Oh man, those first four hundred bites of dirt were not so good. Maybe the next one will be better. -
Stinkoman
I just got back from meeting with a buddy who was telling me how his organization is getting ready to outsource tens of thousands of internal email accounts to Google ... or maybe MSN, they haven't decided yet. We spent a fair amount of time and beer discussing why this is a bad idea, mainly because of privacy, accountability, control, and responsiveness. But it doesn't matter. The people making the decision are blinded by the bottom line and can't perceive the hidden costs.
It occurred to me that this whole "Web 2.0 software as a service" outsourcing craze is remarkably similar to the labor outsourcing craze that hit during the last decade. The people holding the purse strings so desperately wanted to assume that they could outsource their unskilled labor and everything would continue to work exactly as it did in house... they'd just pay less. It's unskilled labor, what difference does it make who does it, right? They should know better, there's no free lunch! When you outsource, you're sacrificing layers of control and adding layers of complexity. And because of that, sometimes the end result is toy trains painted with lead.
Programming, the creation of new software, has already been through this. Now with Web 2.0, technology infrastructure is next on the auction block. Internal corporate email isn't a profit center, so let's outsource it! But the result is going to be the same.
Does it make a difference that the outsourcing is going to be domestic this time? No, not really. In the Internet world of SMTP hops and server logs, the number of hops, and the number of administrative layers, matters more than geography.
UPDATE: And now in 2012, the circle is complete: http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/12/the-insourcing-boom/309166/
"As Macworld approaches, reports of an ultraportable MacBook are following patterns of previously expected products that eventually materialized," analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to clients. "We believe these reports are legitimate and continue to expect Apple to introduce a MacBook with a significantly smaller form factor."
- Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster
One might assume that Piper Jaffray has an "inside source" at Apple. And maybe they do. But another thing that these analysts do is watch the supply chains. The individual components of a new computer product have to be ordered months in advance, so by watching who is buying what in what quantities, predictions can be made.
If you consider the individual components that might go into a "Macbook Mini" or might go into an "iTablet", there's actually a fair amount of overlap. So here's to hoping they've read the tea leaves wrong, and we get something less "Macbook Mini" and more "iTablet".
Why?
For starters, the UMPC market already has several offerings, and even though they are neat little devices, I don't see a lot of people ditching their traditional laptops for one. So if you were jonesing for such a device, they're here now, but it's a niche market. It's not stealing global marketshare from traditional laptops. Since OS X is already considered a niche market itself, a UMPC running OS X would be targeting a niche of a niche. If you're a one-man startup, "niche of a niche" smells like opportunity, but if you're already a multi-billion-dollar company, it smells like a poor return.
What's more, I think Bill Manning is on target when he says that UMPCs have "a cool factor of 10" but ultimately they aren't practical. He's touting the Macbook as his laptop of choice, but his criticisms of UMPCs apply in general.
An Apple UMPC just wouldn't be much to shout about.
A true tablet computer, on the other hand... that's my wish. At the end of my work day I want to get away from my office and away from my keyboard, but darn it, I'm a nerd and I still have leisure activities that involve a computer. I'd like to kick back in my recliner and read some mail or read some Apple ][ History or play a web game, and do it reclined and do it without pounding keyboard.
An iTablet would address all of Bill Manning's gripes about UMPCs. It would have a larger screen, but still be small and light, because you omit the keyboard half of the computer. It won't mess with your muscle memory of your work keyboard, because there is no keyboard. It could have the virtual keyboard, or handwriting recognition via Inkwell, or hey why not both? At this point both types of software are completed products.
My perfect iTablet would have flash-based storage only, and would treat CPU power as secondary to cooling and battery life. The perfect iTablet must run quiet and cool, because who can really keep their laptop in their lap anymore, much less hold it in their hands.
