Apple Doubles Everything

In stark contrast to Microsoft's earnings announcements, there were considerable crowings at Apple. Microsoft showed that without a strong enterprise performance, their overall numbers would have looked pretty grim and now it seems there will almost certainly be my predicted earnings drop in 2012 at some point.

But Apple just plough on. In fact revenue over doubled comparing the last quarter to the same last year with 118% growth to record over $46bn in revenue. And profit rose the same degree to $13bn and they added $17bn of cash in the quarter too.

Over 37m iPhones were sold and 15m iPads putting Apple back at No. 1 in both categories while Macs shipped over 5m units rising a steady 21% as the PC industry took a noticeable dive in shipments and earnings.

Considering there is a pipeline of amazing new products on the horizon, Apple's future looks very rosy. There may be a few green faces in Seattle. After a long and clever plot, Apple is now a serious product in the eyes of corporations despite the fact it is expensive and it doesn't run Windows.

Now who would have predicted that 10 years ago? OK, other than Ty.

Apple will Fail, Microsoft to Come Back?

In a boring conversation over Christmas, a friend of mine said that Apple will take a dive this year as, in his theory, they have saturated demand for their tablets and smartphones and their PCs will never get taken seriously by corporates. Meanwhile Microsoft will resurge back to normal growth rates, was his other prediction.

Of course, he's right on all counts.

Or is he? Having been recently converted to Apple, first via tablet, then iPhone and now the Macbook Pro, I have suddenly realised that as workers we have been held back from many productivity aids and better software over the years. As a for instance, this year over the Christmas period, I recorded and published a talking book of bedtime stories for my young boy which he can now read and listen to at his leisure from an iPad or one of our iPhones or any device that reads ePubs.

Apple Pages, at £13.99 for the software on a Macbook Pro (full end user licence cost), allows you to write the document while the free GarageBand software on the Mac allows you to record an audio file. You just add the media file to your Pages file and then export to ePub format. The recordings took 15 minutes each and the rest was done in minutes. The look on my little's boys face to see his pictures in the book and hear my voice telling the story? Well, priceless.

But this has nothing to do with business, has it? Oh yes it has. This week, my firm will use my Macbook to write several briefing and training documents about Cloud Computing which we will add audio files to and then export them to ePub format. We can then make them available to all tablet users as a multimedia document which they can listen to on the fly. Imagine you are an IT salesperson awaiting a first appointment with a client to talk about Virtualisation or the benefits of Cloud, these documents will be 15 minutes long as audio files to give first, invaluable briefings to make salespeople sound authoritative. And they can leave them with their clients.

What my friend fails to realise is that the PC market is plummeting - even servers - but Notebooks in particular are nose diving at over 50% per quarter. Vendors like HP, Dell and Acer question the viability at the low end as they can't make products cheap enough for the corporate market. Meanwhile, the software is still buggy and expensive and it does much the same as it always has done with precious little innovation over the last 5 years, particularly from Microsoft.

In the face of this, smartphones and tablets are rising at an exponential rate as the phenomenon of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) takes off at work where our own devices are attaching to secure networks. And people using these devices buy their software in a different way - over the Cloud and for a few pounds a shot. And there's tons of it.

The revolution is here, have no doubt. And Apple PC's, in the face of the PC decline, are growing at 27% per annum in terms of shipments and revenue. Yet you can't get a bean of discount for love nor money on these expensive products.

Why are companies now paying top dollar for Apple when they are forcing PC vendors to crumble? Simple, the PC market never has really been about price. If you want capability to do a job, people are prepared to pay. The Sony Vaio is touted as the pinnacle of PC's in terms of graphics and portability but have you seen the Apple Mac Air? There's no real comparison.

But Apple is an island in the world of computing dominated by Microsoft so corporates will never buy, will they? Oh, but they will. Microsoft Office for Mac is vastly superior to the PC version and it's half the price. You can now get it as a client for MS Office 365. If you want full PC compatibility then for £67 you run Parallels virtual machine and then port all your MS licences across, automatically by wifi - Apple does it for you.

Of course, I don't think Apple will dominate the corporate market but I think the PC has had its day in the current form. The way in which companies invest in software will change as the Cloud drives prices down and multiple devices will be used to run the same piece of software with files sourced from one spot for all.

