Applepeels

Apple's Core Has Changed

What runs the engine at Apple has changed dramatically over the last few years.  Someone who just moved on from Apple sent me this article about Chromebooks making up half of US classroom devices sold.

The article did not surprise me. I predicted it long ago, but even I am surprised with how quick it happened.

Apple's early brand was built on a couple of things, productivity and the education market.

Over thirty-three years ago, I bought my first Apple product. It was an Apple II+ and it revolutionized the way that I wrote and mailed a newsletter.  I was a field representative for the Canadian Angus Association. My Apple with Apple Writer II, an Epson MX-80 printer, and DB Master changed the way that I worked.  It turned a week's worth of frustration into something that could be done in a day.

Just six weeks after figuring that out in September 1982, I went to work for a TI mini-computer VAR that was dabbling in microcomputers. The one I bought was one of the first few that they sold.  I became the microcomputer sales coordinator. Within a year we were selling over three million dollars of Apple product.  I was hiring and training sales people as fast as I could.  We opened four more stores across three provinces in the next two years. Eventually we had over twenty people dedicated to selling Apple's products.

The vast majority of those first sales were to education. In November 1984, a little over two years after I dispersed our cattle herd of over 200 Angus, I went to work for Apple.  We moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the next year I closed an order for 1,300 Apple IIes.  The order at the time was the largest single purchase order ever received by Apple Canada. It put an Apple IIe in every fifth grade classroom in Nova Scotia.  I ended up finishing as the number two sales person in Apple's international division that year.

If you fast forward a few years to 1992, I had moved and was working with Apple in education in Virginia.  My efforts had turned the colleges and universities in Virginia into an unbelievable success.  I was named higher education account executive of the year for Apple USA.  I was also promoted to higher education manager and joined Apple's extremely successful but short-lived higher education division with Jim Buckley at the head.  I still wear the sweatshirt that I got at the first higher education managers' meeting in Colorado Springs.

Success in education was at the heart of my success at Apple. The education business along with the support of the creative community was also keeping Apple alive.

Apple's Higher Education division disappeared sometime around 1996 and I believe that the decline in Apple's education business began shortly after that. Part of the problem Apple was having at that time was trying to be a consumer company.

There was a lot of window dressing on the education market in subsequent years, but what Apple and Steve really wanted to do was become a consumer company. The iPod, iPad, and iPhone made that a reality.

Apple has probably become the most successful consumer products company the world has ever seen. However, I have to wonder if Apple sold its soul for that success?

Products that come out of Apple are still very nice and I am sure many educators still love them.  Certainly there are some creative people still enthralled with their Macs, iPads, and iPhones.

From my perspective Apple products have become more suited for content consumers than content creators.  I know the commercials say otherwise, but the people writing the commercials probably do not use Pages, Numbers, or Apple's Photo program.  Even Apple rarely uses Pages or Numbers. Just ask someone who works there.

In the last year I have written about how Apple is no longer at the center of my world and that there would be no Apple under our tree in 2014. In the computer world, I cannot see how the equation has improved for an Apple.  I still very pleased with the Lenovo desktop that was under the tree. Nothing Apple has introduced has sent me rushing to an Apple Store.

I am using El Capitan on my repaired iLemon.  It is not a bad operating system, but I prefer Windows 10.  I work for a Mac-based company and we struggle daily with Apple's software.  Not long ago I had to export a document from Pages to Word to fix a problem and then import it back into Pages.  Today I ended up doing a mail merge in Word on Windows.  After I sent the file to our CEO, he commented about how much work it saved the home office because I got that and the labels all done so quickly.

It used to be that you used a Mac because things just worked on Macs. That not necessarily the case anymore. A lot depends on how hard you push the applications.  Mail does not do a good job with all my email accounts so I use PostBox across all platforms.  I am not an Outlook fan either. Photo does not accomplish anything I want.  I average about 40,000 photos a year and they get processed in Lightroom on Windows. The long documents which were created with multiple style sheets in Pages O9 by our company are not much fun in the new Pages.  I am happy to have almost no contact with Numbers.

As someone who spent many years selling Apple's computers to the education world at the CIO level, I feel some sadness in seeing Apple let that market slip through its fingers.  As someone who depended on Macs for years to get my work done, I am disappointed at the state of Apple software.  I also hate to say that there is no Apple hardware product with the features and pricing to earn a spot on my desktop or under the Christmas tree.  I will stick with my current iMac, Mac mini, and my three Lenovos.

Time will tell if focusing everything on the iPhone world will be the right long term strategy for Apple.  Certainly it has been a great money making strategy, but a legacy of money might not be what I would have hoped for the company that brought us so many amazing innovations.

To find out what life was really like in Apple sales, check out my book the Pomme Company. The stories are true. I am pleased to have over eleven wonderful years between me and my last day at Apple. That my life here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast only intersects a little with Apple is just fine with me.

Apple at the center of our world

There was a time when Apple was my family's world.  It went far beyond technology since the company wrote our paycheck.  Before Steve came back, Apple was much like a family.  I can remember going to a memorial service with our vice president of higher education when the son of my regional manager was killed in a car crash.  I can also remember the same vice president showing up at my father in law's funeral.

Our vacations were sometimes even Apple sponsored. If you were good in sales at Apple, you could win a golden Apple sales incentive Apple trip.  We took trips like that to Paris, London, Vienna, Ireland, Australia, Munich, and Canada.  I once even loaded my family in our Previa van and drove across the country from Virginia so I could attend a higher education conference in Monterey, California.  A key customer was going, my manager said Apple could not afford to fly me out so I turned it into a family vacation.

I usally wrote with a Cross pen that had an Apple logo on it.  I had a number of Apple watches and of course as any Apple employee will tell you, I had an imposing stack of Apple t-shirts.  It would have unusual to come home from an Apple event without five to ten t-shirts.  When I wore a suit, it had a gold Apple lapel pen with diamonds in it. It was an Apple life that went well beyond the technology.

Of course the technology was also there. There were Apple modems then Apple Airports and Quicktake digital cameras and even Apple scanners. Of course there were faithful Apple LaserWriters and color Imagewriters.  Our home networking started with AppleTalk connectors.  We even had an Apple CD player and I once carried the Sony-Erircsson T68i cell phone which Steve Jobs demoed on stage in 2002.

Most impressive of all, I had an Apple Color LaserWriter. As a manager working out of my own house the Color LaserWriter shipped to me not long after it was first introduced. The 110 pound printer was shipped to my house and that same week one caught fire at Penn State which was one of my team's accounts.  It was the beginning of the end of the Color LaserWriter.  None of the reps wanted to deal with it after the fire so it never left my house until it became surplus.  For years it was very popular with neighborhood children who needed color graphs for their science projects.

The Apple technology in house spread to several neighbors.  There were programs for Apple employees to let neighbors and family buy computers at a substantial discount.  We had many neighbors take advantage of it.

