Raju Vegesna's Blog

Now that the much awaited MacWorld is here and the announcements have been made, here is my take…

MacBook Air

There is no doubt that this is a stunning piece of innovation. I’d buy one if only the price is a bit lower. Will there be a price cut in few months like we saw with iPhone? Possible, but don’t count on it. All the specs look excellent. I don’t know the maximum screen resolution on this one though. I wish they included an EVDO. For guys on the road, this is a great laptop.

iTunes Rental

As expected, this is a good move. One thing I didn’t expect though is a free upgrade to existing AppleTV customers. This comes as a surprise and I have no complains here. I am looking forward to playing with it. But frankly, I don’t care about movie rentals. I use AppleTV primarily for Video Podcasts. Its an awesome box for podcasts.

iPhone Update

The iPhone update is another expected one which is good. The best feature according to me is shortcuts (or web clipping as they call it). Now I have shortcuts to all the websites I visit regularly on my iPhone. I can’t wait for custom apps in Feb. The extra price tag for iPod Touch is a bummer though.

Time Capsule

I have been using Time Machine on my iMac successfully and I was hoping for this feature for a while. This is a good move for Apple. What is unclear is support for existing Airport Extreme customers like me. I hope it’ll work when I plug-in a hard drive to my existing Airport Extreme through USB. If not, it’ll be a bummer for existing customers. Interestingly, Steve Jobs didn’t talk about environmental friendliness of this product while he said he’d do so for all new releases. Is it because this is not built with Aluminum (like the other products?). Overall, this is a very good move.

Overall, a great start for the year. I can’t wait for more updates. I guess the wall street is expecting Steve to exceed his previous performance (MacWorld 2007 where he introduced iPhone).

Tata unveiled the long awaited – Tata Nano – for Rs. 1 Lakh (Approx $2500) for the Indian market and it sure is going to be big. The size of the car is small which fits the Indian roads very well. With 50miles per gallon, we can’t ask for more. Best of all, the price is right. You can buy this car instead of those LCD televisions (I had to do this comparison here, I just returned from CES)….or, this is the same price as a DVD player in Lexus.

If Tata’s moves to grab Jaguar and LandRover succeed, it can become a credible player in the international market. Note that Tata is already a good player in software market with TCS.

More info here.

Yossi Vardi coins the term ‘Local Warming’. This is a must watch video for laptop addicted men.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhy1Vp9EFjc]

Lately, my experience with Apple is not very convincing. A series of incidents keep bringing down my expectations on quality from Apple. I agree with Scoble on the brand promise, which simply is not there lately. I don’t see the same customer friendly staff in Apple’s store as I used to see an year ago. I don’t see the same quality in products lately….

I thought I’d never see a blue screen on a Mac….and I didn’t, except that it comes in black. I was working on some important stuff and when I launch a program, it came up with this black screen of death on my MacBook Pro.

Sorry for the poor photo quality….but then, my iPhone cannot take better photos in low light. BTW, iPhone also has a Black Screen of Death.

There are more issues on software. I upgraded to iLife 08 and it completely made my iDVD unworkable. If I need to fix it, I have to take it to the Apple Store (I like Dell better in this case as they service it at your home/office).

Its not just the software issues I had. I had some hardware issue too….right from the day one. First, the CD Drive sounds scary. If you have your laptop on your lap and try inserting a CD, you’ll almost notice a hit on your lap. Another common annoyance is a whining sound you hear at times near the power.

If you bought an iPod Touch, you’ll notice that the accessories it comes with are very minimal. You don’t even get a dock for your touch after spending $400.

These are just some of the annoyances and my rant can go on and on….one thing for sure. I am not such a happy customer I though I’d be with Apple. I am starting to see this Apple going rotten….and of course, I sold my AAPL stock.

Lately, Apple is on a roll. iPod brought Apple back as an ‘active’ player and now they found their rhythm. When you are in rhythm, everything will automatically fall into place.

I think there is one unexpected factor playing a big role in apple’s latest success – The move of applications to the web. As more and more applications move to the web, the OS becomes irrelevant as all we need is a browser. When all you need is a browser, then why not go with a ‘pretty’ OS? MS also seem to be doing its part by screwing up its latest supposedly ‘pretty’ OS.

