Palm candy from Apple: more than an iPod, less than an iPhone 

by Stephen H. Wildstrom

The new iPod Touch from Apple (AAPL) is in a class by itself. It’s like an iPhone, only without the phone. It’s a music player, though not your best choice if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s a wonderful video player and Web browser, despite certain limitations. Most important, it’s beautiful, and I bet it sells like crazy, even at $299 for an 8-gigabyte version and $399 for 16GB. 

The Touch screams out for comparison to the iPhone, which costs the same as the 16GB version but offers half the storage. The new iPod has the same general appearance, with a similar 3.5-in. display, but is shorter, noticeably thinner, and features the iPod’s trademark polished metal back. Its basic software is the same as the iPhone’s, though tweaked in some interesting ways. And Wi-Fi is the only wireless option. That means no voice service, but also no commitment to pay AT&T (T) at least $1,400 over a two-year contract. 

Although it’s called an iPod, for music, the iPod Classic, at $249 for 80GB, is much more capacious, and the newly video-enabled Nano, $149 for 4GB, is much cheaper. Besides, devices optimized for one function—playing music—do it better than the most elegant multipurpose product. The lack of dedicated volume-control buttons on the Touch is especially annoying.

Flash-Challenged

The chief attraction of the Touch is the Web browser which technology is shared with the iPhone and is by far the best on any handheld device. None of the others let you magnify or shrink the contents of a large Web page by spreading or pinching your thumb and index finger, or drag a page just by touching the screen. But the Touch shares a major defect with the iPhone: the inability to play Adobe (ADBE) Flash, which prevents many videos and Web pages from displaying properly, or at all. This would be easy to fix if Apple would just do it. 

Wi-Fi can also be used to download music, but not videos, directly from the iTunes store. (The same capability has been added to the iPhone.) And the Touch can view a selection of videos from YouTube (GOOG). But the iPhone’s weather and stock-price applications have been left off the new device. And with no phone service, there’s no text messaging, other than resorting to Web-based chat programs. 

E-mail is a much bigger omission. You can use the browser to reach Web services such as Hotmail, but they are hard to navigate on the small screen. The iPhone’s mail application, while not great, is much better than this. Apple apparently believes you should buy an iPhone if you want real e-mail. 

This Is Not a Phone 

Don’t even think about using the Touch’s Wi-Fi for a Skype-like phone service. Programmers often figure out how to add applications, as they have to the iPhone. But Apple has made sure hackers won’t turn the Touch into a phone. It has neither an audio input jack nor Bluetooth wireless, so there’s no way to connect a microphone. 

With the Touch, you’re also getting about half a personal digital assistant. You can download your calendar from Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook, but you cannot edit or add appointments, nor can you get updates over Wi-Fi. Contacts are a different, happier story: You can add, delete, or edit those synced with Yahoo! (YHOO) or Outlook. 

Apple’s marketing mavens are very clever folks, and I’m sure that all of the decisions about what to include and what to leave off result from careful calculations. The omissions I’ve described probably won’t make a dent in the soon-to-be explosive sales of the Touch. Still, it’s a shame Apple has delivered such a beautiful and well-conceived piece of hardware with locked-down software that makes it far less useful than it could be. 

Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for BusinessWeek. You can contact him at techandyou@businessweek.com. 

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2007/tc20070919_706225.htm?sub=techmaven 

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Composes Open Document Symphony 

By Egan Orion: Wednesday 19 September 2007, 16:54

IBM ANNOUNCED in New York City yesterday that it will offer a complete set of office productivity applications as free downloads. Branded as IBM Lotus Symphony, the office suite will include word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs. Implementing the XML based file and display formats of the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) specification, Lotus Symphony will be based upon software written by the Open Office coalition, which IBM has joined along with Sun, Google and others. Last week IBM announced that it has dedicated 35 developers to contributing code to Open Office.The rest of IBM’s Lotus line of email, messaging and work group collaboration applications, led by its flagship Lotus Notes product, are proprietary. IBM has invested significant resouces in Lotus for over a decade, ever since it bought Lotus for $3.5 billion in 1995. But its Lotus SmartSuite line of office applications failed to gain traction in attempting to challenge Microsoft Office during the late 1990s.  

By offering its flavor of Open Office under the Lotus banner, IBM may be hinting that it will add features to Open Office to integrate its applications with preexisting Lotus software. 

It’s possible that IBM might even release basic versions of other Lotus applications as open source, although IBM has made no indication that it’s considering that.

By joining Sun and Google to develop and promote open source software products implementing ODF, IBM adds welcome resources and marketing power to lure users away from the high costs and vendor lock-in of Microsoft Office.