Some of those computers in the days of the Performas and endless model confusion before Steve came back were not that great.  I can remember replacing a few.  A few of the ones that that had Intel processors on a card were especially flaky. Fortunately laptops were so expensive in those days that I had no close friend buy one of the infamous Apple 5300 laptops.

When Steve came back, pieces of the Apple life and products started disappearing.  The Newton which had become a favorite of mine while I was traveling got canned along with printers and everything but a few computers.  The new focus was good because some very good computers came out of it, and I bought several of them for the family. I did that even after purchases for the family from Apple became less and less of a good deal with Steve choosing to also make money off of employees.  I believe I bought seven or eight iMacs for the family over the years. There still is probably a lamp shade iMac in one of our children's storage areas.

Most people know that Steve was focused on technology but few understand how focused he was on making money.  I believe the culture of making lots of money pretty well defines everything Apple does these days.

For me Apple has itself whittled away much of their technology that I counted on at one time.  I long ago retired my Airports and went to better, less expensive wireless equipment from other manufacturers.  Even before I left Apple, I ended up switching to HP laser printers.  Where once printers worked seamlessly on Macs, now it sometimes not the case.  From the day I got it over eight years ago my HP Photosmart 6180 has been a challenge on my Macs. The last two OSX upgrades I installed it would work for a week and quit.  I recently installed it on my new I7 Lenovo desktop.  So far it is working flawlessly which it has done on a number of Windows computers over the years.

However, my LaserJet CP1025nw color printer has worked well on my Macs from the start. I have also had good luck with a number of Epson printers from their Professional 4000 servies on down and with a Canon Pixma printer.  Printing is one of those things you never know until you try it.  It once was not that way with Apple.  An Apple printer would just work because Apple made certain that it did.  I like to think printers mostly disappeared because Steve did not like the mess of paper. I think it was 2004 when we got an edict from Steve that we could no longer hand out paper brochures or information in our booths because it made the booths look messy.

Software and services have also disappeared over time but mostly because they have become more problematic or just do not do the job that I need done.  I gave up on iPhoto in 2011 and Apple's Mail in 2014.  I still have to stiffle a laugh when someone complains that Apple's mail search just does not work.  Search in Postbox has never let me down. Probably no one needs to be convinced that while iCloud has improved, it continues the legacy of Apple just not understanding the cloud.

Of course there are some programs that needed to die and iWeb was one of them.  Apple has also made changes that made my love of its products a short term affair. Other times they have made me sound almost prophetic.  I published this in 2007.

I haven't spent much time with the new iPhoto but my initial impression is that it is much easier to do web albums, but the export panel isn't as efficient or perhaps as quick to use.

I do really like the options that people viewing the albums are given.  Apple has done a really nice job there.

This is the link to my .Mac web gallery.  Not surprisingly the Picasa favorites are also available at my Picasa Web Albums ( now Google Photos) and a few of the same photos are in a set at my Ocracokewaves Flickr site.  You can decide which you like the best.

I think web albums part of iLife is much better than the iWeb way of publishing photos.  It's almost as good as the original iPhoto way of doing it. :)  Of course I now have published photos in all three versions.  I'm not sure how I manage the older ones.

I have one philosophical problem with the way Apple manages the web albums.  If you make a mistake like I did and only publish one picture, the only way to get it off the web is to delete it in the web gallery section of iPhoto on my Mac.

It would make a whole lot more sense if you could manage it from the web instead of using an application on your computer.

If you try the links, the only one that does not work  after seven and one half years is the one to the .Mac web gallery.  Given that who would you trust with your photos? Certainly not Apple. At one time we were surrounded by an Apple life and now we are not.  As much as there might be some readers out there ready to comment (and do not waste your time, it will not be published) that I have a grudge against Apple because they showed me the door (which by the way is how almost everyone in Apple sales that I know left), that really is not the case. My Apple career rests on always stellar performance reviews and a wall full of sales awards.  Read my book if you want more.

Most tellingly I have spent something over $7,000 just on Apple hardware products since I left the company in 2004.  I bought an Aluminum Powerbook G4 within days of leaving.  A few months later I bought my dual G5 and Apple monitor which I still have and cherish. I bought a MacBook which I loved in spite of some early faults (and a dead memory slot) and an iMac which has required a lot of love. I now depend on a MacMini which had a tough early life and has no more ports left to give.

That is basically $700 per year on Apple hardware over ten years for five computers. That does not include external hard drives both Firewire and USB, keyboards, mice, cables, and adapters. The G5 is still running but unsupported by Apple.  The MacBook is dead.  The Powerbook G4 is dead but could be fixed but it would require more money than it is worth. The iMac is retired because I just do not want to spend any more money on upgrading its storage and I am irritated by yet another incompatible version of Pages. Taking the iMac apart is not something I want to do again even if that did increase its storage.

I have spent close to that many dollars on Windows computers in the same ten years.  The only one of those nine computers that is dead is a Dell laptop that I bought in 2004.  I gave it away and someone sat on it in 2011.  So when I said there would be no Apple under the tree, there were plenty of reasons behind that decision.

I look at what could be classed as my Apple addiction in the same light that I do the $2,220 that I spend annually with Time-Warner.  It is an expense that I need to manage better.  With Netflix, Prime Video, and some of the other options popping up this year, I hope to halve that Time-Warner expense and get the Apple expense down to under $100 per year.

Maybe life would be different if I had not bought an original Droid five years ago.  There has never been an iPhone in my life. I recently upgraded to a Droid Turbo and love it for all the same reasons that I loved the first one, ruggedness, great mapping capability and very good phone reception.  I am also tremendously impressed with the turbo charging.  I only plug the phone in for charging while I am having breakfast in the morning.  Of course I have to chuckle at the email I exchanged with an Apple employee recently over an almost unintelligible OSX message.

"...too much focus on iOS and yet my phone still keeps crashing and has a defective battery they will not replace."

With no iPhone (because they had very poor reception initially in our coastal area ), it was easy not to fall under the spell of the iPad especially since my children gave me an original Kindle Fire at Christmas in 2011.

We have come a long way since Apple was at the center of our world.  Now on the edge of Apple's world, I am more disappointed in Apple products than anything.  I have not given up on Apple products but I am in more of a holding pattern waiting for a product to convince me that there is still genius at Apple that will produce a product worthy of my money.

I will continue to look for software to make my MacMini useful. No software that has caught my attention recently like Coda 2 seems to come from Apple. Pixelmator will stay as my choice for a couple of very specific tasks for awhile.  We will see if Pixelmator can survive my new found access to the latest and greatest Photoshop.  I also have one website that requires RapidWeaver unless or until I change it.  It is not a good sign that I have not upgraded to the most recent version Rapidweaver.

Five years ago I did a post, The handful of programs that keep me using an Apple Macintosh.  There are two very interesting things in the post. One is the five reasons that I saw for continuing to use a Mac.

1. I can count on my Mac to get the job done no matter what it is.
2. My Mac is instantly available to me. There is no waiting for it.
3. There is still enough user interface consistency that I can use almost any application.
4. Things typically just work, hard drives, cameras, mice, printers, etc.
5. Most of the software I need comes with the Mac, and the rest is reasonably priced.