Now imagine this: if you own an iTablet, and you also own a Mac, it gets better. The iTablet itself has a cool, low power CPU. But the computational power of your iTablet actually goes UP when it can contact your Mac, without running any hotter. How is such magic possible? Oh dear, everyone has forgotten XGrid.
I keep Slashdot in my RSS because it's still a great clearing house for links. But the asinine commentary that comes with the links drives me crazy. Case in point:
"One of the selling points of the iPhone was its revolutionary touch-screen full keyboard. But a study has shown that text messages sent from iPhones contain significantly more typso than messages from phones with other kinds of keyboards — and aren't entered any faster."
Yes the virtual keyboard was touted as a revolutionary selling point. But the revolution is not to be "better" or "faster." The point is that the virtual keyboard allows for a mutable interface. When you don't need the keyboard, it's not there, not taking up precious real estate on the surface of the device. Equally important, the touch screen allows for intuitive interfaces that aren't forced thru the keyboard. Slide to unlock, touch a voicemail to hear it, touch a link to follow it, etc. So the virtual keyboard doesn't need to be "better", it just needs to be "good enough."
George Lucas: "I basically worked out a general theory for the Force, and then I played with it. The more detail I went into, the more it detracted from the concept I was trying to put forward. It worked better as I got less specific... So the real essence was to try to deal with the Force but not to be too specific about it."
(From Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays)
And don't we all wish he'd remembered that 20 years later?
The 3D Dock sucks. Much hash has been made about why it sucks, but sometimes the gestalt view of the layman is the most telling. On first boot, on my Macbook with the glossy screen, there were so many glares and reflections - some real, some virtual - that I couldn't distinguish... well, anything. It's a visual trainwreck. Using the defaults command to make it 2D is better, but still aesthetically inferior to the 10.4 dock. I guess I'll be browsing at leoparddocks.com.
The translucent menu bar is irritating. Not so much that I want to pluck my eyes out, but it's harder to read and it doesn't even look cool. It's just pointless.
And the thing with the folders in the dock is insane. How can that be a useful idea for anyone, anywhere? I was looking forward to the Downloads folder with the fanout effect, but that shapeshifting icon thing was just too irritating and I had to take it out of my dock. Please give me a haxie to disable that.
I like the unified look, but I still hate the rounded recessed buttons of Apple Mail compared to the metallic raised buttons of, say, Safari. If you open Apple Mail, Safari, and iChat, and set them side-by-side, guess which one still doesn't look "unified"? If someone with clout at Apple is in love with those recessed buttons (El Jobso?) then why haven't they had their way with other apps like Safari? At least then we'd have the "unity" in "unified".
On the other hand, Apple Mail, traditionally a performance dog since at least 10.3, is much more snappy in Leopard. Props for that, but I always thought that Apple Mail in Tiger, with its weird buttons and poor performance, felt like a stepchild compared to the other bundled apps. Now at least it feels like a peer, even with the odd buttons.
The system as a whole feels much faster, even if it isn't - but I think it really is. Windows drag smoother, minimize faster, Dashboard loads faster (remember in Tiger, the first time you'd go to Dashboard after a reboot, and everything would strain as all the widgets loaded at once? No longer noticeable.)
Quick look is awesome. PDFs, Word docs, text files, source code, movies, iChat transcripts... get a look at any of them without having to open an app. Is there a hotkey for toggling full screen mode without going to the mouse?
Cover flow of directories: Originally I wrote "meh. Not for me." but I take that back. If you're not a big iPhoto user, as I am not, you probably have some folders full of images that are not being managed by iPhoto. Cover flow + quick look is a fun and convenient way to browse those folders.
When you select Show All from a Spotlight search, you now get a real Finder window and not some bizarre supernumerary window. Hurray!
