sales figures for such an important and new product gives the impression Microsoft isn’t proud of them. Imagine if Apple released a new product then didn’t mention how many units were shipped during their next earnings call. There would be chaos.
How many times do I have to say it: The Microsoft Surface is a turd.
At least I figured out why the Surface RT exists. It’s more to protect Microsoft’s margins than to delight their customers. I still need to figure out why the Surface Pro exists.
My fear is that even if the Surface gets updated frequently and well, all customers who’ve bought one so far will be left out in the cold. Their Surfaces will be obsolete faster than they’d like.
And nobody wants that.
Unfortunately, today brings even more bad news for Microsoft: the 64GB Surface Pro will only have 23GB free storage space. Marco hits the nail on the head:
If your computer’s “1 TB” hard drive has 50 GB of preinstalled software and unusable space, you still have 95% of its space for user storage, which is hard to complain about. But advertising a “64 GB” Surface Pro that only has 35% of its space available to the user is a very different story.
Here’s a quick comparison of mobile device advertised storage space versus actual available space:
It's worth noting that the space taken up with preinstalled software is generally fixed, so the smaller the device’s storage, the lower the average percentage of free space available will be. Even though that’s the case, compare the difference between a 16GB iPhone’s percentage — 83% — and the 64GB Surface Pro’s — 35%.
This is a problem.
So, this is what I think matters. First, Microsoft can (and hopefully will) make swift and meaningful updates to the Surface products, both hardware and software. These may very well make the devices more attractive to new customers. This is a good thing. However, the downside is that the more software improves, the higher system requirements this software will have. This will shorten the life of current Surfaces. If a customer purchases a Surface today, only to have Microsoft release huge software updates a few months from now which cause the device to run at a snail’s pace (or, worse, updates which the current device doesn’t even support), is the customer likely to stick around in Microsoft’s ecosystem?
The more optimistic take on the Surface is that Microsoft has a ton of money to blow and will keep beating the horse until it does what they want. The more pessimistic take is that the Surface-horse stumbled out of the gate and is only going to continue to fall down as time goes on.
I think what will actually happen is somewhere in between these strained metaphors. It’s just not roses.
Since Tim Cook became CEO, Apple has been making some very positive changes in this department. Good to see it’s continuing.
As usual, smart observations from Horace.
IP-based messaging (read: iMessage, Whatsapp, Skype, etc) are on the rise, cannibalising SMS. I wonder how carriers feel about that.
Interesting article by Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent for The Telegraph:
Professor Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, said that at present illegal use of drugs was treated mainly as a law and order issue.
However, giving evidence to MPs yesterday Dame Sally referred to research which suggested the focus on criminalisation was “deterring drug users from seeking medical help”.
She said: “I think we have a health problem, and we would do well as a nation to look at is as a health problem. I think there’s quite a lot of evidence from other countries, and science, about how you could go about that.”
Here it is. Starts any minute now. Buckle up and enjoy.
I wonder what we’re in store for.
Max Tegmark writes a very thought-provoking short essay entitled “Life As We Know It”. I suggest reading the whole thing if you’re after some inspiration and food for thought on this cloudy Tuesday. Here’s a taste:
As our "Spaceship Earth" blazes though cold and barren space, it both sustains and protects us. It's stocked with major but limited supplies of water, food and fuel. Its atmosphere keeps us warm and shielded from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays, and its magnetic field shelters us from lethal cosmic rays. Surely any responsible spaceship captain would make it a top priority to safeguard its future existence by avoiding asteroid collisions, on-board explosions, overheating, ultraviolet shield destruction, and premature depletion of supplies? Yet our spaceship crew hasn't made any of these issues a top priority, devoting (by my estimate) less than a millionth of its resources to them. In fact, our spaceship doesn't even have a captain!
Maybe I was a bit harsh yesterday. Still, it shows Google’s willing to violate privacy when there’s profit to be made — just perhaps not when there isn’t.
Wise words from Tim Cook:
“In terms of cannibalization, I think cannibalization is a huge opportunity for us. Our base philosophy is to never fear cannibalization. If we do, somebody else will just cannibalize it. We never fear it. We know iPhone has cannibalized some iPod business, we know iPad has cannibalized some Macs, and that doesn't worry us.”
The Official Apple blog “Inside iTunes” is a good resource for finding semi-obscure tricks and tips to really dig your nails into the more advanced features of OS X’s media player.
Did you know, for example, that every song you preview in iTunes — either on the desktop or on iOS — is saved, so you can go back and check it out later? Preview a song on your iPhone, then when you’re back home and in front of your Mac simply head over to the store and decide if you want to buy it.
This is but one example of major convenience provided by The Apple Media Ecosystem. This convenience is why I’m finding myself buying almost all my music there, even though I’m somewhat of an audiophile and music nut.