The next is the list of programs that I believed five years ago to be keeping me on a Mac.

"RapidWeaver, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Fetch are the programs that keep me using a Mac.  I also use Pages for one tri-fold brochure that I publish monthly.  I am pretty sure that I could do it in Word, but I have never taken the time to try it.  I could live without Pages."

It is funny how things have changed in five years.  My Windows computers are the ones I count on now. They boot faster than my Mac and have done so for a long time.  The famed Apple user interface consistency is not what it used to be.  I would far rather use Techsmith's SnagIt on Windows than on a Mac. The user interface is better. The user interface is also better on Windows Mail 8.1. The iMovie user interface changes with every release and it seems that I have relearn it every time that I open it.  We will not even get into the changes on Pages.  The incompatible file formats are enough of a headache as Bregalad recently commented. When I am managing a lot of files or devices, I would far rather be using Windows 8.1 than a Mac.

I migrated my tri-fold brochure to Word long ago because the office printer I was using stopped supporting Macs after an upgrade.  A few years after that I switched to a two-sided rack card that I now get Staples to print.  I did have trouble printing the PDF proof of it last year from Pixelmator on a Mac and switched to Photoshop on Windows.  I abandoned iPhoto and now Apple has it on the same chopping block that got iDVD.  My sneaking suspicion is that things do not work as well on a Mac as they used to but other than anecdotal information, I have no real proof other than having to regularly reboot a couple of applications on my Mac.  That never used to be a problem.

The other real challenge is that Apple is choosing over and over again to make laptops unfixable and even products like the low end iMac and MacMac Mini impossible to upgrade. Unfortunately the trend is catching.  The battery in my Droid Turbo cannot be replaced and I suspect my Lenovo Yoga is not very easy to tear open either.

In the end many of those things that made me commit time and money to the Mac have disappeared.  I bought my wife a Chromebook for Christmas.  Her five year old HP laptop is still working but the battery life is not what she needs in spite of a new battery last winter. She loves her new Chromebook and I actually like it better than either of my tablets.  I am amazed by the Chromebook's battery life, good screen, speed, and light weight.  However, there is still an Apple IIe in a storage closet to keep the memories alive.

If computers are going to become disposable like Apple seems to hope, they need to be very inexpensive and I am not holding my breath for Apple to catch that wave.  That is it from the Crystal Coast where we are on snowflake patrol while others are waiting for a potentially historic blizzard.

 

Is The Enterprise In Apple's DNA?

Reading a sampling of this week's articles about Apple heading into the enterprise brings to mind Yogi Berra's famous comment "It's like déjà vu all over again."  As one Apple employee told me, we never stopped going after the enterprise.

There is a grain of truth in that as I will explain later, but if you read a few of this week's Apple enterprise articles, you will find that the newest Apple push is based on partnerships with other vendors and developers.  When I see articles touting partnerships like the one with IBM, I have a hard time thinking beyond what a longtime Apple employee told me a few weeks ago.  "You cannot say Apple and partnership in the same sentence."

Considering my long history at Apple in enterprise sales and that I still have some whiplash from Apple's enterprise efforts, I think a few comments are in order.

The gospel according to Steve Jobs says that Apple is a consumer company which makes great products, some of which work very well in the enterprise.

My last few years at Apple I led what might have been Apple's most successful enterprise team.  It was something of a skunk works project, but we did exceptionally well in one of the toughest enterprise markets in the world, the United States federal government.  We had some high level support including Tim Cook, Bud Tribble, and Fred Anderson. 

We were able to get operating system level implementations that made Apple products attractive to a number of agencies and especially to scientists who were tired of dealing with what at the time was a never-ending assault of viruses and malware.  We got as far as getting OS X approved as part of the federal government's enterprise architecture. Apple did an OS level implementation of smart cards.  Smart cards are requirement if you are going to do business with the federal government.  A couple years after I left, they even published a manual about how to implement smart card services on your Mac.

Apple in 2000-2004 period championed CDSA, or Common Data Security Architecture, as the middle-ware building block for smart cards.  The theory being it would be easier for everyone if security devices and providers across difference architectures wrote to the same middle-ware.  I have not followed this closely but I know that you can still use smart cards with a Mac.  However, Apple has switched how they do it all as of Yosemite and there are some questions as to Apple's direction with their security implementation.

With that as a background, here are my thoughts on Apple and the "new" enterprise push.

First Apple has done many enterprise pushes and perhaps all have shown some degree of success but the ill-fated attempt just after 2000 to get into the enterprise with iMac kiosks.  The only thing thing that push accomplished was to get a lot of enterprise sales people fired.

Since the early nineties, all of Apple's enterprise sales pushes have had a few common characteristics.

1. Lots of strategy.
2. Few actual Apple feet on the street.
3. Apple has continued to go its own way.

I still remember the Apple-DEC alliance announced in 1988.  Most of us selling to the enterprise hopped on a train and went to DEC Word in New York City.  DEC was to provide the integration support and people to get Macs into the enterprise.  I cannot remember any sales bump from the DEC alliance.  Perhaps the third time alliance with IBM will be the charm.

In talking to Apple folks, the theory is that Apple is just building the hooks into OS software mostly iOS and that the enterprise folks are going to run with this on their own with help from IBM and a sales bump to Apple.

It is obvious that iPhones are doing well in American corporations.  A new iPhone, much like a fancy Mac was in my days of selling at Apple, is a pretty nice corporate perk.  iPhones are tied down more than the Android world so there is some appeal to the corporate IT folks.

However, there are some substantial cultural barriers at Apple.

1. As my example with smart cards illustrates, Apple often changes course for what seems to Apple like very good reasons.  However, those changes are sometimes not communicated well and often the benefit is more in Apple's mind than to the customer who sometimes just wants things to work without having to jump through some new hoops.
2. Apple really does not know how to listen to customer needs. It used to be a big part of the company's culture before Steve came back. It disappeared then.  If you saw the procedure Apple uses to determine what features make it into an OS release, you would have a hard time not laughing.  I hope but doubt it has changed much.
3. Though the Yosemite Beta program  is certainly a step in the right direction, I doubt we will see pre-release versions of iPhones being sent out to enterprises to make sure that new software and/or hardware does not break their software.  Apple is built on surprise and secrets which are not favorites in the enterprise world.
4. Enterprises really like companies that keep working on something until they get it fixed.  Apple would rather invent something new than fix something old.  That is truly part of the company's DNA.
5. Enterprise sales are often built on long time relationships between executives and Apple does not do this well.  One of our biggest challenges in selling to the federal government was that no Apple executive would say in public that the enterprise was important to Apple and that Apple would stick with its enterprise products.  Beyond that Apple executives do not like to travel far beyond the safety of their offices in Cupertino. You have to make the pilgrimage to Cupertino. Enterprises want you to come to them.  Unfortunately not enough comes out of Apple executive briefings to compensate for this Cupertino-centric approach.

