Robin Bloor's  Instablog

Netsuite, one of the rising SaaS vendors, recently unseated SAP from a subsidiary of Asahi KASEI. The cost savings were huge!

Fear and Loathing in Redmond

Apple is an unusually difficult company to read. Most other companies telegraph their punches, but Apple does the opposite. It even misleads Apple watchers, so that when it releases a product it will be a surprise, in some way at least. This strategy has served it well in recent years. Before any major Apple event, like for instance the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) that just took place, there is a rolling wave of prepublicity that builds up like a tsunami approaching the shore line. The consequence is that the event and the announcements at the event are  well reported, even when there is very little to report.

It’s became obvious to me at the start of the year that the Kindle was going to fail as a consumer device. The sales had not been bad - encouraging actually, with Amazon running out of stock over the holiday period. That should have been auspicious, but on New Years Eve I ran into one of the entrepreneurs who founded Lexcycle, the company that introduced Stanza. I reported on our conversation in One Million Users: Is Stanza Killing The Kindle? and later reported on Amazon’s acquisition of Lexcycle. I’ve not changed my mind about the Kindle. Here are 10 reasons why.

ust as Apple was unable to keep a lid on the news of its iPhone before its official announcement, it hasn’t been able to completely quell the speculation surrounding its imminent media tablet. In its teleconference to discuss its most recent and very impressive quarterly results Apple’s COO, Tim Cook, was derogatory about netbooks yet again. Apple is clearly positioning itself to produce “the device that the netbook wants to be, but clearly isn’t.”

I’ve just reviewed 10 Pointers To What Apple’s Netbook Will Be Like and right now I can’t disagree with anything suggested there. It seems pretty much on the mark. The new device will be a tablet, no keyboard laptop and the price point will fill the gap between the iPhone and the low end Apple laptop.

I said most of what needed to be said about Amazon’s Kindle with
One Million Users: Is Stanza Killing The Kindle? I’ll reiterate some of what I wrote then, in the light of recent events, but I’ll add to it. There are 2 points: