Eideard

So here we are — the last day of 2011 and the end of the first year of me writing my occasional newsletter, Om Says. Being on a break, I decided to not read the web and instead go analog and read a lot of books to nourish my mind. For me, it was an enjoyable year of writing these newsletters and I have picked out 12 stories from the archives that I feel are something you might want to revisit during the New Year’s weekend. Happy 2012, everyone.

The top story of 2011 that impacted me personally:

Steve Jobs and the sound of silence

Steve Jobs left a big hole not only for his company, but also for the tech industry. In a time when so many companies focus on short-term decisions, Jobs taught us that real success is in taking the long view…

I’d already ordered Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs before it became clear he was dying. That didn’t change the experience of the read – though the book arrived after his death.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like many of my colleagues in Silicon Valley, I was having a fantastic day today. It is crisp in the shade, warm in the sun. The skies are a magical blue with puffy clouds floating like dreams. And when all seemed to be going well, an email in my inbox — without as much as the new message sound — arrived: Letter from Steve Jobs. It was as if the inbox was observing the solemnnity of the occasion. It is an end of an era.

The first thought that ran through my head was about Steve’s health, and I thought to myself that this cannot be good. I don’t care about him being the CEO or head of Apple. What I really do care about is his health. He wouldn’t be making this decision unless things were pretty dire.

It is incredibly hard for me to write right now. To me, like many of you, it is an incredibly emotional moment. I cannot look at Twitter, and through the mist in my eyes, I am having a tough time focusing on the screen of this computer. I cannot hear the sounds of the street or the ring of my phone. The second hand on my watch moves slowly, ever so slowly. I want to wake up and find it was all a nightmare.

And while I wish for him to have more time with his family, I am also being very selfish. I will miss the thespian who made inanimate objects like a computer become a thing to behold. A few years ago, I compared Steve to Howard Hughes using the line, “Some men dream the future. He built it…”

Jobs (and by extension, Apple) has taught me (and I am sure others) a big lesson: If you want to change something, you have to be patient and take the long view. If Apple and Steve’s incredible comeback teaches us something, it’s that when you are right and the world doesn’t see it that way, you just have to be patient and wait for the world to change its mind.

Today, we are living in a world that’s about taking short-term decisions: CEOs who pray to at the altar of the devil called quarterly earnings, companies that react to rivals, politicians who are only worried about the coming election cycle and leaders who are in for the near-term gain.

And then there are Steve and Apple: a leader and a company not afraid to take the long view, patiently building the way to the future envisioned for the company. Not afraid to invent the future and to be wrong. And almost always willing to do one small thing — cannibalize itself. Under Steve, Apple was happy to see the iPhone kill the iPod and iPad kill the MacBook. He understands that you don’t walk into the future by looking back. If you do, you trip over yourself and break your nose.

Thanks, Steve.

Thank you, Om, for bringing insight and understanding to sadness. Thanks for opening the door to the future – that seemed like it was ready to be shuttered by the naysayers who never believed in anything enough to fight for it with their whole being.

Click the link in the post and read the whole letter. I’ve posted about half of it here.

It has been a long time coming, but now an average broadband subscriber in the U.S. can sign-up for a 100 Mbps broadband connection. Comcast, the largest cable (and broadband) company said Thursday it’s launching Extreme 105 across its entire footprint, which covers 40 million homes in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle; Chicago; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; and the majority of Boston.

To be sure, companies such as Cablevision provide 100 Mbps connections in its region (New York), but Comcast is making it available at a national level. Forecasts have indicated we could have 100 million homes with 100 Mbps by 2015, and with Thursday’s news, we’re pretty close to that target now. That should make the FCC pretty happy.

Now, it’s not cheap: about $105 a month for the broadband connection if you sign up for a triple-play plan, where other services cost extra. The standalone price is pretty darn steep — $199 a month — which I think is a shame. Comcast should have sold this at a more affordable price….A Comcast spokesperson says that their 250 GB cap applies to this super-fast broadband connection as well…

Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV, Spotify and Pandora make up most of my [Om's] digital content diet. When it comes to work, it’s now all in the “cloud” via Google Docs and Gmail. With higher bandwidth, the experience of all these services has improved for me. With Comcast making the higher speeds available nationwide, the upside is going to be for all these streaming services.I predict they will see a big bump in usage.

It’s a shame Comcast is initiating this service as if it was 2007 and the Great Recession hadn’t happened, yet. Anyone on a fixed income has been spending the last few years cutting back – not expanding their discretionary bump.

At the moment it feels like I have an increase in download/streaming speed with my much less expensive Comcast broadband. That may be a temporary side effect while they tune and tweak the changes they’ve made. I was getting upload speeds comparable to download for spell while they engaged their throttling system and that has settled down to a 5mbps maximum.

Blogging is on the decline, according to a New York Times story published this weekend — citing research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project — and it is declining particularly among young people, who are using social networks such as Facebook instead. Pretty straightforward, right? Except that the actual story said something quite different: even according to the figures used by the New York Times itself, blogging activity is actually increasing, not decreasing. And as the story points out, plenty of young people are still blogging via the Tumblr platform, even though they may not think of it as “blogging.” What blogging is really doing is evolving.

The NYT story notes that blogging among those aged 12 to 17 fell by half between 2006 and 2009 according to the Pew report, but among 18 to 33-year-olds it only dropped by two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier — which isn’t exactly a huge decline. And among 34 to 45-year-olds, blogging activity rose by six percentage points. The story also admits that the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the U.S. in December than it had a year earlier (a 2-percent decline), but globally its traffic climbed by 9 percent to 323 million.