The history of Apple is littered with failed enterprise products from Apple's AIX based Network Server to the more recent Xserve and Xserve RAID products that were abandoned in 2010.

The whole Xserve with the RAID product was supposed to a major push into the enterprise.  They were great products but Apple had done little preparation for the selling and support of the products.  They shipped the products, the field sort of figured out how to sell them and the diehard Apple customers helped us through the many product challenges.  Apple actually did a training for the sales people after the Xserves had been selling and the people doing much of the training were the people in the field who had figured out the product's limitations.  Apple was never willing to commit enough system engineer resourses to adequately support the products.  Apple also made a major server architecture change to Intel.  Changing processors pulled the rug out from under one of the largest Xserve customers who was using the Xserve product mostly because of the small heat footprint of its PowerPC processors.  One might want to ask the VAR who got stuck with lots of outdated PowerPC Xserves about the reliability of Apple as a partner.

As to Apple listening to customers, I can still remember giving Tim Cook's Quicktime movies of enterprise customers talking about the difficulties they were having getting Macs to be good citizens on their Active Directory networks. After those made their way through the organization, I can remember Avie Tevanian flat out telling us that the customers did not know what they were talking about when they said Macs were not good Active Directory clients.  In his mind there was no problem.

The solution to that problem was that I took one of my field system engineers and had him spend months writing an Active Directory plugin that got rolled into OS X.  The employee is still writing OS software for Apple.

I was recently complaining to an Apple employee about all the incompatibilities between different versions of Pages.  He assured me there were no problems. Yet I told him we live with problems almost on a daily basis because so much of our work over the years is in Pages 09 and there are always litle problems if we open the sixty page documents in newer versions.  He said that Apple certainly did not expect enterprise employees to move to Pages but it was fine for small businesses.  As someone in a small business, I might question that assessment.

Unfortunately the problem is not really Pages.  It is Apple's attitude that it is okay to release a product that is not backwards compatible and then not even work at fixing it.  If iPhoto can die for a "better" product, what changes might Apple spring on the enterprise just because it is going to make something better for Apple.

I am not holding up Microsoft as the perfect enterprise company, but the kind of we-are-going-to-fix-it attitude that took VISTA and made it into Windows 7 helps enterprise customers stay the course.

It is entirely possible that Apple's DNA has completely changed and this enterprise push will be the charm, but pardon me if I remain a skeptic for a couple of years.

For more on the world of Apple enterprise sales, check out my book, The Pomme Company.  Of course this is not my first post on Apple and the enterprise.  Feel free to visit, Once more into the trenches on Apple and the Enterprise or Lingering regrets from Apple days.  I also stumbled across this post, Why the Apple-IBM tie-up is doomed to fail, and how it could succeed, by Jean-Louis Gassée.

As with most things Apple, time will tell better than any of us making guesses, but at least I have history on my side. That is my take on Apple and the enterprise from our spot which is almost as far as way from Cupertino as one  can get and still be in the United States.  

Our November Transformation at the coast is a much better prospect than hopping on an airplane and heading to one of the Apple Sales Conferences that are happening this time of year.

However, I will look forward to hearing how this new enterprise push is positioned internally.  It should be entertaining.

 

The Chancy Software of Apple

Many people love Apple computer hardware.  I think people who love Apple written software are a little harder to find.  Sure there are people out there who still think OS X is Apple's gift to the world, but you will struggle to find someone singing the praises of Mail, Pages, Keynote, iPhoto or any of Apple's shrinking suite of computer software.  I can say up front that I have said some nice things about Pages 5 but it is not a piece of software that I choose to use.

Part of the problem is that Apple introduces software and kills it off. The list goes back many years and includes software from Apple's application company Claris.  Claris emailer was a good program as was Claris Works.  Aperture was well thought of by some users and I was a fan of iDVD.  All those programs are gone.

Then there is the iWork series that languished until recently when Apple brought out Pages 5 which creates all sorts of formatting problems when moving back and forth between it and Pages 09.  People would not have to move back and forth if Apple had maintained feature parity with the old version.

Word might be bloated and not much fun to use, but it does a much better job moving between platforms and versions.  Apple just does not seem to care.

I can perhaps buy the argument that Claris Emailer did not make sense for Claris when Apple decided to give away the Mail.app program.  However, if that is the case then why isn't Apple's mail program a better program?

Perhaps you think it is, but I can assure you that it is not a program that you want to bet your company on these days.

While I admit to being an email program's worst nightmare with over a dozen email accounts, I long ago gave up pushing Mail.app.  I only asked it to take care of five email accounts. One is a legacy Mobile Me account and aother is an iCloud account.  The other three accounts were IMAP based accounts that I use in business.

I have been struggling for three or four months to trouble shoot a Mail.app problem on my Mac Mini.  Before I detail the problem, it might help to understand my desktop.  I have multiple computers at my fingertips including an iMac that is not pictured.  In my office I run two Mac computers with OS 10.9.5, one desktop with Windows 8.1, and a laptop with Windows 7.  I also have another laptop with Windows 8.1 that sits on our kitchen table downstairs.  My MacMini also runs VMware Fusion and Xubuntu Linux.

In addition to all the computers (and you can read more at this article), I also once was a vice president at an email services company and spent plenty of time reviewing training materials telling people how to configure our email services on a variety of email clients. I also did some of our Linux and Mac compatibility testing.

There are not many email clients that I have not used over the years including Eudora and even Outlook on earlier versions of Windows.  Having worked for years at Apple and after spending time at an email company, I believe email should be bullet proof.  Even after I left our email company, I would sometimes call the company and ask them if they were having server problems when I noticed an email taking too long to be delivered. Each time I called, it was confirmed that they were experiencing some server problems.

So here is the email problem that has finally made me call it quits with Mail.app.  One of my business email accounts will randomly will stop receiving emails and/or refuse to send emails.  I have done everything to verify the settings are correct including deleting the account and starting over. Nothing helps except pivoting to another computer to send or receive the email. Mostly I just launch VMware Fusion and Thunderbird and send the copied and pasted text from Thunderbird running on Linux.  It has never failed me.

I have also turned to my iMac and sent the email using the Mail.app running on it.  It never has a problem sending the email.  Of course I am also able to send using Windows Mail 8.1 which I quite like. Today I finally broke down an installed Postbox on my MacMini with the troublesome Mail.app.  There was still an email from yesterday that my boss had sent and that Mail.app had refused to receive.  Within minutes of entering the same settings into Postbox, I had the email from yesterday.  It is also worth mentioning that my original Kindle Fire, my Nexus tablet, and Android smartphone all have no problem with the same email account.

I have done enough testing to conclude that Mail.app on this particular MacMini has a problem. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not.   Perhaps I could reintall Mail.app and fix the problem but it was easier to install Postbox because I get the added benefit of a mail search that actually works.

