After years of stagnation, the mobile phone market has begun to go haywire, and next year the landscape figures to change even more dramatically.

Already we’ve seen Verizon Wireless announce that it will open up its network to allow customers to use phones they’ve purchased elsewhere. The FCC auction in January of the old broadcast television spectrum for use by wireless networks will help promote even more interactivity between devices. Because of efforts led by Google, some chunks of that spectrum will be required to be open to all devices. And Google’s Android initiative will further stir the pot by providing a new, more adaptable platform for handset makers.

The trend towards openness – wireless devices that will run on any network – will eventually completely dissolve the connection between cellphones and cellular service providers.

Apple, of course, adopted a cellular business model predicated on locking the iPhone to a single carrier with long-term contracts. A year ago, the company could not have foreseen the cracks that are now appearing in that strategy not just for Apple, but also across the industry.

Look at what’s happened as the iPhone has launched in Germany and France in recent weeks.

In Germany Vodafone’s court challenge to Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile’s exclusivity deal quickly led to the availability of unlocked iPhones there. Just days after T-Mobile responded by offering unlocked iPhones for €999, €600 ($890) more than the price of one with a contract, competitor Debitel said it will offer unlocked iPhone owners a €600 rebate if they switch.

A French law against locking mobile phones to a single carrier forced Orange, Apple’s French partner, to offer unlocked iPhones for €649, quite a bit less than what Germany’s T-Mobile is asking. (Point to ponder: if someone buys a €649 unlocked iPhone in France could they sign up with Debitel in Germany and get the €600 rebate?)

As I have pointed out in a previous post, Apple needs to switch to something like a “preferred carrier” strategy under which iPhones locked to a contract would sell for less while unlocked iPhones with some features disabled would sell at a premium. Essentially, they need to roll with what’s already happening in Germany and France, though I can’t see many people willing to pay T-Mobile’s €600 premium.

And let’s not forget that of the first 1.4 million iPhones sold in the United States, 250,000 were purchased to be unlocked -- illegally.

Yesterday news Web sites were buzzing with a quote from AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson that we will see a 3G iPhone at some point next year.

Here’s where Apple – if it plays its hand aggressively -- has a huge opportunity to expand the iPhone’s market footprint in a very short time. Imagine a 3G iPhone that retains its ability to connect to Wi-Fi hotspots as well as AT&T’s GSM-based network, which is the most commonly available mobile network technology in the world.

A hybrid phone is not so crazy a thought. Research in Motion started selling a “world phone,” the Blackberry 8830, through Verizon back in April. It can use both GSM and CDMA networks (Verizon Wireless in the U.S. is a CDMA network.)

Apple could sell such a “Universal” iPhone as a high-end option at a very steep price. But it also would have to surrender on the concept of locking the device to a single provider.

Rather than continue to fight the inevitable, Apple should announce at January’s Macworld that a 3G unlocked iPhone is coming, along with the expected price premiums. AT&T will still get to sell a locked version along with a contract for a lesser sum.

The question is whether the massive boost in sales Apple would get from an unlocked iPhone, Universal or otherwise, would outweigh the profit the company would forfeit from the lost shared monthly revenues with its partner carriers. Profits would have to come primarily from hardware sales, as they do with Macs and iPods.

If high-end cellphones are indeed destined to become portable mini-computers, Apple is ideally positioned to thrive. The iPhone already does this better than its rivals; as with the Mac, Apple’s control of both the hardware and software gives it an ongoing advantage.

If Apple can bend a little on the issue of locking the iPhone to one provider, the potential is mind-boggling. The three main impediments to higher iPhone sales have been 1) the price; 2) being locked to AT&T’s network for two years; and 3) the relatively slow speed of the GSM technology.

Apple showed how changing just one of those factors could spur sales when they dropped the price $200. Think how many more people would buy an unlocked 3G-enabled iPhone. And how many would buy an unlocked Universal iPhone.

The possibilities boggle the mind.

Posted by David Zeiler at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
                    

You never can tell where an obsession with Apple will lead.

