Month: December 2010

MobileMe Wants to Be [mostly] Free

... Apple sells the service for $99 per year, or $69 for the first year with the purchase of a Mac or qualifying iOS device. For that, the MobileMe subscriber gets services like IMAP e-mail, data syncing, photo and website hosting, an interminably slow iDisk, a questionable Backup, and Find My iPhone. They also get 20 GB of storage and 200 GB of monthly bandwidth. There’s also a MobileMe Family Pack for $149, providing more e-mail addresses, storage, and bandwidth.

In comparison, Google offers free e-mail, data syncing, photo hosting, along with a free office suite, and free Android device location. ... Microsoft provides 25 GB of storage, along with free e-mail and other similar services, all for free. See where this is going? Apparently Apple doesn’t. Apple just recently  introduced Find My iPhone for free, but it basically had to because of what the competition is offering.

via Charles Jade at GigaOm.com

I think that Charles Jade has a point about MobileMe not being a compelling solution at $99 when compared to free but capable services from Google and Microsoft.  But I think his conclusion that Apple should use MobileMe as a loss leader to drive iOS device and Mac hardware sales is flawed.

I think that MobileMe's value proposition is that all it's services are well integrated with the FREE software that comes pre-installed on every Mac (or the integration services available from an iPhone or iPad).  Steve Jobs alluded to it in his speech during the Apple Q4 earnings call in October.   MacStories's  Federico Viticci has a good analysis of that.

Flickr provides unlimited photo accounts — Flickr Pro — for $24.95/year.  My favorite online backup service, Backblaze, provisions unlimited storage accounts for $5/month or $50/year.  Online storage is not too expensive.  To consumers it might seem that they are really paying $99/year for iDisk since Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts are free. I would agree. And $99/year is a lot to pay for 20GB.

But Lev Grossman, writing for TIME about the early days of Internet music sums up my conclusions about how MobileMe can compete.

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy

Seamless and easy integration with the OS is MobileMe's value proposition.  I don't have any facts about the adoption rate of Find My iPhone but I would wager that it's use has increased since it became free.  I think Apple gave away Find My iPhone to bring attention to MobileMe — very few of my Windows colleagues had ever heard about it — and as a way to test the waters and measure consumer adoption for what they are really planning.  Apple has completed building a large data center in North Carolina and there is a quite a bit of speculative coverage about what that data center is North Carolina will be used for.

What if MobileMe came in two versions?  A low cost (US $20-$30/year) or "light" version and a "pro" (US $50-$99) version.

The light version of iDisk would offer similar storage and syncing capabilities to Dropbox — 2GB.  You would also use the iDisk storage for iPhoto and iMove galleries and me.com address for iWeb hosting.  The email and calendar account would be limited to one user with 1GB of storage (separate to the iDisk storage). Apple could offer it free for one year with the purchase of a new Mac, iPhone or iPad.

When the year ends Apple could provide easy renewal (auto-renewal) and an option to upgrade to the "pro" version.  The pro version should have features that meet or exceed ( shared storage and multiple accounts ) the free services being offered by Google and Microsoft.  I think this would give Mac — and iOS device owners especially — a taste of what is possible and hook them into the Apple eco-system.

I'm not an analyst and I'm often wrong about a lot of things but I think what I suggest is quite possible and doable.

HyperPrime 50mm f/0.95

In low-light photography and cinematography, the lens exceeds the perception of the human eye. From nightscapes to campfires, now you can shoot in situations that are often impossible to capture with a normal lens.

via noktor.com

OMG! I would love to have one of these for my Nikon.

Comments on Google Books

On one of my online groups someone started a discussion about Google Books.  I chimed in because I had concerns about Google's normal lack of consumer friendliness and the cloud storage thing.

Why bother with the ugly Google Books store when you can use [Amazon] Kindle which has more device support, a larger catalog and actual customer service?

One of the groups members responded.

Being able to read a book in a browser isn't elegant.  But technically I could read it just about anywhere, on anything that has a browser and I don't need a specialised piece of hardware to do so.  Do you get what I'm saying?

He's correct.  Very few are going to sit and read a novel on the computer. It’s an option that’s not really an option. It’s like trying to promote a car by saying it’s available in pink.

As for the read anywhere options.  Kindle has them all beat.  I don’t use iBooks because the catalog is small. Apple doesn’t have the deals in place. I do have the Nook reader app, the Stanza app, the Borders e-reader app, and the Kindle app for iPad/iPhone. I can read any book from those catalogs and I expect the apps for the Android market can do the same.  I prefer the Kindle solution because of the very large catalog andubiquitous device support — for me that means Macs and iPhones/iPad but Windows and other smart-phones are supported as well. Plus … I can lend my friends/family/coworkers my e-books.

But he did have a point about formats:

The biggest problem with the current trend is that you get locked into a device. Want B&N content? Get a Nook. Amazon? Kindle. Yes, some universal formats (like PDF) work on many devices. But wouldn't it be nice if there was one universal format and everyone made devices for it?

I don’t think consumer care about “open” in the context of hardware devices ( or even understand what that means ) as much as geeks think they do.  For most consumers, ease of use and utility usually trump open. Otherwise both Microsoft and Apple would be niche players and Linux would be the people's choice.  Make it easy and understandable and you’ll get the consumer’s dollar.

However, I think consumers do care about data formats and moving data between applications. They don’t care if the formats are proprietary; they just want to know they can get things to work. “Can it read Word documents?” is often the first question I get when I recommend iWork or OpenOffice as a Microsoft Office alternative. No one asks me whether or not the format has been blessed by a standards committee.

Is there an open e-book format that supports a business model where the publishers and authors can protect their intellectual property? ePub is an open standard book format.  iBooks and other a few other readers supports the ePub format.  But once you put right management systems in place the e-book is back to being locked to a single device — negating the advantages of a single standard format and confusing the consumer.

I don’t think we will see a universal e-reader format anytime soon. The fact is that universal right management does not work well. These systems are usually designed around a single shared master and the device or software vendors all share the risk and the reward of the one key. Once that master is leaked or stolen all the content from every vendor is unprotected for every device. Then new keys have to be generated and distributed to all the vendors simultaneously.  Stolen/leaked master keys is one reason why I have to keep updating the firmware in my Blu-ray player or risk not having newer movies work. Last week my Sony Blu-ray player refused to play Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen until I updated the firmware.

I don’t see that Google has done any innovating with Google Books. I think that all they have done is provide a store that can sell you a version of a book that is compatible with your choice of e-reader. A nook device owner still has to buy the nook version of the book. Basically, Google Books is a more of universal e-book store not a universal standard format e-book store.  I already have an app for that.