I was reminded of how well the Apple Mail program worked at one time when I booted up my trusted Dual G5 running OS 10.3.9.  I personally like the older version of OS X, iPhoto, and Mail.  Mail search actually found what I was looking for quickly. iPhoto let me use the escape key to move back from a picture to the library and the old version of OS X felt very comfortable.  I was relieved to find the operating system actually remembered the last place I looked for files. It was also interesting that there was no Apple way to move some exported JPEG files from my old iPhoto to the cloud.  I ended up using Dropbox which worked perfectly.  Apple has proved time and again that it does not care even one tiny bit about my ten year old Mac.

Now I am not going to give up on Macs because of a flaky mail program, but Apple seems to be waging a war of attrition on serious computer users.  iPhoto certainly is not the revolutionary program which I loved when it was first introduced.  Even the iPhoned-version of it seems is falling out of favor.  I actually quit depending on iPhoto over three years ago, I pull the plug on Apple's iPhoto at v 9.1.5. I moved to Picasa and Lightroom.

While I can make it run,  I truly miss an up to date version of iDVD.  Then there is iMovie.  I just prepare to relearn the program every time that I use it. Apple's somewhat undeserved reputation of user interface consistency falls completely flat with iMovie.  It seems to never be the same program.  The formatting errors we find moving back and forth between versions of Pages are a huge hit to productivity.  It takes a lot of time to correct them and we cannot find any font based issue that would cause the problems. Adobe got a lot of our company's money to make certain that was not the problem. In the end it is easier to switch over to Word to do a mail merge than fight with different versions of Pages.

Seriously if I am a Mac user in business, I seem to be stuck with Microsoft Office and what seems to be the declining interest of Apple in providing alternative software and services. I did not become a Mac user and go to work at Apple just so that I could have nice hardware to run Microsoft applications.  I could write a whole post on how disappointed I am in iCloud. So many companies even Microsoft get the cloud close to right and Apple cannot even get into the ballpark.

I recently asked an Apple employee if Apple used any of their own software, the reply I got was that a handful of Pages documents have been sent out but never a Numbers document.  I suspect Apple still uses Keynote, but that is not enough to keep a business user on the platform even if it were truly that much better than PowerPoint.

Perhaps Apple's software would get better if company policy dictated only Pages and Numbers documents sent from Mail.app.

I work for a company that uses Macs so I will continue to hope for innovative solutions like Postbox that make staying on the Apple platform a lot easier.

That is it from the Crystal Coast where summer is still here but fall is knocking on the door.

 

Classic Apple Style

All the brouhaha about the iPhone 6 will probably settle down well before Apple is ready for you to buy another product.  The one really classic thing that I saw is this statement in a Slate/Business Insider article, Is Apple Accident-Prone?

We asked Apple for comment, but its spokespersons were silent at the time of writing

If you have ever lived inside Apple, you can relate.  Seven years ago I wrote an article, Not a great Apple innovation: the robotic spokesperson.  Memories from my career at Apple came flooding back with that 2007 kerfuffle over iPhone batteries that resulted in all the "no comments" coming out of Apple.

Though I do not agree with Apple's relentless pursuit of thin and light over reliable and still great, bending of Apple products is not new.  Some of the very first Xserves that shipped had cases which bent after they had been in the racks for a while.  Apple fixed that and I am sure that they will stand behind their iPhone 6 products as people learn not to sit on them.

The bigger and more serious problem for Apple is that it does not adequately test its software products and its hardware.  The company is so devoted to secrecy that broad testing is hard to do.  Consumers who buy the products end up being the product quality assurance folks.  It is not a great way to run a company but Apple has such dedicated fans that most of them are willing to do just about anything needed to have an Apple product in their hands even if it is a not-quite-final version.

A secondary and almost more worrisome challenge is that Apple does not have a good regular channel of communications with its customers.  The company has always limited the number of people that could talk to the press but beyond that the company is afraid of talking to anyone whose views might show up on the web and/or in print.  Things have to get to a crisis mode before Apple responds.  Other companies know there are better ways of interacting with customers especially those that truly love the company.

The really big chink in Apple's armor is that it is a Cupertino company pure and simple. Apple has little interest in being a truly world company.  Most of the world does not have a lot of money and Apple is only interested in those places with the most money.  Folks might think Apple is a technology machine but it switched over to being a money machine long ago.  Apple has few customers who worry about their disposable income.

A few years ago I helped someone who was having trouble getting his MacBook Pro repaired.  He had paid for three repairs at various Apple Stores and his computer still did not work.  I got Apple's Executive Relations to intervene.  Even after promising to expedite his repair, they could not get his computer repaired. They refunded his money for the repairs.  How did the problem get fixed, the guy went out and bought a new Apple MacBook Air.

Why should Apple worry about a few iPhone 6s that are bending and a Software Update that does not work?  Their customers will forgive any sin and buy another product to prove their loyalty.  Tim Cook must be smiling in spite of all the bad press.

That is it from the Crystal Coast where we spend more time anticipating the great fall weather than we do worrying about Apple's latest product snafus.

Not so fast Apple, iCloud is part of the problem

Apple was pretty quick to point the finger someplace besides themselves in the recent celebrity photo brouhaha.  It is an Apple tradition that there are never problems with Apple products or services.  The only problems are with how customers use Apple products.  Remember the Apple response that customers were holding their iPhones wrong?

I will admit to being a long time critic of Apple and its cloud efforts. Part of the reason is that I worked at Apple for so many years and was in the cloud with them from the start.  Because of Apple's many tries at getting the web right, I am certain I still have broken website links and lost photo albums not to mention abandoned webpages that I trusted Apple to host.

Still I am going to point the finger at Apple because Apple has never understood the web and the latest implementation of iCloud shows that basic lack of understanding of the web and how most people use it.

Back in 2012, I complained about about Apple's cloud world and said this.

Adding photos to your Picasa web albums, Google drive, Dropbox or your Microsoft Skydrive is much easier than fooling around with your photostream.

I could have also said deleting them is much less of a challenge.

So here is the real problem and it is Apple's problem and not something that users can fix on their own.  You cannot administer and manage the photos on your iCloud account from a web interface.  In fact you cannot even use a web interface to see what photos are in your iCloud photostream.  You have to find the Apple device that put the photos there and delete them from that device.

Just think how backwards that is from the way that the web and other cloud services work?  All services that I have used allow me to log into my account and manage my content from the web.  If I see a photo album that I do not want to be on the web, I can delete it.  I hate to break the news to Tim Cook and his developers but the web usually outlasts Apple devices.  I had the problem when I was at Apple.  One of my Apple devices would disappear and it was impossible to manage what the device had put on the web.

It is the fatal flaw in Apple's web strategy.  Apple is a device centric company and putting a web interface on something means that you could manage your iPhone photos with a Windows or even a Linux computer.

A basic computing rule that web centric companies have figured is that your data should be device independent.  I should be able to manage my web photos or content with any device not just one manufactured by Apple.

This becomes very important when devices die or when you decide to switch to another platform. Of course Apple does not want you to switch so they put you in a walled garden where it is inconvenient to switch.