Last week I saw the new iPod Touch ad on television numerous times. It’s clever ad that shows off the multi-touch technology while a very catchy song plays in the background. A very catchy song.

In fact, I couldn’t get the song out of my head. I went to Apple’s Web site to watch the ad. At the bottom of the Web page I noticed Apple had thoughtfully noted the song’s name, “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex;” the band that made it, CSS; and that it was available on iTunes.

So off to the iTunes Store I went, where I found CSS’s Cansei De Ser Sexy album in its entirety. Reading the bio blurb I learned the band hails from Sao Paolo, Brazil, where it began to craft its quirky sound in dance clubs. Intrigued by the album’s song samples, I downloaded it.

As an aging rock aficionado who spent most of the 1980s listening to endless oddball alternative acts, I can say CSS is the best new group I’ve heard in years. I can hear the club music influences along with a lot of echoes from such eclectic bands as Sonic Youth, Duran Duran, B-52s, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Most notably, however, CSS is a band having fun, something all too rare in alt/rock today.

Anyway, hats off to Nick Haley, the 18-year-old U.K. student who created the original iPod Touch ad, as well as Apple for noticing it on YouTube and enlisting TBWA/Chiat/Day to polish it into a professional commercial.

I thank you, and my iPod thanks you.

Posted by David Zeiler at 6:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
                    

The other day I received a message from a coworker with this in the subject field: “OK, I’m going Mac.”

Another colleague fed up with Windows-based PCs is seeking my aid on switching to the Mac.

Having written about Apple and the Mac for the Baltimore Sun on and off for the past decade, I have become a handy resource for my colleagues at the newspaper whenever they have questions about Apple products.

Over the years nearly all of those questions have come from fellow Mac users with a particularly vexing problem with their Mac at home, although I’ve done more than my share of Mac troubleshooting in the newsroom (shhhh, don’t tell our IT department).

But over the past six months or so I’ve helped half a dozen coworkers who wanted to ditch their Windows PCs at home for a Mac. I realize this is anecdotal, completely unscientific evidence, but since such queries were rare before this year I’m counting it as further evidence that the Mac is making significant headway in the consumer market.

The reasons these folks have given me for switching from Windows -- which in most cases they have always used -- reflect points Apple has emphasized in its advertising campaign. They’re tired of PCs that get so gummed up with spyware, viruses and adware they become unusable. They’re tired of peripherals that are supposed to work but don’t. They’re tired of struggling with Windows, and are reluctant to buy a new PC because it means learning the new foibles of Vista, Microsoft’s most recent version of the OS.

At the same time, Apple’s powerful brand made enough of an impact to get them to consider the Mac as an alternative. They’ve witnessed the hype around the iPhone and noticed the dominance of the iPod in the portable music player market. Several visited an Apple Store before they made up their mind. In short, Apple’s strategy is succeeding.

Best of all, everyone who has switched has been glad they did. They’re mostly surprised that a home computer can be as hassle-free as the Mac generally is. They’re converts who will likely tell their friends about their positive experiences.

The Mac’s steadily growing U.S. market share numbers indicate this sort of thing must be happening more and more, and could be ready to snowball as we head into 2008.

Microsoft, watch your back.

Posted by David Zeiler at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)
                    

Although it’s been nice to see some of the bigger PC game developers such as Electronic Arts and Id Software returning to the Mac platform this year, a few smaller game developers have supported the Mac all along, even during the Dark Ages of the late 1990s.

One such company, Freeverse Software, known early on for its quirky adaptations of classic card games (I personally spent way too much time playing “Burning Monkey Solitaire”), has made yet another significant contribution to Mac gaming.

This week Freeverse announced the relaunch of Macfun.com, a site devoted to shareware-type Mac games such as those Freeverse makes. The games typically cost a reasonable $19.95 each.

You can download demos of the games, or buy them directly from the site. There’s also an “online” area but so far it looks like it contains only lists of uploaded scores showing where registered users rank against each other. It’s not clear if this area will gain more functionality in the future.