IBM executives compare its ODF initiative with the support it gave to the open source system Linux by promoting its use in corporate data centers, support that helped make Linux very successful over the last several years.

Melissa Webster, an analyst for research firm IDC, said “IBM is jumping in with products that are backed by IBM, with the IBM brand and IBM service. This is a major boost for open source on the desktop.”

We strongly agree, and we wish IBM’s Lotus Symphony and Sun, Google and Open Office every success against the dark side of software innovation incarnate in expensive closed, proprietary protocols and document formats

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=42476

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by Joel Dreyfuss 

One day, we may look back on Sept. 17 as the official beginning of the end for Microsoft’s dominance. Two separate events signaled the shift; one was the European Union court’s harsh ruling against Microsoft itself, charging that the world’s No. 1 software maker had abused its monopoly power to harm competitors. The verdict was expected – and showed that European bureaucrats had more courage than the U.S. Justice Department. 

The other important announcement was IBM’s offering of Lotus Symphony, a suite of office applications, for free. This is just the latest bullet to the head of Microsoft’s cash cow. Years ago, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt ran Novell – and tried to save the faltering networking company – he argued that Microsoft’s real stranglehold on the PC market was not the Windows operating system but its Office productivity software suite. 

Most users could care less about operating systems, he said, but they wanted to run Microsoft Office to be compatible with everyone else. After all, Schmidt argued, others, including IBM (OS/2) and Apple (Macintosh), had already shown they could write a better operating system.

It is no surprise, then, that Google has gone after Microsoft by providing an ever-expanding list of online office applications that include a word processor, a spreadsheet, a calendar – and soon presentation software to compete with PowerPoint. Others have been chipping away at the office market that provides 40 percent of Microsoft’s revenues. Sun has also distributed its version of Open Office, a suite of apps developed under the open source model and therefore improvable by users that is also the basis of IBM’s offering.  Microsoft, fully loaded with smart guys, has not ignored the dangers that free online apps pose to its dominance. The company has thrown a full court press at the open office movement, which wants to set standards for document formats. Predictably, Microsoft has lobbied hard to win a prominent role for its own technology in the standards. Responding to the evolution of on-demand software, Microsoft has also launched Microsoft Live!, a set of online apps that are still limited, for example, providing tools to help small companies design web sites.  But is Redmond willing to cannibalize its own highly-profitable packaged products with online versions? The company has indicated it will not. But Steve Ballmer may not be able to avoid giving away the store. It is clear now that Microsoft has become the legacy company of the 21^st century, playing the kind of defensive role that IBM played when the upstart from Redmond outwitted the incumbent in Armonk and walked away with the best parts of OS/2. 

The EU court this week ruled that Microsoft had abused its power by adding a media player to Windows to undercut the leader, Real Networks, and upheld record fines of almost $700 million. Microsoft’s allies (including the Bush administration) have sounded the predictable laments. In a statement, Thomas Barnett, an assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division, warned that the European decision, “rather than helping consumers, may have the unfortunate consequence of harming consumers by chilling innovation and discouraging competition.” Only Bushspeak would translate a slap against monopoly behavior into a hindrance to competition. 

Far more people in the tech industry will argue that Microsoft’s dominance has discouraged software developers and venture capitalists from creating products that compete with the software giant. 

No one should think the war is over. But the run of battle is clear. With $51 billion in revenue in fiscal 2007, up 15 percent from the previous year, Microsoft is hardly on its deathbed. The real issue is how quickly Microsoft can adjust to the realities of the on-demand era. 

Can it transform its products to co-exist with a growing on-line infrastructure and still generate those massive revenues? Will a Lou Gerstner emerge from the ranks of management to push a massive transformation of how things are done in Redmond?  source: http://www.redherring.com/Home/22835

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Adding to its slate of Web-based applications, Google Presentations allows users to create slideshows and share them with the world or with a defined set of contacts.  It can also be used as a free, basic alternative to Microsoft Powerpoint, allowing users to block any outside access to their documents.

Users can also present the slideshows live to a group of people, complete with a chat box for comments during the presentation.  Like other Google Apps, files created on Presentations carry a complete history of modifications made and the people who made the respective changes.  Users can also send the file to someone via a one-click e-mail button, automatically giving them access to the presentation.

Google Presentations has many of the same basic elements as Microsoft Powerpoint.  It contains a set of slide layouts and designs, as well as a complete palette of text editing options.  The major component not in the initial release of the new Google app is animation.  There are no image fly-in features or slide transition effects.  

The Google Docs suite also includes Spreadsheets and Documents, respective clones of Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word.  The online giant claims that millions of people have created at least one document in the Google Docs package.

