Apple's recent decision to hire Kevin Lynch, a former Adobe employee who chamioned flash, has stirred up a shit storm amoung many Apple bloggers. I share some of the concerns given hriring decisions Tim Cook has made thus far as CEO. Daniel Eran Dilger has written a nice piece on the topic for Apple Insider. I hope this works out better than the hiring of John Browett did.
Hat tip to Loop Insight
The shuttering of Google Reader continues to reverberate in the blogosphere. Marco Arment explores the topic of free on his blog. It’s an interesting read.
Google’s intent with Android was always to provide a free platform to manufacturers to build hardware on. Google would benefit because these hardware devices would use Google services. That sounds great in theory. But what happens if a majority of device manufacturers eliminate Google services completely? Benedict Evans explores this possibility in a very interesting blog post.
If Samsung were to decide to fork Andoid and remove Google services, Google would have a big problem.
Innovation is hard. Just ask Samsung, who have rarely innovated anything. Apple has been beaten up lately in the press for not innovating anything new since the iPad three years ago. Samsung has been immune to critisism as they’ve become the market volume leader in smartphones. I’m not sure why people expected a bunch of innovation with the launch of the new Galaxy S4, but they did. Philip Elmer-Dewitt has the details at the Apple 2.0 blog.
Hilarity ensues.
John Gruber does a great job of deconstructing a Reuters story about Apple in light of the recent launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Lazy.
I’ve been using the Mailbox app since I made my way through their signup queue. I absolutely love the concept and execution of the app. It’s not the only email application I use, but it’s my front end to addressing the email I receive. I can’t wait for iPad and desktop solutions to be created. I’d also love the app to work with email accounts other than Gmail. Especially in light of yesterdays cancellation of Google Reader by Google. I’d like to remove Google from my life entirely, but right now I’m relying on Google for all my email accounts.
Today, the folks at Mailbox have announced that they’ve been aquired by Dropbox. I love that Dropbox has a sustainable business model that gives users a free taste of their service, but then allows me the opportunity to pay them money for expanded services. I’m excited that Dropbox is now invloved with Mailbox and hopefull that there will be amazing integration between the two services for storing and sharing email attachements.
Google casually announced today that they're killing Google Reader. The ‘sky is falling commentary’ will ensue.
Seriously, this is terrible news in the short term. Hopefully a solution will be created to replace Reader that is even better. Makes you really want to use Google services, huh.
Benedict Evans sums up the smartphone industry is a couple simple charts on his blog. Apple and Samsung are the outliers in this industry, but in very different ways.
MacStories has a writeup on a new bluetooth device and app combo for iOS that will monitor your car computer simply and easily. The data will then be recorded and reported via the app. The idea is very cool and I've placed my preorder already.
Horace Dediu takes a look at the growth rate of Android in the United States in comparison to the rest of the world in a great blog post.
The more startling thing is the difference in growth: it implies that with a US growth rate of only about 13.3k/day, global growth is 150 times faster than US growth. In other words, that 0.6% of new users are in the US and that 99.4% of Android growth is outside the US.
This fact says very interesting things about where Apple needs to prioritize development of additional iPhone models.