To commemorate the launch, the company is offering visitors a free copy of one of their most popular games, 3D Hearts Deluxe. According to the press release, “Macfun.com will always have at least one free game available, so visitors should come back often.”

In another move to keep folks coming back, Macfun.com also plans to release a new game every Friday.

As a longtime fan of Freeverse games (other favorites of mine include “Wingnuts” and “Burning Monkey Casino”), I applaud the company’s latest effort to boost Mac gaming. Frankly I prefer Freeverse’s less intense, less time-consuming and less expensive games as compared to most mainstream commercial offerings.

I recommend any Mac users with an interest in gaming to check Macfun.com out for themselves.

Posted by David Zeiler at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Now we know what a legally unlocked iPhone is worth: 999 euros, or $1,477.

That’s what Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile unit in Germany is charging for a contract-free iPhone in the wake of Monday’s court injunction ordering it to cease selling locked iPhones. The price for an iPhone with a two-year contract is 399 euros, or $590.

Apparently T-Mobile simply baked the revenue it would have received from the two-year contract into the initial sales price.

To put it in perspective, a black MacBook or the 20-inch iMac with the 2.4 GHz processor costs about the same as an unlocked German iPhone.

At first it sounds crazy. Who would pay that much money for a cellphone? And while such a customer is free to choose his or her cellular provider, that still means shelling out even more dough for monthly service.

And yet that is the crux of T-Mobile’s (and presumably, Apple’s) strategy. By offering an unlocked iPhone at an outlandish price, T-Mobile satisfies the demand of the court order while simultaneously discouraging anyone from taking advantage of it. The court order said nothing about a decent price. Expect the unlocked French iPhone, due out by the end of this month, to carry a similar weighty premium.

Not everyone faces the tough choice between paying a reasonable price and freedom of carrier choice, though. Any lucky ducks who already had bought an iPhone in Germany from T-Mobile can have the SIM lock on their phones removed at no extra charge.

In a post yesterday I suggested that the legal problems in France and Germany will be repeated as the iPhone launches in other parts of the world, and that Apple needed to re-evaluate its “one-country, one carrier” policy.

I’m not sure that charging an exorbitant amount for an unlocked version of the iPhone will be the answer in every case, but it could work in Europe. In countries with more active underground economies such as China -- where the black market price of unlocked iPhones already has dropped below $500 -- the strategy could backfire.

Apple has created a bit of a trap for itself in brokering these clever revenue-sharing deals with carriers that depend on locked in customers. They’re lucrative for Apple, but not very customer-friendly. A lot of customers want unlocked iPhones, but unlocked iPhones wreck the business model. Ugh.

Eventually Apple will need to come up with a better answer that preserves a decent profit for itself without alienating the millions of customers it needs to ensure the iPhone’s success.

I don’t envy the guy with that assignment.

Posted by David Zeiler at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
                    

Constant rumors of Apple negotiations with cellular carriers in an ever-growing roster of nations – Spain and China being the most recent – indicate that the company is pushing forward rapidly toward realizing its dream of selling the iPhone worldwide. But its policy of tying the iPhone to one carrier per country has met with increasing resistance.

Yesterday the German unit of Vodafone Group obtained an injunction against Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile unit to try to force it to sell unlocked iPhones in Germany. Apparently T-Mobile could sell locked iPhones as well, but Vodafone claims German law says it must offer an unlocked version as well.

"We want it to be available to buyers without a mandatory calling plan," said Vodafone Germany chief executive Friedrich Joussen.

T-Mobile disagrees. Another hearing on the matter is scheduled to take place in two weeks in the same Hamburg court that issued the injunction. It could well result in the availability of legally unlocked iPhones in Germany.

If that does happen, it will mirror the situation in neighboring France. There the sale of mobile phones locked to a single carrier explicitly violates French law, which forced Apple and its French partner Orange to offer an unlocked version of the iPhone.

France and Germany are just the beginning. I suspect lots of other countries where Apple would like to sell iPhones have similar regulations against locking customers to a single carrier with long-term contracts.