Another collaboration-based Web app is Google Calendar, which lets users share their schedules with each other by pointing their browser to a unique HTML address. The presentation application is available now at docs.google.com. Source: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33909/140/ 

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By Jacqui Cheng | Published: September 18, 2007 - 11:29AM CT 

IBM has announced that it too is throwing its hat into the free office suite ring by introducing a free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation suite based on OpenOffice.org. IBM describes the software, called Lotus Symphony, as “enterprise-grade” office software, with collaboration capabilities like those in Lotus Notes 8. Lotus Symphony will be able to run on Windows XP and Vista, several Linux platforms, with “support for Apple Macintosh planned for the future.” 

 “IBM is very pleased to be joining the OpenOffice.org community. We are very optimistic that IBM’s contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide tangible benefits to the community membership and to users of OpenOffice.org technology around the world,” IBM’s Mike Rhodin said in a statement. 

“But how does this differ from StarOffice?” you may ask. Parts of OpenOffice.org 1.x were integrated into IBM’s software several years ago, which were updated with a new UI and accessibility enhancements for the recently-released Lotus Notes 8. The applications in Lotus Symphony are just standalone applications of the same versions that are available as part of Notes. Conversely, StarOffice is built off of the OO.org 2.x code with some contributions from Sun, and so the two are slightly branched from one another. 

One more difference between StarOffice and Lotus Symphony is file format compatibility. IBM says that Lotus Symphony apps will support the Open Document Format (ODF) and PDF, as well as Microsoft native file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt). IBM does warn, however, that not all Office-created documents will open flawlessly, particularly those that make use of embedded macros or are encrypted. 

The move comes as a direct challenge to Microsoft Office and its dominance of the enterprise market. While OpenOffice.org has never made much of an impact on Office’s market share, IBM’s repackaging and support of the free software solution could attract many more users over to the platform. Other free office solutions, such as Google’s collection of apps, are also said to challenge Office, although some parties are highly skeptical that the free, basic applications can truly address the needs of enterprise customers. IBM hopes that it will have an advantage in the enterprise, however, with its good name and well-known support giving the product a boost above the competition.  

source:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070918-ibms-free-symphony-hopes-to-drown-out-offices-brass-band.html

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By Tarmo Virki Mon Sep 17, 12:39 PM ET HELSINKI (Reuters) - Major handset vendors have much more to gain than to lose from the buzz Apple Inc’s coveted iPhone will create when it arrives in European stores for the key shopping season ahead of Christmas. 

As Britain, Germany and France await news this week on which telecom operators will be awarded contracts to sell the iPhone in Europe’s major markets, Apple’s rivals reckon they will profit either way. For one thing the iPhone will have a tough time justifying its price tag in Europe, expected to be around 399 euros ($553), in a market where almost all but the most basic pay-as-you-go phones are given away for free with operator contracts. 

Sales of the iPhone, which has been available in the United States since the end of June, do not approach those of its competitors there — Apple has sold a million iPhones so far, about the amount Nokia sells every day. At the same time the iPhone marketing campaign has raised awareness about extra features in phones — which can only benefit the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung Electronics, who have strong portfolios of music focused phones. 

“The iPhone is hugely positive for the handset market,” said CCS analyst Ben Wood, adding that those operators who do not get an iPhone contract would look for alternative products to keep their clients. “Who’s got the problem? Operators. Who gains? handset makers. For every one operator that gets iPhone — there are three to four who don’t,” he added. 

In Britain, Vodafone has already unveiled a range of new handsets and services for the Christmas period including an exclusive music service offering unlimited tracks in preparation for the iPhone’s arrival. Speculation has swirled for months over which European telecom operators will sell the iPhone, which combines the popular iPod music player and a Web browser. 

In Germany, a source told Reuters last week it would be sold through Deutsche Telekom’s retail outlets at an initial price of 399 euros. Apple is expected to hand a deal to Spanish Telefonica’s O2 UK unit, and France Telecom’s Orange unit is expected to win a French deal, analysts say, though the companies have maintained strict silence about any deal. 

Apple signed up top U.S. telecoms operator AT&T Inc. in an exclusive deal for at least two years to sell the phone in the United States. But earlier this month, Apple cut the U.S. price for the iPhone to $399 from $599.  Analysts said Apple is likely to benefit from its strong brand and dedicated followers when starting European sales, but a limited offering and signing deals with just one telecom operator per country would put a lid on its sales hopes. 

“You need a brand, a product and a distribution to get market share. They got the brand, but the product is limited and distribution is rather limited,” said Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.

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