I recently gave up Windows and moved over to Apple just because the underlying OS simply didn’t matter as all the apps I use are online. I thought I’d miss Maxthon, but they made it easier for me by screwing up their latest version.

All these trends seem to be working well for Apple. I have no complains currently….except, I’d like Apple to be more open (frankly, I don’t think they will).

AdBlockPlus is one of my favorite Firefox add-on. In fact, it is the only add-on that is present on all my FF installations. Today NY Times talks about this plugin and its impact on the Ad driven market. I recommend reading it for more details on that topic.

I am not a big fan of ad based business models. They simply wont survive long-term. People do get immune to ads as they spend more and more time on the net. Today if I visit any site with lots of ads, I unknowingly ignore the portions with ads and concentrate directly on the actual content. This kind of immunity to ads develops as users spend more and more time on the net. The $$$$ companies like Google make on online Ads will eventually go down….but then, plugins like AdBlockPlus can help the user a lot by removing the annoying ads altogether.

Many users don’t know such plug-ins exist in the first place. It’ll greatly help if browsers include such plugins by default. I dont see IE doing it anyway, but if Firefox can bundle such plug-ins by default, it’ll greatly improve its value and usefulness against its competitors. If I were to vote between Offline support in FF 3 and AdBlockPlus bundled by default in FF, I’d vote for the later.

Now, I am off to figuring out how to turn off the annoying pop-ups on NYTimes site when I double click on some text using ABP.

I may be a fool (along with 2.5 Million others) as per Mark Evans, but then, I don’t work for Google or any other company with Ad-based business model and I don’t mind paying for services with good value.

Two weeks back I was helping my cousin restore his Windows system corrupted while upgrading from IE6 to IE7 on his Dell laptop. I was able to help him out with this as there are hundreds of people with the same problem on the internet.

Two hours later, my Dell laptop reminded me that it needs some work too….my mouse stopped working. I managed by connecting an external mouse, but then an hour later, my keyboard stopped working. So I reluctantly called Dell and was pleasantly surprised when someone answered my call in less than 10 minutes. This is a great improvement from Dell. The Dell rep asked me to do several tests for about an hour and while doing this, my hard drive crashed. When asked Dell about this, they said they’ll send me a replacement and they cant do anything about the data. WTF? I lost all my data while doing the tests they asked me to do and they cant do anything about it?

I asked BestBuy if they can do something about it. They said YES with $1679.00…thats to restore the data. Luckily, most of my data is online….but to restore some of the videos and other image data, spending almost $1700 was too much.

When Dell shipped the replacement, I spent almost 2 days installing the OS and the software only to realize the blue screen of death to appear again and that was the trigger point for me to get rid of Dell and Windows. Instead of spending $1700 to restore the data and wasting my time on this crap, I decided to go with a MacBook Pro.

With Apple, I didn’t have any problem opening any boxes…..I just spent couple of hours installing the apps I need and I am all set. I couldn’t think of anything else. For just in case scenarios, unlike Zoli, I bought Windows XP license and installed it on Parallels…and it is all working like a charm now. At this point, I am glad I moved out of windows and I wish I never have to go back to that deadly Dell/Windows combination. With an iMac, MacBook Pro, AppleTV, Airport Extreme and an iPhone, I guess I am too much tied into Apple now.

As I write this post, I am waiting for one of my video to render in iMovie 08 and it says that it has 45 minutes remaining to save my video in MOV format.

Today I bought iMovie ’08 primarily to edit some new movies. I am really blown away by its simplicity and it is very very well done. Great job to whoever is involved in this project. It saved me lot of FinalCut Pro time. I was able to finish editing a seven minute movie in about 30 mins, but when I wanted to save the movie in .mov, it is taking forever on my iMac. While this is happening, my CPU usage is less than 25%.

While it is doing its job, I thought I’ll quickly post on this.

No, I am not refering to Apple TV. I am speculating about a possible upcoming product. Looking at the trends, I cant help but speculate on this. You’ll find details on why I think it makes sence for Apple to do a TV.

