Apple to take on Dell

And the angels sing, "Halleluyah, Halleluyah" while the geeks rejoice in the streets. Apple will not stand in the way of people who want to load Windows on their MacBook Pro or iMac Core Duo. Yeah, you heard me (angels continue to sing).

So what does this mean. Well a couple of things:

1. Apple really is a hardware company. People have been saying that the money is in software for so long that we all just assumed Apple was a software company. They're not. They use software to sell hardware. When they (finally) figured it out that they can sell (much much) more hardware by being on both sides of the the fence, they jumped on it.

2. Apple will eventually take on Dell for dominance in the consumer PC market. Apple will probably never have a chance in the corporate space due to the price premium they put on their products for desirablity, but there is no excuse anymore that a home PC user will have not to buy the Apple PC they so desire. For years folks (including myself) have been avoiding Apple at home because work PCs run Windows and they don't want to have the headaches. Now, you can run either (and I bet there will be an option to dual boot with some 3rd party software that'll cost $0 after rebate). You can run Windows for work and games AND run Mac OS for iMovie/Final Cut, GarageBand, iPhoto or whatever else. It's going to be a god send for people like me who adore Final Cut software but just can't afford another PC (especially a high end Mac) to run it. For my next upgrade (probably end of next year or early 2007 right after Macworld) you can bet that I'll have my eye on a dual core notebook for Hongyun and a big bad Intelimac quad core for home/media center usage.

And guess what, only Apple hardware will be able to do this. You'll pay a little more, but it beats buying a Dell AND a Mac. Eventhough Apple stock was up a few percent today, I'm selling just about everything else I own in my "speculation" investment account and dumping it into Apple. I'll probably keep a little left over for even crazy specualtive moves, but I'm betting Apple is going to big in 2006 and much BIGGER by 2008 or2009.

See For Yourself.

Oh TV, I love thee

Oh TV, how can I watch thee...let me count the ways:

1. Live TV in the living room (so 1983)
2. Tivo'd shows in the living room (goodbye commercials)
3. Media Center PC in the living room (Tivo + $1000 - $13/mo.)
4. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the Portable Media Center or Windows Mobile device (slow transcoding sucks)
5. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the PSP (via some series of
decryptng and transcoding)
6. Video Ipod ($1.99/show is mighty pricey and they look ugly on any screen bigger than credit card)
7. Some off brand portable running Linux or BSD straight out of Taiwan or Korea (LOTS of formats supported, but usually bad UI, and bad PC software)
8. Windows Media Center Online Spotlight - Comedy Central Motherload from your sofa with a remote control...'nuff said (man we need some folks to fix the naming of our products)
and so on and so forth, forever and ever

You get the point...there are a LOT of ways to get your daily fill of Days of our Lives and guess what, there are going to be a LOT more ways coming up.

Yahoo Go! links Web services to phones, TVs - Wireless World - MSNBC.com
Microsoft partners with Murdoch in video pact (I guess no one remembers how DirecTV screwed Microsoft in the heyday of UltimateTV...here we go again)
Google sets up the Video Lemonade Stand

And soooo much more. Yes folks, TV 2.0 is finally upon us. I, like you, have been waiting for this for a long time. Man, I'm kicking myself for missing CES this year...CES TV junkies, I envy you.

MSNTV Cats Flying Out of the Bag

During his keynote, BillG showed off some stuff the MSNTV team has been working on. It's quite an honor to grab such a large chunk of the demo especially since our team is so tiny and we've only been working on this stuff for a few months. I'd like to say I had a hand it in, but alas I did not.

At any rate, I was proud that our team is on the right track so much so that BillG and company decided to use our technology to spotlight Windows Live.com, Messenger, and MediaCenter. We also got a plug for Remote Record!

