Eating The Forbidden Fruit...

Finishing was interesting, I thought it was funny that the full title of this post was so long that I got errors while trying to post it. The Full title I intended was - Eating The forbidden Fruit: Five reasons Apple can take over the world. I guess that didn't work out. I also realized after I named the post "Eating the forbidden fruit" That the apple logo has a bite taken out of it.

Anyway unless you have been living under a rock, you must have heard the media waves made by Apple. This is a company that was saved by the revolution of the Ipod, taking the world away from portable cassette/cd players to pure digital (mp3) sound. Now Apple has revamped their computers (Their core product) changed their design pimped them out with the new core 2 Duo processors from Intel and now like the Ipod, the once obscure computer platform is becoming a craze for the young and old alike. Apple is not shying away from all the attention, in fact they are embracing it, and coming out with more cocky "Get a mac ads".

So I have sat down and analyzed this company, where do they plan to go? where is this hype going to take them? are they going to switch places with Microsoft? after a lot of thinking and research I came up with 5 reasons why apple has a chance of taking over the market.

1. The Cool Effect
The Ipod revolution created an effect where your not cool if you don't have an Ipod. That effect is beginning to migrate into apple computers. In high school and Universities all over America having a mac is personality statement, now macs are going mainstream having a mac means your either cool or your different in a good way. Everybody wants to be different in a good way well in other words special. So what do they do? go get a mac.

2. The Cult Effect
There has been a lot of talk about the Apple marketing strategy, Ilker Yoldas in her blog described the mac fan club as having cult like characteristics. I agree, there are the Mac Evangelist who spend time trying to convince people into using or buying a mac. This is very popular with mac fanatics and this has been used to convert many present mac users such as myself from windows. This tactic is very deep and creates brand loyalty which means most mac users will be mac users for life, which maintains the company at a certain level at all times.

3. They have the chicks
As a result of the cool effect apple has manage to get girls on board their fan club. This is a feat that the game industry has been trying to do for years. Companies like Nintendo has worked hard to break this barrier for a long time, because they know once you have girls interested in your electronic device you have won over the world (like in the case of the Ipod). There are even blogs like the macenstein that have girls (some of celebrity status) that pose every month (mac chick of the month) and say how much the mac has changed their life and the wonders it is doing for them. The apple store (practically anywhere) is the only electronic store I have ever been to where you see girls ranging from the age of 14 - 22 playing with the electronics and at the store and at the same time matching the number of males at the store at any given time.

4. Microsoft Messed up
Microsoft just recently released the a new operating system after 5 years, Windows Vista. There has been a lot of criticism on the software giant about how they have copied apple in the ways the operating system works. So the question if Microsoft are still the leaders in producing the best operating system arises. To me that is not where they messed up. Where they messed up was by them making the operating system so hardware intensive that anyone one who want to upgrade from Windows xp has to practically buy a new computer. What this does is that it lets consumers think. It lets them contemplate if they want to stay with Microsoft or use this opportunity to move to the coolest thing now (an apple machine). This lack of seamless transit to the new Microsoft operating system has been of benefit to apple.

5. They are good
This is last but not the least, in fact it might be the most important. Apple has actually done a good job in marketing, designing and Engineering their products. Without this all the above points will be futile because as soon as consumers use these products they will be able to see right through the deceit. If you have used their products for a while you will know that real thought has been put into every step of the design and it feels so intuitive, in my opinion they have giving us tomorrows operating system today as Steve Jobs will put it. Now with Leopard coming out in a few weeks, the iPhone coming out in June and rumors about all their hardware being redesigned they are increasing the barrier farther again from their competitors, lets just keep our eyes out and see what they have in store for us.

Watch out for part two or this post: 5 reasons why Apple should not take over the world

Are we gonna joost it?

As I was prowling through the web today (while I was supposed to be working), I bumped into an article about how Joost has been successfully put on the newly released apple TV and that got me thinking. For those who don't know, Joost is a new peer to peer software that promises to revolutionize television by letting us watch it through our computers through the internet. This project previously known/codenamed "The Venice Project", was started by the same internet entrepreneurs that started up Skype (Which was sold to ebay) and Kazaa which is dead now. Joost presently has 85 channels and is still climbing. This software is currently in beta and you can only use it if you have been invited (similar to gmail but not quite). Right now all the invites have been suspended till further notice (So if any of you have any or know when its gonna come back up I will like to know).