In a recent (I actually wrote this prior to iPhone release) Q&A Session, Steve Jobs said the following.

Q: So many analysts have suggested that with the expected success of the iPhone, Apple is about to be transformed into a different kind of company. What’s your take?

Jobs: I hope it doesn’t change Apple too much, we like it the way it is. We’ve got two strong legs on our chair today — we have the Mac business, which is a $10 billion business, and music, our iPod and iTunes business, which is $10 billion. We hope the iPhone is the third leg on our chair, and maybe one day Apple TV will be the fourth leg.

We know that iPhone (and its successors) have the  potential of being a third leg to apple adding another $10Billion.

On the other hand, anyone who have used Apple TV can easily say that it doesnt have the capability to be another leg (I mean another $10Billion business). I see Apple TV as an experiment to test the waters for a possible TV product from Apple. Having released excellent 30” displays and products like Apple TV, I dont see Apple far from doing an iTV.

…and BTW, if you remember, Apple initially named its current Apple TV as iTV initially. If iTV is supposed to be the third leg, it suites its current naming convention. But why did it change the name, well, I can guess there is another product named ‘iTV’ that is on the way. Apple is just testing the waters with its AppleTV.

When this happens, assume that iTunes playing a more central role. It is the only application that’ll connect the four legs of Apple – The Macs, iPods, iPhone and ofcourse iTV. Now with a Computer, Phone, Music, Movies and a TV, Apple will completely control your living room. I am not going to say no as I love their products.

The next questions is, how can iTV be better than current TVs? Well, there are lots of things you can expect. Here are a few quick ones.

• Current Apple TV will be part of iTV (streaming photos, movies, audios, movie trailers, YouTube etc)
• TV will have a web cam embedded for virtual family gatherings
• Wont you love it if your TV has WiFi (to Sync photos, music, movies from iTunes)
• Tivo like functionality to record your TV
• Your iPhone or your Touch Screen iPod becomes the remote for your TV (or even the keyboard for your TV)
• If you get a call on your iPhone while watching TV, it’ll show up right on your TV
• With Steve Jobs on Disney’s board and with iTunes succesful, it sure can get all the content

Anyway, this is all speculation. But if I were to bet on Apple’s next category, it would be this one. 

No wonder Apple dropped ‘Computers’ from its name.

Robert Scoble responds with a great post to some of the discussions going on regarding Facebook. Reading through his post, one part caught my eye. Facebook is not good at, as Scoble explains, is capturing the information regarding a person and a relation. To quote him…

Second, how could the friends definitions and ties be improved? 1000 ways. I’ll be honest, I don’t use the at all. I just add you as a friend and don’t put any details in there about how I know you. For one, adding that kind of detail is a competitive advantage for me and for PodTech.
For instance, my first result is for Danny Krimgold. I’ve never written about Danny. You don’t know who he is. But he was one of the first people I talked with on Netmeeting back in 1996. He was in high school then and I could tell he was damn smart. I kept in touch with him as he went to Cornell, got a masters in computer science, and now is working at McCann Erickson as a project manager. There isn’t a good way to tell Facebook how I know Danny. In fact, I found that there isn’t a good way to tell Facebook how I know people for about 70% of the people I know through the Internet. So, I just leave them all blank. I guess the best choice in NetMeeting is the “met randomly” choice, but that sounds so stupid. So, I leave it blank.

In my view, there are two areas where Facebook can be further improved.

• Easy way to find the right people
• Good way to capture relations

This is exactly where Spock shines. Spock finds people and it does it well and keeps on improving as more people are on it. Earlier I was searching for ‘Matt Marshall’ on Facebook and I find 200+ people in Facebook. If I do the same search in Spock, I get more than 500 results. But if I search for ‘Matt Marshall VentureBeat’ in Facebook, I get no results (I know he is on there) while Spock is spot on with the correct result.

As Scoble says, the relation ships are not captured well in Facebook and I completely agree with him. Again, this is where Spock shines. The ‘Related People’ section in Spock is very flexible and can greatly help Facebook.

I can go on with different scenarios. I think Facebook and Spock can be a great couple. Will it happen? Lets wait and see.

Scoble’s Spock video is here.