To many people (but, admittedly, probably not most people) Spaces is more of an overdue item than a gee-whiz item. Unix, X11, virtual desktops, old-timers, here's a nickel, blah blah. I used to be a big fan of virtual desktops, so much that I used and loved DesktopManager when I first switched from Linux to OS X. Then when Tiger came out, it broke DesktopManager. After that, I learned to make good use of Exposé and learned to live without virtual desktops. Time will tell if I re-incorporate Spaces into my workflow or not. Binding applications to specific Spaces is cool, and the way that Spaces works with Exposé is cool. I'll probably try it, but I don't automatically assume I'll keep it.
This week, I experienced exactly this problem:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1065874&tstart=0
At first I was sure it was a hardware problem, because it affected the screen both in OS X and when I booted to XP with Boot Camp. I knew the video card was okay, because my external monitor looked fine, but I thought it could be a problem with the laptop LCD, or with the ribbon cable.
But I deleted ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess.plist, just like the last poster said in that thread. Then I did a complete shutdown of the laptop (not a warm boot) and when it came back, it was fine.
Weird.
If you delete com.apple.universalaccess.plist, you will lose any custom keyboard shortcuts you may have defined, but then you can re-create them. Small price to pay.
Peeve of the moment: Whenever some people refer to the Mac's standard Mail program as "Mail.app" or "Mail-dot-app". I also sometimes hear "Terminal-dot-app", and I expect I'm going to hear "Numbers-dot-app". Yes, "Mail" is a very vanilla name for a program. Yes it needs to be disambiguated from other mail programs, and even from the common noun "mail." But you never hear people say "Word-dot-exe". They call it "Microsoft Word" to disambiguate it from other "words". Likewise, let's call it "Apple Mail". After all, that's what it calls itself:
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3)
Google gets it.
From the Q&A section of this week's Apple press conference:
"Introduced multitouch on iPhone, what about for the Mac?"
Steve: "Makes sense for the iPhone, not sure it makes sense in the Mac. Classify that as a research project."
(taken from Engadget)
Some people really latch on to this idea. Other people dismiss it, citing the well-known gorilla shoulders effect. I think they're both right, because they're not necessarily talking about the same thing.
But first, if you're not familiar with gorilla shoulders, you need to be. Try this:
1) Extend your arm straight in front of you, parallel to the floor.
2) Extend your index finger.
3) Keeping your arm straight, rotate your index finger in a circle approximately four inches in diameter.
4) Every third rotation, make a jabbing motion with your arm.
Keep doing that, and make a note of how long it takes you to reach "uncomfortable" and then "tired." It's faster than you think. Lots of people use their arms all day - it's called "manual labor." But the particular angles of using a touch screen display on a desktop present unique physical demands. Touchscreen displays have already been tried in the mid-1980s, usually on the workstations of places like banks, and the fatigue effects became known as "gorilla shoulders."
Now with a laptop, it's a different story. The distance is much shorter and the angle is different. I could see a multitouch display on a laptop, in addition to a keyboard and trackpad. So instead of reaching for the trackpad, I just reach out and touch the thing that I want. Try it on your laptop right now. Personally I'd find that superior for most cases of scrolling, and manipulating icons, but I'd go to the trackpad for fine details, like bandboxing an image region for cropping.
That's why I say both camps are right. People who get excited about a multitouch "Mac" really want a multitouch Macbook, and people who already know the history of gorilla shoulders automatically hear multitouch iMac and reflexively say no, that doesn't work.
Why is it a historic new keyboard? Check out this photo from Engadget. For the first time in a long time, we have a Mac keyboard where the Command key is not also the "Apple" key.
I've had a strange fascination with the history of the "Command/Apple" key ever since I learned that the original Macintosh used the ⌘ symbol exclusively in the interface, and did not have the Apple symbol on its keyboard:
(Photo from aresluna reprint of Byte Magazine)
But by the time I was doing computer lab support in the mid-90s, Apple keyboards had both symbols on the same key, and everyone in the Mac labs spoke of "Command-S" and "Apple-S" interchangeably. When did those two get conflated, if the original Mac never used the Apple symbol?