The question is here will Joost change the way we watch tv? will we watch tv through our computers or will our tv's become more interactive? Joost offers you the ability to watch what you want when you want. As their slogan goes:

"Tv anywhere, anytime..."

It will be cool to watch your favorite tv shows or music videos in the airport while you wait for your plane or in starbucks as you drink your coffee and read a book. I do not see this technology actually taking over tv but I can see it filling a gap. The ability to literally watch tv anywhere is great and has been missing link for a while now, but for us to come home from work turn on our 40 inch flat screens and look at a Joost logo? I am not to sure about that, but all in all I think it is a great Idea that will definitely change the way we do things and maybe influence the future of tv.
Joost VP giving a preview [Video]:

Summer on the moon... Anyone? (Virgin Galactic)

You know as the future draws nearer (or does it ever really?) I see more sci-fi stuff becoming real. Sometime it makes me wonder, do science fiction movies actually influence what our scientist research on or do the movie directors have an inside scoop on what scientist dream about at night and then put them into movies, I don't know but I tend to lean towards the previous.

Richard Branson (Virgin group founder), has recently added a new company under his belt. This one called Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic offers normal people like me and you (Well wealthy normal people) tourist trips to space as soon as the year 2009. I found this mind shattering, so people now can go to space and actually look at the earth from another point of view for a hefty $200,000 ticket. With no surprise there is already a line of people that have payed for this and our on the line waiting for 2009 to launch this new service.

So what this actually means is that when your done traveling the world. Visiting Safari's, looking at the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China and backpacking around Europe you can now round up your world expedition by viewing the world from the outside. As you know no good thing comes without a price. Before you go on one of these trips you have to have months of training and loads of health tests are done on you to ensure you are physically fit for such a trip, these can be time consuming and arduous.

Like any other business Virgin Galactic has competitors. Space Adventures, Rocketplane and the Benson space company, but Virgin Galactic is one of the more popular/ most commercialized of these genre of companies and one of the cheapest.

Its a matter of time and then we are going to have hotels in space to accommodate these High Fliers, in fact Hilton is one of the major investors in a private space hotel project. We are looking at probably a ten year wait here and with an investment of about 10 billion dollars needed to get this project out of the drawing boards and into space. What I find amazing about this is the how quickly fiction is turning into a reality.
What happens when we run out of ideas for fictional stories? well lets worry about that later and savor the technology of the present. Who is up for springbreak in space 2010?

Is the Nintendo wii next Generation?

For the past few months now, there has been this console buzz. The Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Wii have finally been released and people have stood in line for hours if not days in order to get their hands on the latest technologies. Now we have finally played them, the whole game industries is flooded with reviews. Wii fans, Xbox fans and Playstation fans all hit it head to head trying to prove which console is the best and giving advice on what newbie gamers should go for, and this is when people now pull out what i feel is the most misused phrase in the game industry "Next Generation". There has been a battle on which console is better than which and which console is next generation and which isn't.

The question here is what is a next generation console? Is it a console that has better and faster graphics or is it a console that reinvents the art of gaming. Does just popping in a new processor and graphics card into a box make in next generation technology or is it re-engineering the ways games are looked at and played. I believe it is the latter. In the case of the Wii, I think in terms of all the consoles released in 2006/2007 the Nintendo Wii is the only one that has the bragging rights to be called Next Gen, because they have actually reinvented the art of gaming and yes they do not have great graphics or an extra fast processor but those are easily available and can be done if that is what Nintendo wanted, but what Nintendo was looking for while building the Wii was a way to bridge the gap between hardcore gamers and non-gamers and the have invested time and money to come up with technology that is closer to doing that than any other major console manufacturer. Although there is a major resistance now by hardcore gamers who are not ready to trade soar thumbs for a work out. I think with time it would be revealed without a doubt that playing games with motion detection is the way of the future.