Who is Farhan Lalji?

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is kicking off in a couple of minutes. I don’t own a Macbook or an iPhone (yet) but I’m pretty excited. As I mentioned earlier I’m a guy who waits for a couple of product iterations and when the price comes down a bit before I dive in. In addition my phone contract is up later this year and I’ll be relocating in the next couple of months which will mean it’s time for some new toys – hello Apple… or blackberry, it depends on what’s announced later today.

It’s incredible how much excitement is generated from the WWDC, with speculation running rampant from tech blogs to the BBC. Flickr has over 11,000 pictures tagged with the term wwdc. My favourite is this picture that has the covered banner from inside the conference space.

What Apple does really well is create products and get people excited about them. People are so excited that when they release a newer cheaper version a few months’ later people aren’t ticked that they bought the more expensive version, instead their lining up to buy another phone.

It all comes down to innovation, design and execution. Apple does this well, they build innovative products, they ensure the design has a “wow” factor and they execute early, often and iterate like crazy. That’s a great model for tech businesses if you ask me.

Umair’s been spending quite a bit of time talking about good and evil, open and closed, Microsoft and Yahoo, and Facebook and Google. A very basic synopsis would be that open is good, Microsoft, and increasingly Facebook, have bad DNA and this will prevent them from sustaining success in the long run. Whereas Google has being good in it’s DNA and this will enable them to succeed in the long run. It’s a pretty smart analysis and I think its pretty spot on.

However, one company that has kept its doors closed and managed to succeed is Apple. iTunes has to be the most closed bit of software I know. And DRM is just plain evil, very evil. But yet Apple kills in this market and is showing no signs of letting up.

So my theory is that design can trump good and evil in the short term. If you ensure that users have a great experience, and that it’s simple, efficient and effective users and the community in general will overlook the fact that it’s closed, proprietary and evil - how else would you explain DRM? The iPhone is another example of closed and well designed but yet super successful. The fact that Apple was bricking unlocked phones is another great example of evil but well designed.

Is this sustainable? I don’t believe so. I believe if someone comes up with a really useful, easy, super smooth system that has a wide variety of content and is good, open, basically DRM free, then iTunes could go down. And if someone (RIM/Nokia I’m looking at you) comes up with a phone that meets the standards Apple has set for usability for browsing and interacting online on your handheld device and is open as well, well then Apple could go down there too. It’s not easy, because Apple’s set the design bar so high, but it’s not impossible.

Henry Blodget and Kara Swisher have two great videos on Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker.

On the first they’re discussing the mentality of Google’s founders in comparison to other founders. Their DNA and how they’ve moulded the company in their own image. Basically, how they’ve kept it authentic.

My take, well duh, authenticity and value people, authenticity and value!

Second one is looking at how a lack of innovation has ended up biting Dell in the behind. You have to invest in research and think long and convince the market to understand the value of research. HP, Apple and Google do this well, the list of companies who don’t is too long.

Enjoy the videos embedded below.

So Amazon’s releasing a ebook reader, calling it Kindle, and hoping that it will get the ebook market going. I don’t – and won’t – buy it.For some people who like the experience and have already started reading ebooks, and after reading Michael Parekh’s blog I was amazing to find that there are people who do indeed fit into this category, it’s a good step up from your Sony reader. But for people who prefer the paper copy I can’t see this being a likely substitute.

To begin with there’s nothing really wrong with the classic book reading experience, sure carrying multiple titles with you might be attractive, but how often have you thought “wish I had another book with me”. Finishing a book and not having an alternative might in fact be a good thing as it gives you some time to reflect and meditate on the book.

And sure there are environmental concerns to buying lots of books, but if you buy books from used book stores and give books to used books stores then the environmental impact has to be minimal when compared to, oh I don’t know, cars and airplanes perhaps!?

I also found it really weird that Amazon decided to go into this market (as a manufacturer), they don’t have the experience or the knowledge to manufacture customer goods. And if Apple releases some ebook software for the iPod or the iPhone, heck when the SDK comes out in Feb if someone releases a software program for the iPod or iPhone, that’s got to be more useable, useful and probably will end up more used then the kindle.

Manufacturing consumer electronics isn’t cheap, and the fact that this was a first for Amazon probably meant they started from scratch, lots of costs. With a price point of 400 USD wonder how many they’ll have to sell to actually be ROI positive. Sure the ebooks will help the bottom line, but if the apple devices have software that reads ebooks surely this would have come down their pipe anyway. Anyway will be interesting to see if we’re all using kindles to surf and read books in a couple of years. But I doubt it.