It goes back to the Apple IIgs, and the Apple Desktop Bus. ADB was sort of an early version of USB, a unified cabling and signaling interface for peripheral devices that was capable of daisy-chaining. ADB was introduced on the IIgs in 1986 and on the Macintosh II in 1987. This allowed Apple to supply a single keyboard model for both the IIgs and the Macintosh line. The Macintosh of course had the Command key as its primary meta key, but the IIgs was descended from the //e and so used the Apple key as its meta key:
(Photo from the Graphical User Interface Gallery)
So the two keys became one on the unified ADB keyboard, to wit:
(Photo from the Flickr stream of jd_wages)
The IIgs finally reached its end of life in 1992, so why did the Apple symbol continue to live on the Macintosh keyboard for another 15 years? Why choose now to get rid of it?
This August marks the tenth anniversary of Macworld Boston 1997, AKA "The Return of Steve Jobs." You can see the video of his speech here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEHNrqPkefI
At the 23 minute mark, he says something very interesting. He says that when he returned to Apple and examined the state of the company, he uncovered two core assets: the Apple brand name, and the MacOS software. Looking back over the last ten years, it is striking how well Apple has executed on leveraging those assets. They have leveraged the Apple brand into markets previously considered tangential to personal computing, and they have continued to invest heavily into creating and maintaining the best personal computer operating system available.
Also notice at the 27 minute mark, when he announces the infamous Microsoft "partnership", how he is carefully conciliatory and diplomatic towards Microsoft. Certainly, that didn't last. Probably, with Apple on the brink of ruin, Jobs wanted the option of increased cooperation on the table, but it turns out they didn't need it. Now, they obviously feel very confident and comfortable in making fun of Microsoft.
A few years ago, at the height of my free software beliefs [1], I was having lunch with a co-worker who was also a free software proponent. He had a cache of license keys for some Microsoft software, and he was sharing them freely with anyone who asked.
"Man, don't do that," I said.
"Why?" he asked. "Screw Microsoft. We want them to lose, right?"
"Yeah, but you're not really helping free software. When you distribute closed source software for zero dollars, you're undercutting one of the advantages of free software."
"Maybe," he allowed, "but that's not what free software is really about. You're talking about free beer and I'm talking about free speech."
"I agree with that," I said, "but that distinction is lost on most people who aren't programmers. Even though we know it hinders them to own a car with the hood welded shut, they just don't see it. So when I talk to some guy's mom about free software[2] I try to use the free beer angle as the lead-in. I say 'you can get all these great programs for free' and she says 'I already get my stuff for free. My son put Windows on my computer for me.' Even when Redhat sells their Linux in boxes at the bookstore[3] they're charging way less than what Microsoft charges. But if everyone is pirating Windows and giving it away, that competitive angle is destroyed."
He said he'd think about it, but I'm pretty sure he went on pirating stuff.
[1] A belief which reached its peak, and has since declined.
[2] Yeah, I really used to do that. Sigh.
[3] Yeah, they really used to do that.
John Gruber was the first person - that I saw - who points out that Apple makes money on Google searches done with Safari's built-in search-box. (i.e. not just browsing to google.com.) That's the angle I was trying to fill in. Apple didn't port Safari just to grow browser share. They didn't do it just to help develop for the iPhone. They did it to make cold hard cash, even if it's not obvious how.
John Gruber's angle and my angle are not mutually exclusive. In order to grow Safari's market share, and the associated search revenues, Apple has to do more than just put it out there and say "we've got the better browser." Firefox and Opera have already been doing that for years. Firefox has had some success with that, Opera less so. Safari now has to compete not only against the incumbent Internet Explorer, but also Firefox and Opera. To entice people, Apple has to create some perceived advantage to using Safari to access some part of "the cloud." .Mac can be the way to do that.
