I’ve been using OS X pretty steadily now for over two years. I’ve had very few complaints in that time and many, many moments of awesomeness-induced joy.
One of the things that makes Mac so usable is the number of really useful keyboard shortcuts that are available throughout the system. It’s not necessary to know these shortcuts to use a Mac, but as a user develops their Mac skills these shortcuts provide tremendous room for growth. Maybe Windows XP has similar conveniences as Mac but Mac just seems to do it better. Take application switching as an example. Windows has Alt-Tab. Alt-Tab cycles through every window. Hurray. Mac gives you Command-Tab to cycle through applications and Command-` to cycle through open windows of an application. Note the difference – Mac gives you a more fine-grained control over the switching. These shortcuts work in Expose as well. Pressing F9 gives a user a view of all open windows – pressing and holding Command while pressing Tab will switch the view from the F9/All-Windows view to the F10/All-Windows-for-a-Given-Application view. That’s cool but more than that, it’s useful.
If you’re a Mac user you owe it to yourself to check out the list of shortcuts on Apple.com – learn just one shortcut a day and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your experience on Mac will transform from merely great to insanely great.
Apple made a mistake. One of the critical things to understand about the cell phone market is that cell phone doesn’t lend itself to platform lock-in.
This is unlike the classic Mac-PC battle that Apple has been engaged in for the last couple decades – consumers switch manufacturers and software platforms on computers very rarely. The reasons for this are numerous – for example, consumers typically buy lots of software for their computers that they can’t take from one platform to another. Additionally, the interfaces of modern operating systems – while much improved over interfaces of old – still require time and effort to learn. These and other factors cause consumers to tenaciously resist change.
Conversely, in the cell phone market consumers might not change service providers very frequently but typically will change their physical phones once a year (non-scientific poll for your consideration). The barrier for consumers to move their phones is typically low – making calls remains the primary use of cell phones and the phone book continues to be the primary collection of stored data on phones. Placing a call on a cell phone is easy and other resources collected on phones such as text messages, ring tones and downloaded games typically considered expendable.
Which brings me to my point. I would rather have this phone than an iPhone. It’s got excellent industrial design, it’s got the features I care about and it likely wouldn’t cost $500+.
In my view Apple’s offering has already been eclipsed by Samsung and LG. Apple entered the music market and became the only real choice in music player – there’s no way they’re going to be able to pull this off with the iPhone, at least not for long. And that’s going to do more to diminish the Apple brand than an increase in their profits will offset.
Direct sales figures aren’t as good a means to determine the success of any given thing as is the ecosystem that thing builds around itself. Apple’s iPod is a huge seller but the real story, and the thing that cements its dominance, is that Apple has also fabricated (from thin air) a billion dollar market for iPod accessories.
Google similarly ensured its own dominance of the online mapping service market not simply by making cool software but also by providing easy access to the application programming interface (API), encouraging programmers the world over to create mashups. There are now thousands of applications that take advantage of Google Maps, making the service hugely popular and valuable for Google.
A things popularity can even be determined prior to release – here’s a ridiculous iPhone case, two months early.
This in mind, it was interesting for me to note the ecosystem that sprung up around the movie 300. Maybe I’m not as observant as I think I am but it seems to me that the amount of supplementary/complementary material to 300 exceeds other movies that have come out recently. Silly examples, one funny:
One not:
These two videos are (admittedly anecdotally) part of a wave of information surrounding 300 – news stories, historical analysis, even political dustups. Thus, it came as no surprise to hear of 300’s success. It’s success was assured given the amount of exposure that it received.
So what’s the takeaway point here? Success is not something that can easily be achieved as the result of solitary effort – rather, success comes as the result of the creation of an economic ecosystem around an effort. Just as “no man is an island”, neither should anyone think of their products or services as independent of a greater context.
