IBM To Buy Sun? We Shall See…

The New York Times has a detailed piece on rumors that IBM might purchase Sun Microsystems.  That would be huge if this actually happned as it would give IBM control of the Solaris operating system as well as JAVA which is used on everything from cell phones to enterprise servers. It would also make IBM #2 in the UNIX marketplace behind HP.

Of course, this all assumes that an anti-trust challenge doesn’t get served up by the feds the second this happens.

The other concern is duplication in their product lines. I can’t see a merged company running duplicate lines of hardware and software. The best example of this is the HP/Compaq train wreck. That merged company got Tru64 UNIX and HP-UX. Customers on the Tru64 UNIX platform were told to migrate to HP-UX. Some didn’t and took their business elsewhere.

With Sun and IBM, they’ve got to choose between either a massive duplication of effort, or pick one of Solaris/AIX, MySQL/DB2, SPARC/POWER, Galaxy/iSeries, Storagetek (including the ZFS-based products like Thumper/Amber Road)/IBM storage, Websphere/Glassfish, Netbeans/Eclipse – the list goes on.

I wouldn’t want to be the guy making those decisions as you can be guarnteed that some customers are going to get ticked at the end of the day.

Mac Sales Drop…..PC Sales Rise…..Fanbois Crap Their Jeans

It seems that the party is over for Apple in terms of gaining market share on their PC competitors. It looks like the PC empire has finally decided to strike back and according to eWeek, the February numbers pretty much speak for themselves:

U.S. retail Windows PC unit shipments rose 22 percent in February, despite the weak economy. By comparison, Mac unit sales fell nearly 17 percent. Apple’s stronger category, notebooks, could no longer defy gravity. Windows laptop unit sales jumped 36 percent year over year, while Mac notebooks declined 7.5 percent.

The author of this article does suggest a good reason why this might be the case:

The obvious answer is upfront pricing. Consumers and small businesses pay more to join the Mac club because the entry-level prices are higher. Perhaps Apple sells computers for more than most consumers or small businesses are willing to spend right now. Apple’s iMac starts at $1,199 and MacBook at $999. In February, the average selling price for Macs was $1,500, down from $1,628 a year earlier but up from $1,482 in November. By comparison Windows PC selling prices continue in a downward direction from $668 to $555, February to February, and $572 from November.

True, the price is higher up front for something from the Apple universe. But fanbois many would argue that you get much more for your mone in terms of hardware and software up front as well. But given the times that we live in, that may not be enough to sway people to the Mac. A companion article written by the same author has some additional reasons:

I see three factors benefiting Microsoft and its OEM partners. In order from least to most important:

• Some cost-conscious would-be Mac switchers are choosing cheaper Windows PCs.
• Netbook sales are rising, giving additional uplift to Windows laptop sales.
• “Windows. Life Without Walls” marketing is doing what it’s supposed to.

I’ll buy into the first two points, but I’m skeptical about the third. Maybe the cute little kids do make some sort of difference in terms of making PCs/Microsoft look better. But from talking to my customers, the cute kids aren’t making Vista any more appealing to them.

But then again, numbers don’t lie…. much.

Psystar Releases Sexy Looking Mac Clone…. Too Bad The iLawyers Will Destroy Them

Dubbed the Open(3), Psystar has ditched the low rent look of their Mac Clones and come up with something cool and sexy looking. It comes out of the box with a Core 2 Duo (or Quad) processor, 500GB HD, Nvidia 8400GS graphics chip, and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Of course OS X is preinstalled and you get all of this for $600 US.

Not bad.

Too bad that Apple’s iLawyers are going to destroy this company in fairly short order. Perhaps Psystar should spend more time circling their legal wagons rather than coming out with new computers? After all, if they lose their legal battle (which they will), it doesn’t matter that their computers are starting to look cool.

iPhone 3.0 Gets Previewed….. Fanbois Go Wild…. [UPDATED]

Apple had a religious experience preview event to annouce that iPhone 3.0 has offically gone into beta. There’s a rather lengthy list of features that come with iPhone 3.0 including the following:

• In-App Purchasing: Allows developers to sell additional content from within applications. Highlighted uses include magazine subscriptions, eBooks, additional levels and items for games.
• Peer-to-Peer Connectivity: Find other devices running sharing applications via Bonjour over Wi-Fi of Bluetooth. Good for gaming, but also for sharing porn data.
  