Wait a minute... "perceived advantage" of one browser over another? Isn't that what started the standards wars in the 90s? Well, yes, but that's not at issue here. In the standards wars, Netscape and Microsoft were fighting to control the de facto standards of the entire World Wide Web. If Apple wants to add value to their own web site when viewed with their own browser, so what. Especially if the browser is a free download. Do you feel outrage that the YouTube video player only plays videos from YouTube's own site? Nope.
Helping to develop for the iPhone may be a secondary motivation, but it's not the primary one. I just don't buy that, and here's why: If you're developing a web app with Safari on Windows, you're not developing for the iPhone. You're developing for Safari on Windows. Any web developer worth his salt will tell you that you can't develop for browser X on platform Y and just assume that browser X runs the same on platform Z. Differences in the way the application interacts with the underlying platform APIs can cause subtle bugs. (Or not so subtle!) You must cross-test against each combination of browser and platform. Indeed, the initial surge of Safari/Windows exploits hinges exactly on this fact:
On the OS X platform Apple has enjoyed the same luxury [...] namely intimate operating system knowledge. The integration with the originally intended operating system is tightly defined, but the breadth of knowledge is crippled when the software is released on other systems and mistakes and mishaps occur.
- Thor Larholm
URL protocol handlers on the Windows platform work by executing a process with specific command line arguments. When Apple released Safari for the Windows platform they neglected to implement a proper level of input validation for these arguments
- Thor again
Plus, to take advantage of the iPhone's new hotness, like making calls, you need an iPhone to test that stuff! So you may as well do your early work on the browser with which you are most comfortable. Would Apple like that browser to be Safari? Of course. But from the developer's own perspective, having the iPhone as a deployment target is not a compelling reason by itself to do your early work in Safari.
At the D5 conference, Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs about iTunes on Windows. Steve Jobs said there have been hundreds of millions of downloads of iTunes for Windows, to which Mossberg said "that makes Apple one of the larger vendors of Windows software." Given today's announcement about Safari on Windows, you almost wonder if Mossberg's question at D5 was a plant.
While Safari on Windows is a neat idea, you have to wonder what Apple is trying to get out of it. iTunes on Windows is a no-brainer - that's the only way to shop the iTunes store, so Apple clearly makes money on it. But what do they get out of porting Safari? Are they trying to take control of the de facto web standards? No, certainly not. In order to do that they would have to (a) take substantial market share from Internet Explorer, which is something that Mozilla hasn't been able to do in 10 years. And (b) they would then also have to wrest enough market share from Firefox so that Apple could dictate standards. Not only is that not going to happen, it's not even worth fighting for, because the RIAs are coming (i.e. Flex, Silverlight, and whoever else jumps into that ring.)
It seems more likely that in the near future, .Mac is going to gain some new capabilities, and even though it will remain cross-browser, I suspect you'll see the really super whiz-bang extras only work with Safari. Since Safari now runs on Windows, this makes every Windows user a potential .Mac customer. When they see their friend with the Macintosh using the super cool .Mac whiz-bangery, some small percentage of them will go ahead and sign up. And as the Long Tail tells us, the Internet is so damn big that a small percentage of any global market returns big bucks. In short, Safari is about to become the loss leader for .Mac in the same way that iTunes is the loss leader for the iTunes store.
If this plays out like Apple wants it to, not only will it grow .Mac revenues, it will also continue to grow the halo effect.
I mentioned this to a couple people and they considered this strategy to be a stretch. And they're right, it is. But it's a stretch that incurs almost no risk to Apple. With iTunes and Boot Camp, Apple has fostered a group of veteran in-house Windows developers. Porting Safari was not a large investment. If Windows users start buying .Mac, hurray, if not, nothing is lost.
On the one hand:
New eight-core Mac Pro performance a mixed bag
On the other hand:
"12:23pm - Easy to spread multiple threads across as many processor cores as you want -- demo [of Compressor] shows octo-core encoding jump to 100% across all eight cores. Shows live bookmarks in video, publishing to iTunes. All done!"
