Living On The Edge

Is Android becoming Kitchen Sink?

rishibhargava — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:52:43 +0000

As a product manager, I look at each feature addition very carefully. Recently (in froyo release of android) google added a feature where users can install the application on external media like SD card. The first reaction to this feature would be : Wow!. Google 1 up over apple as iphone memory is fixed and I cannot increase that but within a month challenged have started to show up.

Users can now take this application on the stored media and use it in another device without buying the application. To prevent this piracy google announced a new feature today: cloud based licensing service. Again the first reaction: Cool idea. The service lets the developers control and lockout the user in case the app cannot ping cloud periodically. Think about the impact of such a feature. Now if a developer chooses to add this feature then what happens when network is not available like while I am in flight or bad connection. I understand that the developer can control the behavior and also the frequency etc… but still this is way too complex. More decision points for developer and clearly developers are going to get hurt either which way they go.

This is a great example of feature bloat in products where customers get negative value for a feature added over long run.

Why I’m Craigslisting My iPads

rishibhargava — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:10:37 +0000

I have been meaning to write a blog about this thought as well but techcrunch beat it to me. Here is the link to a great article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/17/why-i’m-craigslisting-my-ipads. I completely agree with every word in this article and here are few more supporting facts:

Lack of flash: Every evening (pretty much) I sit down with my iPad and within 15 minutes I end up at a website which has flash and I have to move to me real computer (macbook Pro). Even websites that dont have video are using flash for interactive experience and without flash my web surfing experience remains incomplete (as it stands today)
History of web pages visited and books mark sharing: Firefox launched a plugin yesterday but I dont use firefox. At work during the day, I get tons of interesting links which I want to revisit in evening and they are not in email so in evening there is no way to find the, other than my work laptop. This is an area where apple should focus so that there is information sharing between multiple devices. Firefox home is an iphone extension to do the same.
no multitasking and tabbed browsing: I dont need to elaborate this for all you readers. This is purely painful.

I really think ipad should run general purpose OS and that will solve all my pain .

iPad, flash and my thoughts…

rishibhargava — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 04:13:56 +0000

This is my first blog post using the word press app on iPad. I have to say that I am loving the iPad so far. I had very low expectations from it as it is missing some of the vet important features. I would have liked to have it a general purpose OS. But it is what it is and the fact that the apps work on it is more important than the general purpose Os features.

Another interesting thread right now is the while flash and adobe fight going on. I have to say that I don’t like the current apple stance. I am a big apple fan but this is completely unethical and my biggest problem is that this is harming the developers who have mace iPhone what it is. I don’t want to right a lot on this as enough people have written on this but I am extremely disappointed in apple and still I love my iPad. Oops I mean I love my wife’s iPad …

My Mac died and yet I bought apple stock!

rishibhargava — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:37:53 +0000

Continuing on the discussion about apple stock price and market cap…

So when my Macbook Pro refused to boot this monday, I tried all the tips that apple support suggests and then decided to go to an apple store to meet one of their geniuses. My earlier phone experience with apple support had been horrible but I still decide to pay them a visit. The experience was flawless, I walk in and get greeted by a genius in less than 5 minutes and genius understands the things I have tried and without any further delay takes my laptop for a repair and changes the hard disk. At this time my frustration with bad quality changed into hard disk failure happen and I was not worried about data as I had been using a time machine.

So I get my laptop back in 2 days all ready to go and now is the part of restoring my data. This is where I say apple has put in the brains. The data restore process was the smoothest, 3 clicks and I had my computer in the state I left it on sunday night. Yes, three clicks and everything restored. There are lots of solutions out there in the market for backup but I can tell you that apple makes things just work.

So I think it is not about the quality, it is about interoperability. If you decide to go all apple and yes somebody would wonder why but lets say you do, then the experience you get is amazing… music setup in all rooms … three clicks, backup restore three clicks… sharing printer across macs and windows three clicks… So the effort that goes behind making software and hardware that works well together should not be under estimate. Eventually if as a customer I can get smooth experience in times of hardships (disk failures) I will go back to them and hence I bought an airport express!

Is it time to short AAPL?

rishibhargava — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:25:22 +0000

If you have noticed recently the current market cap of apple is 70% of MSFT market cap. So is it time to short apple stock?

Recently at a poker night, somebody pointed out this interesting fact and claimed that it is time to short apple. This was starting of a religious fight between the mac lovers and others. Mac lover in this case was me. Here are some interesting excerpts from mail exchanges that continued for days to come. It is a long chain but please totally worth it…

—————–

now to install requirements… I think that is a good point that apple never released this as general purpose.. I stand corrective on that.
Now that I think it has always been their strategy and from my perspective there is nothing wrong with that . As a product owner that reduces my suport matrix and increases upsell of other products.
Of course it is good for apple. But not so good for the customer. Another company doing the same would be seen as monopolistic practice and would attract antitrust lawsuits.

