Earlier in May, word got out that Apple is planning to invest $1 billion in a server farm. The facility, to be located in the State of North Carolina, will follow a similar (albeit smaller) $600 million undertaking by Google. As could be expected, analysts, bloggers, and the Twitterverse the world over speculated about the possible uses for the investment, but I don’t think anyone hit the nail squarely on the head. I think Apple will use its new server farm to completely cut the cord between its iPhone product line and the desktop. And it will do so in a big way. Read more »
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NuevaSync logo courtesy of NuevaSync
As some of you may know from my previous posts, I have been an outspoken complainer about the lack of wireless over-the-air (OTA) calendar synchronization options for the iPhone. Simply put, unless you have access to a Microsoft Exchange server (medium to large corporations do) or pay for MobileMe (with which you can’t share calendars with friends and family), there is no easy, intuitive, or otherwise streamlined method to synchronize a web-based calendar such as Google Calendar with the iPhone. Luckily for us iPhone users, this has finally changed thanks to one company: NuevaSync. Hit the Read More link to find, well, more!
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Computer-based calendaring: the background
Today’s calendaring applications help us coordinate our work (and play) time. For some time, calendaring was something we did on a desktop-computer basis. These “high-tech” solutions, as some would describe them, offered many benefits over traditional paper-and-pen calendaring and planning solutions. The most significant of these benefits was (and still is) the act of making changes to a schedule: no longer does the user have to erase/white-out/cross-out a changed event and re-write it somewhere else. By using computer-based calendars, all the user needs to do is drag the re-scheduled event to its new location in the calendar. Yet these early solutions offered little (if anything) in terms of sharing your schedule with co-workers, family, or friends. Read on to find out how digital calendaring can help us and what changes need to happen in order for it to improve. Read more »
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These days, it seems like Microsoft’s business is getting attacked from every angle. What’s most interesting, however, is that the software giant is being challenged the most in those areas that it holds a significant share of the market. From the Mac going after Windows on the desktop, iPhone gunning for (and surpassing by years end?) Windows Mobile devices, Linux infiltrating the server market, and OpenOffice along with Google docs chipping away at the all-mighty Microsoft Office – the big M has many companies to pay attention to these days. As of late, Microsoft has been so busy saying goodbye to Bill Gates chasing its competition, it forgot to show up to a scheduled fight with one of its most feared closest rivals.
“Exchange for the rest of us”:
Let’s see what Microsoft’s identifiable markets are: home users, business users, corporate customers. In an interview on Windows Weekly a few months ago, a Microsoft executive in the online Live division explained how the company sees corporate users also as home users who want to enjoy their computers and have fun with them when not at work (my paraphrase). He noted that it was Microsoft’s goal with Live to unify the experiences of such users. That’s great and all, but just tell me one thing: how does a tech company that has been (incorrectly) relegated by the media to be the best choice for “home users” beat you in making “Exchange for the rest of us”, when Exchange is your own (Microsoft’s) product? It’s so embarrassing that it overshadows Windows Me (the biggest flop to leave Microsoft labs).
Just in case you have been living under a rock for the last few months, that company with the “home user” target market goes by the name of Apple, Inc. You know, the company who is known for turning certain industries upside down and re-inventing the business processes within them. Apple announced MobileMe on June 9, 2008 and dubbed it “Exchange for the rest of us”. That “exchange” reference, as mentioned earlier, is alluding to Microsoft Exchange – a corporate/large-business email and PIM tool/service. MobileMe basically does Exchange but for the consumer – on a personal subscription level. Herein lies the question: how does Apple, a company so focused on the “home user”, roll out something Microsoft should have been selling for the last five years?
You see, somewhere along the lines of Xbox breakdowns, Vista problems/negative PR, and chasing after copying Apple with Zune, Microsoft completely missed the boat. For a nominal fee to the user, Microsoft should have created “Exchange Hotmail”: a paid-for part of Hotmail that “brings your data with you at the speed of *push*” (my marketing tagline). It should have been the scaled down, personal version of Exchange that integrated with Hotmail/Live mail in the cloud, integrated with an Exchange-compatible mobile client, and pushed out to Outlook/Windows Live Mail on the desktop. It would do push email, calendar, and contacts the way Exchange does it, only Joe User would be able to sign up for it himself. But it wasn’t to be. Apple brought it first because Microsoft was too busy defending its “server plays”. Most likely, the big M felt that introducing a personal version of Exchange tied to Hotmail would in some way enroach on its own user base of corporate Exchange users. But that’s just a load of bollocks, since the two markets using Exchange enterprise and my proposed Exchange Hotmail would be different (a corporation would still run an Exchange server for company-wide email and Joe the employee would simply subscribe to Exchange Hotmail for personal use).
On second thought, the company did roll out a scaled down version of its server product for home users dubbed Windows Home server. Why could it not have applied the same type of thinking to an email and PIM system? After all, the new Microsoft is all about software plus services (as described in the linked memo by new Microsoft chief Ray Ozzie). Exchange Hotmail would have been a perfect play for Microsoft. So in the end, Microsoft is left with a very popular online mail solution (Hotmail) yet has not made a significant effort to monetize it. Apple, on the other hand, has beaten Microsoft at their own game and has brought out a kick-butt web service and, along the process, used Microsoft’s “Exchange” moniker in its description – almost as a mokery.
On triple thought, what has Microsoft really done to Hotmail and its consumer online services lately? Sure, they have copied Yahoo! and made Hotmail “drag-and-drop”. But what Apple is really great at doing is making an end-to-end solution, as the comapny has done with iPhone and MobileMe. The latter is the perfect complement for the iPhone user. Microsoft hasn’t seen the light at the end of this tunnel, and the jury is still out to see if it ever will.
P.S. Throughout the article, I put “home user” in quotation marks because for years it has been thought that “home use” was the best use of Apple Macs. Though this opinion is beginning to change rather quickly – and as it should – many uninformed tech journalists, “experts”, and those in tech media still wrongly believe this to be the case.
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