Apple

Mac App Store Downloads Top One Million in First Day

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Mac App Store Downloads Top One Million in First Day

I’d love to know how many people have the app store installed to generate 1m downloads. Remember this is an OS update after all.

France, UK, Uncategorized, US

London vs. Paris…

Ask most historians in the UK and New York became the center of the world after the Second World War, I always wondered about this view of things.

Google Ngrams shows New York passing in front of London in 1910.

London, Paris, New York (English)

I’ve not mentioned Paris which lags behind London for the whole period. But then it is in English. How do the Germans see the world?

Apple, Technology

Mac App Store…

OK, it’s here.

Apple – App Store – Buy, download, and install apps made for Mac.

I’m on the record as saying that this is a massive day for Apple. Today is the day that it becomes easier to buy software for a Mac than for any other platform.

The next few weeks will contain grumbles about developer contracts and prices but the result is that today Apple has the only platform that works from end-to-end. Life gets difficult for the competition starting today.

Here are my first impressions:

  • The prices are all over the place. Obviously if you’ve charged 50€ for a packaged software for years it’s now difficult to go for volume and sell for 5€. However, I can’t see Pixelmator being 24€ for long. They probably need to be under 10€ although it’s worth more.
  • Where are Google, Real, Microsoft, Adobe and the others? I can only imagine that marketing or legal stopped them being there on day one. They’ll regret it.
  • It’s a shame that it doesn’t detect the third party software that I’ve installed.  That would have been really good.
  • Why does Software Update still exist? System Updates only?
  • Does this kill MacHeist?

Overall, there are tactical issues to solve but when the strategy is so clearly right I think that they can afford to spend to the time getting this right.

Politics

Horlicks…

“After going through that experience, Woolley had an epiphany: financial institutions that react to market incentives in a competitive setting often end up making a mess of things. “I realized we were acting rationally and optimally,” he said. “The clients were acting rationally and optimally. And the outcome was a complete Horlicks.” Financial markets, far from being efficient, as most economists and policymakers at the time believed, were grossly inefficient. “And once you recognize that markets are inefficient a lot of things change.”

Wall Street, investment bankers, and social good : The New Yorker.

Apple, IT, Technology

Wrong about the iPad…

“Whatever the collection of reasons, the iPad seems to be the first Apple product that corporate IT shops are looking at with their blinders off and the Macalope didn’t expect that.”

The Macalope Weekly: Wrong about the iPad | Tablets | MacUser | Macworld.

I think that this fundamentally misunderstands whats happening on the ground. In the mid-90s I remember PCs arriving in offices, purchased on the stationary budget and network cards for PCs on expenses.

Employees are buying and using iPads. IT departments are hating it, it’s just that they don’t have the choice.

Architecture, Environment

Failure of architecture…

Every so often modern architecture is blamed for something or another; normally social ills and the end of civilization.

I’ve never understood why a tower block works for the rich of London but never the poor of London.

Then I saw this…

“From the beginning, however, there was confusion about whether the street decks were public or private space. They were used by milkmen and postmen, but the police deemed them private property and refused to patrol them.”

Joe Moran’s blog: Streets in the air.

So the issue could be simply that these places were mismanaged from the start. They are now being torn down at great environmental cost; why?

Random thoughts…