That brings up another point we discussed.

EU’s lawsuit against MSFT: http://www.pcworld.com/article/173253/microsoft_eu_reach_accord_on_antitrust.html

From this link, the main beef that EU had with MSFT was that MSFT gave IE unfair advantage over rival browsers.

“To address the browser case the software giant has offered to create a new ballot screen inside its Windows operating system that lists a maximum of 12 browsers and gives them all exactly the same visibility and ease of use as IE.”

Now, do we see a mac version with a choice of 12 browsers any time soon?

———-

I think it is great for the customer to have something that works well and is cheaper than all the pieces put together or may be even slightly expensive (apple is getting much better here)… and comes all pre packaged. As a consumer, choice is not improtant quality is and if I need to go to something else, I can always take the extra step to install that … so I think what I am saying is that the whole EU premise of anti-trust is something I dont agree. I am with MSFT on that as far as they let you disable IE which they did not and that is where it started 4 years back.

We should continue this over beer next time we meet…

——

Now, I know apple fan boys don’t want to hear anything against their favorite toys, but the talk about quality of mac is over hyped. My macbook from work crashes very regularly, is heavy, gets overheated and sometimes cannot connect to wifi until I reboot and also, sometimes when it comes back from standby, the screen remains black, forcing me to reboot. May be some of these issues have been addressed with snow leopard, but it does not sound not much different from vista. And then, I don’t know of too many people who don’t run windows on their mac (either by boot camp or by parallels/vmware) to run applications that are not supported on mac.

beer will be nice…

——-

We stopped exchange emails on this topic and agreed to disagree… then something happened 4 days back which is very relevant to this topic… my mac died! There goes my claim for quality! It is not over though… What happened after that in the next blog entry.

TED: Awesome demo of a new desktop interface

rishibhargava — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:12:21 +0000

Cool Desktop interface… but I tell you that I would not use it

TED: David Logan on tribal leadership

rishibhargava — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:38:43 +0000

Very interesting perspective on organizations…

Technical Support is Technical Support – Apple Genius??

rishibhargava — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:56:44 +0000

When you are dealing with Apple, you expect everything to be perfect. That is a great image for a company to have but this morning I had not so good experience with the 1-800-APL-CARE. I am usually not one of the people to call the support lines and I really believe in do it yourself but last weekend, I was trying to setup an airport extreme with an external hardisk to perform backups on network.I could not get this to work and looked for information google, help, manuals and tried all possible configurations. The very same day I was in apple store and decided to talk to an apple genius about this. The genius had no answer but a card with 1800APLCARE.

So I called 1800APLCARE this morning and the call went exactly as it had gone with any other technical support

Reboot the extreme…

unplug the hard disk…

Factory reset the extreme…

reboot windows PC and Mac…

nothing worked… now he transferred me to a specialist. The fun part is that specialist sounded very knowledgeable by the talks and then I gave him my problem so he asked me to check more configurations and after 15 minutes put me on hold to look for more information.

After 10 minutes of wait, here is what he comes back with: “I talked to a specialist on airport extreme and he tells me that when apple released time capsule, they disabled all the usb ports on airport extreme so this configuration is not supported!.”

I was shocked!

While he was taking me through all these configuration screens, I noticed the log messages link and clicked that. I have to stay that I really believe in apple’s engineering team and they did have great logs and I saw an error “Unrecognized file system NTFS”. I guessed that airport extreme cannot work with NTFS drives well. I reformatted the drive to use MacOS extended and everything worked magically.

I am willing to pay per call fees if I can get good quality technical support for products… Would you?

Google Wave – Will it replace email?

rishibhargava — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:47:55 +0000

I recently saw a video of google wave demo and I have to see it is pretty cool. Some of the things that have been within browser are amazing but the real question is that will it replace email?

I think the question can be rephrased as “Will people talk in groups?”. If you think about invention of email, it was just an electronic version of the same way people have been communicating for ages (person to person). Twitter and other forms are causing a little bit of social change where people would like to advertise themselves and may be interact in groups more than they used to but I still believe that fundamentally humans feel comfortable when chatting with one person and hence email will not go away…

May be people will use google wave as email!

Is Facebook and linkedin your new Addressbook?

rishibhargava — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:59:45 +0000

I am having really tough time managing my address book and keeping it current. There are few options out there like plaxo but nothing that works well across personal and business contacts and also syncs with all the different gadgets and other sites. 25% of my contacts in outlook are duplicate and not current!

I strongly think that Facebook and LinkedIn should step up to meet this need.