Signs of trouble can already be seen in countries like China and India where Apple has yet to introduce the iPhone. The black market for unlocked iPhones is exploding.

Tim Bajarin, an analyst for Creative strategies witnessed this himself during a recent visit to China. “I saw unlocked iPhones everywhere – in cell phone stores and camera shops, all over the place,” Bajarin told Wired. “It was unusual even if one of the major Hong Kong stores didn’t have at least one or two [unlocked iPhone] advertisements outside the store. It was really blatant.”

Apple’s negotiations with China Mobile reportedly are sticking on Apple’s demand for 30 percent of the monthly fees, but that may be the least of its problems in its plans to break into the massive Chinese cellular market. Chinese customers accustomed to unlocked SIM cards in their cellphones may well prefer a black market iPhone to Apple’s locked, legal version.

With a the market for unauthorized unlocked iPhones thriving and a widespread distaste for locked mobile phones, Apple may soon find its “one country, one carrier” policy on very shaky ground.

Apple’s rationale for doing it that way – to lay claim to a hefty chunk of the monthly carrier fees, as well as to benefit its cellular partners – may have seemed like a good idea at the time but it is facing steeper challenges overseas than it did in the United States.

Even in the U.S. where customers are used cellphones locked to one carrier, many jumped at the opportunity to unlock their iPhones once a few enterprising individuals proved it was possible.

The growing international legal quagmires and widespread customer resistance will push Apple to reverse course on this issue. It wouldn’t be the first change in iPhone policy.

Apple has already altered its strategy on several aspects of the iPhone in response to various events. It dropped the price $200 to increase sales volume. It announced it would open up the platform to third party software next year. And in Europe, it made a deal with Wi-Fi hotspot providers so iPhone owners can use those networks for free.

I realize Apple would lose revenue from the shared fees, but the tangle of issues it faces calls for new tactics. Apple could still have a “preferred provider” in each country that could offer certain services that users of unlocked iPhones could not get (much as illegally unlocked iPhones now lose some functionality). That would preserve some the shared revenue.

And using the French model as a precedent, Apple could offer unlocked iPhones at a slightly higher price (we still don’t know how much higher the unlocked French iPhone will be) to try to push customers toward the “preferred provider.”

It may not be a perfect solution, but at least it would address most of the legal issues and present a viable option to customers uncomfortable with being locked to a single carrier. Apple can’t wait until its partners lose court battle after court battle and customers all over the planet choose to bypass Apple for the black market.

Steve Jobs, can you hear me now?

Posted by David Zeiler at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
                    

In the process of reviewing Leopard for today’s editions of The Sun, I conducted an iChat video interview with Chris Bourdon, senior product line manager for Mac OS X. After going over Leopard’s key new features, I asked him about a few issues that have arisen since the product’s release.

On security: Many security experts have accused Apple of making security worse in Leopard, primarily by going with a new firewall and perplexingly turning that firewall off by default. (This Computerworld article provides more specifics.) The old firewall is still there, but deactivated.

“You do need to activate it,” Bourdon said, explaining why it’s turned off by default. “We think that’s what people want. Firewalls can be intrusive for the average user.”

Bourdon said Apple’s firewall is better because it’s application based. Rather than allowing all applications to access an open port, as does the current firewall, Bourdon said the new one restricts access just to the application that requires it. The user can create a list of applications in the Security Preference Pane and designate for each app whether it should allow or deny incoming connections. “It’s much better, it’s easier to configure and it’s more powerful,” he said.

Bourdon also referred me to a Knowledge Base article in Apple’s online Support area.

I expect security experts will continue to attack Leopard as vulnerable, but that’s nothing new. It is possible -- though unlikely -- that Apple expended resources to create a new firewall only to botch it so badly that it’s worse than what it replaced. I reserve the right to change my mind if any of my Leopard Macs are exploited.

On the expiration of the Boot Camp beta: When Apple released the Boot camp software, it said it would expire upon Leopard’s release. (Boot Camp is included in Leopard.) Some who have been using the beta under Tiger have worried their Windows partitions will no longer boot now that Leopard is here. Not so, Bourdon said. Users will not be able to create new Windows partitions, he said, but existing ones will continue to function. If you want to make any changes, though, you will need to pony up for Leopard.

