Applepeels

Tim Cook, the right person for Apple's evolution?

New products have been the heart and soul of Apple for most of its history.  The recent comments by Forrester Research chief executive George Colony have received a lot of discussion. 

It is easy to jump on the bandwagon that Apple will decline without that next great thing and the vision of Steve Jobs.

I would disagree with Colony's analysis for a number of reasons.  My first thought is that it is impossible for any company, even an Apple, to turn out hit after hit. Setting the expectation that this is the only way Apple can be a great company is to consign Apple to a future which won't be very bright.

The Apple of today is really the result of three straight home-runs by Steve Jobs, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.  The Apple of tomorrow does not have to be defined by products that break the mold every time.

There is no guarantee that even if Steve left Apple with that next great thing that it will be another product hit.  Despite what has come to be popular wisdom, even Steve had some less than successful products.  You might want to remember back to Steve's wonderfully designed PowerMac G4 Cube for just one example.

Tim Cook might be the person who finally turns Apple into an adult company.  It doesn't have to be a company that declines like Sony has.

I have already heard some thoughts from Tim which indicate that he might be right for this moment in Apple's history.  His comments on the convergence of tablets and laptops are on the money.  I just hope he is strong enough to keep Apple from making its OS X operating system look too much like iOS for the wrong reasons.

Apple has a tremendous amount of momentum, and there is plenty that can be done to grow Apple's business.  Despite what the technology press and analysts would have us believe, computers besides tablets are not dead.  There are plenty of people who will be using laptops and desktops for years to come.

Just as Microsoft is envious of Apple's share of the smart phone and tablet markets, Apple should be eyeing the huge numbers of computers that still ship with Windows around the world.  As the world of technology matures, finding new markets with that next great product might be beyond any company's ability.

However, getting beyond a 10% market share in the world of computers could be within the grasp of a Tim Cook led Apple.  One of the weaknesses that I saw in the leadership of Steve when I was at Apple was the ease with which a market or a product could be sentenced to a slow death as resources were drawn to that next great thing.

My experience with Tim Cook showed me someone who is willing to tinker with things until he gets them right.  It happens to be one of the things that I have admired about Microsoft.  That patient ability to keep working on product until it meets customer needs is what has kept Microsoft alive and still making money.

So what would I like to see Apple do to begin its journey to sustainable growth?

Obviously Apple has to keep churning out new iPhones and iPads, but Apple needs to resist the temptation to load them up with features that distract from their core functionality.  You can make something better without feature creep.  That is part of Steve that Apple needs to keep in the minds of its product designers.

At the same time, Apple needs to focus substantial resources towards making OS X the absolute best operating system for computers on the planet.  At one time it was.  It no longer is the best.  There are things that Windows 7 does better, and I find Windows 7 is more reliable.  Apple should not make OS X look like iOS just for the sake of doing it.  If there are good reasons fine, but don't mess more things up like we have already seen in recent updates to iPhoto.

Apple should not depend on Microsoft screwing up with Windows 8.

Next Apple absolutely must focus on style with reliability.  I should not be sitting here saying that my last three Mac laptops are dead while my last three Windows laptops are still running.  There is no reason why Apple cannot deliver its absolute drop dead gorgeous products and have them be ones that have spectacular reliability.  You can build a company on reliability and customer satisfaction.  You can lose a company if your products don't stand the test of time.

I really don't care if there is another laptop a little thinner than mine if my laptop lasts five years instead of two.

Next, the world of desktop computers is a wasteland.  The iMac and the Mac Mini have not revolutionized it.  They also haven't taken Apple very far into the world of two digit market share. 

There is a product somewhere between the iMac and the Mac Mini with a feature or two from the Mac Pro that could own the desktop world.  While it might not break completely new ground, it could be a home run for Apple.

Things will have to gradually change at Apple under Tim Cook's leadership for all this to happen, but I think it is very possible that Apple has not yet seen its peak.  Maybe the stock won't be as high, but the company could find a spot in the list of companies who have survived the loss of their visionary leader.

It would be good for all of us consumers of technology if Apple could not only survive but thrive.  I really couldn't care less if Apple comes out with a television, but I would be really ecstatic if Apple re-invented the desktop computer and delivered it with the world's greatest operating system.

There are lot of challengs out there for Apple. Android and Amazon will be fierce competitors, but Apple already has a lot going for it and should not face the decline that so many expect.

With that I am back to enjoying spring as it continues to unfold here along the stunning waters of North Carolina's coast.  With warming weather I plan to be back out in my kayak and anchored on the oyster rocks once again.

 

 

 

Take-out Tomato Soup and Apple's view of the future

I actually don't see very many television commercials because I watch very little television.  While I know that television commercials are not a locked-in-stone view of the future, they do give us some insight into the companies who put them on the air.  Commercials especially help us identify the products that business like Apple love the most.

While it might not go into the annals of silliest commercials, Apple's last "Siri" commercial which features someone ordering take-out tomato soup deserves some consideration.

Long ago, Apple had a marketing campaign based on a flying car. It didn't last long. Perhaps it was just before its time since flying cars seem to be coming back for real.  

However, some of Apple's campaign's have really resonated with computer users.

Perhaps my favorite was the one with the dog and the young boy who unpacked his iMac and got on the Internet faster than an adult male who had purchased a Windows computer.

I think the commercial was a homerun because at the time, getting a computer other than a Mac functioning was a really time-consuming and frustrating experience.  Getting an iMac going was pretty easy.  Of course life even with an iMac was a whole lot better when it got a Firewire port and could write CD-ROMs.

We have come a long way since the iMac was first introduced. Other manufacturers have learned a lot from Apple.  I would argue that setting up a new Windows PC is not very different from a new Mac today.  I have done both in the last couple of years.

I don't think it is difficult to argue that Apple isn't nearly as interested in desktop and laptop computers today as they are in iPads and iPhones.  Long ago I predicted that Apple desktop and laptop market share would peak at around ten percent.  I think that is pretty close to their current US market share.  I don't see it growing.

However, I never guessed that peaking at ten percent would be because Apple has lost interest in computers. I know that iPhones and iPads are selling like hot cakes but isn't a Mac still at the heart of it? You certainly can't run iCloud without a Mac to create your identity.

Maybe Apple's focus on small gadgets is finally reaching Mac lovers as it appears that users might not be jumping on Apple's iCloud bandwagon.  Apple is now giving away Snow Leopard to make it easier for users to buy Lion.

