Apple: An iMac is NOT an iPad with a keyboard!

In a number of moves in the past few weeks Apple has tipped their hands on a new strategy-- they want to turn iMacs into over-sized iPhones.

They are shutting down Java

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Java/JavaSnowLeopardUpdate3LeopardUpdate8RN/NewandNoteworthy/NewandNoteworthy.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010380-CH4-SW1

And Flash

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/30691/Apple-axes-Flash-from-new-Macs

And launching an online Mac "app" store:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/the-mac-app-store-will-create-competition/

This is a whole lot like Ford selling a lot of pickups and deciding every car has to have a flatbed. What is appropriate for one market (iPhone and iPad mobile computing ) is not necessarily appropriate for another (desktop computing).

But there is no denying that Apple has made a lot of money in their closed iApp market. A LOT of money. Google-like money.

http://mashable.com/2010/10/18/apple-earnings-q4-2010/

So a decision to try to take back total control of their desktop apps is not surprising.

Greedy, stupid, and destined to push them back into single digit market shares.

But not surprising.

Good news for Apple, bad news for Apple users

Apple has topped 10% of the US market

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/pc-demand-slows-amid-consumer-fatigue-but-apple-share-surges/40416?tag=nl.e539

If you are an Apple user and you aren't running virus protection software, you are officially a fool.

At not just 10% of the market, but a very complacent 10% who are used to believing they are "virus proof" you have become a very viable target.

My Advice: Don't be one of those who learns that the hard way.

Why I don't care about "The Social Network."

So, the big buzz right now is the Mark Zuckerberg biopic "The Social Network."

Its been called "Citizen Kane for the ADD, I wan't it NOW generation", but I think even thats been overly generous.

The thing is, Citizen Kane, the thinly disguised biopic of Willam Randolf Herst, was about a character who was sympathetic in many ways and who had actually lived a life. While not in all senses a nice man, Kane is a hard working, driven man who we see work and sacrifice to make his way to the top. He puts in a life of determined work in order to reach the pinnacle he does. And the ultimate lesson of the movie, that you can't expect to understand a man or his drives from one or two isolated facts about him, is a deep and meaningful thing to think about.

And then we have Zuckerberg, by all accounts (including this movie) an obnoxious self-obsessed late adolescent. Mr. Zuckerberg, you HAVE no life to write about. You are 26. When Kane is 26 he's still a struggling junior reporter. At 26 he is still far lower on the economic scale than you were at birth. And what this movie says is that your motivations are so thin, juvenile, and simplistic that they can be adequately explained by a handful of life events.

And thats why I don't care about you or your "story".

A spoiled rich kid goes to Harvard, feels like an outsider, and gets rich himself. No big surprise. Money is power and, like Bill Gates, you started out with a lot of it. Power brings power, money brings money. If you had had to work flipping burgers to pay your way through a state school, like many people I know, would you have had the time to create your "brilliant" invention? I bet there are plenty more brilliant inventions out there that could be created by college students without the need to actually pay their way through life.

Your story, such as it is, is pedantic, predictable and maybe just a bit pathetic. The rich get richer. Thats a story I see every day in the news for free.

Get them to make another movie when you have actually lived some life, say maybe when your 70, and maybe I'll go see that.