Thankful for Steve at Thanksgiving

You bet baby! I’m thankful for Steve Jobs today too. Historians will look back on the 21st century and view the introduction of the iPhone as a seminal moment in Human History.

Ah, the irony

Who knows what goes on in the head of the Googlempire, but one things for sure, its about (making) the money, stupid! Still, between poor developer relations and the problems of a so-called open market, Android may struggle to make the impact many are predicting. The controlled eco-system of the iPhone has fundanmental advantages for developers – the App Store works, I trust what I buy there, I know it will work on my device – even if getting an app in there can sometimes be difficult. So closed is open, and open is closed.

There really is an app for that

I find I’m having an increasing number of “there’s an app for that” moments. I was in a bookshop a couple of days ago and I spotted a new book by a well known author. But as I hadn’t heard about it, I used Red Laser to scan the barcode (got a strange look from one of the bookshop assistants for that one) and surfed on over to Amazon, where I read a couple of reviews and decided against buying it. There’s an app for that too.

Its a two horse race, wake up and smell the turf

Shelton says “At this stage of the game, it’s easy to see how [Symbian] will be the biggest community around an open operating system.” Oh dear. Someone is living in cloud cuckoo land. This is so a two horse race, its iPhone and Android. The openness, or lack thereof, is largely irrelevant.

So many iPhones

On the back of Apple’s best quarter ever, with sales of 7.4 million iPhone units, comes the not surprising news that the iPhone enjoys 30% of (some) market share in the US. Yes, I know, lies, damned lies and … but anyway, I was at a kind of Workday techie conference recently, at which there were some 24 techies. I reckon about 18 had iPhones. A much higher percentage amongst geeks then. And my better half wants one, it took her about a month of my “there’s an app for that”.

Untouchable iPhone

I’ve had an iPhone for a couple of months now. I can honestly say it has changed my life for the (very much) better. It is insanely fantastic. I just don’t see anyone catching it anytime soon. That sentiment seems to be increasingly shared. Android may be a match eventually, but it will probably be at least another 12 months. Palm webOS? Forget it. Interesting that Nokia don’t seem to have a clue what to do about this market. Of course they should back Android and really push it, but they seem content to do nothing. Echos of Microsoft missing the web. Quite frankly, I think I’m becoming a serious Apple fanboy … I want a Mac.

Workdays great 2009

Great post from one of our partners (and indeed customers) on Workdays 2009 and beyond. As mentioned in this post, we recently passed the 100 customer milestone.

Cloud computing / SaaS shift

Good summary of the state, opportunities and threats of the cloud computing / SaaS shift.

A job in space and developing for Eclipse too

It doesn’t get much better than this!

The deal that never made sense now officially doesn’t make sense

eBay and Skype: bring on Wall St. to sort it out though.