I still edit all my photographs (thousands) in LightZone, and have always vehemently made statements against Adobe Photoshop. Not because of the lack of photographic capabilities but primarily because of the proprietary language it forces you to understand before you can use Photoshop effectively.

Photoshop remains the “vi”- editor of photo editing, powerful yet very cumbersome to use. No secretary uses “vi” today, and the future of Photoshop is moving further and further away from the mass market Adobe should be trying to attract. Nothing new there.

But Photoshop CS4, after a long track record of rather meaningless innovation and UI revamps now includes some very nifty innovations worth looking at, as the videos demonstrate. Content aware scaling (from a company Adobe acquired last year), panoramas and the new 3D capabilities are very cool. So, if you’re interested in rudimentary 3D capabilities before you jump into Maya, check out Adobe’s website where the nifty new capabilities of Adobe’s Photoshop Extended are available for roughly $1,000. But, perhaps this time around, the premium price is worth it.

Credit where credit is due.

Tags: Photography, Photoshop, LightZone, Maya, Photographers, Adobe

Facebook, one of the fastest growing social network sites has really screwed up User Interface (UI) design with its new look. Take a look at the screen capture above. Now you tell me in 5 seconds the intuitive difference between clicking on: [Facebook] and [home], [home] and [profile], [profile] and [Georges van Hoegaerden], [settings] and [profile], and [settings] and [Georges van Hoegaerden].

But more importantly, Facebook has clearly not read my blog on removing the technology language to appeal to consumers, an issue that prevents many consumer technology companies from maximizing their growth potential. But who’s counting at Facebook these days?

Facebook is a technology company that exposes social networking capabilities in a very technological fashion. The examples are plenty: the workings of the UI described above, the categorization of data optimized to suit their internal data-models and the very complicated way to add applications to the platform, and we can keep going on. But for now, they’ll get away with it. Other consumer technology companies won’t be that lucky.

A great user interface can never be an objective by itself as that just presents a pretty face, try living with a person that only has that. The ultimate user experience (and this is where I politically depart from the previous analogy), is defined by an ecosystem of capabilities, cost and ease-of-use that creates the real and sustainable appeal.

BMW figured out early on that the Ultimate Driving Experience™ is what sells cars albeit their engine capabilities and timing was their initial core strengths. Today they sell the sum of all parts, The Ultimate Driving experience: great engine capabilities, spiffy performance, practical design and excellent comfort - a thrilling way to drive from A to B.

Facebook currently has a horrible “Ultimate Social Experience”: good (but no longer unique) social networking, so-so performance, impractical design and pretty bad comfort. Those are probably the reasons why 90% of my Facebook friends never use any Facebook features but simply create an account.

Many of Facebook’s recent poor decisions (including ad network issues etc) are evidence that user growth is outpacing their ability to grow up. And that could be catastrophic. Facebook is a great social networking platform with a lot of potential that many people rely on.

Facebook better watch out and prevent that too many people will start hating it. Those same users may use Facebooks own social networking capability to turn it off as fast as they initially turned it on.

Tags: BMW, FaceBook, Performance, Platform, Consumer

Two days ago we got word about the demise of the Photoshelter collection marketplace. Not surprising because Photoshelter was not a marketplace. Technologists have a tendency to slap the marketplace label on anything they build, without understanding what it truly means.

Marketplace models, criteria, funding and execution are fundamentally different from premium market models. Photoshelter was really nothing more than a replica of Getty Images without Getty’s money to buy inorganic growth.

Here is how Photoshelter failed to meet marketplace rules:

Marketplace violation 1: Photoshelter artificially arbitrated supply, through a lengthy subjective signup process in which Photoshelter arbitrators determine whether you get to play.

Marketplace violation 2: Photoshelter artificially arbitrated demand, as it aimed to sell it to “the industry’s top buyers”, not to everyone.

Marketplace violation 3: Photoshelter gave preference to images they liked, rather than simply connecting any supply with any demand.

Marketplace violation 4: Photoshelter deployed a sales-force (from Getty and other photo agencies) that promoted a premium market model, like any sales-force driven by quotas would.

But CEO Allen Murabayashi makes a few damaging statements in his blog on why they failed and tries to blame that on the market as a whole:

“Licensing photography is fraught with clearance issues”
150 Years of photography exchange has resolved the fundamental issues of rights management quite effectively. Getty-Images, Corbis and others have gone through a well defined process in order to clear rights in their move from analog to digital exchange. Photoshelter has relied too much on a model that requires people intervention, while the majority of rights and enforcement can be embedded in and enforced by technology and made the responsibility of the asset owner. In the same way eBay sellers are responsible for the fulfillment of transactions. That enforcement guarded by a true meritocracy will quickly weed out bad behavior (that plagues any marketplace).

