Greener Desktop

The definition of a fad varies a little from dictionary to dictionary but essentially what they all boil down to is this (from Wiktionary):

“A phenomenon that becomes popular for a very short time”

There is no denying that the iphone meets at least half the definition of a fad. It has become very popular in a very short period. Not long enough to make it to the list of enduring fads like the Rubik’s Cube or Skateboards.

In fact it wasn’t until the second iphone was created and launched world wide just over a year ago now that it really began to pick up pace.

The question is though, will the iphone just turn out to be a fad? Will all the cool kids be carrying around the next Motorola, Nokia or LG by this time next year?

One thing we can be sure of is that it’s starting to lose its street cred or “geek cred” as some call it. When you see grannies and stay at home mums using a phone that used to be the sole the domain of designers and the “technorati” you know it’s nearing the end of its adoption lifecycle. In fact someone did a lot of research into this a while ago and came up with something called Roger’s bell curve and the technology adoption lifecycle. The iphone is indeed in the late majority phase (where your slower than average adopters are). In other words it is no longer cool. Sorry Mr Stephen Fry.

This by no means proves it as a fad. No more than being called a shiny, stupid toy by the haters does.

What all this leads me to is an article I read about the death of the Croc shoe. Who’s death unlike the iphone I could not possibly even shed a single tear for.  What an ugly, ugly excuse for a shoe. At least the iphone looks nice.

You know those stupid pieces of footwear that started off as a fairly niche product suited for a single purpose that were very well marketed as being a shiny all rounder type shoe that might even work on public pavements. Kind of like sticking a phone on a multimedia player and calling it a smartphone. Yes! I am going somewhere. Crocs are to shoes as iphones are to, well … phones.

The article – named How Crocs Crashed was very positive and actually went on not to so much focus on how the Crocs fad failed but how you can keep your brand fresh. What I got out of it being a negative nelly and all is the exact opposite. I saw the massive parallels between what Apple are doing right and what they are doing wrong.

The keys to keeping a brand “hot” from Ries’ pieces. Along with my iphone take on them:

1. Dampen demand

This is one thing Apple certainly isn’t doing. In fact they’re adding so much fuel to the iphone fire I’m beginning to wonder whether they were behind the invasion of Iraq.

You just can’t escape the brand in Sydney. If you’re not walking past an Apple store you’re looking at an Apple ad on the back of a bus, on the side of a bus shelter in a magazine, newspaper. They’ve even managed to convince the media that there is no other phone. I’m sure this is the same in any major first world city.

Apple’s marketing department are flogging the iphone for all its worth. It’s almost as if they think it might dissapear overnight. A sure sign of a fad if ever there was a good sign.

2. Resist line extension

This is one area in which Apple, at least when it comes to the iphone, have managed to resist all temptation. Even when their biggest fans have yelled and screamed about it. If you pay any attention to the iphone you would have heard the rumours about the iphone nano, the apple tablet and a qwerty iphone. That’s it. They’re all rumours.

You maybe applauding Apple right now and thinking how smart their marketing department are. However, they aren’t just doing it because they’ve read Ries’ blog. They’re doing it because they’ve seen what it does to the big boys’ profit margins. It reduces them, drastically. In fact Nokia barely make a few dollars on most of their phones while Apple continue to make hundreds.

3. Control Distribution

Apple initially did the right thing in this area by making the phone exclusive to a particular provider in a particular country but the lock-in in their biggest market, the USA, is starting to have a damaging effect.

No longer is the AT&T/Apple partnership considered exclusive. It’s now considered a burden by an ever increasing portion of Apple’s customer and potential customer base. People might actually soon be ditching their iphones just because of AT&T.

4. Focus on Core Consumers

This is probably what will finally lose the battle for Apple. That young, technology savvy and high disposable income core that the iphone rode the wave of are now starting to tire of it. The endless lock in, the lack of customisation, the ever growing list of wants will finally be fulfilled by someone else if Apple don’t pay attention to it. This is where the flood gates will open and the wave of oppressed customers will finally escape. It will only take someone to open it and like the Croc the wave will just go somewhere else.

5. Expand globally

Well you can’t fault Apple on this one. They did this, but as with the Croc Apple flooded the market. There’s some countries that Apple just stepped into too quickly and lost a lot of face and rapport doing so.

Will the iphone just turn out to be a fad or it will it stay with us? Only time will tell but there’s no doubting that given some of the warning signs it will be an interesting product to follow.

Full disclosure: I am actually the author of iphones suck so I come full of bias. This is a blog after all and what are blogs if not opinionated.

Every time I hear about more middle class, educated parents not vaccinating their children or another outbreak of easily preventable diseases in our schools it makes me angry. Vaccines are fundamental to our way of life.

We in the western world have it lucky. Our health care, hygiene and preventative measures against disease and epidemics has never been better. Smallpox was the first disease to be eradicated completely thanks to Edward Jenner’s vaccine and a world wide program of systematic vaccination.  This disease (I use the past tense) used to kill an estimated 400,000 Europeans a year in the 1800s. Considering the population of Europe during this century was under a quarter of what it is today that would mean in today’s figures over 1.5 million deaths a year. Just in Europe. Polio is a disease that is incurable, debilitating and up until the 1970s was still affecting Western populations. Today it is all but eradicated. Without the help of vaccines our lives would be a lot shorter.

There is no denying that vaccines have been the biggest single contributor to our good health and long lives. Having all but eradicated any disease that vaccines exist for.  Why then are there parents out there who are refusing to vaccinate their babies?  Awareness and myopia are to blame somewhat. Vaccines are voluntary and most parents have grown up free from the horrors of these diseases. They simply don’t know why it is so important to immunise their children. The government needs to spend more on awareness, it’s a simple fix for these people. However, there is another group who cannot be reasoned with it seems. These people are convinced that vaccines are causing autism.