This is not a world described by PCs or Microsoft and so either these companies will have to adapt or get left behind. Apple may not win the end battle but they have shown that end or client devices can be anything going forward and users are defining what is paid for them against the corporate mandates. 

Steve Jobs said it before he died, we are in the post-PC era and you don't have to look far to see executives and consumers using the same devices running lots of software that has been suppressed for years by the narrow minded view of the world by mammoth software companies.

2012 will be a year of innovation and the year that the PC market accelerated its decline at the cost of new devices. Apple will get a share but look out for more innovative products and lots of great software at affordable prices. 

If Apple has done this one thing, then it has put value back into the valueless object that was once a PC.

BYOD Threat to Enterprise Security

BYOD or BYOT (bring Your Own Device or Technology) is a huge trend in corporations. As yet CEO/CIOs don't really understand the full implications or don't care that much, according to some research, but the growth in smartphones and tablets being brought into the enterprise network set up promises to be one of the biggest threats to security in the coming years.

Imagine the CEO's iPad going missing complete with an auto-connection to Dropbox on several applications and some local files with only so much as a 4 number PIN protecting it if anything at all. It couldn't happen? It has - the European President of a $24bn global company did just that. And not a single IT person could do a thing to prevent any data loss.

Apple now has thing's like Mobile Me and Find the iPhone with iCloud as back up which start to solve some of the issues but realistically they go nowhere near the kinds of security set up required to satisfy Corporate or Public Sector Governance on data controls and security. As the astronomic growth in smartphones and tablets continues unabated, this is going to become a major issue going forward.

Enter Bradford Networks from the US. This company has a specific solution for the BYOD craze and it's Network Sentry product addresses this issue. 

Bradford Networks' Network Sentry product manages IT assets like iPads and provisions customised security policies to control things like unauthorised network access especially in the case of a device falling into the wrong hands. Bradford Networks have specific market sector solutions for the enterprise, healthcare and education. It may mean some sacrifice in privacy for users as the product monitors activity but in reality corporations need to wrestle back control of the security of data and Bradford Networks offers a resilient way of doing this.

Bradford Networks has also joined in the SaaS market - not Software but Security as a Service with its Bradford.cloud solution for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). What Bradford.cloud does is to provide a protection layer on Private Cloud networks provided by MSPs so they can understand what devices are connected to the Private Cloud and manage their security from a single console.

Bradford Networks are at the forefront of delivering the highest level of security to enterprises both on premise and in the Cloud and have a unique answer to the growing question on security the BYOD brings for resellers and Managed Service Providers.

For further information, call +44 207 193 2356.

Keep Taking the Tablets, Boys

This whole tablet thing isn't happening. It won't take off not in the way it actually has done already. It will be the way we design it to be. The market will stop, retrench and come back to our way of thinking. I have my fingers in my ears and I'm saying 'La la la la'. I can't hear you, Mr Tablet Market.

That's the Microsoft way, according to Andy Lees, MS Windows Phone President, who said as much at this week's WPC event in Los Angeles. In doing so Microsoft has banned its OEM Partners from using the Windows Phone operating system as the operating system for tablets.
OK, let's recap the story so far. By June of this year, Apple had sold approximately 25 million iPads, and that rate of growth in sales is accelerating with 6 million sold in the 3 months between March and June. In total between smartphones and tablets around 394 million have been sold versus a global PC population of 1.3 billion and a global mobile subscriber base of 5.1 billion.

Something has changed. Knock, knock Microsoft. Hello, is there anyone at home?

By 2014 it is estimated that there will be more than 400 million tablets sold globally at a rate of 185 million a year by then. It is thought that not Apple but Google's Android operating system (OS) will be the choice of over 40% of those tablet vendors and will be the biggest market share. It is estimated that Microsoft will have less than 13% of the tablet OS market, Blackberry falling to just 5%.

Why is it important to treat these devices as mobile smartphone type devices and not PCs? Don't we want to use them for business? Won't we want Microsoft Office running native on these devices?

The answer is that yes we will want them as hybrid devices as Microsoft describes them but the paradigm has changed. The web has become the platform so we don't need USB ports or adherence to corporate networks, we just need access to the web by WiFi or 3/4G. We want to use these lightweight devices to port business around like a briefcase, sharing folders in The Cloud but having local copies.

