Apples critics have been wrong before, but they’re not wrong this time.

Steve Jobs can’t hope to compete head to head with the biggest in the wireless business – he’s inferred as much in quoting targeted sales figures of 12 million units.

So what will Apple have achieved for itself in getting involved in this market? On the positive end, they may have the opportunity to extend their “iPod halo” into the board room which would be tremendous.

On the negative end of things, Apple may have just provided a host of very competitive electronics manufactures the means to simultaneously dilute Apple’s brand while enhancing their own through competition.

I’m puzzled by Apple’s choice of venue for competition here. Apple clearly has the basis for a video iPod, but they have chosen to hold off delivering it to avoid drawing attention away form the iPhone. Apple has crippled the growth of its most explosive product line to serve some purpose that’s not entirely clear. I think the purpose of the iPhone is unclear because it’s not a terribly compelling product and that’s a huge problem for Apple.

Anybody care to disagree?

The Playstation 3 has not done quite as well as Sony hoped against the Xbox 360 and Wii. The reasons for this seem pretty elementary – Microsoft got out of the gate early with a powerful system and good games and so owns the high end while Nintendo rethought the gaming experience fundamentally, wrapped it all up in an affordable package and now owns the low end. Uptake for the Playstation 3 has been weak because frankly it doesn’t have any features to justify a higher price and compensate for the lack of games.

Or does it?

Anybody who’s read Snow Crash (or used Second Life) will recognize this. Sony looks to be trying the Metaverse angle as its killer app. I must say, this looks pretty interesting. Whether Sony will be able to deliver on the promise remains to be seen, but perhaps with the immense power that’s been built into the PS3, and the premium price that entails, really will result in some astonishing next generation experiences.

Except not really.

Digg has taken an interesting approach in trying to foil those who would exploit it – they’ve chosen to keep all their efforts and algorithms secret. Further, they don’t seem to be taking too well to suggestions or criticism either.

These tactics are notable for their similarity to Microsoft’s, an industry paragon of security and reliability and geek envy. Oh, wait.

What this doesn’t look a lot like at all is the Open Source community, adherents of which frequent Digg quite a lot (ironic?). Open Source encourages review and criticism and cooperative development of systems and, contrary to what many nay sayers have implied, this has led to very secure and stable systems.

Could the same idea be applied to Digg? If Digg made its code and algorithms open, would it then be able to gain from the wisdom of its user population and do better in combating the rampant “gaming” of Digg?

Maybe, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty much zero. I don’t see the founders of Digg as being excited about encouraging competition, even if that competition is of the “rising tide lifts all boats” variety. They probably also have something in the funding agreements that prevents this were they even interested (which they aren’t).

Don’t look for Digg to improve, then, any time soon. The “wisdom of crowds” that powers the site apparently isn’t wise enough to help build it. Because of Digg’s insistence on closed development cycles and closed weighting algorithms, there will be a new thing that does it better (open source or not) that will unseat Digg. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

The desktop (computer interface metaphor) is tired. What I’m asking in this post is does it have legs to continue into the future? If not, what’s next?

I had this thought while reading this article. The article is light on specifics and seems geared toward steering people to Mac. Still, it raised the question in my mind of why we are using an (albeit extended) desktop metaphor to do what we are doing with computers.

Why, for example, are we organizing music in folders? When was the last time you put your CDs in a manilla folder, in a drawer? Or movies for that matter? Or games? Or even documents? Does the desktop, and the workflow it enforces, fit our modern usage patterns any more or has it become a liability?

I say it doesn’t.

Regardless of the answer it’s easy to see how we’ve gotten to this point. Revolutions are hard to sell – evolution is insidious and incremental and doesn’t need to be sold. It just happens. When Microsoft established itself as the standard for PC operating systems years ago it ensured that the Windows idiom, and the desktop metaphor, would be the basis for all subsequent comparison and (serious) competition. That competition largely tried to evolve the desktop, not revolve it. Many companies tried, and failed (BeOS, OS/2 et al), to usurp the desktop through evolution – the product that Microsoft had developed, like it or not, was too good and too deeply entrenched to be threatened by imitators. The imitation of the desktop metaphor took place irrespective of the efficacy or suitability of that metaphor.

Incidentally, Microsoft had itself adapted and commercialized the desktop metaphor from Xerox PARC, a research division of a document-centric company, so it’s no surprise that the workflow of the interface is oriented to document creation, management and editing. Now, however, we do a lot more with our computers than simply create documents. We listen to music, we watch movies, we IM and surf the Web, we play games, we store and edit photos – the list of common tasks runs on and on. How many of these tasks map well to a desktop metaphor? I’d say not many.

Many people believe Apple has done a better job with their implementation of the desktop metaphor and I agree, yet I would suggest that this is because they have minimized the role of the desktop and focused the user experience on applications. When an application interface is used to access data, that data can be presented in a much more data-relevant manner. Accessing music through a well conceived music application, for example, can provide a very musicy experience. Same with pictures.

So the above is pretty anecdotal. I’ll back it up with something meaty if I get the time.

Extending the above I’m curious to know what an operating system would look like that makes data available only through data-relevant interfaces, or that dynamically changes the interface to fit the data that is being used or accessed by the user.