(more…)

Most of the regular readers of this blog and those who know me personally probably know by now that i hate the iPhone. With a passion. It’s not that I particularly like any other type of smart phone out there (my Nokia E71 is ok). It’s just that the iPhone stands for everything wrong with the world.

The straw that broke the camels back today and hence lead to this rant is an app (no link coz you iphone fanboys will just buy it to spite me) called Birdhouse and while they have done a great job doing up a promotional video for it which has world class production values. The application itself is ….. USELESS. It’s beyond useless in fact. It’s just a notepad for the iphone.  I don’t own an iphone but I’m fairly certain it has a notepad feature already and if it doesn’t then that’s one more reason for it to burn in hell along with all the idiots who bought one.
(more…)

James, we’ll call him as he would like to remain anonymous was, just six months ago the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of one of the big four banks in this country. James had a mansion in Mosman, a beautiful blonde trophy wife, 2 adoring kids (both in top private schools) and played tennis every Sunday with an ex premier. Now he lives in a one bedroom apartment alone and despondent. Next week he may end up on the street with so many other “misfits”.

For James it all started when his boss, the CEO of the bank called him into his office. Angrily his boss shouts..
(more…)

The Sydney Morning Herald just published an “article” today that can only be called a fully paid for advertorial, poorly disguised as an article.

The article itself starts off by bagging  established photo sharing sites. Actually Flickr and Zenfolio are the only two real photo sharing sites mentioned.  The author then introduces subject of the article and praises the slickness of a site which I can only really describe as a flash version of a photo sharing site from the 1990s. It reminds me of when I first tried Yahoo back in university. Which has of course moved on since then. The author then goes on to paint a dramatic story of unrivalled passion from the creator of the site. Apparently it took him four years to make it. Ouch!
Anyway enough of the aesthetics as the author and the creator of this new photo sharing site have a real gripe which is backed up by quite possibly the most ridiculous and completely unsubstantiated claim I have ever heard.
(more…)

I’ve long been a follower of the Big Mac Index and its poorer (or is that funnier?) cousins like the iPod index. It’s used as a measurement of the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) of various nations around the world and involves taking the current price of a Big Mac in around 120 countries, a product that should theoretically cost the same everywhere and converting its price to US dollars. What you’ll find is far from parity. Some currencies appear over valued and others under valued. For example the Australian dollar appears to be vastly under valued simply because of the fact that a Big Mac in Australia is a lot cheaper than in the US. Likewise the Euro is overvalued because the average burger there is more expensive there than in the states.

(more…)

Anyone who catches public transport in Sydney whether it’s buses, ferries or trains know that the system is groaning under the pressure of the regular patronage. Not because Sydney is growing rapidly (although it is) but because the state government has refused to invest in bringing an ageing system up to scratch.

I personally have lost count of the number of times it has taken me an hour to get to work ( a whole 5 kms from home). Walking to the bus stop, waiting 20 minutes while dozens of buses pass through completely full and then sitting on the harbour bridge with literally hundreds of buses in front and behind mine.  On to York street (the major inflow into Sydney from the north) and there is a sea of red lights and blue buses. Sometimes I imagine how long it takes for the poor people who have to travel on another 5 kms to get to Central Station. It must be at least another hour sometimes.

(more…)

Today the Australian government announced their intention to go ahead with building a national broadband infrastructure, themselves. Apparently none of the tenders were up to scratch. Including those from the big players like Optus. Telstra was dumped from the process a long time ago.

Theoretically this is a great move. I have long said that the government made a big mistake when they privatised Telstra. Effectively creating a private sector monopoly on telecommunications. The difference between a public and private sector monopoly is greed. Corporations by their very nature are greedy. When Telstra was privatised it should have been split up into retail and infrastructure. With infrastructure not only servicing Telstra retail but other players. Infrastructure would have remained a public service.

So what the government has just announced is effectively what should have been done 11 years ago. Hooray right? Now for the bad news.

The government has effectively cut out the middle man when it comes to implementing their Internet filter. Since they will control the wire they will also control the Internet. This is great for the government since cooperation from ISPs has been a problem all along. The ISPs have known all along that the filter stinks. It’s bad news for them and it’s bad news for their users. Telstra the largest ISP in the country refused to participate in any trials and during the initial round of trials a lot of the ISPs that did participate dropped out.

Part of the motivation for building this network seems to come from frustration over what the private sector can deliver but the conspiracy theory in me says that a lot of it has to do with pushing it’s paternalistic filtering agenda through. With one hand the government giveth and with the other it taketh away, our rights and liberties, anyway.

Most Australian state governments government quietly announced last year that if ANZAC day fell on a weekend then that day would be the officially gazetted public holiday. Not the following Monday. What this means is that for the majority of workers, the Monday to Friday 9-5 crowd ANZAC day is no longer a public holiday.

(more…)

It’s well known that the Rudd campaign was the first federal election campaign to use social media effectively. The year was 2007 and the slogan Kevin 07 rang thick. Not just through old media but online as well. Obviously this wasn’t the first time the internet had been used to help reach potential voters. Websites, blogs and display advertising have all been used in the last few campaigns. I remember seeing banner ads for Howard’s campaign as far back as 1996 when he took on the then encumbent Labor party. The difference in 2007 was that the dialogue changed. It went from being one way communication to a conversation that listened to and engaged with the voting public. It also quite likely won them the election. There was a huge swing towards Labor much of it coming from young, first time voters. Who obviously felt engaged by a party and potential prime minister who was willing to listen.

(more…)