John Katsaros

Apple's Personal Cloud

And speaking of the personal cloud, at this week's Apple's WWDC Steve Jobs introduced iCloud — effectively removing your PC from being the center of your content and putting everything in the cloud. Make a change in your calendar on your iPhone. The change automatically gets pushed up to the cloud and then downloaded to the appropriate devices (he even demoed a shared calendar where everyone gets synched from the cloud). At the core is a completely re-written version of Mobile Me with three main apps — Mail, Contacts and Calendar. What's more, the pricing goes from an annual $99 service fee to FREE. With Apple's backing, the personal cloud may become a reality much faster than the other three cloud types. Apple defines the consumer side and Citrix (and maybe others later on?) define the interconnection between the personal cloud and IT. Data now moves into the personal cloud where it can be synched, the PC becomes just another device with which to synch and automagically it all works.

"A Hard Day's Night"

In honor of Apple's recent agreement to sell Beatles tunes online we've decided to dedicate our headlines to Beatles' songs (maybe Apple will send us an iPAD?).

iPhone Jokes

It's true that we don't get enough laughs these days. Here's a few at Apple's expense:

"Apple has called a major press conference to discuss the iPhone 4. Well, they actually tried to call three days ago, but it finally went through just now." —Jimmy Fallon

"Problems c ontinue for this new iPhone 4. To give you an idea of how bad they are now, flight attendants are now telling passengers, 'Eh, don't shut 'em off after takeoff. You're fine; you're not going to get any calls anyway.'" —Jay Leno

iPad (the XPARC Alto redux?)

There is a delicious irony to the iPad (probably many). If you remember the history of the Mac, in a sense it begins when Steve Jobs visits Xerox PARC and seeing the Alto (the $100K "personal" computer that PARC built to understand what could be done in the future) and then Jobs "stealing" the windows and mouse design for the Apple Lisa, and soon thereafter the MAC. The irony is that the Alto system principals — Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker — both ended up at Microsoft Research and were the creators of the Windows Tablet prototype that Microsoft made into a marginally successful product line. Now of course the iPad is going to cause serious issues for Windows and PC's. I don't think that anyone will accuse Jobs of stealing the tablet design this time!

iPad Envy - - and HP?

While the swine flu epidemic was more or less a bust, iPad Envy has hit Silicon Valley in a big way. Lots of people want one but corporate affiliation may mean that if you get one you might have to keep yours in the closet. If you bought and boasted about your new Kindle in 2009, then buy one of those iPad book covers to conceal it — we don't want to hear how much you love it. If you work for any one of a long list of companies including Intel, Google and Microsoft then you can't take your iPad to work. Probably the worst case of iPad Envy may be HP which on Wednesday said it would pay $1.2 Billion to acquire Palm and subsequently went on to say that Palm's webOS was a key dealmaker cause HP needed an OS for building things like ...iPads. Since we don't know the details it's hard to say whether this will be a success or not and there seems to be a lot of value in the Palm patent portfolio. An argument can be made that HP could have been a stronger player in the mobile market if it was device agnostic and treated things like smart phones and tablets like disposable devices. However, with this acquisition we're past that point. You've got to wonder why HP would want to take on a competitor like Apple. HP's enemies list is pretty big — longstanding were IBM and Dell. More recently Cisco. Now add Apple and Google into that mix and you end up fighting battles on too many fronts. With regard to Palm, one of our readers who shall remain nameless sent in this final advice learned from the Palm debacle — for heaven's sake, don't call your hot new product the "Pixi." Blackberry, iPhone, Danger, Android — all OK names. But Pixi? That's a mistake you can't recover from.