Alec Saunders SquawkBox

A couple of people emailed me the 60 Minutes piece last week on working 24/7.  Naturally, I’ve been working pretty hard, and hadn’t had the chance to watch or read it yet.  It’s a great testament to why people need tools like iotum.  And, the star of the show is my friend Joe Hurd.

Congrats Joe!

The Pew Internet and American Life Project is an amazing resource.  The project is a Pew Research Center, a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts.  They publish 15 to 20 pieces of detailed trend research a year, and it’s absolutely free.

Their latest, on Cell Phone Usage, has some fabulous information in it about how people use the cell phone, their likes, dislikes, and wants all segmented by age, ethnic and usage demographics. I grabbed these tidbits for iotum:

In this survey of adult cell users, more than a third say their cell phones have enabled some type of unwelcome intrusion in their lives.

1. 24% of cell-using adults report they often feel like they have to answer their cell phones even when it interrupts a meeting or a meal.
2. 22% believe that "too many" people try to get in touch with them because others know they have a cell phone.

And

Cell phone use is changing expectations about when and how others are available to us. These results show how much cell owners have a love-hate relationship with their phones. On the one hand, they like that they can reach out to others no matter where they are. On the other hand, they are sometimes not too happy that others – perhaps including their bosses and work colleagues – can reach out to them at any place and time.

Strategically, is this a good move or a bad move for Apple?  I’ve been wondering that for the last couple of days.   Historically, there have been examples of Dual OS systems that have fared very badly, such as OS/2.  Will Apple do better?

The driver in the OS business is developers.  If you have lots of developers, and by extension lots of applications, supporting your API, then you will have success.  Trying to create cross over systems which also support the competitors API and applications in the hopes of luring their developers is a bit like trying to catch a falling knife; a neat trick if you can pull it off with high potential for personal injury if you make a mistake.

The situation is different for Apple than it was for IBM with OS/2, however. IBM’s message was that OS/2 was a "better Windows than Windows", because it could run Windows sessions as well as OS/2 applications in separate virtual machines on the desktop.  In OS/2’s case, there were relatively few native applications available, and plenty of pretty good Windows applications. The result was few developers wrote native OS/2 applications. Most customers just bought a Windows app, and ran it on OS/2.  All Microsoft had to do was catch up to OS/2’s capabilities, and then there was no reason to buy OS/2 anymore.  Unlike OS/2, Apple already has a large and loyal following of developers.  What Apple has to do is hang onto those developers.

There are those in the Apple Community debating this question right now.  Hadley Stern’s No Windows Boot Pledge is a good sample of the dialog.  He writes:

Sure, I can hear already all the good responses. Like there is the real estate program I want to be able to run that is Windows only, or, look at all the cool games on Windows. But these arguments will lead to a further undermining of the Mac platform. Developers will just think, hey, if a Mac person wants it they can just dual-boot so screw the Mac platform. Not good.

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. What if Apple sees this as a no-lose gambit? Here are two possible outcomes:

1. Apple successfully hangs onto their large and thriving OS X developer community.  They enlarge their business by bringing more Windows folks into the Apple fold, providing a safety net for users to cross over.  Microsoft and Apple both win in the short term. PC manufacturers (Dell, etc) are the losers. Longer term, if this strategy is succesful, Microsoft is also impacted, as developers move away from Windows.
2. Apple’s OS X developer community shrinks. Developers reason that they can build one version of the software, and run it on Macs on Windows or OS X so why bother building two? As the number of developers building apps shrinks, Apple’s focus shifts to their excellent hardware, and they become a highly differentiated PC manufacturer.  Microsoft wins the OS battle, but now Dell et al are stuck competing against Apple’s superior hardware, and Apple has gained a strong position in corporate America.

Personally, I find Apple’s move compelling.  It might just get me to go buy a Mac after all these years.  Who knows which OS I’ll run on it, though…

Andy writes about Blogger Malaise.  It’s not hard to agree.  I’ve had a flurry of activities over the last month, and the blog often suffers the most when something else is on the go.  Not only do I have less time to write, I have less time to read, and less time to think.