Maybe Apple's marketing has become silly enough that it is no longer a company strength. Or perhaps potential computer purcahsers aren't interested in searching for take-out tomato soup with their phone assistant?

If you ask me to define Apple's current marketing message, I would say it is all about very fancy screens for tablets and a future where we are reduced to ordering take-out tomato soup.

Maybe I grew up in a different world, but the thought of being lazy enough to order take-out tomato soup is beyond what I can imagine.  And in this world where people are struggling to find jobs, does Apple really believe that there are people out there who can afford to order take-out tomato soup or who even would want to?

If the computer future that Apple envisions for us is asking my phone silly questions and following the responses, it might be time to say out loud that Steve's absence is being felt.

Those of you who still know how to cook might want to try my grilled salmon recipe which is at the end of this post.

The culture change that might come back to haunt Apple

It is easy to say that Apple is all about great products because the company does have some very good products.  However, I wonder if that will remain the case as we head into the future.  There was a time at Apple when having a great product was an end in itself whether or not the product sold well.

Perhaps one of the best examples of that was Steve's G4 cube which was an absolutely stunning product which sold very poorly except to some pockets of NASA engineers.

It might not be too much longer before we see another very good product leaving Apple's price list. Last November, my former colleague, John Martellaro, wrote an article, "Why Apple’s Mac Pro Won’t Last."  I agree with him, but I also would not be surprised if Apple completely gets out of desktop computers.

My first question is why is the Mac Pro dying. I know that I wanted to buy one when I bought my last iMac in 2010.  Unfortunately the price band of the Mac Pro had gone up substantially from what I paid for my dual G5 system in December 2004.  An I5 iMac with a screen made more financial sense though it lacked some features that I wanted.

Perhaps if the Mac Pro had been reinvented and shipped at a better price point in case designed less than ten years ago, it might be selling a little better.  However, in Apple's defense, obviously focusing on less expensive higher volume products has been a more profitable course for Apple.

They are not alone in focusing on profit and specifically share price.  I recently read an article, How American Corporations Transformed From Producers to Predators, by William Lazonick.  The article talks about the time when "executives began to base all their decisions on increasing corporate earnings for the sake of jacking up corporate stock prices."

Reading the article brought back memories of management meetings at Apple in the late ninties and just after the turn of the century.  I clearly remember our financial people saying that while we had great products and were headed in the right direction, we were not moving the stock price.  It was also around this time when Apple decided to quit giving stock options to employees below a certain level.

One of the first theories that came out of these discussions was that it was much more important to sell lots of less expensive stuff than it was to sell just a few very expensive items.  I don't think there is any question that Apple has executed this strategy exceptionally well.  All you have to do is look at the stock price and how much gear Apple is selling.

So far the lots of iPads and iPhones have almost universally been rated as arguably best of class products. I might argue that they are almost addictive products.  I'm not certain whether the attraction of the product is what the product does, the features, or just being part of Apple's cool world.  That would be an interesting study.

However, there is a very fine line between delivering a product where the focus is to make it the absolute best at what it does and between creating a product which has lots of stuff which makes it buzz worthy and something that people just "have" to have.  One of Apple's favorite tricks has always been to create an upgrade that you must have or you get left out.  See my post on Apple's "free" iCloud service for more thoughts on this.

I would argue that one of the best examples that I have seen of a company focusing on being the best and doing just what needed to be done at the moment was actually Microsoft's Windows 7 product.  Vista was an unmitigated disaster or a quagmire as I labelled it.  Windows 7 had to be good or Microsoft was going to lose a lot of customers.  Windows 7 actually turned out to be a great product. There are number of things that I like better than what I find in OS X.

However, it appears that Windows 8 is being designed more from the perspective of trying to sell Windows tablets than anything else.  It will be interesting to see whether or not it is a success.

If I take the argument and apply it to Apple, I have to worry about the new iPad which seems to have a marketing campaign built around a screen which certainly appears to be better than anything else that is out there. The question is, do you really need that screen and what will have to happen to websites before the web "looks" better to new iPad users?

It is a complex question, I can remember debating university professors when when I was selling Macs with millions of colors. 

One actually told me that no one needs more than sixteen colors.  As a photographer, I certainly love great screens and lots of colors, but I wonder if tablet and maybe phone screens reached the point of being just the latest example of the megahertz race for computers or the megapixel race for cameras.  David Pogue has an interesting column, Spec Obsession Disorder: The Incurable Techie Malady.

I know that there are other reasons besides stunning screens that cause people to buy their iPads and iPhones. Many believe they are easier to use, though I haven't exactly struggled very much with my Android phone and Kindle Fire.  I have seen some talk about having to redesign websites to help them take advantage of the iPad display.

I have also seen an article about the new iPad greatly increasing data usage which at some point must make the phone companies pretty happy if they can figure out how to charge more.

On April 7, the Washington Post published an article about a Chinese teenager selling his kidney to buy an iPad.  It is sad commentary on the addictive nature of consumer goods and Apple's products in particular.

Apple obviously needs to keep selling products and being innovative is the best way to do that.  However, I hope Apple's next OS release focuses on being really good and something we want to buy because it works better and not just another product with features that mean little to most users.

I don't know enough about the latest iPad to make a judgment call as to whether it is something that works so much better that it is a must have upgrade or not.  Most commentators seem to be saying that if you have the previous iPad version, there are not a lot of reasons to upgrade unless you see the screen on the new one and can't live without it.

Over the years, I have always believed that we bought and used technology because it enabled us to do things which we could not do without it.  We are now to the point of having so much overlapping technology which can do many similar things that I believe it is right to question whether we really need some of the feature laden products that have come out.  

Apple is on a real roll, and I am more a content creator than I am a content consumer so my bias would be towards desktop computers with big screens. It is where I am most efficient.  I can easily do Twitter or Facebook updates from my phone or Kindle Fire, but I'm not certain that I would want to build websites or edit photos on either.  I'm not sure editing a photo on an iPad makes sense if only other third generation iPad can see it as I see it.

I put photos on the web on Pinterest and most people have screens that let them see my photos fairly close to how I see them. Would that be the case if I did my editing on the latest iPad?

As I think back to technology and the pieces that have come together to give us what lets us be productive, I remember when Apple started shipping CD-ROMs in their desktop computers.  Apple as I remember was losing some money on each drive but the belief was that the technology was so important and needed that it would eventually make money as volumes increasesd. If was a hard decision in those challenging times.