- Apple Keynote Live from NAB 2007
Even though SMP has been around for years, it hasn't really been mainstream until now. Around 1997 or 98, I bought an SMP Pentium II system. A few years later when I built a Pentium 4-based computer, I couldn't even find a consumer-grade SMP motherboard. I think that as computer prices continued to fall, the cost of SMP, relative to the other components of the computer, pushed it out of what the consumer market would pay. But now multi-cores have changed the economics again, and the writing is on the wall - multi-processing is going to be a fact of life for all but the most modest entry level computers for the foreseeable future.
Eventually, general purpose software will catch up and take full advantage of the multi-core processors. Until then, buy the tool you need and not more. If your daily software doesn't use eight cores, no one is forcing you to buy eight cores. If you buy a nail gun when all you really needed was a box of thumbtacks, maybe you're compensating for something.
When a Mac, or a Linux computer, or a Sun, is broken, there is still a logic to the brokeness. I have tools available to me for inspecting the computer, and I can pursue the symptoms of the problem, and the symptoms lead on a rational path to the cause. In the cases where I can't fix the problem, I at least feel confident that I have exhausted all my options and the machine is truly well boned.
Trying to troubleshoot a Windows computer is like trying to reason with someone who's had a psychotic break:
Me: Hey what's the problem?
Windows XP: I don't have a problem.
Me: Well you're not remembering my preferences. Really, what's the problem?
Windows XP: BLAH BLAH boogity boogity boo BLEE BLAH BLARRRGH!
Me: Can you be more specific?
Windows XP: I don't have a problem.
Here's a good time I had trying to reinstall Norton Systemworks:
Norton: I'm installing... gosh, I can't do it.
Me: Why not?
Norton: I'm not going to tell you. Would you like to rollback or retry?
Me: What's the point of retrying if I don't get a chance to fix the problem?
Norton: Well, those are your choices.
Me: Fine, retry.
Norton: Nope, still can't do it.
Me: Okay, I give up. Roll back the install attempt.
Norton: Heave... ho... nope, I can't do that either.
(Remember when "Norton" meant "unquestionable quality"? Not anymore.)
I was going to buy a book on Aspect Oriented Programming, but all of the books I can find use AspectJ, and I don't currently use Java for anything. So I went looking for online resources about the principles of AOP and found some good stuff:
- Gregor Kiczales describes AOP to Google
This is excellent. It starts a little dry - like every good thinker, he's pedantic in laying down his groundwork. But in the last half hour, after he's described the concepts of AOP, he goes on to describe some of the potential applications and you'll start to see, if you hadn't already, that this is Teh RoX0rz.
- Gregor Kiczales's 1997 paper on AOP (download PS or PDF on the right)
I went ahead and ordered a book that uses AspectJ, but really I'm interested in applying AOP principles to Ruby programs. [1] [2]
If you've heard of AOP but haven't looked into it yet, don't think that AOP is trying to be a silver bullet supplanting OOP. Kiczales has OOP continuing to be the "primary decomposition" for most software designs. AOP is a "secondary decomposition" providing a way to formalize the parts of the solution that don't naturally decompose into an object model, and then cleanly graft their calls onto the object hierarchy without having to tear the whole thing apart and put it back together. How many of you have worked on an object-oriented design that had a "Utility" class which was a bag of miscellaneous yet essential functions? Yeah, that. AOP brings order, abstraction, and flexibility to the bag o' functions, and also makes it super easy to add new calls wherever they are needed.
To me, the most compelling example is the example of adding logging to an established system. Let's say you inherit a project that has 50 classes and each class has a method called log_message(). But, for whatever reason, log_message() is defined independently in each class. Further, the implementation of log_message() is woefully insufficient in 48 of the 50 classes. Normally, what do you do? You check out all 50 classes and edit their log_message() implementations one by one. Probably, since you're at it, you'll try to factor out the commonalities, but either way, you're editing 50 classes. But with AOP, you can define a new Logger aspect and then define a pointcut pattern that intercepts any call to log_message() from any of the 50 classes and invokes your Logger in place of, or in addition to, log_message() itself.