“Stock photography is a slow growing market dominated by a single player”
Nonsense, the term stock photography is an artificial classification (made up by its current participants) that bares no value. Today $22B of photography is exchanged of which less than 10% is transacted electronically. Growth through the premium market model of Photoshelter is limited because the photography market requires a free-market.

“Research Requests move too quickly for individuals to react in a timely fashion”
Perhaps they do in the “top buyer” segment, but certainly not in all. Since Photoshelter artificially limited the demand characteristics, any assessment of market traction and behavior should be taken with a grain of salt.

“Buyers desire more diversity, but convenience (aka subscription deals) triumphs this desire”
Absolutely, buyers deserve diversity, and buyers should be presented with the ultimate experience (subscriptions are not the answer). What has fundamentally changed in a 150 year old analog photography market is that demand does not come from a few buyers, but a highly fragmented buyer market that will want to use an image for any purpose (not just for your average advertising purposes).

“A crowd-source model for stock will likely never work”
Absolutely disagree. Photoshelter deployed a premium market model on a market that requires free-market principles. It failed for the same reason Getty Images fails to become a market-leader in the un-arbitrated exchange of digital photography (identified by roughly 30% market ownership). Getty Images grew by inorganic growth and acquiring other photo agencies with staff photographers that create the majority of images it sells (less than 7% come out of third party supply according to a statement by its CEO in 2006).

Photoshelter, as lovers of photography, seemed to have their hearts in the right place but not their execution. And they neglected to respond to our offer for help one year ago, when we saw their demise coming.

Tags: Photographers, Photography, Getty-Images, Growth, Free-market, Marketplace

Let’s look at photography (my hobby), arguably the most important purchasing-driver of computers (after the ability to access the internet) by consumers. Media management (yes, on the desktop) remains more than a Billion dollar market opportunity.

Case in point: new announcements of Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture tout enhanced interoperability with third party plugins to manage and edit your photographs. Don’t you feel good about that warm open-source-like karma of interoperability?

I don’t. Both vendors have deployed their next trick to customer imprisonment. And plenty of uninformed customers will fall for it. Here is why you shouldn’t:

1/ There is no need for an additional platform for photo management.
Photo editing capabilites of both applications are mediocre (no layer based editing, no advanced local editing etc.) and their asset management capabilities are little more than a replica of file system capabilities (even photographic attributes such as exposure, aperture and other attributes are maintained by the file-system metadata today). So, except for making nice photo albums and calendars, why else would you slug thousands of photographs in a proprietary asset management format that is less reliable than the underlying file-system and requires seperate backup and archiving strategies to maintain.

2/ Plugins have worked for years on file-system based photographs.
The announcement of the interoperability with plugins is really old news as those third party applications have been working with file-system based photographs for years. This is a platform on top of a platform, designed to milk more money out of customers and locks them into a proprietary technology stack. A prison with the windows open is still a prison.

3/ The operating system needs-to and will evolve faster.
The pace of meaningful innovation of the Personal Computer OS is deplorable. Microsoft has not made the PC operating system significantly smarter over the last ten years and that has opened the window of opportunity for Apple to surpass Microsoft in usability (rather than functionality). The ability to easily create and manage user-generated content such as, Photography and Video, has now become important adoption drivers to the platform, OS-vendors have yet to respond to. Photographic capabilities should be built-in (not priced-on). These days the unique media experience of the platform is the differentiation that sells the computer (since they all do internet quite well).

As a consumer, buying into seperate photography management siloes will cost you significant time and money (as the former CEO of a photo software company, researching the alternatives, I tried). My advice is to wait until an agile vendor steps up and turns media management into a core competency of the computing experience.

In the words of Ray Lane (partner at KPCB and former COO of Oracle) who once said customers are better off skipping some steps of innovation (in his case to skip client-server for three-tier internet architecture), I have just presented you with my reasoning to skip-over Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. Not because I don’t like some of its functionality, but because it is strategically a dead-end street.

The next evolution of media management will soon eradicate the old one and deliver lasting differentiation to the vendor that owns it and provides a much, much better media experience to the consumer.

I am planning on having something to do with that.

