Computers are about 0s and 1s, right? Every bit has its place, and we keep inventing bigger computers to handle greater and greater precision. Which is great, say, if you are calculating your bank balance, or calibrating a laser for brain surgery. But as you leave the data center, you leave the land of computers [...]
As I spend an inordinate amount of time on mobile devices, with networks ranging from great WiFi to LTE/4G to crappy coffee-shop WiFi, I have been watching a wonderful (and predictable) shift. Those who follow the Alsop-Louie-inspired Evernet predictions (I am a fan) will be happy to note my unsurprising “findings” — that you can find [...]
Funny event yesterday: I was working on a laptop in a close conference room environment, when a colleague suggests to me, “Hey, we should move that here” and taps my screen. Normal behavior the last 20 years. But in this case, it was a Windows 8 laptop with a touchscreen — and they actually executed [...]
Who says developers can’t act mature? Even in a world that included WebOS, Android, Windows, Symbian, and iOS, for a long time all I heard about was iOS Objective-C development. In 2011, I had one bank VP tell me that he expected to spend all of their money on iOS — even though that would risk [...]
Ok, it may not be popular to admit it, but I think Steve Jobs was wrong about touch. Or wrong about expecting simple beautiful designs. Or both. I don’t really believe that it is pragmatic to expect excellent app design to exist broadly. Don’t get me wrong, it is possible. I have seen wonderful apps that are [...]
After thinking about my piece on BlackBerry and the reasons for their strength in the enterprise, I realized why Samsung cannot claim victory with their new KNOX model. They are missing something. There are many good and critically important things about the Samsung KNOX. Both Ryan Faas’ article in CITEWorld and Jack Madden’s article at BrianMadden.com are good reads about the impact of dual [...]
I have been watching the BlackBerry announcements and strategy analysis with the same curiosity that many in our industry share. Whether you are Canadian, wish-to-be-Canadian, or aware-that-Canada-exists, if you’ve spent the past 15 years in the technology marketplace, you likely have a soft spot for the Waterloo firm that broke the mold for personal productivity. [...]
The number of mobile devices being introduced is creating a staggeringly fractured marketplace. This fracturing causes issues for developers as well as consumers. And it’s not just being caused by tablets, but also by laptop-esque touchscreens with instant-on and the like. Developers…where do you put your scarce resources for building applications? Consumers….which product do you [...]
When I used to run IT operations at a software CRM company called Clarify, I recall the staff lunches we used to go to in the South Bay. We would go to a restaurant and because of the bulky phones, etc., people would invariably toss their devices onto the table. Which then became a game [...]
As I mentioned in a recent post, there are two BYOD needs on a single device: 1) real-time, bite-sized apps via the app stores and 2) corporate productivity apps. And Microsoft is well positioned on both. While Microsoft is light on content in their app store, they do have a decent running start: Xbox Live and [...]