Big Picture
This fall, the tech market will witness a perfect storm as three major technologies and industry forces converge to deliver a whole host of new products for consumers.
Before smartphones, it seemed as though everyone was building mobile versions of their websites. This even happened again for a short while with smartphones until app stores arrived. Now it seems more attention is being paid to making apps than making versions of websites optimized for smartphones screens. On the horizon, however, I see a world where both native apps and web apps will coexist.
One of the more interesting questions I get asked about as an industry analyst who’s followed Apple since 1981 is why Apple is so successful. It’s an honest question because to those unfamiliar with Apple, the company’s rise and current dominance in non-PC devices is somewhat puzzling.
It seems like you can’t go anywhere in Silicon Valley without hearing about someone who’s making an app. Apps are all the rage these days and software engineering is one of the hottest jobs all over the world. But in the not too distant past, there wasn’t this much excitement around software.
There have been two recent announcements about watches that work as companions to smartphones, and both show a lot of promise. Is it time for Apple to create a smartwatch tied directly to the iPhone?
If Bill Gates’ original vision was that every desk in every home would have a computer, then the next major frontier will be bringing a computer to every person’s pocket.
Thanks to Apple, the role of tablets in our lives is being broadened now. But if you “think different” you will see that the tablets of the future will just be screens that use web browsers to connect us to everything we need from the cloud, and thanks to subsidization, they’ll be cheap enough that each room in our homes can have one.
I was having a discussion with a few executives at a technology summit I was attending and an interesting question was asked to me concerning what America would look like without Apple. The more I thought about it, the more interesting the question became
Intel and its partners are about to launch the biggest promotion of a new product category called Ultrabooks since the company’s Wi-Fi based Centrino launch early last decade. And Microsoft is about to launch a major update to Windows called Windows 8 that introduces the new “Metro” touch user interface. Together they are critical products for the future of each company individually.
I have no doubt that Apple is going to become one of the most powerful video distribution networks by nature of its existing customer base. The sooner TV networks see things like Apple’s distribution vehicle as a critical way to get their content to the masses quickly, the sooner they can fine tune business models to take advantage of the new era of video content.
The annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) show in Barcelona, Spain is a great place to get a glimpse of the state of mobile technology. This year was no exception, and a few things caught my eye.