Tags: Platform, Photography, Consumer, OS X, Operating System, Innovation, Integrity, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple

We communicate with each other using a common language and we obviously become more effective when we all understand that language. However, technology complicates our lives as each piece of technology we interact with requires us to learn a new (proprietary) language; a set of rules, technology grammar and a unique user-interface experience.

Think about it, when Larry King on national TV stumbles over his own URL (yes, language) and messes up http, semicolon and slash (or was it backslash), I can't help but think about the hell we put users through to use the internet. Only if you understand that language do you get to benefit from its capabilities. That's like forcing anyone that wants to vacation in Mexico to speak Spanish first. The Mexican tourist industry would grind to a halt.

It gets worse, for example, to make photographs look better, Photoshop (and now with Photoshop Express) and many other photo-editing applications deploy a language that requires users to understand the intricacies of color and light and apply that language in the right order.

Here is a synopsis of the skill level my mother-in-law would need to master in order to make her photographs look better: first increase the dynamic range using a histogram, then use curves to change the tonal values to your liking, apply the right white balance and improve saturation and vibrance. Indeed, what I just described is the introduction of yet another language to solve a pretty mundane problem.

To create a web page, we introduce yet another language, a compilation of HTML, Perl, Ajax and Flash usually contained within a desktop product with its own proprietary language. To write a book we wrestle with 90% of Microsoft Word's functionality and language we seldom use, trying to figure out how to create a table of contents. In Excel we use another language consisting of non-intuitive formulas (like sum() ) to derive values from other cells. Should I go on?

So why is it that we seem to get away with it - or are we? For one, lots of people make money understanding a computing language that fewer others do. Web designers don't always create better design, but they understand the language of design, and can implement it. So, web designers don't want you to know there are better ways to do this. Adobe is probably not in a hurry to remove the language and erode its premium market, it could have created much more democratization in the website creation process. Many times have designers, with corporate marketeers in tow, abjected the use of Rapidweaver, a tool that attempts to democratize web design (this site is built with it).

But we are fooling ourselves. The democratization of the internet requires that we make technology more accessible and easier to understand and implement. Only then will it reach real mass adoption.

We could easily build technology that figures out how to make the majority of images look better, or design a web page by drawing it - rather than programming, or have Word make recommendations for a table of contents when it discovers one.

The iPhone is a great example of how packaging existing technologies in a different way, can make people feel that they don't need to learn a new language to communicate with it. My 3 year old daughter uses it. Each of the individual technologies in the iPhone had been around for a while, Apple "just" packaged it so the language became intuitive.

But Apple is not the only vendor that can remove the computing language from the equation, others just need to pay attention to it.

So when you design products, pay attention to the removal of the language, fewer yet intuitive options - rather than more. After all, for thousands of years, we ourselves, have communicated in many other ways than verbal, the majority of our communication remains behavioral.

Innovation has become the art of packaging a flawless user experience, rather than a race to add features. The latter quickly becomes commoditized anyway.

Tags: Apple, IPhone, Experience, Microsoft, Adobe, Photography, Internet, Democracy, Communication, Innovation

I bought the Apple TV the moment it came out about 9 months or so ago. Initially surprised by the tethering requirement to a computer running iTunes, I used it quite a bit as a giant picture frame (showing off on a 50" plasma), playing music during parties and watching kids shows with my daughter. Now, with Take 2, Apple has stepped it up and provides HD quality movies (and 5.1 Dolby Digital audio) and, less talked about, removed the need for a separate Airport Express to stream any iTunes audio through your Entertainment center.

But very interesting to see is how a technology called Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous - 13 year old Apple technology, first available in AppleTalk) automatically finds and connects iTunes capable devices on the network and staving off the need for central media management. And it does so quite well and transparently. Movies, music purchased on the Apple TV show up on the iTunes on your laptop and vice versa. When Comcast showed off a central media server for the home at CES 2007 that could stream content to any of your cable connected devices, I thought it was going to give Apple a run for its money on the movie rental business. But more than one year past and still product from Comcast in sight. Don't even start about the current Comcast DVR mess, possibly the worst UI experience I've ever encountered (the Tivo deal may ease the pain a little, but the early news is not encouraging). With Apple TV, no more runs to Blockbuster, or mailing DVDs to and from Netflix, just sit at home and watch whatever you want.

What I admire most about Apple is its ability to not just create new products but that it adjust its business and operating model so those products can succeed. That is a gift bigger companies like Oracle (my former employer) and Microsoft can learn from. Media and content are the new Consumer Packaged Goods of this century and if technology vendors don't invest in the ecosystem around it their technology solutions will continue to yield mediocre user experiences and sub-par adoption.