Another interesting example is the factory example. Say you have 3 or 4 classes with constructors, but these constructors are guarded by a Factory class and should not be called from outside the Factory. (Think singletons.) You could probably do something with protected to enforce this, but that can lead to brittle dependencies in your class hierarchy. With AOP, you can lay pointcuts over all of the constructors, and throw an error if the caller isn't coming from a method of the Factory class.
Now that they have a Super Bowl victory, the Colts are free to try some "experimental" game plans.
Like releasing the whole defense and having the offense play both ways.
Reggie Wayne is training at cornerback and Peyton Manning is training at linebacker.
Manning was quoted as saying "I get two paychecks this way."
Harrison plays corner, but since he has better hands than 99% of receivers, he just intercepts any balls thrown to his man. That way he never has to tackle.
One of the local TV stations just finished running a Top 50 countdown of the best Simpsons episodes ever. They had Homer's Religion at #2 and the Dental Plan at #1. Those are great episodes, but I wouldn't have put them at 1 and 2. They made some other very questionable choices, like putting the Spring Break episode way back in the 40s.
My top episodes would look like this:
8. The Swimming Pool ("See, your epidermis means your hair, so technically, it's true.")
7. The Lemon Tree ("Run faster boy! He's got a taste for meat now!")
6. Homer Goes on Disability ("Stupid bird! I never should have left you in charge!")
5. Dental Plan ("See here Mr. Burns, I don't go in for these backdoor shenanigans.")
4. Lisa's Beach Vacation ("SWEET MERCIFUL CRAP! My CAR!")
3. Homer's Religion ("If I'm wrong, I'll recant on my deathbed.")
2. Bart's Soul ("Milhouse give him his soul back! I've got work tomorrow!")
1. Bart's Spring Break ("No, Principal Skinner, Bart's never been to Thailand.")
#1 and #2 is a really close call, because the Spring Break episode probably has more laughs, but Bart's Soul is the only Simpsons episode that is also beautiful.
By now everyone who knows about the iPhone also knows that Cisco owns the trademark on "iPhone" in the United States. Cisco and Apple were in negotiations over the US trademark, but then Cisco got mad and decided to take it to court. Everyone assumes it's a matter of money. But now Cisco has said something very interesting:
What were the issues at the table that kept us from an agreement? Was it money? No. Was it a royalty on every Apple phone? No. Was it an exchange for Cisco products or services? No.
Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future.
- http://blogs.cisco.com/news/2007/01/update_on_ciscos_iphone_tradem.html
Reading between the lines, Apple already tried greeting Cisco with a dumptruck full of cash, and Cisco said "no, thanks, we already have several of those." Rather, Cisco wanted to be allowed to play in Apple's new ballpark. Rather a cagey move by Cisco. But Apple, famous for exerting end-to-end control over their products, naturally balked at that.
But then why did Apple go ahead and announce it as "iPhone" anyway?
For starters, Apple does own a trademark on "iPhone" in some other countries, just not in the United States. If you announce a product which will (eventually) be sold in those countries, but you make the announcement in a country where you don't hold the trademark, have you broken the law? I don't know.
Also, remember that about 6 months ago, Apple pre-announced a product codenamed "iTV" which is now officially known as tv (or, AppleTV.) Are they going to defend against the lawsuit by saying iPhone is just a project name? Is that a defensible position? Again, don't know.
Several people, including the venerable Bob Cringely, are going with the theory that any publicity is good publicity, and announcing it as the "iPhone" now cements the correlation between iPod and iPhone in the public consciousness, even if it ships under another name.
Or, did Apple just assume everything would work out the way they wanted? That would be a very John Sculley thing to do, but it's not beyond possibility.