Just this morning I blogged that Microsoft Office 365 is already redundant for the iPad because it's SharePoint back end is the wrong animal for the job and it assumes bulky Office client software to be present in full on the local device. Dropbox is the obvious choice. GoToDocs allows creation, viewing and editing of MS files and PDFs and you can print them via WiFi (OK that's ropey for now but it's not rocket science to get it right). This application was downloaded in seconds from iTunes Store and cost less than a few pounds. And cost is key here - nothing in Apple's App Store costs over £30 at the last look. This is good news.

And this is the point. We don't want another device that takes an age to boot and has zillions of processes clogging up the CPU and memory. We want always-on, reasonably priced innovative applications that allow mobile working to be not just effective but affordable. We don't want over-priced, resource-hogging, out-moded operating systems hammering the performance. We want machines with high performance graphics that we can use as a business-grade engine AND as a recreation device - that lasts full day in battery and doesn't weigh a ton.

The tablet market is one of the most exciting things to emerge in the industry for a decade and products like Evernote lead the way in terms of usable business software. A superb MS OneNote alternative constantly synchronises the notes you make on all devices via the Cloud - and it's free. Why do you want vast local storage with that power at your fingertips?

At last the world of computing has wrestled free of Microsoft's grip. And it's fast moving and it's exciting again. This weekend Google Plus will attain 20 million users in just a short period of time - that pulling power is distorting our way of thinking and users like the way it's going. The web is making the world of computing available to any device and it's capturing our imagination.
Microsoft has to change. It is fast becoming a dinosaur and there is a feel of the IBM of the 80s about the management talk as they adhere to only things they know and want to hear. They talk only in the product set they have and cannot seem to innovate new things to tackle the companies stealing their market.

With the European PC market dropping by over 17% this year, the writing is on the wall as the tablet market grows into the space left behind. The world has changed already and Steve Ballmer, Lees and others at the top are standing Canute-like as the 'Sea of Progress' inevitably washes over them.

The problem is that Microsoft's numbers don't reflect it yet. And that IBM feeling comes back once again. The bolt from the blue - the one no one saw coming - has already struck but it hasn't manifested itself in the numbers as yet. The tablet market is established and the main player is not Microsoft - that has got to hurt.

Where a potential 13% of the tablet market leaves MS OS and Office is anyone's guess but with a potential 40% of it, Google would be rather hopeful that they may have a greater say than anyone else with Apple standing beside them.

You could not have predicted this just two years ago. Bill Gates once wrote a book, 'Business at the Speed of Thought'. Well it seemed someone stopped thinking in his company. And Steve Ballmer is reputed to have once fielded questions from an audience where he started by saying, 'Microsoft is right. Now what was the question?'

That about says it all.

Caught with their pants down

Another day and another mobility giant disappoints.

This time around its RIM, makers of the Blackberry. The once darling of the markets and the must-have device of any workaholic executive, the Blackberry led the way for corporations to serve their emails on mobile technology. It had so many things that were wrong to start with - the clunky wheel mouse, inability to read attachments, constant scrolling up and down to find messages, that blinking deductive text that made so many messages just total rubbish. It didn't matter, the Blackberry was simply a cutting edge device, we put up with it all.

Suddenly the world is different. Profits dropped in the quarter to May to $695m down from $769m on the same period last year - missing even their revised forecast. Talk of challenges and cost cutting is rife - shares are down 12%. Oh and any company that has joint CEOs is asking for trouble.

The same could be said for Nokia who, having absorbed Symbian, had got so locked into their own world of mobile phones they simply failed to see the Smartphone revolution as a threat. HTC, Apple, Samsung have all battered them repeatedly and now they have turned to Microsoft as a last ditch effort to be saved.

For Blackberry, their woes have gotten worse as there have been delays in delivering their new tablet product which would be just another catch up device in a rapidly filling market. Google Android came from left field with Apple to invade the mobility market and their power and brilliance has simply left the traditionalists behind. Innovation at RIM and Nokia seems to be a thing of the past.

In both cases, RIM and Nokia have been caught with the pants down. RIM has at least got a decent share of the corporate market to defend but when it took me precisely two minutes to configure my email client on my Android with ZERO new software on any server, you know that Blackberry are struggling for the future.