The boys and I like to look at train videos on YouTube from time to time. Trainspotters the world over have taken hold of YouTube for the distribution of their work and dads with young boys are benefiting hugely.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. Browsing around YouTube (it’s impossible not to), I saw quite a lot of people posting “responses” to original content videos. This is not a facility provided by YouTube but rather something that seems to be springing up organically from the user community. People are making response videos to whatever they see and posting “Re: Flying Cheese Monster Hits Light Pole” wherein the virtues and failings of the Cheese Monster are discussed.

I watched a few of the responses. They’re all horrible, horrible rubbish, without exception. Anybody who’s made one of these things should be ashamed. This garbage adds nothing of value to my YouTubing and frankly I want that bit of my life back that I wasted watching them. Oh, and I’ll just say that when you’re making a video of yourself, people, look into the camera. The whole watching yourself on the computer screen while you’re filming yourself annoys the snot out of me. But I digress.

My assessment of the worthlessness of this content doesn’t mean that it’s not worth-ish-y. I’m not quite the best when it comes to spotting trends and value on the Internet because I still don’t see the point of MySpace, but it seems to me that this could be the next big thing. What’s more Internet than monotonic emo children preening and complaining about something they just watched on YouTube? Nothing! It’s MySpace redux.

So that’s what this looks to be becoming, a form of video MySpace. YouTube’s next big challenge (and a gauge of how sharp they are or aren’t) will be to provide new and innovative bits of functionality to handle their becoming MechaMySpace, like built in response handling. If they succeed in doing this, they win. Again. If they don’t they could lose out big to the next up and comer that makes socializing in this more bi-directional manner a core part of the product.

Sorry - Apple’s my fixation. Some interesting things have popped up recently and they bear on the iPhone, my current pet peeve. First, the Chinese company Meizu is showing a device that looks remarkably like something we’ve seen before. I’m certainly not surprised. How long will Apple be able to retain its brand coolness when everybody has something that looks the same? Are the white earbuds going to be enough? Though FIC wasn’t able to get the look down, they’ve got a full-screen device on the way in March. Linux based, it’s not going to rule the world but it’s another leak in the dike. This list shows that the full screen mobile device market isn’t quite an empty field that Apple wants people to believe it is - remember what I said about the vicious nature of cell phone market? (Look specifically at the section entitled “Awakening the Sleeping Giant”) For my money, this device by Samsung looks really nice - I wonder what the candid response by Jobs would be to it? Is it worthless because it actually includes a keyboard? Somehow I don’t see that as a liability.

Enough doom and gloom - it appears that Apple is still doing well, despite the critics. Their recent earnings set a new record. What is really interesting here is that for the first time in a while the most popular item on their web store was not the iPod, but rather was the Apple TV box. This is profound. Apple is now going to see a surge in sales of media through the iTunes store as people are able to share their movies and TV shows with the family. These media sales have got to have a pretty good margin for Apple. After all, selling more episodes of the office from their web store isn’t going to require Apple to open up new research offices in Berkley or outsource anything to China or India. They’ll pretty much just make more money.

So, Apple as the media giant - is anybody nervous or do we all welcome our new overlords?

Robert X Cringely has an interesting take on Apple TV. He thinks that Apple TV is expensive if all it is is a media hub, in the vein of a slingbox. Cringely’s thought is that a 40GB hard drive is overkill and that means that Apple is trying to “trojan horse” some sort of other functions or features into customers houses. He thinks that this means that Apple TV is really just a fancy Bittorrent machine which will give Apple control of the most powerful distribution channel in the whole of the media industry.

Interesting thoughts, but I’m not buying it. Apple would have to make customer participation in such a network “opt in” if they wanted to maintain good relations with their customers. Given that, how many people would agree to let their Internet connections be used in such a manner, with space on the 40GB hard drive that they (the customer) bought and own fair and square be used by Apple to increase Apple’s profit margin? I’d guess not many.

Rather, I think that the hard disk is there so that I don’t have to have a powered computer running in order to watch TV. Seems logical to me. Occam’s razor.

Look familiar?

Thanks to Engadget for pointing out the obvious.

The iPhone probably isn’t a ripoff of the LG phone. Rather, the iPhone is essentially a licensed product - could this be a first for Apple? And if so, what sort of rights does LG retain in all this? Do they get to shop their phone around along side the Apple phone? The plot thickens!

I like to check to see who is linking to Wi from time to time and this gem turned up recently: I hate losers with nothing to say.

Apparently somebody decided that their New Years resolution was going to be to start a blog on the Mac their parents got them for Christmas. Hurray.

If “mind filter” had done the slightest bit of delving it would be clear that I’m no Microsoft fanboy, though that seems to be the assertion. The posts I’ve written about various features of OS X that I like which should be some indication of where my loyalties lie.

Given a few years “mind filter” will grow up, move out, experience life a bit, and realize that Apple isn’t perfect (though for somebody whose perspective is limited to Steve Jobs “second coming” it might be hard).

There’s a deeper point here, though. Ever heard of “garbage in, garbage out?” Or “iron sharpens iron?” The Internet represents the garbage here, not the iron. People like “mind filter” do nothing to sharpen anybody else and I worry for the consequences that our society will face when the next generation comes of age.