There were also other cats let out of the bag this morning by our marketing folks. MSNTV has announced a partnership with a company called KVH that creates RV, boat, and car sattellite TV and communications products. We're going to put MSNTV2 in RVs, boats, and cars! Using the power of EVDO (think broadband speeds with cell phone coverage), users will be able to surf in their RV at current EVDO speeds (300Kbps-2Mbps). I recently uploaded the photos of the mobile test to the dodoskido gallery. Basically we took an MSNTV2 box and the green Junxion box that hooks up to the Verizon EVDO service. We tried to take a TV along, but my power inverter was too overloaded so I brought my laptop with an RCA to USB adapter. We found a couple of minor quirks that occurred when using the broadband while on the freeway (which we've since fixed), but overall we were quite surprised at how smooth the performance really was. I'm not sure if I'll get one in my car, but rest assured, I'll have some form of broadband in my car soon as I just signed up for Sprint's EVDO service on my new Sprint PPC-6700 (goodbye Tmobile Wifi!).

BillG CES 2006 Keynote blow by blow

In reverse chronological order:

BillG wrapup
Themes for 2006:
Xbox 360, Cheap HD, Media Center
Partners
User centric-all platforms easy and seemless

Xbox 360
4.5-5.5 million boxes by end of June
4 Games attach rate
3 Accessories attach rate
New manufacturing partner to meet demand
4 million Xbox Live marketplace downloads on Xbox 360
Same demographic and market size as CSI
Paramount premiers MI3 trailer on Xbox Live Marketplace
March 2006 - over 20 free games (including Street Fighter II - WOW!!)
Xbox 360 HD-DVD external drive to be launched later this year (MAN, I gotta pay extra for it?)
Xbox 360 driving HDTV sales
50 HD Games by Summer 2006
EA Fight Night III - Al Bernstein comes out to announce fighters
BillG plays as Muhammed Ali
SteveB plays as Joe Frasier
SteveB heavyweight division, BillG lightweight division
Game looks pretty cool. Camera angle nice. Accurate player styles
First Person View if you're getting your ass kicked
Cool replays...spit flying and everything. Whoa
BillG wins, Balmer throws controller
Xbox Live Marketplace users get free demo of EA Fight Night III RIGHT NOW!

Vista Media Center User Interface
Faded overlay on playing TV
Music
Album Cover View
Different Views
View by artist
View by year (WOOHOO!)
Works with XBox 360 as extender
Movie Library
Movie Poster View
DVD-Changer can be hooked up
Digitally Legal copies show up here

Digital HD Cable on Vista
Cable adapter box with Cable Card attaches to PC
Consumer buys "Cable-Ready PC"

HD-DVD player
Toshiba player availabe soon
HD-DVD on Vista
Interactivity on HD-DVD - scene chooser overlays on top of movie WHILE it's playing ("HD-DVD Interactivity Layer").
Shows you actors in the scene by order of their appearance in current scene WHILE movie is playing (OOOHH)
Can query information ("What else is this actor is in?") WHILE movie is playing (AAAAHH)
Overlay commentator video WHILE movie is playing
Digitally legal copies to be stored on the PC.

Windows Live Messenger
TV Buddy (YAY MSNTV TEAM!!)
Recommends shows your buddy likes
"What's on tonight?" - Activity API recommends shows based on your criteria
Plays trailers right in Activity API screen
MSNTV Remote Record built in...click and it records your TV shows!

Windows Live
TV services (YAY MSNTV TEAM!!)
Recommendations service based
RealTime MediaCenter activity

TV - Media Center
New online spotlight services on Media Center
Comedy Central Motherload
Cool UI that allows browsing while show is playing
Comedy central archives
Total Number of online spotlight apps: 110 worldwide
Webcast feed died
New media center form factors from PC maker partner
Toshiba Gigabeat portable video player
30GB HD
4 hours playback
Media Center UI (sync video [online and broadcast], music, photos)
Stars VONGO.com service
Similar to CinemaNow and MovieLink
Allows use on portable or PC
$9.95/mo. for 1000 movie selection (same as Stars current movie selection)
LG Portable Media Center
Widescreen

VOIP phones
Contact list on the phone
Seemless VOIP

Treo 700w
Available TOMORROW from Verizon!