Analysts are saying that users are not waiting for Blackberry - they are moving to other platforms. The same can be said of Nokia. Too little, too late.

Social Blunder

It's very humbling to know that even savvy guys like Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, can get it wrong.

He cites not reacting to the amazing growth by companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as being 'His biggest regret'. So even Google underestimated the impact of social media. Even better, when asked why he missed all the tell tale signs, he responded simply, 'I was busy' (as told to the WSJ).

It's easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day running of your company and, perhaps, the belief that the exciting world of technology revolves solely around you. Heaven knows that IBM were guilty of that in the 80s and Microsoft has been a repeat offender. Now we see Nokia stumbling over its own self-importance and paying the price in the smartphone arena.

It's a harsh lesson and one I will focus on in the build up to the opportunities The Cloud presents as you can feel the inertia in the channel already.

There's nothing like a challenge to the status quo to flush out the tree-huggers.

Nokia Knocked Again

Nokia has once again downgraded its revenue and profit forecast. This has caused an 18% slide in the value of its shares.

Not a good time for the new UK General Manager, Conor Pierce, to take the helm and some important decisions will have to be made for the future. Nokia is still the highest shipper of handsets even if its market share is dwindling. The problem is that it still ships the vast majority of its handsets in the very low margin 'dumb mobile' sector. The high margin smartphone sector has largely passed them by and this is now being dominated by the rapid growth shown by companies like Apple and HTC.

Did Nokia's management underestimate the threat posed by companies like Apple who came from left field? Did Nokia cling to the hope that Symbian would be the de facto standard in mobile operating systems, again underestimating the threat that companies like Google posed - again coming from left field?

They have pinned all their hopes of a revival on their much publicised partnership with Microsoft. The first of the new handsets sporting Windows 7, as there is no real mobile operating system form Microsoft, will not be seen in UK markets until Q1 2012. It already sounds late.

Having already made announcements about 7,000 job cuts, the once mighty Nokia is a little punch drunk. But is it on the ropes?

Xooming Marvellous

Up front, I will admit I am an Apple iPad man. I bought my iPad 2 about a month ago, upgrading from the iPad in the process. And I love it.

Now here's a curious thing. Chatting to a high-up-in-Microsoft mate of mine recently, he basically said that the iPad would get swamped by the Microsoft combatants. I poo-pooed his argument as usual as just MS bluster version 3.5.

BUT, whilst my MS friend version 2.0 maybe wrong on one count he may be right on another. You see, I also recently received an upgrade on my mobile phone and went from a steam-driven pseudo Nokia smartphone to the HTC Desire Z. Oh my, what a spanking phone - if you will forgive the battery from not lasting anything like it says on the tin, that is.

OK, battery aside, the phone is superb. And that's because of its Android operating system from Google. There are tons of brilliant Apps, the Wifi linkage is brilliant and even the retractable keyboard for idiots like me is actually fairly redundant as the touchscreen works really well.

What is more, the operating system seems stable and quick. The graphics are dazzling and it's a dream to Twitter, email, text and all else from. In short, it's the cat's whiskers in smartphones, in my humble opinion.

So enter the Motorola Xoom, the Android 3.0 (honeycomb) driven tablet. Even the marketing blurb is wonderful simply saying 'It supports Abobe Flash Player 10'. If only Apple could say that for the iPad - it continues to be a rusting nail in a festering wound for them.

There's more. The Xoom has a 10.1" display at 1280x800 WGA screen. What does that mean? It's bigger and better definition than the iPad 2. The onboard cameras are better than the iPad's too. Better still, you can buy nice accessories like a portfolio case rather than useless and expensive Smart cases that the iPad 2 has. Mine went straight into a cupboard and I stuck with my nice, leather and expensive yet not dimensionally correct 'Snugg' case bought by my family on my birthday.

If there is going to be a serious threat to Apple, I think it will be Android that will bring it on. If nothing else, we are all a bit jaundiced by the Microsoft 'catch up and botch it' syndrome. In this case they cannot simply buy the company to compete as Apple and Google are just a little beyond reach on that front.

There are a few drawbacks at this stage. Models available are Wifi only so far, with external 3G Mobile broadband extra which is a shame and it looks slightly pricey at the moment although you do get bigger memory for your bucks.