I’m pretty sure at some point in time I’ll switch to an iPhone, whether it happens in November – when the first ones come to this side of the Atlantic – or next year, or the year after remains to be seen.

In February of this year Steve Jobs wrote a pretty scathing commentary on DRM (Digital Rights Management, as defined by Wikipedia “Technologies intended to give content providers control over redistribution and access to material.”) on music. He basically said if people pay for the music it should be there’s to do with as they please.

This week, Apple has said that if you have an unlocked phone, the next release of iTunes, will make your phone inoperable. Plus they’re going to void warrantees on phones that have been modified (read: unlocked). I don’t know how the lock will work here in the UK, as I think it might be illegal to do this on this side of the pond – if anyone knows more about the legality of locked/unlocked phones in the UK, please let me know how this might work here!

Jeff Nolan over at Venture Chronicles says that Apple will be launching unlocked iPhones here in the UK – which, if true, means I can buy one and then use it on my existing networks - but I’m not sure how this will work with the newest software releases of iTunes.

Nolan also says that the DRM issue and the phone issues have Apple playing double standards. It’s not okay for the music industry to lock down users, but its okay for Apple to do so. Or at least that’s what Apple would have us believe. He doesn’t go as far as calling Jobbo a hypocrite – but I will. DRM sucks. Locked phones suck. And as long as Jobs is peddling/pimping DRM and locked phones in my books he’s a hypocrite.

I won’t pretend to know more then Steve Jobs, the guy is a genius, but I do believe the user is always right. So if people are unlocking phones – release unlocked phones. If people are downloading DRM free materials, release DRM free materials. And don’t give me this trash about the music labels wanting DRM, twist their arms and they’ll do it.

I’d be surprised if the bottom line suffered as a result of these actions. My hunch is it would look a lot better.

So even before the iPhone has left the US shores there’s been a price cut and Apple have released the iPod Touch, which has a safari browser, is wifi enabled and is much cheaper then the iPhone.  I don’t know who would be more pissed off AT&T or the collective geekdom that purchased the iPhone the first couple of months it was out – the peeps who waited till the last 14 days will at least get a bit of their money back.

Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) has a great couple of posts about this.  And Business 2.0 has a great article on the potential reasons for the price cut on the iPhone.

I wonder what the entry price will be for both the iPod Touch and the iPhone here in the UK… hmmmm.  I bet they don’t even release the current model and just launch a 3G model here.

The big question that the iPod Touch put in my head is whether this is the first step to making “traditional” mobile phones obsolete?  Think about it, if you can get Skype on your iPhone – albeit with some hacking, if you can get Skype on an iPod touch, who needs a phone?

I can’t see the mobile going anywhere soon, but heck if we have wireless internet devices, wifi, and messaging clients that are voice enabled who needs a mobile phone?  How great would it be to just have to give out email addresses or messaging client id names instead of mobile numbers?  I wonder if Apple has some kind of agreement with AT&T not to put the iChat on it’s iPhone, wonder if it has the same kind of agreement prohibiting them from doing this on the iPod?!

I wasn’t the first of my friends with a mobile phone.  But I do have one that some of my friends are jealous of now.  Before 2000 a phone booth, a land line and a pager sufficed.  Segue; pagers – what were we thinking?  Now I carry a couple, text like a maniac, occasionally surf the web, write blog posts and play around with excel with my phone.

I wasn’t the first of my friends with an iPod, but I couldn’t really imagine my life without one now.  Before 2004/5 I made due with a Sony minidisc player, cd’s, Winamp and mp3s on my PC.  Now I listen to a bunch of podcasts, most if not all of my library is on iTunes, and I can’t see myself using anything other then my iPod for digital music.

So as the iPhone get’s closer to the UK market and as I read about all the fun American users are having with their new toys, I’ll wait.  I don’t think I’ll get the iPhone in the next year - or two for that matter.  I think hardware takes a couple of years to work the kinks out and truly provide users with a good experience.  Not to mention the fact that the price will come down dramatically (the Razr started out at 500 USD as well and now you can get it for a song with a plan).

The only think you get from being one of the first adopters of hardware tech stuff is cool cache.  I think I can live without that.  Patience definitely pays when it comes to technological hardware and I believe that waiting a year or two will pay off with an iPhone that has more then 8GB of memory, 8 hours of battery, a 2MP camera, not to mention the fact that the pipes for internet consumption and sites should be rendering much better for mobile internet.  Not to mention I still have a year on my existing contract.

I didn’t regret waiting for a mobile phone, an iPod and – although I’ll probably end up with one in a couple of years – I won’t regret waiting for an iPhone either.