Apple doesn't have to make those kind of tough decisions today, but maybe they should.

That's it on this beautiful long Easter weekend from the Crystal Coast where the fish are starting to bite and the strawberries are ripe. 

Our week-ending rain brought much needed moisture but headed off the coast just in time for the full moon to bring us a little frost on top of the kayak which was okay since my nearby tomato plants were covered.

Toro and I settled our differences so if this week just marked the beginning of a mini-real estate boom in Roanoke, VA where our home is for sale, I would be one very happy camper.

 

 

Lessons that Apple might learn from its past

If you are a long-time reader of Applepeels, you might know that I have said many times over the years the experience of being an Apple employee depends a lot on what you are doing and the management team in charge of your division.

Today I came across a presentation from RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) that talks about what really motivates people. 

Paying attention to some of the thoughts in the presentation would really help Apple fix a hidden weak spot in their culture and management philosophy. 

You might argue that Apple doesn't need any help with anything, but I actually know some very good people who have left Apple.   In the long run even for a great product company, losing very good people could lead to problems down the road.

Apple actually had some great results in the past from the techniques discussed by RSA, but I suspect that years of wet-behind-the-ear MBAs have erased the memories.

It is likely not a surprise to some readers that Steve Jobs was not a fan of the Apple sales force.  At best he believed them to be a necessary evil.  I did get to hear him in essence say that.  Unfortunately, I never got to have a personal talk to Steve about his views on sales. 

However, I did work for some of his Apple managers who really did not understand sales.

Understanding the potential for success by having good sales leadership as opposed to having nit-picking sales management might not matter today in this world where Apple has become the darling of just about everyone.  However, it did once and might again some day.

In the mid-nineties until early in the next decade when customers, especially enterprise ones, were fleeing Apple, it was important to have a sales force which kept customers in the fold so Apple could survive.  I suspect it will be important in the future even if Apple doesn't slip.

There was a time when it was hard to get good people to work at Apple.  There were a lot of reasons for that, but one of the most interesting ones was that Apple sales people didn't make as much money as other technology sales people.  On top of that selling Apple was much more difficult than selling a generic computer box based on price.

That was especially true when you were selling to the enterprise. You had to convince your enterprise customer who was sometimes betting his job on making a large Apple purchase that Apple actually cared about his business.  That was tough to do when Steve spent most of his stage time telling people that Apple was a consumer company that didn't care about large businesses.

Fortunately Apple had people like Fred Anderson and Tim Cook around who were good at talking to enterprise customers.  However, Apple was like many technology companies in one respect.  It believed in a highly leveraged compensation plan that in theory rewarded the top performers the most.

Most of you have likely never been in sales, but those of you who have had some experience in sales would not be surprised if I told you that there is a lot of room for error in setting quotas and measuring performance against them.  All of this boils down to how much money sales people make.

Much of my first experience with Apple was in higher education sales where in the early days it was pretty easy to measure what customers were buying.  Higher education customers bought everything directly from Apple.  You had years of data to help structure quota.  If you had a decent manager and a reasonable divisional goal, you could feel pretty good about having a chance at making money.

In the mid-nineties during one of Apple's countless reorganizations, I got moved over to the business division.  The team I headed was responsible for resellers and large accounts.  It didn't take me long to be appalled at how bad the historical data was and how flawed the quota setting process was in the business division. 

The first year I was there, my team was given quota for a couple of "reseller locations" that turned out to be bank accounts in Delaware.  They ended up being not used the year after we picked up the quota for them.  It was literally millions of revenue which was in our goal and which turned to vapor the year when we were supposed to grow their business.

Still I had a great manager at Apple, and once we got control of the numbers, the next year my team went on to be very successful.  In the fall of 2001, my very good manager fell victim to being blamed for the failure of a hair-brained scheme from upper management to win the enterprise by selling interactive iMac kiosks.

New management was brought in, and my manager who had been in charge of business sales for the US ended up with only one person directly reporting to him.  That person was me, and I had been given the unenviable challenge of turning Apple's tanking federal business around. 

While competitors often had hundreds of reps covering the federal government.  I was given two reps, one on the east coast and one on the west coast.  My area associate came with me and one system engineer along with a person to work with resellers.

It was a daunting challenge, but one thing I did negotiate was a team goal.  In other words I convinced management and the finance people that it was more work to figure out individual numbers for customers than it was just paying everyone on one number. Our small team worked towards one quota number.  If we hit it, we would all be successful.

Doing that made all of our lives much simpler, we focused on the customer and didn't really worry about who was getting paid for what business or even through which channel.  We were wildly successful.  We grew our business a phenomenal amount, and I ended up being manager of the year.

Now the compensation plan obviously was not the only reason for our being successful.  I had run a stealth federal sales organization for over three years.  With help from a number of operating system folks in Cupertino and support from upper management, we removed a lot of barriers facing our customers.  We made Macs attractive as an alternative in the federal market to virus plagued Windows machines.

Still I firmly believe that it you look at the historical records, the team goal was a big part of the reason that a relatively small team of committed individuals were able to turn around Apple's federal business.

We managed to keep our team goal for three years even as the number of people working for me grew to over twenty.  Though we didn't make a lot of money after the first year, we more than tripled Apple's federal revenue in less than four years at time when no other enterprise team was nearly as successful.  The reason we didn't make much money was that each year after the first our goal was set so high that it was almost impossible to make.  That a whole different story.

Still I had a very motivated team that was growing Apple's federal business by leaps and bounds while making less and less money each year.  In the final year that I was at Apple, the team goal was abandoned until six months into the year when Apple had to admit they couldn't figure out individual revenue performance.

It is interesting that most executives get paid on the total performance of the company, yet they almost all believe that paying sales people on just the business they "personally touch" is the only way to effectively compensate them.  I would argue that what is good for motivating executives might work even better for sales people.  It certainly did for the ones who worked for me.

My experience at Apple and the research presented by RSA seems to indicate that a leveraged monetary reward for the top performers isn't necessarily to way to get the best performance out of anyone.  Fixing that might make a huge difference in the Apple sales force over time.

At least that is the view from NC's Crystal Coast where the winds are still blowing this spring, but the ocean water has warmed enough for wading and the air temperature is to the point that a quick dip in the pool is possible.  We still haven't found a new owner for our home in Roanoke, but I have started a new career selling cloud-based network asset management tools.