In converging media markets, the new leaders are going to be the ones that build disruptive business models first and great technology products to support that, second.

Can't wait for Apple to strike a deal with Comcast and similar to the iPhone strategy, replace the Comcast DVR with an Apple TV capable of receiving regular broadcasts as well as tap into the power of iTunes. All Apple needs to do is use its cash war-chest to "threaten" ComCast to go at it alone, just like it "convinced" AT&T it would be better for AT&T not to let Apple become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator.

Tags: Apple, Broadcast, Comcast, Consumer Packaged Goods, DVR, Netflix, Media, Entertainment, ITunes, HD, Mobile

Apple has just released Aperture 2.0 today. A nice product to manage your photographs has gotten even nicer. But -- there should not be a need for Aperture.

Digital asset management, which is the predominant function of applications like Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, should not need to exist, especially not if you are Apple. If Steve Jobs were to take his own media hub strategy serious, advanced asset management capabilities should be available right in the file-system, as a function of the OS. Asset management for photographs is why people buy computers today, so why still does a separate application need to deal with our most precious assets. Incremental revenues perhaps?

Today's proprietary photo management systems eat disk space like nothing else. Non-destructive editing is supported by making superfluous copies of originals (especially when using an external editor). The derivatives are usually many times larger in size than their originals (especially when stored in TIFF or PSD), which forces you to stock up on hard disk space. I will keep using LightZone as my main photo editor and save precious disk space by leaving my photographs right where they are. Can't wait till the operating system innovates and supports photographs natively.

Tags: Adobe, Photography, LightZone, Aperture, OS X, Asset Management

Bose is a great example of a company that delivers a unique experience. I have had a few after sales experiences with Bose and they've all been very positive and consistent. Most recently I purchased the new iPhone adapter for Bose's QuietComfort 2 Noise Canceling headphone, only to find out that the adapter didn't fit my QC2 headset. After a call into Bose, we found out that 2 versions of the QC2 exist and the adapter packaging did not specify this distinction.

Clearly I was an early adopter of their Noise Canceling technology (I also own the QC1) but they did not punish me for it. With a little bit of tugging they offered to replace my 4-year old headset with a brand new set for free. Gladly my new headset arrived before a 5 hour plane ride to the east coast. Another experience like this with Bose came when I moved from Europe to the US about 12 years ago, I wanted to exchange my 901 equalizer with a 110 volt one (so I did not need to down-convert my 220 volt european equalizer). Again, here Bose offered to replace the equalizer free of charge.

Whether you like the sound of Bose is your own decision, but the flexibility of this, still private company to balance earnings with a sincere interest in keeping its customers happy is admirable. More fundamentally, successful companies understand that building a lasting brand means they pay attention to customer retention. Apple is doing similar things by turning part of their retail store into a support center. Great businesses don't look at support as a cost center but as a way to satisfy customer experience and have them coming back for more.

Tags: Bose, Experience

Photo-editing today is still an art form, a specialized and necessary art - and "endured" by prosumers. The great photography you see hanging on walls, on websites or in magazines, all have been edited digitally. Not necessarily to create some outrageous creative effect but because not a single camera accurately captures what your eyes see. Not since the invention of photography in 1870.

Camera vendors promise better results when their customers purchase a more expensive dSLR (digital Single Lens Reflex) camera, a better lens, a solid tripod, a new filter, and, while we’re selling: a new photo bag. Yet, none of those products do anything to change the fundamental difference between what your eyes see and what the camera produces. With a healthy growth of more than 60% worldwide in dSLR sales (according to new 2007 numbers from CIPA), most camera vendors are not in a hurry to out-innovate themselves as their current stance is feeding their business so well. So, the problem remains, camera output is far from ideal.

So today, the great results photographers strive for can really only be achieved through editing, reproducing what you tried to capture. That editing today happens primarily on the desktop (less than 10% of the whole photography market edits online) and by digital SLR users with a great sense of quality and aesthetics. Products are plentiful, such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture and my favorite: LightZone. Yet none of those products completely hide photographic complexity to its new users; the massive numbers of dSLR buyers that just want to create great photographs.

Photo-editing should work like a car, simply put the key in the ignition and drive (without having to worry about how the engine and the transmission works). The editing tool of the future should embed the photographic knowledge and make decisions or recommendations for you, rather than requiring its users to become proficient in the minutiae of color and light. Just like a car, photo editing should be able to go where others have gone before, enriching the experience of new users on a continuous basis. New editing techniques should be sharable through a language we all understand, a photograph. In short: edit "like-Mike" and me-too editing is born.

