Allowing the world to realize that Microsoft Office isn't required for real work to get done.
David Chin
To set up Facebook chat with the Messages Beta app, visit this page after you've logged in to Facebook in the browser on your Mac.
Messages completely replaces the iChat app after installation, requiring you to restart your machine.
So far, Messages seems to be running smoothly on my iMac with the latest version of Mac OS X Lion.
John Gruber, pointing out the most egregious inaccuracy in Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography:
It is in fact, completely and utterly wrong. NeXTStep was not “just warmed over UNIX”. Apple did get NeXT’s OS to run on Mac hardware. Mac OS X 10.0 was a hybrid of Mac and NeXT technology, but it was clearly the NeXT system with Mac technologies integrated, not the other way around. iOS — the system that powers both the iPhone and iPad — is a direct descendent of NeXTStep. Even the original iPod, which wasn’t based on NeXT technology, used the column-view concept for hierarchical navigation that NeXT pioneered.
Gates makes it sound as though Apple’s NeXT acquisition was effectively only a talent acquisition. It was in fact both a talent and technology acquisition, and what was then NeXT technology now serves as the basis for both Mac OS X and iOS.
It’s almost impossible to overstate just how wrong Bill Gates is here, but Isaacson presents Gates’s side as the truth. This is no small thing for Steve Jobs’s biographer to get wrong. Jobs’s career was long, rich, and varied, but if you wanted to reduce his entire life’s work to a nutshell, it would be exactly what Isaacson, channeling Gates, so completely misunderstood: the software system created by NeXT, which was then continuously expanded upon and refined by Apple.
To really understand what Steve Jobs meant when it comes to design, you have to read this piece by John Gruber.
5 years after the introduction of the first iPhone, and RIM still doesn't get it.
You either grow top to bottom, or bottom to top.
…Apple has significant profits [and] has done so with the premium end of the market. This means as they saturate an upper-tier they can grow down into the next tier which is always larger.
Imagine a pyramid shape. Other companies have tried to market the low-end in the maxim "race to the bottom" which gets them very little profit — sometimes they lose money — but gain marketshare in the hopes of gaining mindshare they can eventually grow upward into and capitalize on economics of scale. The two problems with that in the [consumer electronics] market is that you can't maximize economics of scale when you have hundreds of products and you can't gain mind share when even the people that buy your product know it's not good. Every now and then an inexpensive product within a market will actually be of good quality, but not often.
A few products to consider…
PC: Apple takes about 35% of the PC market's profits as of 2009 yet they have done nothing but grow as the rest of the industry shrinks. They also had over 90% of the market share of PC unit sales over $1000. There is little risk of them losing this market and a good chance they will grow it. Perhaps that's what they did with the $999 [MacBook Air].
Smartphone: Apple has the bulk of the profits but when you consider the movement from dumb phones to smartphones there is plenty of growth before the number of sold handset will peak. There is also the resale value of the iPhone that helps to many users on new handsets every year instead of holding onto the same device for years.
Tablet: This market is nascent. It will grow on its own but it will also feed off the PC market for years. Some Mac cannibalization but mostly the non-Mac PCs. It will have a decent repeat customer like the other iDevices though not as much due to the higher cost of entry. i suspect that within 2 years the iPad will be more profitable than the iPhone arm of their business.
iPod: This is evidence of a peak being reached. it now makes less each YoY quarter. That said, Apple wasn't sitting still and was thinking about the next thing. I have no idea what that will be after the iPhone and iPad but I suspect it will be something that you wear. I also don't think it will be for at least 5 and probably more like 10 years.
It leads us to believe that Apple still has PLENTY of room to grow in the US, and HUGE areas for expansion world wide. For instance, the iPhone still isn't even on the largest carrier in China. That carrier alone has 3 times the number of users of AT&T and Verizon combined.
Plus there's the opportunity for Apple to reinvent (or reimagine to their liking) existing markets, just like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad did. Apple probably has some big plans for the future, and that gives them room for growth.
Perhaps the biggest growth opportunity for Apple is in (what was once, and will again be) its core business: computers.
The company has currently an incredibly low share of the market in countries like India, China, Russia, and Brazil, all of whom are inexorably getting wealthier. The folks who can afford it won't be caught dead with Dells, Acers, HPs, etc — they're are going for Apples.
The valuation implications of Apple achieving US-like shares for computers in just these four countries are simply immense.