I will be focusing on that new opportunity in spite of living in a spot where there is a special place around every corner and the beach is always calling me.

 

 

The Real Essence of Apple in 2012

I have watched with interest the announcement of the new iPad and the subsequent grumblings about it running too hot or not having an accurate battery icon.  I have also seen the over the top descriptions of the new screen.  New products always have issues.  Technological advances like the new screen always come with some challenges.

While the truth is always somewhere between the headlines, I am sure Apple has a winner in their new iPad 3.  Coming out with a product like the iPad 3 with great advances which make you want to buy it now is really what makes Apple the most successful company in the world by any number of measures.

Yet here I am on the Internet about to suggest that perhaps Apple has become the technological equivalent of the soft drink company that Steve Jobs mocked when he got John Sculley to come to Apple.

There is no question that Apple has made lasting changes in way we use and view technology. During my career at Apple many of us were driven by the belief that an Apple product came with enabling technologies which were hard if not impossible to get with other products.

That changed over time, but I do belief that making new powerful technology available to people was part of the reason for Apple's early success.  Just look at desktop publishing and printing on laser printers.  With the help of Pagemaker and Postscript, Apple was the leader in that revolution.

That Apple has changed and become more successful for the change is unquestionable.

However, do more people buy Apple products now because they are cool and sexy or because of what they can do with them?  Are Apple products now just pricey status symbols?

I still use my I5 iMac because there are a few web design and graphic applications that I really like and which I believe add to my productivity. 

We're working at selling our mountainside home in Roanoke, Virginia.  I used RapidWeaver 5 to design a website promoting our home.  I also wanted wanted to include a slideshow with larger images so I used Shutterbug.

Most days I use the graphics program Pixelmator to tweak  photos like I have inserted in this post.

I am pretty sure that if I could get those three programs on a Windows PC that I would give up using Macs.  However, I feel no pressure to give up Macs.  On the other hand I am still waiting for Apple to deliver a compelling reason for me to keep using Macs.  Lion certainly was not it.

I actually have not run into a lot of new Mac users, but I do know plenty of iPhone users and a good number of iPad users.  Both are solid products, and many of their users have good reasons for using them.

However there are plenty of alternative products.  I am on my second smart phone. My first was an original Droid, and I was very happy with it until it died.  The second is a LG Spectrum.  The MyTracks App probably was the reason that I stayed on the Android platform. I love maps and GPS. Right now I think the Android platform is ahead of the iPhone in GPS and maps.  Also I was familiar with MyTracks, and I wanted 4G so I didn't consider an iPhone for my second purchase.

I haven't seen enough need for a iPad type device to use my own money to buy one.  However, I have greatly enjoyed the Kindle Fire that my grown children gave me this year for Christmas.  I use it for checking emails when I am sitting in my easy chair. I also do some light web browsing and check the weather in some of my favorite spots.

The most important use that I have found for my Kindle Fire is entertaining our three year granddaughter.  After she has been running full steam for several hours, putting puzzles together or drawing on the Kindle is a great change of pace for her.  However, I am happy that she only has access to the Kindle when we do our monthly visit.  I would rather her spend time collecting earthworms or playing in the water than using any kind of computer, even an iPad 3.

I will give Apple full credit for pulling the rest of the industry into the smart phone and iPad world.

However, I guess the question I really want to pose is,  "Has Apple moved to the point of just sugar coating technology so that people want to buy it more because buying the product makes them feel cool than for what it really does?"  Of course there is some of that in all technology and technology companies.  New products create demand.  Without demand technology companies die.

I would be very interested in hearing some feedback from new Apple users.

Do you have an iPad 3?  What do you do on it that you can't do on an iPad 2?  With all the tiny finger prints on my Kindle Fire, I'm pretty sure the new screen would be wasted on my needs.  How has the new screen changed the way you use your iPad?

If you have a new iPhone, what apps are the ones that make the iPhone essential to you?

And if you are a Mac user, are there Mac specific applications that brought you to the platform?  Or did you come for Apple's new iCloud?  If you came for iCloud, what do you think of it"

For those interested, my book has been finished for a while.  Professional advice that I have received indicates that even if my book is favorable to Apple which I think it is and even if the book doesn't reveal any proprietary information about Apple, which it doesn't, Apple will likely sue me just for the fun of it.

So I will likely self publish, but I am still thinking about the risks.  Those who have read the book believe that it offers a very interesting perspective on life at Apple.  However, I am not sure that I feel up to being bashed around by Apple at this point in my life so that is the delay.

By the way, I am still grateful to Apple for my career which gave me the opportunity to choose where I wanted to live for much of my life.

Aside from that, the tomato plants are in the ground here on the Southern Outer Banks.  Life is pretty good on this watery side of the horizon.  The weather has been so good that it is hard not to hear the beach calling.

 

 

When Apple, Google, and others can't agree, things can get messy

Apple is probably to blame for a fascination that I have had with video.  Sometime in mid-eighties when I was working for Apple, I won a Sony Video8 camera in an Apple sales contest.  I was hooked.

Like any good father, I took hours of soccer, hockey, and dance video over the years.  I still have some of the video of our children playing on the beaches north of Halifax, Nova Scotia, one spring in the late eighties.  I ended up with at least two other Sony video cameras over the years.  A few years ago I spent days going through video and putting some clips on a DVD using iDVD.  That DVD is now a family treasure.

I can also remember taking photos, movies, and music and creating a great prom video for my youngest daughter almost twelve years ago.  I used iMovie and eventually did a version in Final Cut Pro.

When Apple's original .Mac service came along and eventually offered the opportunity to post movies on the web, I was quick to try that.  Over the years Apple has changed .Mac and its descendant, MobileMe, so much that my early movies are no longer visible on the web.

I have long looked at the web as my filing cabinet, but Apple's propensity for change has made it a challenging storage partner.  However, I suspect the motives of other "clouds" on the web are probably just as suspect.  Google's motives are often especially hard to determine, and I'm not exactly excited about the somewhat forced connection between Picasa Web Albums and Google+ albums.

For almost four years I have been posting my videos to YouTube instead of Apple's cloud.  Some, like this simple one of a sail boat docking in Beaufort, NC have been viewed thousands of times.

