One pleasure of living in the Bay Area is that I get to go to Macworld every year for only the cost of a Caltrain (commuter rail) ticket, around eight bucks. I’ve been going every year, just to the Expo (trade show), with my son, who is now 18. (We always manage either to get a free Expo pass or pay at most ten dollars.) I would take him out of school for most of the day, usually a couple of days after the Steve Jobs keynote so we knew what the news was. We brought our lists of problems to try to solve and gear we wanted to find and buy. We often watched the main Apple presentations on their new products and tried them out on the huge Apple stand. I frequented the HP stand (usually gigantic) with questions on scanning and printing, always ragged on Adobe for no longer having a native Mac version of Framemaker, and flitted between the virtualization companies whose products allowed you to run Windows on the Mac. Oh yes, I talked to Microsoft a lot. My son wanted to see everything having to do with playing and composing music and using the iPod. And we wanted to be part of the celebration of Macolytes. We brought our own lunch and spent four or five hours there.
For this year, the first Macworld since Apple announced a year ago it would no longer participate, we signed up online a year ago, not only to secure free admission but also to provide the organizers with some incentive not to cancel the show. It fell during the Presidents Day long weekend so my son did not in fact have to miss school, so up we went on the Friday. We were in and out in ninety minutes.
The Expo was confined to Moscone North; there was nothing at all in Moscone South, and all the sessions for the paid attendees were in the meeting rooms in between. These are not huge.
We went up and down every aisle; we missed nothing. There were two larger presentation areas, one for general topics (like best of show awards) and the other exclusively for music; we saw them mainly as places to get off our feet for a few minutes. There was one aisle for iPhone apps, which I wanted to see. My son, on the other hand, said there are 140,000 apps on the App Store; why waste your time on these few dozen? I didn’t see anything I wanted.
Microsoft had the most ridiculous stand. They had people bouncing around wearing costumes representing the icons for the Microsoft Office applications. We stayed away. No, we ran away.
HP had a stand, much smaller than in previous years, all about printing and imaging. The one cool thing was a large-format printer (maybe 40 inches, not 80 inches). I got some advice on scanning problems. Hardly any other major companies, and no really big stands.
There were a couple of places showing small accessories, a Dr. Botts stand for example and some stands with iPhone cases, even one with iPad cases. But no place to buy batteries, external hard drives, or other real hardware.
Nope, no wow this year. No oomph. No information. My son will be in college next year so if I go it will be alone. At this point I don’t see much reason to do so.
My how things have evolved in six months
Okay, I’ve been busy with another startup and kind of neglected my blog. I would, however, like to highlight two observations that have come to me during this time.
First, the iPad spells – in my opinion – the decline and ultimate end of the single-purpose appliance. That includes all the e-readers, new Android-based virtual office phones, individual airplane movie players, and pocket game consoles. Nine months ago I was excited by the move in the single-appliance world to common platforms like Android and iPhone OS. Boy, that was a short trend. Android, iPhone4, and just maybe (though not likely) WebOS (HP/Palm) will survive but the plethora of single-purpose appliances will not. It’s not just that people won’t want to own, maintain, and carry around a bunch of these but that they will not be as economical to produce and so will fail in the marketplace.
At this point I cannot predict what other than the iPad will serve as the platform for all the virtual appliances. I hear of such diverse populations building iPad applications in a big way – I’m thinking enterprises of all sorts and senior citizens – that the herd of iPad imitators being developed by all the usual suspects cannot help but dwindle. Pocket devices will include those based on iPhone and Android operating systems; I am hard pressed to find any others, and that includes WebOS, Symbian, and Windows Phone 7.
Observation number two is that I see cloud computing pervading not just markets and applications but – more importantly – people’s thinking. The distinction between public clouds and private (enterprise clouds) is important from a policy and management standpoint but it is not significant from a strategic one. At one end of the spectrum, nearly every startup company I know just automatically assumes it will run its servers and storage on AWS or equivalent. It’s like “who needs to mess with that stuff when Amazon will do it, especially if we hope for a sudden surge in traffic just as soon as our product catches on, which could be any moment, you never know?” At the other end, factors driving enterprises to cloud computing include everything from cost and performance (per usual) to, suddenly, energy saving. Just look at the improvement multiples from Arista Networks’ cloud switch in these three categories if you’re not convinced. In between, entirely new business models are being created because cloud computing makes not just a quantitative difference but also a qualitative one.
For example, I have been heads down working with an eye-tracking startup (www.locarna.com). Eye tracking has been a niche market for neuroscientists and, more recently, website designers (using cameras mounted in or adjacent to computer screens to determine what on the screen draws your eye’s attention). The industry is structured in an old-fashioned, way: a few companies sell (expensive hardware), a small number of customers buy them either to conduct research with or to offer research services with (especially market research), and large product companies buy expensive services to conduct eye-tracking studies on a few subjects (which is all they can afford). You probably have not heard about eye tracking even though it’s been around for, oh, a hundred years.
I think the problem is that it’s arcane, expensive, and standalone. Locarna is unique in envisioning mobile, real-world eye tracking as a cloud service. Free the customer from having to wrestle with the computing to analyze the raw video from the eye tracker and simplify the equipment deployed in the field to simple glasses only. The upshot is quite profound: a democratization of eye tracking so that all kinds of organizations (think schools, clinics, mom-and-pop retailers, startup companies) can take advantage of its benefits, and a fundamental increase in its value by the accumulation of comparative data from what would otherwise have been disconnected studies. I’m not saying you will suddenly find eye tracking front and center in your life, but watch this space.