I believe photo-editing will move away from what it is today, a basket full of technology tools to a service through which the sharing of editing techniques will enable the new "language" of photo-editing. That dramatically simplified language will subsequently enable editing for the long-tail of the photography market, the massive market of point-and-shooters. New technologies such as Pixenate, Picnik, Adobe Photoshop Express already rush to deliver a new basket of tools for the consumer market. And many others will follow.

Today, plenty of opportunities remain in the prosumer editing space in which no vendor has amassed even close to 30% penetration. New editing capabilities are bound to drive the marketplace in which monetization of photographs and, eventually a free-market for photography can flourish.

What's left for the innovative camera vendor is to build a proprietary imaging pipeline that dramatically reduces the need to edit. With 90% of dSLR vendors using the same imaging pipeline (behind the sensor) the time is right to change the way a camera captures data before it reaches the sensor. In the same way your eyes do very smart tricks before light hits the retina.

Tags: LightZone, Apple, Adobe, SLR, Free-market, Photography, Photoshop

While Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo show impressive results from a console perspective the game-play market today appeals to a very narrow demographic. Consoles are purchased by an age group 25-40 years old. While that demographic may be most capable of purchasing these consoles, we know from the types of games sold at roughly $50 per game that daddy plays more games than his children.

One could also argue that the most playful age range in our lives is from age 2 to 16 years old, yet the games and platforms provided do not meet that demographic. Fewer than 40% of teenage girls play any games, feeble attempts to turn existing games pink did not yield more sales, according to an executive at Electronic Arts.

So, rather than a deep dive in the existing game-play demographic, with even better graphics of game consoles, vendors should focus on a game-play experience that meets real market demand, removes the negative and vegetative connotation of gaming and instead exercises mind and body.

Nintendo has taken the first step of targeting a new game-play demographic and quite successfully so. Robbie Bach, president at Microsoft (who I recently spoke to) described his initial XBOX objective as building the best performing gaming experience. Sorry Robbie, wrong business objective. Sony is by far the leader in console gaming and has great opportunity; to lose or bolster its lead. Execution will be key, Jack Tretton will have his hands full on that one, but Sony's powerful assets in home entertainment should help.

While the console vendors battle it out on price and performance, we are seeing new entrants prepare themselves to enter the home entertainment demographic with new "game-play" propositions. The console vendors will see competition at a different level, Apple is just one of them.

Tags: Electronic Arts, Gaming, Xbox, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Entertainment

To quote Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal at Consumer Technology Ventures last week, quality is an important pillar of success for consumer products and I couldn't agree more. Many times products are hyped with incredible promise (marketing) but the product either doesn't work as advertised, requires other services to be activated or simply is not ready (does Zune ring a bell).

From that perspective I am less happy that Apple (the only PC platform I have ever bought), is gaining popularity. Price pressure and popularity does not always do wonders to quality.

I currently use a 2-year old Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz of which the fan (right after the one year warranty expired) makes a noise like a sawing machine, and I had to reduce the speed of the processor to keep the fans from cooling. For work I purchased a $999 23-inch Apple flat-panel that produces stunning image quality and brightness, yet the ghosting of images on this expensive piece of equipment allows me to see which window was there 5 minutes ago. I expect the best from Apple and I am willing to pay a premium, but I am not willing to pay a premium for under-par quality.

Now, I am not picking on Apple because it is the worst performer in the consumer space, quite the opposite. Apple undoubtedly is the best performer in the business, but given that, Walt's comments make even more sense to me. Switching off of Apple is not an option for me, but griping is.

Update:
After unscrewing at least 20 screws on my out-of-warranty Powerbook G4 (directions courtesy of iFixit), I discovered that the reason why I had reduced the processor speed on my laptop for over one year and avoid the fan from coming on was created by, get this: a quality control sticker in the fan compartment that had come loose and was spinning along with the fan. A simple removal of the sticker solved the issue.

Tags: Wall-Street, Mossberg, Apple, Premium, Quality, Consumer, Images

Did Cingular read my my rant about the ugly designs of Blackberry? The new 7130c from Cingular (not to be mistaken with the still ugly 7130 from other carriers) comes closer to what modern design for a PDA-with-phone should like like.

Having tested a ton of phones, PDA's etc over the years, the 7130c is a very attractive competitor to the bulky Palm Treo 650 and ... certainly more usable. The small dimensions of the 7130c cuts the size of the older Blackberry almost in half, a little thicker than the Motorola RAZR (which I love) and a bit taller, the 7130c still fits in the pocket of my pants easily. I like it so much, that I decided to get rid of my old Blackberry (on eBay) and my RAZR (although I'll keep it around, just in case) and combine two capabilities into one.

The 7130c with EDGE internet connectivity is actually fast enough to make it a delight to browse the internet (and visit the WAP site of CNN) and read e-mail, while waiting for the traffic light to turn green. The industrial design is good enough (not great) and appealing, the screen that is clearly visible in bright sunlight and adjusts automatically to your surroundings. This is absolutely the best screen I've ever seen on a mobile device.

Phone services are integrated into the PDA capabilities, but this part could be more intuitive. The heritage of the scroll menus from the Blackberry PDA platform complicates things beyond what is necessary. More 'special purpose' buttons would solve the problem. For now however, the Blackberry 7130c has become my new one-eyed king in the land of the blind.

Tags: Blackberry, EBay, PDA, Motorola, Cingular, AT&T, CNN, Design

Tags: Apple, Photography, Intel

Apple's latest Aperture software personifies how the technology industry fuels its own growth by creating new software that drives new incremental hardware requirements. Managing an increasing library of 16,000 photographs is what I do when I am not working or playing with my family. And when Apple's Aperture came out late last year, I jumped on the promise to manage those assets (or liabilities in some cases) more effectively. While I had the bottom-of-the-barrel of Aperture's hardware requirements, a not so shabby 1.5Ghz Powerbook, the expansion with 2Gbytes of memory and a 160Gbytes replacement hard-disk seemed a foregone conclusion. But not so fast, Aperture's performance that is. Even this configuration leaves you yearning for a large flat-panel, so the windows and photographs can be displayed in sizable fashion and with the clarity they deserve. An Intel Dual-Core wouldn't hurt either.

The bottom-line is, a two year old, top-of-the-line Powerbook is suddenly on its last leg. I can only wonder what upcoming updates of Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Dreamweaver and others will do to my geriatric Powerbook. Desktop software is still an important catalyst, fueling new hardware replacements in a slowing PC market. Software and services will live alongside each other for quite some time, in the interest of PC manufacturers and admittedly, end-users.

Tips for Aperture enthusiasts:
Two tips that will smooth a transition and took me two months to figure out: 1/ Remove all videos from the iPhoto library, Aperture will abort, in my case after 14 hours, if you don't. 2/ De-fragment your hard-drive after a successful import, or simply copy the main Aperture library to a backup disk, remove the original and copy it back. The Aperture import process fragments the library dramatically; I ended up with a Library of over 6,000 file fragments, absolutely killing performance.

Tags: Blackberry, Design, Microsoft, Apple

Last week I bought a Motorola Razr to replace my Treo650. It is beautiful, highly functional and tiny, and folds open to something substantial in my hand. The Razr synchronizes all business data from my Apple Powerbook wirelessly over Bluetooth, including most contacts and calendar appointments. At a quarter of the size, and a third of the price of a Treo it keeps me just as informed. No wonder Motorola sold 6 Million of them. Lucky Ed Zander, Motorola's CEO who rolled into Motorola (from Sun) after the Razr had already been conceived.

Apart from previous comments in this blog about the Treo with regards to UI, target market etc., the Treo's bulky form-factor (which still reminds me of the old Ericsson, pre-Sony phones) with its pointy antenna, really started to bother me. I felt like a cop patrolling the neigbourhood with a gun in its holster.

But the real reason for my change is a strategic one. I lost confidence in the Palm (Source) platform and so apparently has Palm's CEO. The announcement of the Treo700 based on Windows Mobile has reduced Palm to a commodity hardware player with not much to be proud of. Owning and refining the Palm OS and segmenting it to identifiable target markets would have been the winning business strategy.

Amazing is the power and persistence of Microsoft who now delivers the Windows Mobile version on PDA phones from Motorola, Sharp, Samsung, HP and other brands, steadily repeating its Windows PC software success downstream. I am eagerly awaiting Apple's foray in the phone OS business.

Tags: Palm, Treo, Motorola, HP, Apple, Windows, Razr

"Apple is going in a different direction than we want to go." That is the statement from a long term Apple customer (10+ years) we recently talked to. The Apple Store in Palo Alto has recently been revamped to where the iPod and its accessories seem to make up the majority of the new store layout. Media software has been tucked into a little corner in the back. Ent