I find it rather ironic that Apple, the creator of Quicktime, has made it so difficult to keep my movies created using their software and hardware in their own on line world.  With iCloud maybe things will get better, but Apple's track record doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

Unfortunately, things have gotten even messier than a few early pages with Quicktime clips not working.  Apple's war against Adobe's Flash and other vendors' worries about the H.264 standard have created a mess if you want to do your own video and post it on the web on your own site.

It is to the point that the easiest way to do video on the web is to embed a YouTube video in a web page.  Today, except on an experimental basis and for mobile users, YouTube video is Flash based.

You can get an idea of the problem for web developers by going to this YouTube site which lets you opt into their HTML5 trial.  Depending on which browser you use and how your browser is configured if you use Internet Explorer, you will see different things.  Just taking the time to visit the YouTube HTML5 site with both Safari and Firefox will give you an idea of the challenges faced by webpage developers who want to use movies.

Being very geeky, on my Windows laptop I have Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer. On my Macs I have the same without of course Internet Exploer.  On my Ubuntu Linux machine, I have Firefox and Chromium.  I also have a Kindle Fire and a new LG Spectrum Android phone where I use Opera Mini.  I have friends with iPhones and iPads.

While all my browsers on most of my machines are the latest versions, there are plenty of old browsers out there.  Even my 2004 Dual G5 is running a very old build of Firefox.  Getting a web video to work on all of these is not easy.

I can remember when getting someone to see a video posted on the web was as simple as making sure they had installed a Quicktime plug-in.  Of course a lot of people never could figure out how to install plug-ins, and they do cause troubles.

All of this led me to experiment with posting some video on the web. Over Christmas I got a new beach camera, a Nikon COOLPIX P500.  I bought the COOLPIX so I wouldn't have to subject my Nikon D3100 and nice telephone lens to sand and surf dangers.  So far it has been a great beach camera.

It turns out that the COOLPIX P500 takes some really great long distance HD video as long as you use a tripod.

One of the reasons that I wanted to do my own movies on the web is that I have seen increasing difficulty in posting YouTube videos directly from either iMovie or Quicktime exports.  However, I can upload a movie directly from the Mac using the YouTube up-loader.  Unfortunately the Mac program connections seemed to be broken on my iMac.

I actually didn't learn how bad the video mess was until after my first efforts which involved using code directly generated from Quicktime using save for the web.  When I started testing that site with different browsers, I figured out there was a problem with most other browsers besides Safari and Internet Explorer.

I had an Apple friend runs some tests, and he also was surprised at the challenges.  I did some searching on the web and came up with the site Video for Everybody.  It has a pretty good discussion of the issues.  Even more useful to me was an automatic code generator.

Of course Quicktime is no help in generating the new formats that some of the browsers are using so I ended up using two video converters, the Miro Video Converter and a video to Flash converter which I can't remember.

Based on all that I created a site with several movies in different formats of a Pelican preening itself.  While I was working on all this, I put the Pelican movie up on YouTube.

After a little tweaking, I now have this Pelican Movie site which seems to work on all computers using all browers including Firefox and Chromium on Ubuntu Linux, my Kindle, and my Android phone.  However, in order to get the Pelican movie working on the iPad and and iPhone I ended up creating another site done with Apple code and a reference movie.  It also works with many but not all browsers.

This was an interesting experience, and certainly convinced me that embedding a YouTube movie into your website is the easy way to go.  It does appear to me that most of the other vendors are lining up against Apple, but in the world of technology, today's enemy is often tomorrow's strategic partner.

On a side note I use Picasa on my Windows computer to manage most of my photos and video clips. So far I have had no problems directly exporting video from it to YouTube. That shouldn't be too surprising.

This summer I used a small Sony pocket camera to take some ACVHD video including the clip that I exported to YouTube for this great run down the White Oak River in our skiff. 

However, the only way that I could deal with AVCHD video was through Sony's movie software.  My Mac using Apple software didn't recognize the movies.  Picasa on Windows was also no help at the time.  I have noticed some conversion utilities recently, but I am using the Nikon with HD format now so the problem went away for me.

Perhaps these issues will get better over time, but someone is going to have to give in, and none of these large technology companies like to do that.  My personal bet is that however YouTube goes, so will go the majority of the web.

If the end of January has you thinking about nice places to visit, read my post on why Beaufort, NC is such a nice place to visit.

Perhaps my tales of Beaufort's uniqueness might convince you to vote for Beaufort in Budget Travel's Coolest Small Towns of 2012 contest.  Those of us living on North Carolina's Crystal Coast would greatly appreciate the votes of technology folks interested enough to read about the challenges in posting web video.

You are even welcome to join us during the fantastic weather that has given us some magic moments on the beaches even during the heart of winter.

 

 

A Quick Take on Apple's part in Kodak's history

It was the spring of 1994, just before things really started to get interesting at Apple.  I called my higher education team together for a spring meeting at Mountain Lake Resort not too far from Blacksburg, Virginia.

We were planning for back to school at universities and colleges from Maryland all the way through North Carolina. It was still in the days when college students could get a real deal by buying their computers on campus.

As an Apple manager, I never bought into the idea that Apple reps should focus on marketing by brochure.  I believed that my people needed to know what they were selling so I always managed to set aside some dollars for demo equipment.

That spring, I ordered Quicktake 100 cameras for my team.  They had revolted when I had suggested an overnight camping trip and a hike on part of the Appalachian Trail as a prelude to our meeting.  We settled on a digital scanvenger hunt around the trail at Mountain Lake.  It gave them a chance to get familiar with their Quicktake cameras.

The first Quicktake was actually manufactured by Kodak.  It was a revolution in its day.  I can remember using both the Quicktake and Kodak's earlier Photo CD product.  My oldest daughter did a Hypercard project for a high school science project, and we had a Photo CD created.

In a little over three years, Steve Jobs would be back at Apple.  Apple would focus on just computers.  Cameras, scanners, printers, and even the Newton would disappear from the product lineup

For a time I thought Apple had made a mistake in abandoning cameras, but within a few years, it was clear that to win in the digital camera business took a focus that Apple didn't have if you will pardon the pun.

Apple's next great contribution to the world of photography would be iPhoto which was released in January 2002.

Like most folks I have a history with Kodak cameras and film.  We even used Kodak disc film and some of their multi-format cameras.  When I was in college in the sixties, I actually had a Kodak SLR camera that I carried with me on a trip to Alaska.  It didn't have interchangeable lenses so in 1969/70 I switched to Nikon which is the camera line that I still use the most.