On the many cosmetic changes: It’s hard not to notice all the new icons and how the iTunes interface has propagated across numerous Apple applications in Leopard, particularly the Finder. Bourdon said the reason for so many design changes in Leopard was partly to refine and improve them, but also to achieve “consistency across all applications.”

Posted by David Zeiler at 6:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

If we can glean any meaning from the buying habits of the tech-savvy population of Japan, it would be that Mac users are far more likely to buy an OS upgrade for their computers than Windows users.

Although largely caused by the spike in sales generated by Leopard’s launch, the new version of Mac OS X beat Microsoft’s Vista in the packaged operating system category (that is, they bought the OS in a box rather than pre-installed on a computer) in Japan for the month of October.

Leopard snapped up 53.9 percent of the market according to BCN, a Japanese language consumer electronics news and data services company. Although Vista is not as fresh, having been on sale since the beginning of the year, Leopard had only the last six days of the month to accomplish its feat.

It gets better. Combined with sales of Tiger (people are still buying Tiger?) Apple took 60.7 percent of the market. That’s a huge leap from September, when Apple had only a 15.5 percent share.

So far in November, Leopard is beating its nearest competitor 40.2 percent to 10.5 percent. And that competitor is not Windows Vista – it’s the three-year-old Windows XP SP2 Home Edition.

Posted by David Zeiler at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

This time Apple is going for the jugular.

Watching the three newest “Get a Mac” TV ads, which attack Windows more pointedly than ever, shows an Apple unafraid to exploit Microsoft’s misfortunes with Vista, its latest version of Windows.

Most of the earlier “Get a Mac” ads featuring John Hodgman as the PC and scruffy Justin Long as the Mac have poked fun at Windows and its assorted shortcomings vis-à-vis the Mac without drawing a lot of blood. Many of these ads showed Macs as better at “fun” creative endeavors, with PCs more suited for such routine tasks as spreadsheets. Even the “Viruses” ad, in which Hodgman’s sneezing represents the tens of thousands of PC viruses in the wild, had a mood more playful than vicious.

The tone started to change earlier this year with ads such as “Choose a Vista,” in which the many varieties of Vista are represented on a big game wheel that Hodgman spins (only to land on “lose a turn”).

The three new ads hold back nothing, opportunistically exploiting reports that many Windows users who tried Vista have since downgraded back to XP. In “PR Lady,” as Hodgman’s discusses the “downgrading” problem with Long, a smartly dressed woman interjects a positive spin: ‘By downgrading he means they’re upgrading to an older, more familiar experience.” When Hodgman suggests PC users might switch to a Mac, the flustered PR lady can only say “No comment.”

The other two ads reverse the long-standing role of the Mac as the challenger and portray the PC on the defensive. Hodgman, dressed in a boxer’s robe, tells Long in “Boxer”: “Well, your sales are through the roof and I’m showing the people I’m not going down without a fight.”

In “Podium” Hodgman plays the role of a politician extolling Vista, despite its troubles. “Some people are giving up on Vista because it doesn’t work the way they want it to,” he tells Long from behind a podium marked with the slogan “Don’t Give Up on Vista!” He makes outlandish statements like “If your printer isn’t compatible with Vista, I say buy a new printer!” The ad concludes with Hodgman admitting -- despite his strong rhetoric – he “switched back to XP three weeks ago.”

Casting Windows as the besieged OS is a clever twist. By turning the traditional relationship on its head, Apple hopes to convince the computer-buying public that the Mac is winning a war that was supposed to be over a decade ago. In so doing the company hopes to persuade consumers that buying a Mac is the prudent choice.

Everybody loves a winner, right?

Posted by David Zeiler at 2:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
                    

One month ago I wrote a post speculating on whether installing Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on an older Power PC-based Mac – particularly one on the edge of the minimum system requirements – would result in a less responsive machine compared to that same Mac running its predecessors.

