Hype, Reality and Expectation

October 30, 2007

Here's a little history: in the early nineties, much of my consultancy work orbited (often eccentrically) around a binary model: the development of new technologies and helping clients to understand how those technologies could help their businesses and to work out how and when to jump in. It still does.

To complement my arm-waving, I devised a simple model to help demonstrate and explain the accelerating curve of hype, bubble, bust and disillusion that typically accompanies the development of new technologies and services. With tongue only slightly in cheek, I called this the Hype Cycle, and it's proved a useful way of helping people understand the interplay between capability and perception in investment, marketing and strategic decision-making.

First Impressions: Apple iPhone

January 10, 2007

I've been waiting for this. I've been waiting a long, long time. In fact ever since I first cabled my Apple Newton to my Nokia phone and managed to get a feeble-but-exciting GSM data signal from within the bunker of the Palais de Congres in Cannes (it was a very very tedious conference session). And that was fifteen years after my first mobile computing experience – an only approximately luggable Texas Instruments thermal printer terminal with a built-in acoustic coupler: the first mobile combo device. Since then, I've been through the mobile mill: I've carried around every 'mobile' device Apple ever made (if you've ever played with a Newton, you'll understand the quotification of 'mobile'), helped design a couple of them and, when Steve The Revenant canned the Newton in a Learish fit of Alpha Male pique, I reluctantly went over to and through various incarnations of the Palm. Compared to the Newton, it was but a nursery toy but it did have the major advantage of being truly pocketable, unlike the dear old Newt. Along the way I dallied with an early incarnation of the iPaq - for about three days, after which I returned it as "unfit for purpose" - to say that I was disenchanted with PocketPC (as it then was) was a galactic level understatement.

Apotheosis of the PowerBook

March 20, 2006

The MacBook Pro is a very cool, very fast and very shiny computer. But, as of now, largely pointless for me: until such time as core applications for the photographer and image munger are released as Universal Binaries, I'd simply be paying more for a machine that ran Photoshop and its ilk more slowly than my existing machine (under the Rosetta emulation environment), and which wouldn't run some plug-ins at all. Unless I was using Aperture as the heart of my workflow (which I can't, due to its current, "limitations" in RAW conversion), the only benefit would be that the Finder, email and text editor would run ludicrously fast (and they're fine already). The first generation MacBook Pro has also taken some backward steps in its specification that smack of a rush to market.