As someone who sometimes takes a thousand pictures a day and still sells a few prints, I am a dedicated camera user and not particularly interested in the cameras in devices like the iPhone.  I am certain you can take great pictures with them, but they don't meet my needs.

Apple has been a company that has been able to re-invent its business a number of times.  There are myriads of reasons why Apple and Kodak are different companies on completely different trajectories.

I am also not sure if the world of digital photography would be much better if Apple had gotten serious about the camera market.  However, I do think Apple deserves some credit for helping create the bridge between the world of photography and computers.

I know that I have a very rich history of digital images which I probably wouldn't have except for the Quicktake, iPhoto, and actually the Apple OneScanner and its Ofoto scanning program.  All of these gave me an early start in the digital world and likely a path away from Kodak.

While I can live with Apple not being my digital camera supplier or the source of my scanner and its VueScan software, I certainly do miss Apple in my world of printers.  Actually I can live without Apple in the world of laser printers, but I certainly do miss Apple's genius in the world of color printers.

I keep floating between Epson, Cannon, and HP color printers, but none have the magic of Apple or even work much better with Apple's OSX than they do with Windows 7, but that is fodder for a post another day.

Aside from complaining about the death of common courtesy, that is it from the Crystal Coast where winter never stays very long, but we are enjoying some brief winter beach time.  If you are using Safari for your browser, you can check out my belted Kingfisher movie.

Perhaps he had a comment on being photographed about three quarters of the way through the move.  The movie was done with a Nikon Coolpix 500.  I might have some comments soon on the pain of movies and browsers in 2012.

 

My wishes for Apple in 2012

To start I want to get off the plate my perennial wishes for Apple that I know will never happen. 

The first is for a nice $1,000 mini-tower that has room for a couple of hard drives and an optical drive.  All it needs is an I5 processor but an I7 would be a nice option.  It doesn't have to be designed to survive a nuclear holocaust like the current Mac Pro. Just a simple elegant case will do.  I don't need to elaborate on the specs since this does not appear to be anywhere on Apple's radar.

The second wish that I know will never come about is a reasonably priced 15" laptop.  I don't expect Apple to compete with low cost laptops but it sure would be nice to be able to get a 15" laptop from Apple for only 50% more than the competition instead of more than double the cost.

My third never-going-to-happen perennial wish is that Apple would establish real communication with customers. While I know that customers can be a pain in the rear when you are the most successful company in the world, I really think both customers and Apple would gain from having a dialogue instead of mostly one way communication.

I have no idea whether or not my last wish from previous years has been fixed since I still haven't figured out how to access iCloud without spending money for an upgrade that I don't want or becoming best buddies with someone using Mac OS X Lion.  The holidays did not help in this respect since my adult children gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas.

Now that my old wishes are out of the way, what do I really hope for Apple in 2012.

Well the first thing that I would like to see Apple do is to focus on making things work really well instead of adding things that might be of questionable value. Changes to iPhoto are what I have complained about the most but there might be significant issues in OS X Lion.

While I wish I had hands on experience with OS X Lion, I don't.  What I have heard from my valued testers has not been very positive and has kept me from installing it on my I5 iMac.  This recent article in Slate confirmed what my tester-friends have been telling me, that Apple perhaps has stretched a little far with Lion.  I'm not saying the direction they're headed is completely wrong, but it would be really nice if things just worked really well.  That is usually the case on a Mac, and that is why most of use Macs.

My next wish is that Apple would quit playing the game of forcing people to buy more expensive products just to get what they want. Now I will give credit where credit is due.  You no longer have to buy the iMac with the largest screen to get an I5 processor like when I bought mine in October 2010.  My desk really didn't have room for the large screen, but I had no choice at the time if I wanted an I5 processor.

That being said there are still some nagging issues like having to buy a 13" MacBook Air to get a SD slot and having to buy an external CD drive for the MacMini.  Just about the time the Mac Mini got updated enough for me to consider buying one, Apple takes out the CD-ROM drive

Now I understand Apple wants everyone to go to their online app store which most people seem to think has reduced prices but having an external CD-ROM sort of defeats the elegance of the Mac Mini.

Beyond that I don't have a lot of complaints about Apple, but that might be because I don't have both feet in the world of Apple.  If I want to transfer photos from my Android phone, I just plug it into my computer and drag them over. I don't have to go through iTunes which I hardly use.

If I want to share files across multiple computers, I use DropBox which is a drop dead elegant solution that works on everything.  My pictures are in Picasa Web Albums, and I am even giving Microsoft Skydrive a try since it also works on everything and seems very fast.

I know that the life blood of Apple is innovation, but I am hoping that the reign of Tim Cook becomes know as much for refinement as it does for the latest technology. 

There is already an overwhelming amount of technology out there. Apple's core strength has always been making technology easy even when not everything was built by Apple.  I hope to see that direction revitalized this year. It is something desperately needed in our world.

Finally I would love to see Apple take some of their cash horde and figure out how to help jump start the American economy.  Certainly Apple can't do it alone, but by the same token Apple could become a leader in helping America retool for the future.  Other Silicon Valley companies are used to following Apple's leadership, and this would be a great place for Apple to use it's influence.

If you are wondering about the donation button that is now on the Applepeels blog, you can read details in this post. It is just an effort to generate some cash to be able to review more products which will then be auctioned off to readers. Any donation from a buyer will be credited towards a purchase.

 

 

 

Apple's laptop math doesn't work for me

I know that I am in the minority of Apple users when I complain about Apple's prices.  Most Apple users absolutely love their products and happily pay more than one might expect for the privilege of using Apple products.

In October of 2010, I willingly shelled out a substantial chunk of cash to get an I5 iMac.  Over the years I have bought lots of wonderful Apple products whose purchase made my computing life much nicer.

Included in those purchases was a MacBook that I bought in July of 2006.  That trusted MacBook recently got to the point that it had to be retired.  Five years of use is a worthy accomplishment for any  laptop.  The MacBook made one trip back to a service center.  I also upgraded its memory, did a couple of hard drive transplants, and had to buy a power supply over its useful lifespan.

Because I also work in the world of Windows, I have been using Windows laptops since the fall of 2005.  At that time I was using my one year old Aluminum G4 PowerBook which built up enough problems to require the purchase of the MacBook in July 2006.