I am not exactly sure how the hackers got the photos that were on iCloud, but I suspect the photos just synced to whatever Apple device they used to get into the account.

By protecting its users from actually seeing files in iCloud, Apple has actually made it much easier for the wrong files to end up and remain on the web.  Now I am not defending anyone who is crazy enough to take nude pictures of themselves but in making it so easy for photos to get on the web with an Apple device and so hard to tell what is actually there, Apple bears some responsibility and can help fix the problem.

Apple owes users a web interface and a way to see what photos it is storing on iCloud.  I think Apple's brilliant software team could figure that out if Tim Cook told them to do it. Isn't it about time that Apple got the web right.  While they are doing it maybe that could fix that document black hole that they have promised to fix.

That's my take on it from the summery Crystal Coast.  Come visit, the best of the beach season is yet to come and our warm salt water will help you to stop worrying about what pictures are in your iCloud account.

For more recent articles about Apple, check my ReadWrite author page.

Could Apple have been even more successful?

I was hired to go to work at Apple in October of 1984, only a few months after the Macintosh was introduced.  My first official day was November 26, 1984.  In one of the few moves in those days targeted at saving money, my partner and I did not get to start until after the sales conference that year.  We were sure they just did not want to spend the money for another two tickets to Hawaii from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

 

My days at Apple lasted until July of 2004.  This summer it will be ten years since I left Apple and a lot has changed at the company and in my life. In 1984, fresh out of two years in sales management at an Apple reseller, Macs were the only computers in my life.

 

Today I am down to two Macs and my life has more Windows and Android devices than Apple products.  At the peak of our addiction, and I include my family since they were all Mac users, we had well over a dozen Macintoshes not counting my collection of old Macs. Today the total number of Macs across the five adults in the family numbers three.  The two that I have and one iMac that my older daughter has.  No one in the family has an iPad or an iPhone. Even my wife who loved her 12” Powerbook well beyond its useful life is now using a HP laptop.  I think we might be able to find two or three old iPods in drawers.

 

With the drop in Apple products in our family, I started wondering if the technology in our lives might have been different if Apple had been even more successful particularly outside the consumer world.

 

Sometimes it is hard to imagine that arguably the world’s most successful technology company might have been more successful, but I expect if you could find other ex-Apple sales folks besides me willing to talk, you might find a number who would agree with me that Apple could have gone farther in the enterprise if they had wanted to do so.

 

Back in December on my Applepeels blog, I posted an entry, The Decision That Lost The Desktop For Apple.  In it I make the argument that the pricing decisions that Apple made at the height of the popularity for the Macintosh II had a huge impact on Apple’s desktop market share.

 

You could take my reasoning a little further and say that we were all hurt by Apple’s punting on the enterprise market.  Certainly the federal information technology world which needs all the help it can get. I have argued at ReadWrite that federal IT is a mess.

 

Then there is the rest of the enterprise and publishing market which actually kept Apple afloat until Steve Jobs discovered the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.  My career at Apple ended roughly about the time that Apple figured out that selling to consumers was a whole lot easier than meeting the demands of fussy CIOs.  As an Apple product manager famously once told me, “Customers do not tell us what to make, we tell them what to buy.”

 

But what if Apple had been successful in the enterprise market?  Many of us believed that Apple had all the elements needed to be successful there except the support of Steve.  We had a great operating system that was far more secure from viruses at a time when Windows was being swallowed alive by all sorts of threats.  In those early days of OS X even Apple laptops and professional desktops were very competitively priced.

 

We were able to get token support from Steve on some federal requirements like SmartCard support, but there was never a serious push into the enterprise after Steve came back to Apple.  There was only ever a handful of enterprise sales people at Apple and in spite of some recent rumblings reported by Business Insider I don't think that is going to really change.  My guess is that the 100 enterprise people Apple is looking for probably just cover the ones that got too expensive on the payroll and were let go. 

 

When my team took over the federal market for Apple, we started with one sales person on each coast, one system engineer, my area associate, and me.  We joked that we could hold team meetings in my Previa van.

 

Still Apple and my federal team in particular was very successful in the federal market.  Many CIOs were tired of being held over a barrel by Microsoft.  The cost for Microsoft Client Access Licenses (CALs) was a thorn in the side of many federal CIOs.  However, no CIO federal or otherwise was stupid enough to bet their whole enterprise on Apple which refused to say in public that the enterprise was important to the success of company.

 

One of my last meetings at Apple was taking Avie Tevanian in June 2004 to see Karen Evans, who at the time was the CIO for the whole federal government.  Avie got wound up trying to convince Karen to start developing applications with WebObjects.  Karen handed him his head and told him the federal government had moved to COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software.  She also asked him a question that sent him into a serious enough tailspin that I had to rescue him.  She wanted to know why she should trust her important business to company that only ever talked about the consumer market and iPods?

 

The fact that Apple practically gave up on the federal market and has never taken a lot of the business world seriously left room for Microsoft to keep pounding away on their OS until they came up with Windows 7.   The lack of a viable alternative to Microsoft meant they were to maintain their stranglehold on the feds.  It also left a lot of the small business world firmly in the grip of Windows XP and its descendants.

 

My two older children are in IT and the youngest worked in a finance office.  My wife worked in an insurance office and after Apple I sampled a number of different workplaces whose only common denominator like those of the rest of the family was that usually I was the only Mac user in groups as large as seventy to one hundred.  I struggled through the pains of VISTA but was pleasantly surprised with Windows 7.  I held off in getting a smartphone for a long time.  A year after my son bought a Droid, I relented and followed his platform choice. I did not even consider an iPhone because the AT&T network was so bad here on the edges of civilization.

 

At WideOpen Networks job, I am happy to be back at a Mac centric company, but I am not going to give up my Windows gear.  I like living in a multi-platform world and I know how fickle the winds of Apple are.

 

Had Apple been more successful in the enterprise market, my family might never have wandered away from the platform.  Obviously Apple is very successful, but just imagine a world where you went to work and everyone was using Macs.  I think Apple not pursuing the enterprise world left room for Microsoft to keep plugging away.  There was a time when the argument that the Mac was a more secure platform was undeniable.

 

I stuck with Macs not because of any great love for Apple but because I like using the product. It is not inexpensive to use a Mac in spite of what some loyalists will tell you, but I find myself more productive doing certain things on a Mac so I have not given up on the platform.

 

Perhaps we have Apple to thank for the fact that we all can buy some pretty nice Windows hardware like my Lenovo Yoga at very reasonable prices and some great tablets like the inexpensive Nexus 7 that I have.  If Apple had taken the enterprise market seriously and made some aggressive moves on pricing, this world might be even more Apple centric than it already is.  Then again, all that success in the enterprise world might have distracted Apple and we would have never gotten the iPhone and iPad.  Then it might have taken a long time for Android to develop and we would have all been stuck with Blackberries.

 

We will never know for sure.

