Category Archives: Meta

Meta, Personal

What I use

Every now and then I think it might be helpful if I outlined here the various tools I use to get my job done. Aside from acting as a form of recommendation to others, it’s perhaps a helpful set of disclosures as well. I hope this proves useful. I’ll probably update it periodically to add or change things. This first version was written in November/December 2014.

You’ll notice right away a serious bent towards Apple products – both hardware and software. I first began experimenting with Apple products back in about 2005, when we bought a Mac Mini for our family, and we began buying iPods around the same time. Several MacBooks followed, and iPhones started showing up in 2008. I find Apple products to be highly reliable, beautifully designed and high-performance devices that do the jobs I need them to do well. They also run all the software I need them to (mostly as apps downloaded through Apple’s various App Stores). The other thing with the Apple ecosystem is that it’s self-reinforcing – the more (and the more exclusively) you use it, the better it gets, because the parts work together well. However, because I have to regularly use other devices for testing and reviews, I try not to over-commit to Apple’s various products so that my workflow doesn’t break down entirely when I switch to something else!

Hardware

My main computer is a pretty maxed-out “Mid 2010” version Mac Pro I acquired a couple of years ago when we were starting a small video production company and I had to do a ton of video editing. Here are the basic specs:

Mac Pro specs

This thing is my workhorse and it’s plenty powerful to do everything I need to do and then some. I never have to worry about running too many programs at once or having too many tabs open. It’s running Yosemite, and in fact was running the Public Beta right from when that first became available.

When I’m traveling I currently use a 13″ current vintage MacBook Air that’s on loan from Apple as a review unit. I’ve found this to be the perfect traveling computer – small and light enough to fit easily in my backpack or a briefcase without slowing me down, starts up instantly when I open it up, runs for hours and hours, and just the right size to use on an airplane or on my lap.

When I’m traveling I also always take an iPad, and when I’m attending a conference where I’m going from one meeting to another, the MBA tends to stay in my hotel room or my car while I carry an iPad Air with a Logitech Thin Keyboard for typing on. I find I can take perfectly adequate notes, do email and the other things I need to do during such a day on the iPad without any problems. And of course the battery lasts all day, even if I occasionally need to use it as a hotspot to provide connectivity to another device.

My main smartphone is an iPhone, and has been since the iPhone 3G came out. At present, I’m using an iPhone 6, also a review unit from Apple, though before that I was using an iPhone 5S I bought last year. The iPhone is running the latest version of iOS 8, and I generally keep my OS and the various apps on the phone religiously up to date. However, I regularly switch devices and use many Android and a smaller number of Windows Phone devices during the course of the year as various vendors send me review units. I’ve found the recent higher-end Android devices to be very good, and particularly enjoyed the second-generation Moto X recently.

Software and services

The following software and associated services are critical parts of my daily and weekly workflow: Continue reading →

Big picture, Meta

Beyond Devices

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This post is intended to encapsulate the philosophy behind this site and its name. If you spend any amount of time working in or covering the consumer technology industry, you quickly find that it’s dominated by devices – principally, smartphones and tablets. At Ovum, our relatively small devices team dominated our press coverage, not because those analysts were better than the others, but simply because of the huge volume of stories written about the latest smartphone or tablet launch across the industry, business and popular press. It’s easy to see why this is so – devices are the most tangible aspect of the consumer technology market and also its status symbols.

And yet there are two key reasons why this fixation on devices is misguided. Firstly, devices serve no purpose of their own – they merely act as endpoints for the things consumers really care about: namely, content and communications. And secondly, the hardware itself is nothing without the software that runs on it – both the operating system and the individual apps. Apple isn’t successful merely because it makes great hardware – its success is predicated on its prior success as a purveyor of content (through the iTunes store) and on its tight integration of easy-to-use software with that hardware.

Samsung, by contrast, is successful largely as the default option for Android smartphones (and to a lesser extent tablets), with its marketing budget rather than particularly good software-hardware integration explaining its present dominance. And there is a reason why most other purveyors of smartphones and tablets aren’t making money: hardware by itself is not that compelling, and that results in commodity pricing and thin margins.

Five parts to the consumer digital lifestyle

There are essentially five pieces to the consumer digital lifestyle, and they’re shown in the diagram below. Two of these are paramount – communications and content. These are the two elements that create emotional experiences for consumers, and around which all their purchases in this space are driven, whether consciously or unconsciously. The other three elements are secondary, with two being conscious choices and the last – cloud services – being somewhat hidden from the user in many cases.

Beyond Devices 1Of course, without devices, consumers couldn’t engage in communications or consume (or create) content, and removing connectivity from the equation is equally fatal. But these are means to an end rather than ends in themselves – consumers spend hundreds of dollars on devices not because the devices have inherent value, but because they are endpoints for content and communications. Equally, connectivity is essential, but to many consumers a pretty fungible element of the equation, one that might easily be provided by a number of companies in a largely interchangeable way.

Why is all this important? Why does it matter which of these things are primary, and which secondary, in consumers’ minds? And why does the inter-relationship between these elements matter? Well, for two primary reasons:

  • The successful companies in this space are those that increasingly combine several of these elements, ideally in a tightly integrated fashion
  • Consumers are increasingly building meaningful and sticky relationships with the companies that provide the primary functionality, while their relationships with the companies providing the secondary functionality are loosening.

That’s good news for companies which are successfully combining these elements, among whom are Apple, Samsung, Google and others. But it’s bad news for those that aren’t, including many carriers but also players which own a number of the elements but haven’t yet combined them in compelling ways, notably Microsoft.

All of these ideas are worthy of further exploration, and that’s what this blog sets out to do. This is the framework through which I’ll be looking at this space and the set of players that competes in it, which is far more than just those companies that make devices, and where the keys to success are to be found in combining these elements of the consumer digital lifestyle in an integrated fashion.