In many ways, this “blogging is dying” theory is similar s to the “web is dead” argument that Wired magazine tried to float last year, which really was about the web evolving and expanding into different areas. It’s true that Facebook and Twitter have led many away from blogging because they are so fast and easy to use, but they have also both helped to reinforce blogging in many ways.

What’s really happening, as Toni Schneider of Automattic — the corporate parent of the WordPress publishing platform (see disclosure behind the article link) — noted in the NYT piece, is that what blogging represented even four or five years ago has evolved into much more of a continuum of publishing. People post content on their blogs, or their “Tumblrs,” and then share links to it via Twitter and Facebook; or they may post thoughts via social networks and then collect those thoughts into a longer post on a blog. Blog networks such as The Huffington Post get a lot of attention, but plenty of individuals are still making use of the longer-form publishing abilities that blogs allow…

So what we really have now is a multitude of platforms: there are the “micro-blogging” ones like Twitter, then there are those that allow for more interaction or multimedia content like Facebook, and both of those in turn can enhance existing blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. And then there is Tumblr, which is like a combination of multiple formats. The fact that there are so many different choices means there is even more opportunity for people to find a publishing method they like. So while “blogging” may be on the decline, personal publishing has arguably never been healthier.

I guess Mathew is inspired to post his comments as a reaction to the ancient newspaper practice of having someone write headlines other than the journalist who wrote the article. The NY TIMES article contains a boatload of contradictions to the headline. Something that always trips my trigger.

Even the analysis of growing use of social networks is incorrect – since the fastest growth is among geezers my age. Damned if I know why, though.

Even with the much publicized release of the Galaxy Tab this week, it looks like the real battle to upend the iPad won’t happen until next year. Lenovo’s chief executive confirmed that its LePad tablet won’t hit the market until 2011. LG also pushed back the release of its tablet until next year. Both are waiting to launch their tablets with Android Honeycomb, the upcoming release that is designed for tablets. Meanwhile, those who want RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook or a webOS-based tablet will also have to wait until early next year.

This isn’t to say that competitors aren’t lining up offerings right now. Samsung is predicting it can sell 1 million Galaxy Tab devices running Android 2.2 by the end of this year. Acer is expected to unveil new tablets running Android later this month. And Dell has released the 5-inch Streak, which runs an older version of Android.

But Google has said that, currently, Android isn’t designed for tablets. And it looks like Gingerbread, the update that is scheduled to be released any day now, won’t be optimized for tablets. So Android tablets, even if they’re released this year, probably won’t hit their stride until Google releases Honeycomb.

Right now, manufacturers are torn between moving forward and trying to get some traction like Samsung is attempting to do, or waiting until the platform matures, but risk Apple zooming ahead again with the iPad 2. That some like LG and Lenovo are sitting it out suggests they’d rather nail it the first time with the right software rather than put out something that initially disappoints…

The iPad will surely get serious competition and will undoubtedly lose its 95 percent share of the tablet market. But it looks like we’ll need to wait for next year when Android tablets, along with a BlackBerry PlayBook and a webOS tablet from HP, can make a real run at the iPad.

Many of these firms make it sound like they’re getting better at responding to Apple’s R&D opening new marketplaces. I’m not as convinced. It takes a great deal of process management to accomplishment a complete rollout for a breakthrough product like the iPad. It also helps to have an infrastructure like the App Store + apps + designers ready and willing to design for the new platform.

The only product I see stealing market share from the iPad is this. My wife’s arrives Monday.

Ignore the Livestream date. This was recorded a couple of days ago. Yes, I enjoyed watching the live stream in HiDef to my computer – as it happened. Om doesn’t take his offices apart very often for something like this – but, when he does, he gets the tech right.

This is an hour long. Enjoy as much as you like. Nice to experience a truly informal gathering like this one.

The GigaOM Network has been increasing its group of tech blogs, but its newest feature is a subscription research service called GigaOM Pro.

Om Malik, the founder of GigaOM Network, plans to sell in-depth research reports on technology sectors and shorter, timely reports on companies and news in those sectors to technology and business executive. Subscriptions to the service, which GigaOM is unveiling Thursday, will cost $79 a year at first and more down the road, said Mr. Malik, in an interview. (Read Mr. Malik’s blog post on GigaOM Pro here.)

GigaOM is the latest example of a Web company that once relied solely on advertising for revenue adding new revenue streams. On Monday, I wrote about other start-ups making similar shifts.

“To assume that there is only one revenue stream, which is advertising, is kind of short-sighted in this kind of media economy,” Mr. Malik said. He does not believe in charging for content that publishers have already given readers for free, so GigaOM Pro adds additional services. Readers have asked for deeper analysis than blog posts can provide, he added…

Six GigaOM Pro analysts will cover four areas: infrastructure, mobile, green I.T. and the connected consumer. Led by Michael Wolf, who recently joined GigaOM from the analysis firm ABI, they will add more topics in coming weeks. Bloggers for GigaOM blogs will contribute content.

GigaOM Pro will also offer longer briefings, like a 23-page report on the smart energy home or a 65-page briefing on social media in the enterprise. There are quarterly and weekly wrap-ups and closer looks at certain companies in a sector, such as a report on whether Google will lead the way in mobile app innovation and an analysis of Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital. Analysts also publish collections of links to relevant articles from around the Web.

I suppose this wouldn’t be especially newsworthy or a topic for a diarist like me – except for the fact that it centers on Om Malik. Om is not a guru; but, his knowledge of tech business – grounded in a global understanding of many business streams – provides a heck of a lot more useful information than does anyone more likely to use the title.

I don’t give investment advice except to a couple of close kin. I think I ain’t bad at it because I got back to where I was before the recent crash – last week. But, if there is anyone in print, digital or otherwise, that I might credit with prompting a few of my picks – it would be Om.