day 46

microsoft smells $$s 3: over the top

Yesterday, we claimed the PDA market has fizzled, but the personal digital appliance market has not. The Psion and HP machines have sold millions, while the Apple, Motorola and Sony machines have not. Too much innovation. Why? Over-the-Wall Rule: Any consumer product or service that changes too many things at once cannot mainstream. Microsoft, for example, knows that lots of innovation at once tends to scare away sales. So, the giant software company dribbles out incremental improvements over long periods of time. The MIS directors and corporate paper-pushers can handle only so much change at once. Anything that involves more than incremental tweaking, from one release to the next, turns off the green eyeshades. Most of the really cool PDAs have violated the Over-the-Wall rule. The Apple MessagePad pushed technology in too many directions at once, leaving early buyers in a technology daze. Even the techno-elite are left staggering from the array of innovative technologies one must comprehend when buying a MessagePad or Magic Link. You'll find these techies squinting at BYTE magazine articles describing the differences between Magic Cap and Newton Intelligence. Handwriting recognition, functional languages, wireless networking, novel user interfaces, and a new class of applications all add up to over-stimulation of the cerebral cortex. If the geeks can't get it, then how are Cyber Simpsons going to cope? More recently, Apple has tried to turn the MessagePad into an appliance. Apple is releasing a set of four software libraries or "enablers." The Newton Internet enabler combines a dialer, a TCP/IP stack, a PPP/SLIP component, and a domain-name resolver. This is the basis for Newton's support of a variety of potential Internet apps including Web browsers, news readers, mail and Telnet. Similarly, General Magic is trying to save itself by repositioning Magic Cap devices (Marco and Magic Link) as appliances. If this does not work, General Magic will probably go belly-up. Now, their devices are being positioned as a lower-cost notebook replacement for mobile professionals who don't need a full-fledged PC on the road. The company sees a significant role for the communicators on intranets, as well as the greater Internet. Prior to the announcement, MagicCap communicators -- manufactured by Motorola and Sony -- already supported a variety of land-line and wireless mail and paging capabilities. The problem is, Apple and General Magic have too much technology, rather than not enough. They are going in the wrong direction, and will dump millions of dollars into a black hole until they either give up, or learn a few lessons about the software economy.

microsoft smells $$s 1 2 Daily Dose Index