I would like to see one in action to validate my argument but on 'paper' the Motorola Xoom with Android looks pretty darn hot.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Google Android & Your Data

Eric Schmidt (Chairman of Google) has recently tried to allay fears that Google Android devices are accumulating our location data and backing it up to storage devices. He says that, 'Google is on the side of the consumer'.

Of course, Google would claim that we opt into such features. Note that whenever an Android App asks you to switch on your location indicator, such information is being relayed back to Google's servers and is stored - allegedly.

Microsoft have made great play on this - almost to the point of slander. But the reality is that they are not far wrong. Google claims that by storing and using such location data that it can produce 'Better targeted search'.

That phrase is in fact a euphemism for 'Making more money' - that is selling highly specific target information such as user location to advertisers so that they can more accurately tailor an advert to us and therefore increase their chances of a hit and possible sale.

As an example, just this morning I received adverts from Zoopla for postcodes near where I was sitting, not my home address. That's highly specific and very much dependent on my current location.

It is noticeable that Google tries to hide the fact that it will 'sell' the location information to advertisers and not a penny of that increase in revenue comes back to us as individuals. Perhaps, if Google wants to use this data in the future, we should charge them for every time they sell it or get a cut in the advertising revenue. After all, we are becoming the moving billboards upon which they can mount their adverts to woo us.

Google, as we are becoming aware, are not the nerdy, friendly cool guys we once thought they were. Their revenue figures and profitability are simply astounding. They are a fantastic money machine and we are the ones who make it happen.

We are all stakeholders in the Google phenomenon. Perhaps we should rise up and ask for our share of the money they are making out of us?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Has The iPhone Changed The World?

The Apple iPhone is a remarkable device. It certainly saved Apple from a long, slow death but it has arguably changed our view of mobile phones forever, moving away from the world dictated to us by the Scandinavian and far eastern manufacturers. But in the world of mobile, has the iPhone really reinvented the model?

To be sure, the iPhone has changed our perspective in many ways. As you would expect, Apple brought us an easy to use, sophisticated user interface, as they brought windows to the world of PCs long before Microsoft did. Apple also destroyed the mobile store model as they invented the concept of an online mobile store that allowed not only ringtones but applications, music, movies and much more to be bought and downloaded on the go. They also brought us a flat-pack price model even if you have to pay a premium for the phone. There is no doubt the world they brought us on the mobile is here to stay as others rush to follow and the growth of 'Smartphones' as they are called is causing a rise in network traffic.


This rise in traffic is enormous but smartphones are not the lone or even the biggest contributor to the rise. Netbooks, laptops and the growth in the mobile browser, peer to peer data calls, application downloads, multimedia streaming and other things are contributing to a truly phenomenal rise in data traffic on mobile networks. As subscription penetrations reach saturation point, the pace of innovation keeps the market driving forward and for the first time last quarter the market reached $10bn in revenue in the US alone. By 2010, the global codified information base will exceed 1 'yottabyte' or 1,000 billion terabytes (a terabyte being 1,000 gigabytes which is 1,000 megabytes). The future we will be fast talking about 1 zettabyte (1,000 exabytes or squillions of bytes to the rest of us). We are talking more data than bank bailouts here - at last a number bigger.


We are entering the 'yottabyte era' as some call it and the one thing you can depend upon is that the mobile network providers are not ready for it. The financial strain of keeping up with this incredible growth in data is enormous and with the laughable prices of Government tenders around the world for airwave licences, it has not been easy for companies to make enough profits to keep reinvesting at the right pace to get ahead of the traffic growth.

With the exponential growth in mobile applications, mobile media viewing and advertising expected mobile operators are going to have to accelerate deployment of new 4G technology, they are going to have to take some of the load off networks by implementing femto or Wifi technology faster, get a better grip on managing the network and optimising it, look to standards on broadcasting mobile video rather than let it grow itself without control and look to get smartphones defined properly.

It's a hard job and very cash consuming but we are only now seeing the kinds of possibilities that mobile technology really offers. It's a far cry from the bricks that we used to use as mobile devices when, from a small, flat device, I can browse my emails, make video calls, view films, listen to music and browse the internet, all for a flat monthly charge.

And it has only just begun.