• Push Notification: This is a feature that has been MIA for a very long time. For those of you who might have forgotten what this does, a third-party server pushes text and audio alerts from/to applications.
• Turn by Turn Directions: Apple will allow developers to use CoreLocation for turn-by-turn GPS directions. Basically turning your iPhone into a navigation system.
• Cut, Copy and Paste: It’s about time this made it! It will be available across all applications. Shake to undo or redo.
• Landscape keyboard: Available in all key applications, including Mail. Another feature that should have been there from the start.
• MMS: Picture messaging now available. Finally.
• Voice Memos: Record notes, lectures, interviews, etc. using your iPhone. Why wasn’t this there from the start as well?
• Spotlight Search: Available across all applications. Systemwide search available from main home screen by flicking to the left.
• A2DP Bluetooth: Support for stereo bluetooth headsets, but only if you have an iPhone 3G or a newer iPod Touch. So that means that coming soon to an Apple Store near you are Apple bluetooth headsets with a built in microphone so you don’t miss a call. I’m calling it now.

If you want to play with this as well as the software development kit, Apple has posted a page describing how to score yourself a copy of this. Remember it is a beta so if things go south, you only have yourself to blame. If the stars are properly aligned, this should hit the streets this summer and it will be a free upgrade for iPhone users, but cost $9.95 for iPod touch users.

What do the fanbois think? The reaction on ehmac.ca (Canada’s leading Apple fanboi site) is largely positive. Why not leave a comment with your thoughts on this as well?

UPDATE: A Quicktime stream of the event is now available.

Apple: No DRM In Apple Headphones…. But There’s Still An Apple Tax, So This Still Sucks

The Interwebs have been buzzing with news of the “authentication chip” inside the new Apple headphones. To try and put the issue to rest, BoingBoing managed to talk to an Apple PR droid employee and got this response:

Just spoke with Apple. There is no encryption or authentication on the chip, so clones could conceivably be made, just not with “Made for iPod” official certification. And now we know!

Great. But it still means that there’s still an “Apple Tax” on accessories as to make them work right and more importantly to get people to have the warm fuzzies when buying them requires paying money to Apple so that you can license the technology. Plus by doing so likely keeps the iLawyers at bay if Apple ever decided to become draconian when it came to accessories that didn’t have their stamp of approval.

Frankly, I didn’t care if their headphones had some sort of DRM scheme or not. What I do care about is the fact that my choice of headphones is being restricted by Apple because they want to keep the cash rolling in to buy Steve Jobs more black turtleneck shirts charge accessory companies licensing fees which get passed onto consumers. So what my feelings were in my original article still stands. I won’t be buying the iPod shuffle and nether should you as a closed ecosystem is not in the best interests of all concerned.

Nvidia’s 10Q Sheds Some Light On How bad The Graphics Chips Mess Might Be

Many people think that reading the 10Q documents (AKA: their annual report) of major corporations is as dry as toast. But you can sometimes find some interesting tidbits in them. Take Nvidia for example. In their annual report, I note the following items. You might recall that Nvidia had set aside $150 – $200 million to deal with graphics chips that were failing at a obscene rate. Nvidia has spent $43.6 million so far according to their annual report. But the telling point is in this paragraph:

In September, October and November 2008, several putative class action lawsuits were filed against us, asserting various claims related to the impacted MCP and GPU products. Such lawsuits could result in the diversion of management’s time and attention away from business operations, which could harm our business. In addition, the costs of defense and any damages resulting from this litigation, a ruling against us, or a settlement of the litigation could adversely affect our cash flow and financial results.

Translation: If the people who filed these lawsuits win, we’re screwed.

That sort of implies that this whole graphics chips mess is a lot bigger than they are admitting to publicly. It’s hard to tell as the 10Q really dances around the issue to a great degree. But perhaps now is a good time for them to start repairing the damage that this circus has caused by manning up and dealing with it? It may be cheaper for them in the long run.

Thinking Of Buying The New iPod Shuffle?…. You May Want To Rethink That…

You’ll recall that I said the following when I posted the original story about the iPod Shuffle:

First, the controls for the new iPod Shuffle are on the headset. Can you say “Cha Chnig” as there’s no third party products that work with this iPod (yet?).