Vista Tablet
Heavy investment in Vista tablet
Cheaper tablets on the way

URGE MTV and MS partnership
Integrated in WMP
No mention of business model (subs, ppv, ad based?)
Search similar to WMP library
Pro blogs
Sharing, tagging, community - user driven content
Justin Timberlake arrives on stage to plug his new album and URGE

Vista Demo
Similar to PDC 05 and Company Meeting 05 with some new stuff:
Demo of Photos (super fast thumbnails, tags, search, and automated slideshow with mixed photos/video)
Demo of Windows Media Player Vista (better UI, search)

Future of Computing Demo
Family screen (as seen at PDC 05 and Company Meeting 05)
Info to phone (as seen at PDC 05 and Company Meeting 05)
Info on table PC in airport lobby (as seen at PDC 05 and Company Meeting 05)

BillG started with a lot of preview (as usual) of the various technologies that he's going to talk about

BillG's CES Keynote

Tonight (January 4, 2006) at 6pm, Bill Gates is going to give the keynote at CES. I'm not going to spill the beans, but there's going to be some really neat stuff in the keynote. Be sure to watch live. If you don't watch, don't worry...I'll have a blow by blow here tonight.

Hotmail becomes Windows Live Mail

What's in a name really? A lot apparently. Microsoft is switching the name of hotmail to "Windows Live Mail" to fall inline with their recent "Live.com" announcement. So what else is new over in the hotmail building (other than we can't call them hotmail anymore)? Everything. Signup for the Beta to see all of the cool new features. And yes, I've confirmed that there will be a version that works with MSNTV2 when Live Mail officially launches.

TV 2.0 catch up

So it's been a while since my last real post and here's a recap of transgressions in the TV world since then:

• Apple drops the bomb with iPod Video and iTunes with Pay Per Download Video (PPDV?). By the way, if you want a FREE IPOD VIDEO, just click. These are the same guys that had the freebie deal before, but now they're giving away the latest and greatest iPod nanos and videos. The best part is that some of the deals are quite good. For example, the Citi Dividend card is AWESOME. Hongyun and I have one and we use it for our groceries and gas purchases. It gives us 5% back (up to $300 per year) on these kinds of purchases and since gas and groceries are always getting more expensive, it really does work out nicely...consider it a $300 bonus at the end of the year to buy some Xbox 360 games to go with the new Xbox 360 dropping next week (you did preorder one didn't you? If not, good luck explaining it to your kid).
• Steve Jobs uses Pixar's rock and hard place relationship with Disney to finagle episodes of LOST for the iTunes Store.
• Netflix drops the ball and gives up on trying to fulfill rental requests through streaming video. Reason: movie studios are bone heads and prefer people pirating their content than makign a few bucks through rentals each time the content is viewed. Imagine this: a movie distributed via P2P, but is wrapped in a special file format that locks it for certain folks or randomly unlocks it (have Windows Media Player check a server to unlock the content, the server will randomly handout freeviews to 1 in 10 folks...the others have to pay $2 to watch the movie). Talk about viral....maybe they'll figure it out before it's too late...maybe not.
• NBC and CBS announce plans to give people shows without commercials on demand for 99 cents. So lame. Let me count the reasons why:
  1. Bitter that they couldn't pull a deal with Apple to get into iTunes
  2. Can I download them to a portable device or laptop to watch them on the go? No.
  3. Why wouldn't I just pay for a Tivo for $13/month and get all the shows I want commercial free? Sure I have to push buttons, but it's easy. Also Tivo lets me transfer them to my laptop (although I loathe the Tivo Desktop software...that's some scary piece of code they released-Mac users, considers yourselves lucky for not having to deal with the crap fest).
• AOL and Time Warner FINALLY figured out what to do with their alliance. Took them long enough. When they first merged 5 years ago, the idea that went through my brain was wow-that's a natural fit. AOL's got the eyeballs, TW's got the content AND the broadband. It took them 5 whole years to get their heads out of their asses and figure it out. Anyway, it looks like it's going to be too late for them to make a big splash since Microsoft may buy AOL. The dialup Internet Acess business is definitely the slow boat to nowhere in the tech world. We haven't heard anything official on the inside so who knows what's going on.

Windows Live Favorites

So Windows Live Favorites is now in beta and I've been playing with it. What's REALLY cool is that MSNTV2 has designed their server side favorites storage to hook into Windows Live Favorites. So I can manage and access my favorites on my MSNTV2 box or on my PC seemlessly. It rarely happens that MSNTV is leading the pack as far as adopting Windows technologies, but in this case, I believe we're the first team to adopt Live Favorites and use it on a non-PC platform.