Flashback

A post this morning on Engadget about the similarity between the most recent ad for the iPad, and one for the original Apple Newton gave me a profound sense of déjà vu.

It’s far from unusual to see Apple ripping off others when it comes to spots, and the same is true in reverse. But copying itself? Head on past the break to catch the similarities between Cupertino’s freshest iPad commercial and an eerily familiar Newton ad from yesteryear — something tells us the former will make a somewhat more indelible mark on the world than the latter, though.

Back in the mid-90′s, more than fifteen years ago, I was one of the pioneers of tablets with digital cellular connectivity: working in New Zealand for what is now Vodafone New Zealand we put together the Apple Newton with the Nokia DataCard and the Nokia 2110 to provide the first predecessor for today’s smart phones; this was even before the very first Nokia Communicator.

Anyway, take a look at the two videos:

Mobile shapes cloud services

There's an interesting guest post on TechCrunch this morning by Marc Benioff of salesforce.com, an archetype for or epitome of cloud services, talking about how 'cloud services' are evolving. I hate his 'Cloud 2' moniker, but agree with some of his hypothesis, if not all:

Cloud 1 ————————————->Cloud 2

Type/Click———————————->Touch
Yahoo/Amazon—————————–>Facebook
Tabs——————————————>Feeds
Chat——————————————>Video
Pull——————————————->Push
Create—————————————->Consume
Location Unknown————————->Location Known
Desktop/notebook————————->Smart phone/Tablet
Windows/Mac——————————>Cocoa/HTML 5

Fundamental Shift in Cloud ComputingFWIW, we believe that amazon.com and Google will both thrive, and remain deeply skeptical about Twitter.

One very interesting development, is how this battle is affecting standards for rich graphics on the web. Marc notes the move to Cocoa and HTML5; we were skeptical about HTML5 but may re-examine our position given the impact of the iPad and the iPhone, as highlighted by this recent post from Gizmodo:

The iPad doesn't run Flash. If your website uses Flash, it won't play well on the iPad. Turns out, a lot of people want their sites to look pretty on the iPad. So the internet's already starting to look different.

One of the more interesting effects of the iPhone was that it drove a ton of websites to format their content for the phone in at least of two ways, and often both: iPhone-optimized sites, with more finger-friendly navigational elements that look almost app-like, and actual iPhone apps. We're seeing a repeat with the iPad, though the adjustment appears to be less about the screen size than its lack of Flash support, and there's the fact a lot of sites will be ready on day one. (Though before we go any further, let's be clear: Flash is sticking around, for many reasons, regardless of Apple's opinion of it.)

Virgin won't Flash

Standards battles are often critical to competitive success; one of the key contests currently underway is over web standards for rich(er) content:

• Adobe's Flash - very widely used (YouTube, anyone), but (famously) not supported by Apple on the iPhone, and perceived by many as a major source of security weakenesses
• HTML5 - being advocated by Google
• Silverlight - Microsoft's proprietary technology

In a recent assessment, we concluded that Flash was so widespread, and the standard-setting process so slow, that it would be a very very long time before HTML5 became the dominant standard.
An interesting recent development suggests, however, that a reassessment might be worthwhile - we're always alert for these 'triggers' or early indicators of how different demand and business ecosystem scenarios evolve:

Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is "good enough" for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.
...
It illustrates the options customers have between picking the closed Flash - or Silverlight from Microsoft - and open technologies such as HTML to serve content to a new generation of mobile computing devices.
Virgin picked HTML to give users of iPhones and other mobiles the option in the future of checking in through their phone. The battle between Adobe and Apple has seen Flash deliberately excluded from the Jesus Phone. 

Simhambhatla: iPhone, and other mobile, users welcome

Later, it highlights the value of Flash when you control the hardware:

"Flash provides beautiful interactivity," Simhambhatla said. "We wanted to bring a smoother application experience and modularity and be able to build up an interactive experience for the kiosk user - Flash is all these.
"Flash is really, really good, but as long as you can keep the hardware controlled...If the hardware you are trying to put your product on isn't [controlled] then Flash is questionable."

Samsung gets smart...

It seems that Samsung has recognized the importance of the smartphone market - Samsung aims to triple smartphone sales in 2010 | Reuters - and now has ambitions to triple its shipments. While a target of 18 million smartphones sounds impressive, that doesn't make it a leader:

• Nokia's shipping about 21 million units a quarter
• Apple's shipping about 9 million

With Nokia's shipments comprising about 40% of the smartphone market, it's on track to be about 220 to 250 million units, depending on how fast it grows; that implies 7-8% market share for Samsung, split across the Android and WinMo platforms.

Love the data, hate the graphic

One of the key themes we're focused on at the moment is the multilateral asymmetric contest amongst major platform players (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nokia in particular), device vendors (Apple, RIM, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Motorola, HTC in particular), service providers (Google, Apple, Amazon in particular) and network operators (Verizon, Vodafone, FT Orange and so on). There's some interesting data from Silicon Alley Insider illustrating the size of the stakes...

The cash resources of some of the major players

While the numbers are interesting, I have to confess I hate the graphic... It looks like an area chart, but it's actually a line chart. Tufte's head would explode...

And I'd love to see the analysis extended to include Nokia, RIM, Samsung and so on. And in this context, who cares about Intel, other than ARM and Qualcomm?