Reading the Apple Tea Leaves

I certainly do not claim to be an expert on today's Apple.  However, I have lots of history with the company and I have written the only book which describes what it was like to work at Apple in sales. 

With that background I can look into the Cupertino tea cup and swirl the tea leaves as well as anyone.

Recent numbers on CNNMoney based on Gartner and IDC suggest that Apple might have had a period of "negative growth" in Mac sales during the critical back to school season.  Both Mark Rogowsky, a contributor at Forbes, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball have recently chimed in with perspectives on Apple.

Others have chosen to spin this drop in sales as dramatic.  I doubt Apple is any danger.  They could keep Tim Cook in sushi almost indefinitely with their offshore billions.

The one take away that I have from Gruber's article is that today people who have the money are willing to pay for Macs.

The Mac today has roughly 10 percent of the PC market, but it’s not just any randomly distributed 10 percent of the market. Quite the opposite — Apple’s 10 percent of the market is entirely comprised of the high end of the market. Mac users are discriminating, willing to pay more for a product they deem superior.

I am not sure many price conscious buyers like me would be surprised that Mac buyers seem to have more money.

Long ago I hinted that Macs would have a hard time getting above 10 percent of the market, and price was a limiting factor then.  I think things are perhaps even more challenging today. 

My experience which is perhaps different than yours is that Macs have not delivered the value that I want in a computing platform. My computing closet still contains a very expensive 26" i5 iMac that died well before it was two years old.  Hopefully it will be this year's holiday project for my son and I to install a new SSD in it.

The only Mac in our household today is a new Mac Mini that had some challenges early in 2013. Our last Apple laptop purchase was a 2006 MacBook which was a faithful friend for years.

With Apple's continued focus on thin and light, I have not seen the type of changes that once defined Apple's computer products and kept users on their seats and might have brought me back to its laptop platform.  My Windows 8 laptop has a touch screen and it is almost a year old. Apple still does not have touch screens in their laptops and you cannot get an Apple laptop with a SD card reader for under $1,000.

Rogowsky's article, In A Declining PC Market, Opportunities For An Indifferent Apple is out of left field and must have been suggested by an old Apple enterprise sales person because he seems to think the real opportunity is for Apple to go after the enterprise market.

"What it hasn’t done so far is seized on the weaknesses of HP, Dell and others, though, to build a world-class corporate sales organization to push its tablets and PCs aggressively into thousands of organizations worldwide."

As much as I have a problem with Gruber's "discriminating" buyer argument, I came close to choking upon reading the suggestion that Apple build "a world class sales organization."

Actually I think Apple had close to a world class sales organization in the early nineties.  It was perhaps one of the things that kept Apple in business long enough for Steve to rescue the company from itself.

Certainly Steve did not love the sales organization and that is one of things that the field sales force clearly understood.  Apple's sales leaders after Steve came back were undistinguished and often off base unless you somehow believe that going after the enterprise with iMac based kiosks was a good idea.

As for thoughts that should temper any suggestions that Apple go after the world's corporations with an enterprise sales force, this post, Lingering Regrets From Days At Apple, that I wrote seven years ago is still pertinent.

Apple will never be a successful enterprise sales company, it is not in the company's genes.The company had plenty of opportunities that Microsoft threw in their laps but they punted on them all. 

Certainly after Apple's last flirtation with the enterprise which included the Xserve, I would think most large customers would have a hard time seriously considering Apple on the desktop.

If I were an enterprise CIO who had tried Xserves only to see Apple abandon them, I might be worried that Apple would completely give up desktops and laptops for iPhones, iPads, and iPods.  The CIO of the federal government was worried about that when I took Avie Tevanian in to meet her back in 2004.

The only real opportunity for Apple in the enterprise is to keep doing what they are doing and penetrate the enterprise with iPads and iPhones which users will demand be supported.

More important in reading Apple's tea leaves than either Gruber's or Rogowsky's article is the hint that the back to school season was not good for Apple.  I do not have any inside verification that back to school was not great for Apple.  However, it would not surprise me.

Higher education has been a strategic but sometimes under appreciated market for Apple since I joined the company in 1984.  One of the things that higher education has always done for Apple is put a device in the hands of the one person most likely to understand leading edge technology in a family, the college student.  College students often go home and sell their families on Apple technology.  When they graduate from college, they take their Apple devices to work and lobby for corporate support for Apple.  It was a well appreciated sales cycle at Apple during my time as a higher education manager.  Apple lost a lot of its higher education focus when it rolled the higher education division in with the K-12 folks back in the nineties.

The only time in my memory that we had a bad back to school at Apple during my career there was during Gil Amelio's brief tenure as Apple CEO.  He decided that Apple was giving higher education students too good a deal on computers so he raised prices for students.  Higher education sales tanked.

Now Apple's prices have not gone up, but their laptop prices have not gone down either.  As I suggested in the article that I wrote over four years ago, all you have to do is walk the aisles of either a Best Buy or Staples to get a feeling for just how far PC laptop prices have gone down.

In spite of what Apple folks think, there are some very nice PC laptops out there.  I use a first generation Lenovo Yoga which cost me under $1,000. It is my second Lenovo laptop and will not be my last.  When I decide to pass this one on to someone else in the family, I will be buying the next generation Yoga.  My Yoga has been one of the finest laptops that I have ever used.

Beyond the product, I also happen to like the philosophy of Lenovo.  Back in January I wrote an article for RWW, Apple and Lenovo: The Tale of Two Companies.  I had this to say.

Apple has come to believe it cannot make anything worthy of the Apple brand at a low price point. Lenovo believes it can deliver quality and still serve customers looking for a good deal.

If they are both right, that's a big win for Lenovo.

If you look at the CNNMoney charts, Lenovo has grown the most of any vendor.  While one quarter is too early to make much more than an educated guess, it is possible that the Apple price differential on laptops has finally gotten too much for even college bound parents to bear. Tuition keeps going up and family incomes have not gone up.

We are in a tough economy and the reality is that Apple is a luxury brand.  There is protection in being a luxury brand as Gruber hints, but there are limits to your growth if some of your strategic customers have decided your products are too expensive.

Perhaps Apple's actual numbers will spin all of this a little differently.  Certainly there is no cause for doom and gloom in the Apple world.  After all, someday they might actually ship that new Mac Pro that they announced in June and of course we are due for an iPad refresh.  Let me guess, they will be thinner and lighter but will still be lots more expensive than a Nexus or Kindle.  Did I tell you I suspected the "new" iPhone might sport some color?

That is it from the Southern Outer Banks where we might get summer in October but the hope of actually seeing a Mac in one of our electronics stores is as elusive as ever.  I will just keep living my dream to ease the pain.

Update- Mark Rogowsky posted some interesting charts on Apple after my article was published yesterday.

Just to make my point on price, I checked the flyer in the Sunday newspaper and compared the computer prices I found to Apple Store prices.  You can argue all you want about Windows 8 and it certainly is not perfect,  but it is very usable and in fact I use Windows 8 every day along with Mac OS X Mt. Lion and Xubuntu Linux.