In fact I have had three Windows laptops in the last six years and two Mac laptops.  Of the three Windows laptops only one is no longer working.  My youngest daughter's big dog managed to sit on the screen of the 2005 Dell Latitude last summer and crack it.  The other two Windows laptops are still alive and mostly well.  My second Windows laptop which I used for something over three years had Vista on it.  While it runs, it is a stretch to call anything with Vista "well."

I personally concluded that Vista was a quagmire.  That was one of the reasons that I bought myself a new I7 HP laptop in February 2010.  Both my wife's I5 HP laptop and my I7 HP laptops have been very reliable.  I did recently have some software issues with my I7 due to the software that came with an external USB backup drive. 

Those issues seem to be resolved, but I am nearing the two year life span that I hoped to get out of the HP.  With the replacement battery and new power supply that I bought, the cost per day for the system will be around $1.38.  On top of that I can clean the hard drive off and give it to my daughter with the hope she won't leave it somewhere her dog will sit on it.  She would dearly love to have an upgrade from her white half moon (lamp tower) G4 iMac with an eighty gig hard drive.

With my MacBook dead, I would really like to have a Mac laptop, but once again Apple seems to have made it hard for me to make that decision.  I really don't want to spend more than a thousand dollars for a laptop.  The money per year that I have spent on Mac laptops and Windows laptops is roughly equivalent, but the difference is that 67% of the Windows laptops are still running and none of the Macs are.

Some of my Apple friends have been pushing me towards a MacBook Air, and it looks like a lovely machine. However, the $999 MacBook Air does not meet my minimum specs.  First off it only has two gigs of ram, second I have to buy an external CD drive, and third it doesn't come with a SD slot.  Finally it only has an 11" screen.  It might make a fine second laptop, but I would not want it as my main laptop.

That leaves me with the 13" MacBook Air as the lowest cost viable Mac option.  With the external CD drive, it would cost me $1,378 except I would likely have to add an external storage drive for my photos.  In the end I am carrying around too many pieces and still don't have exactly what I need for the money that I want to spend.

What I would really like to have is another MacBook just like the one that died except with an I5 processor, 4 Gigs of ram and a nice fast 500 gig hard drive.  I think Apple could build one of those for under $1,000 dollars if they wanted to get serious about being competitive in the low end market.  If Apple would build something like the White MacBook once again, I would buy it in a heart beat and not even complain about the 13" screen.

However, with all the web work that I do and my aging eyes, I really need a laptop with a 15" screen for my main laptop.

So I went out and configured a 15" MacBook Pro to meet my needs.  It came out to a stunning $2,249 which happens to be more than twice what I want to spend on a laptop.  I am sure it is a great laptop, but the math just doesn't work for me.  On something that expensive, I would have to add another $349 for extended AppleCare.

So I went to the Lenovo website and after looking closely decided to order one of their 15.6" I7 laptops.  It has a base price of $799.  You can see the specs here. While it doesn't have Thunderbolt, it supposedly comes with USB 3.0, but I will wait and see how it works before commenting.   By the time I added Microsoft Office Home & Student Version, a cable, and NC tax, the total came out to $997.96.  All the rest of my software will transfer, but I decided it was time to upgrade from Office 2007. 

The Lenovo has everything that I need and want at a price that meets my budget. Had I bought the MacBook Air, I would be able to solve my iCloud issue since it would have given me a Mac OS X Lion system to administer iCloud, but it would not have fit the other things that I needed.

I know that I am going to get plenty of Mac users telling me that I have made a mistake.  I believe what I have chosen does the best job of meeting my needs especially since this is my desktop replacement laptop.  However, I would dearly love to have a MacBook Air so I could write about the product and about Mac OSX Lion.

So instead of trying to argue specs and life cycle costs with the people who think I should have gotten a Mac laptop, I am going to give people a chance to do something about it.  That's why you will see the PayPal donate button at the top of the right panel.   I would love to review more Apple products, but the reality is that I cannot afford to buy them, and there is less than a snowball's chance in hell of Apple ever sending me a product to review.

I have been writing about Apple for over seven years now, and all the product reviews and commentary have been based on products that I bought with my own money. Before I recently pulled a lot of content in preparation for my book, I had over 1,000 pages of Mac commentary on the web.

Unfortunately the extra dollars are just no longer there for Apple products that don't match my needs. I would love to give the new Mac Mini a whirl, but I have a perfectly good Dual G5 system still doing the job, and I can't justify the expense of buying a Mini.

If I get close enough to the price of a MacBook Air, I will kick in some dollars to get the project rolling. I like to think that I add a somewhat different perspective to the world of Apple.  If enough people think what I write is worth a dollar or two, then it won't be long before I write my first MacBook Air review. 

If the donation thing works, I'll keep the product reviews flowing interspersed with the Apple company insights that I will do one way or the other. (Update) Upon further reflection, I think it makes sense to put any hardware that I buy with donations up for bid after I have spent three months with it.  I'll set the minimum bid at 20% less than I paid for the item.  Winning bid will get the product for their bid minus any donation that they made towards that purchase.  I'll take the proceeds and buy another Apple product for review.

If too few people are willing to donate to buy something from Apple, I will take what comes in and make a charitable donation with it.

With that, I'll have to say that we have enjoyed a wonderful holiday season with some homemade treats and a few games of Rook.  The cold weather has me thinking of Canada and happy not to be living in a world where shopping is at the epicenter.  There are benefits to hanging your hat along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks where December can still bring some stellar beach days, plenty of shorts weather,  and a peaceful end of the year.

My book about Apple is finished and just waiting for me to talk to an agent when they come back to work the first week in January.  More details will be available here as they reveal themselves to me.

There are a few other changes to my blog.  There is a search option for the blog now available in the right side panel.  There is also a new way of sharing at the end of the post.  I appreciate anyone who takes the time to send my posts onto their friends.

Have a great New Year's celebration.

Apple's "free iCloud" services? Not really.

I guess that I am guilty of not paying enough attention to the world of Apple.  However, I have been a loyal and long suffering paying member of Apple's .Mac and MobileMe services.  I lived through all the changes such as my web pages coming down and my photo albums disappearing into incomprehensible folders.

My account was also one of those whose renewal coincided with the announcement of the new free iCloud services.  That meant that my account got extended until summer of 2012 which is probably why I have paid so little attention to iCloud.  The other reason is that the cloud that has my attention is Google's.

However, when I got the notice below last week, I thought perhaps I should spend some time investigating iCloud's free services.