I didn’t know the half of it. Apparently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the only third party accessories that work with the iPod shuffle are ones that have an “authentication chip” on them:

Normally, of course, independent headphone makers could simply reverse engineer the interface. The “authentication chip” is there so that Apple’s lawyers can invoke the DMCA to block those efforts. So this shows us, yet again, what DRM is for — not stopping piracy, but rather impeding competition and innovation.

By the way, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management (a.k.a. copy protection) and this link will fill in the blanks on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

And iLounge goes further:

This is, in short, a nightmare scenario for long-time iPod fans: are we entering a world in which Apple controls and taxes literally every piece of the iPod purchase from headphones to chargers, jacking up their prices, forcing customers to re-purchase things they already own, while making only marginal improvements in their functionality? It’s a shame, and one that consumers should feel empowered to fight.

Apple has done things like this in the past. For example, when the new iPod Nano and the iPhone 3G came out, it was noted by iLounge that the way that the device charged itself had changed, rendering many accessories that had charging capablities useless for that purpose. They did say this at the time:

As we noted with the release of the iPhone 3G, Apple alerted developers to this change quite some time ago, so the only people who will be surprised will be the many users with incompatible accessories, including some high-end car kits. Thankfully, it doesn’t disable most accessories entirely, but it’s yet another example of a disconnect between Apple’s “Made For iPod” program and the customers who have relied upon it to purchase add-ons.

This time my friends, this is a disconnect of epic proportions. Currently were are stuck with Apple only accessories. When third party accessories finally surface, you can bet they won’t be cheap as those companies are likely going to have to pay Apple to make sure that Steve Jobs pockets continue to be lined with cash some sort of licensing fee. As a result, I say that the best way for consumers to fight this is not to buy the iPod Shuffle. Or, you can buy the previous generation iPod Shuffle since they’re still available (for now).

Either way, voting with your dollars is the best way to tell Apple that this sort of behaviour sucks.

Microsoft Says IE8 Is “World’s Fastest Browser”….. WTF?

From the “What drugs are these twits smoking” department comes this report from Microsoft that declares Internet Explorer 8 the “World’s Fastest Browser.” I’m not sure how they came up with that although slanting the tests in your favor comes to mind as the likely reason as pretty much every other benchmark I’ve ever seen (let’s take this one for example) says quite the opposite.

I guess that Microsoft is tired of being on the losing end of the brower wars. Still this isn’t they way to give yourself some street cred.

Bell Canada Says That If It Doesn’t Get Its Way, It Won’t Upgrade…. What A Bunch Of Losers!

Recently, Bell Canada was told by the CRTC that as it upgraded their networks it had to give competitors fair access to those upgrades as well. That was a great decision at the time because ISP’s that use Bell’s networks have typically been shut out of getting access to things like ADSL 2+ for example. Which basically gave Bell an advantage in the marketplace.

Now Bell has decided to appeal this decision and if it doesn’t get its way… Well, read for yourself:

In making its decision, the CRTC ignored the fact that such extensive wholesale regulation discourages the development of new, multi-billion-dollar, state-of-the-art network technologies. By inhibiting investments in next-generation networks, the CRTC decision would create a new urban digital divide – in stark contrast to the government’s own policy priorities for the Canadian economy.

That translates to “If you don’t reverse your decision, we’re not spending money on our network and everybody will suffer.”

Of course, the only reason why Bell would act like this is that they don’t want competition from other ISP’s. Hopefully the CRTC grows a pair sees through this and tells Bell that they’re out to lunch.

Sprint And Palm Have A Webcast About The Pre…. But Offer Little In The Way Of New Details

Sprint and Palm hosted a Webcast (news.com has a transcript here) about the upcoming Palm Pre. The webcast in short showed off everything we already knew about the device, but it left out two important facts:

1. When will it ship?
2. What will it cost?

I don’t really get why Palm and Sprint are avoiding discussions about a launch date or price. It really gives the appearance that the device isn’t ready for prime time yet. IMHO, Sprint and Palm really need to do something about that before people go back to talking about the iPhone. Oh wait, people have already done that.