As of October 13, 2013, the least expensive Apple laptop with an I7 processor is $1499.  The MacBook does have a slot loading optical drive, a thunderbolt port, and Firewire 800 port, but I live quite well without any of those on my current laptop.

Best Buy's Sunday, October 13, 2013, flyer lists a Lenovo laptop with an I7 processor, a 15" touch screen which is bigger than the 13" MacBook Pro for $829.99.  The hard drive is smaller on the Lenovo but the bigger screen would make that a wash for me. As someone told me when I bought my MacMini, you can find USB optical drives for under $70 if you really need one.

I have used a lot of Mac laptops and I judge the quality to be similar to Lenovo.  You can make your own judgment, but as of October 13, 2013, you pay a 81% premium for buying a MacBook over a Lenovo. Unless you put a lot of value on Thunderbolt, aluminum, and Firewire 800 as opposed to USB 3.0, I think the Lenovo is a better buy especially for college students.

Laptops are almost a necessity for college students and those of us who travel for work.  The word that comes to mind for someone willing to pay 81% more for a product that will likely need to be updated in three or four years no matter which one you buy certainly is not "discriminating."

 

 

Apple Between the Lines

It has been nearly two months since I scanned the headlines on Apple websites. It has been even longer since I wrote my last article on Apple at ReadWrite.  I have been busy getting two books out the door.

I am not surprised that there is little to draw me beyond the typical Apple headlines. I got the feeling that Apple and I were heading in different directions as I was finishing up my books.  I am one of those people who still work with desktop computers, build websites, manipulate photos and graphics.  I suspect in Apple's world that I am something of a dinosaur.  I judge platforms by the applications that they bring to me and the productivity that I find from using those tools.  I do not own an iPhone or an iPad.

Still I am not here to argue that Apple is going to disappear, is poorly managed, or has crummy products.  By most financial measurements Apple of 2013 is a great success. Unfortunately, all that success has not made it to my desktop. I am here to report that I see little reason to keep Apple on my immediate radar.  I am actually down to two applications that only run on a Mac.  I still cling to Pixelmator as a favorite graphics tool and I have a couple of websites where I use Rapidweaver, but that is it.  The rest of my Mac experience is gone.  I got tired of waiting for new versions of the iWork suite.  iPhoto managled one too many photo libraries and why anyone would put up with iCloud and its services is beyond me.  I use Postbox on Windows for my mail.

I did give Apple a fair chance at keeping my loyalty.  I bought a new MacMini in January and with the OX 10.8.3 update it has become a stable and reliable partner.  It is not nearly as fast as my similarly powered Lenovo desktop running Windows 8 but speed is not really the issue.  The real issue is that there is no software that draws me over to the Mac platform and I am not that happy with the Mountain Lion interface which should scare folks since Windows 8 is my main other platform.

I thought iAuthor might be something that would be important to me, but when I found out that it would only work with an iPad attached, I gave up on the Mac as my publishing platform.  Amazon has a very capable piece of software that emulates a Kindle which I can use to view my work before I publish.  There are some subtantial advantages to being on the Kindle platform so it did not take much to kill the idea of moving my books over to the iPad.   While I am not a huge fan of Word, it seems to be the best tool with the most specific instructions for creating books to be published on the Kindle platform.  I actually tried my older version of Word running on the Mac but it just made for some additional work.

Then there is the whole cloud issue. DropBox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive all work very well and do what I need.  I have still not met anyone who loves iCloud.  I know Apple keeps making some incremental changes to Photostreaming to make it palatable, but I have been burned too many times by Apple's ever changing online photo storage strategies.  I do not care about iCloud anymore.

This August will mark thirty-one years since I first came to the Apple platform.  I got excited about it because I could do things with that first Apple II+ and subsequent Macs that I could not easily do with other computers. That has changed and I did fight the change.   Over the years I campaigned for a better and more reliable iPhoto and even a small tower that would more closely meet the needs of those of us who still believe that creating quality content requires more than an iPad or iPhone.  I even sort of grew to like Pages before I decided it had become just another abandoned Apple software product.

Even if Apple does come up with a tower, I likely will not be looking at it because I do not see a new version of Microsoft Office coming to the Mac in the near future.  I have more hope that I will figure out how to use Google Docs to publish my books than I do that Microsoft is going to bring an upgraded version of Office to the Mac. It is not that I love Google more than Apple but they do update their core products regularly.  Beyond the Office issue, Apple has become an expensive platform.  If you want to argue with me on that consider first that I have purchased three I5 computers in the last six months, one Lenovo Ultra Book, one Lenovo tower, and one MacMini so I know what comes with each system. I am not really intrigued by ever thinner iMacs.  I would rather have  a more reliable one instead of the one in my equipment closet that died an early death.

As I watch Apple executing its huge bond deal in order to buy stock back to keep its stockholders happy, I have to wonder what it would have cost to get some upgraded iWork apps out the door and make OS X better not just glitzier.  Some professional Mac users would have paid for those new Apple products. That the MacMini on my desktop is more a curiosity than my workhorse is a little sad.  After all, over thirty years is a long time to live on a particular platform, but when all the signals to move on are there, it is hard to ignore them.

Years ago Apple gave me the tools to do some really neat things.  Today the deep integration of Google's mapping software and its seamless integration with Google's cloud services for maps and photos let me create a rather unique travel guide.  The mapping done on my Android phone would not have been as easy on the iPhone.  Certainly the mapping tools in Lightroom sealed the deal for me.  My decision to run Lighroom on my Lenovo tower came down to pure economics.  The $599 MacMini came with a 500 GB hard drive and the $479 Lenovo came with a 1 TB hard drive and had more room for photos. Its storage is also more easily upgradeable than the MacMini's.

I will continue to keep an eye on Apple, but it will be more to fulfill my curiosity than to plan any further purchases. I have no doubts that there are plenty of folks out there sitting on the edge of their chairs just waiting for the next Apple product.  I hope whatever it is goes well for Apple and for them.

If you are curious about my new travel guide, A Week at the Beach-The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide, I have created a Kindle promotion with two free days, May 1 & 2, to download the book  Amazon has free reader software that lets you read a Kindle book on anything including the iPad, iPhone, and Mac. In fact with the Amazon sofware you can easily have the book on all your devices.  You will find the details about the free promo and software at this page.

If you are curious about me, try my about me page on my main Crystal Coast Life site.

A Sign That Apple Cares About The Desktop?

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives.  My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer.  Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh.  Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped.  Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse.  Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that.  I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it.  I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine.  What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters.  It is not a new question.  I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read.  I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked. 

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off.  There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP.  Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company.  It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway.  It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue.  I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs.  It likely will not work.  The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks.  Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies.  I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone.  There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview.  Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices.  When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices.  That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet.  I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices.  Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work.  Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days.  I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience.  I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button.  I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down. 

In truth, it does not matter.  I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom.  Guess what?  The "Escape key" works like it should there.  A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.