Actually it turns out to not be so easy to move to iCloud unless you have already jumped onto Apple's newest bandwagon with both feet.

Apple's "free" services are actually free only if you already own an IOS device or have already upgraded to Lion.  Apple doesn't hide this fact, but I have missed any discussions that you have to be running Apple's Lion operating system to enable iCloud from a Mac.

Since I saw Windows 7 mentioned, I thought that I might be able to sneak by with that, but I had forgotten that this was Apple that was offering a "free" service.

I though surely this must not be the case so I contacted one of my favorite Apple system engineers, and he confirmed that you do indeed need to be running Mac OS X Lion.

Now I am not exactly out of date on my Macs.  I did buy an I5 iMac about fourteen months ago.  However, I have seen no reason to upgrade to Apple Lion's operating system, and a couple of good reasons to not upgrade.

First I don't like the on-line upgrade process, and second, I am afraid it might break the older version of iPhoto which I am using.  I quite like the older iPhoto, and as you can see from my posts, I detest the newer version of iPhoto. 

So I have happily stayed on Snow Leopard. While it is not perfect, I no longer have to enjoy the latest and greatest to get my work done.  I am even a version behind on Microsoft's Office on my Windows laptop though I do have the latest Office on my iMac.

It is interesting that Apple's new "free" services are only available to Apple customers with the latest and greatest operating systems.  I might sound like a technology party-pooper, but I have a very usable dual G5 tower that I bought in December 2004.  It has a couple of one terabyte drives in it, and I still use it almost daily.  I can't upgrade it to Lion.

Until late last month, I was still using my 2006 MacBook. While it isn't completely dead, it doesn't run for more than a few minutes before dying on me.  I even tried a new hard drive, but beyond backing up all my data, I had no luck in fixing the MacBook which happens to be our only other Intel based Mac.  I should mention that we still have a very usable white half moon iMac at our other home.  Our youngest daughter is also using one of those.  I bought three of those one summer.

So I guess I am stuck trying to figure out the best, or more properly, the cheapest way that I can enable Apple's new "free" iCloud services. 

When my MacBook died, I was actually thinking about perhaps buying a new laptop of some sort from Apple.  I have been carrying an Apple laptop since Apple started shipping them.  It feels a little funny to not take one into a hotel room when we are traveling.

However, I got a quick reminder of why I am sometimes hesitant to buy Apple products.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I am writing a book about about my career at Apple.  In the fall just before my MacBook died, I sent Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, an email congratulating him on re-instating Apple's charitable match.  I saw it as a very positive change at Apple.  I mentioned in the note in passing that I was writing a book about Apple and would send him a copy when it got to market.

The next week, the day my MacBook died, we got an envelope from Apple's legal department reminding me of all the non-disclosures that I had signed with Apple.  They also included copies going back to the first one that I had signed in 1984.  I took the letter as a not very subtle attempt at frightening me into dropping the book.

However, I sent Tim back a note thanking him for the reminder, but also telling him that I have been writing about Apple for over seven years and until I pulled down much of the content in preparation for my book, I had over 1,000 pages of articles about Apple on-line.  Not once in the seven years did I receive a note from Apple complaining about the accuracy of my posts or about my disclosing any proprietary information.

I did tell Tim that the letter from his legal folks had convinced me that there might be more friendly alternatives to an Apple product such as a Kindle Fire.

So here I am stuck between some family members who would like to keep their old email addresses that go back to the .Mac days and Apple which is requiring me to buy something before I can use their "free" services.

It is hard to believe that even Microsoft is better at free than Apple.  Microsoft's Skydrive which is truly free now even works on Firefox.  Of course Google has a host of free services which seem to work from just about any platform.  Actually Google pays me more in my Adsense account each year than I pay them for the extra storage that I need on Picasa.  They also host one of my domains for free, and their email has become a favorite of mine.

The truth is that Apple is one of the most proprietary companies in the computer business. They are also among the best at mining their customers and accumulating a huge pile of cash.  Much of what Apple does is dedicated to getting you to buy their latest gear and only their latest gear.  I don't have a problem with Apple making money, but I find it wasteful to throw away perfectly good hardware that is still doing the job.  Perhaps that is one reason I love what Ubuntu is doing.

So I am wondering how Ubuntu can create a very simple distribution disk that I can download from their servers and use to install the latest and greatest flavor of Linux on my old Dell Pentium III while Apple wants me to go to their store?  The obvious reason is that Apple wants to lock me into their store and only their store.

Well I might have to figure out if I can buy an iPod touch and use that to migrate my Mobile me services.  That might be the cheapest and least painful of the solutions that are out there.

Any suggestions from others facing this dilemma would be appreciated.  I am not giving up my Android phone because I love the integration of the mapping apps with Google Maps. Besides I like the choice that the Android world gives me.  Also my Droid won't be two years old until March, and it is still doing a good job of keeping me connected.

My Apple book is now being edited by my trusted family staff, my wife and my oldest daughter.  At this stage, it is 295 pages and covers the time from September 1982 when I started selling Apple IIs in an Atlantic Canadian dealership to July 2004 when I left my position as director of Apple's federal sales in July 2004 just after sitting in a Senate hearing with Avie Tevanian.

I feel like I have done a commendable job describing life at Apple, but it has taken me seven years to get far enough from the situation to write a book, so I will await the judgment of others. I am glad that it is all down on paper.  Some of it is still hard for me to believe even though I lived it.

I am grateful that I wrote down about twenty-five pages of thoughts the fall after I left Apple.  That and a habit of using a daily planner have helped me nail down many of the important dates.  Not so surprisingly, the more I wrote about the old events, the more that I remembered.   Somehow I still haven't remembered any secrets, but that might be because I didn't know any even when I worked at Apple.

I have talked to a number of ex-Apple employees to get refreshed on a few things, but the story is mine.  Next week I am talking to agent recommended to me by someone well known in the Apple world.

Beyond that fishing has been good here this fall on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.  We were still in shorts weather through December 16 when I had a spectacular afternoon over on the beach.

While there have been signs of the seasons changing, somehow, the warm weather has managed to help us forget last winter.

With all the great weather, I am glad that I still have the ability to focus, or I would never have gotten my Apple book written in this fall to remember.  Hopefully my next post will have some details on how the book is going to published.  However, after the letter from Apple legal, Tim Cook will have to buy a copy if he wants one.