A few days ago I installed Leopard on my 2001 G4 Quicksilver tower with an 867 MHz Power PC processor – the oldest Mac model that Leopard officially supports.

And it rocks.

My previous concerns were based on a report that Apple had raised the minimum requirements just a few weeks before Leopard’s release. AppleInsider said Apple engineers had determined Leopard ran too slowly on Macs with less than an 867 MHz processor.

Based on my experience so far, I’d say those engineers – if in fact that actually happened (AppleInsider is a rumor site, after all, though a very good one) -- were overcautious.

Subjectively speaking, I think Leopard is slightly more responsive on my Quicksilver than Mac Os X 10.4 Tiger was. The fancy new eye candy such as QuickLook Cover Flow in the Finder work fairly smoothly. Not quite as well as they do on my 2006 MacBook, but certainly well enough.

Now I do need to point out that I did a fresh install of Leopard on a secondary internal hard drive rather than upgrade over my existing system. So it could be the new snappiness is attributable to a clean system that lacks the hundreds of legacy font files and oddball system hacks gumming up my Tiger volume.

Nevertheless, I’m keeping Tiger as my primary OS X version on the Quicksilver for three reasons: 1) Leopard consumes several gigabytes more space than Tiger, and I can’t spare the room on the hard drive; 2) I need to run Classic mode because my daughter still plays a lot of old Mac OS 9 games; and 3) I’m planning to replace the Quicksilver as my primary Mac with a Mac Pro the day the new models are announced, which could be as soon as next week (let me dream, OK?)

Aside from the loss of Classic mode and the unpredictable glitches one might encounter as an early adopter, performance-wise Leopard should purr on any Mac that meets the minimum requirements.

Vista, eat your heart out.

Posted by David Zeiler at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
                    

Regular readers of this blog (all six of you) may have noticed I’ve been a bit light on the posts this week. That’s because I’ve been installing Leopard on my Macs and ran into a self-inflicted problem during the Leopardification of my MacBook. Here’s a lesson on how trying to skirt past an alert message can buy you a heap of trouble.

After you get past the initial option screens, the Leopard installer checks the integrity of the DVD before continuing. Just a few minutes into this process, I got an error message explaining that Leopard could not be installed because of a problem with the disk. The message advised me to clean the disk and try again.

Since I had just then removed the DVD from its package, I could hardly see how it got scratched or dirty. But I obliged the message, cleaned the disk and ran the installer again. Same message.

Impatient to get Leopard on my MacBook, I convinced myself that the disk checking mechanism was wrong and decided on my next attempt to bypass it by clicking the “skip” button. Not a good idea.

At first it looked like I had fooled the installer; the progress bar slowly moved across the screen. But about halfway through it stopped and presented this heart-stopping message in large letters: “Installation failed.” A smaller message informed me that one of the language packages could not be opened. The disk-checking mechanism had been right after all.

Because the installation was partly completed, I no longer had either a complete Tiger or Panther system on my MacBook. The internal drive was unbootable.

I didn’t panic because I had the full contents of the MacBook stored as a disk image on a network hard drive (thanks to the marvelous shareware backup tool SuperDuper!). But I still needed to bring the MacBook back to life.

After some time toying with Target Disk mode and consulting with an tech expert provided to me by Apple, I hit upon an idea. I booted off the Leopard DVD but this time deselected all the language packages in the options window. I still needed to click “skip” on the disk check, but by then I had nothing to lose.

Leopard finally installed on the MacBook. All my old user files were moved to a “Previous System” folder because I did an Archive and Install on the botched first attempt. So I didn’t lose any data, but it was a scary experience. As a veteran user I should know better, but I succumbed to Leopard fever. Learn from my mistake.

My review of Leopard will appear in The Sun’s Plugged In section Thursday, Nov. 15, as well as here on baltimoresun.com.

Posted by David Zeiler at 4:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

One year after introducing its Zune music player with the slogan “Welcome to the social,” Microsoft is going to Plan B.

The emphasis on the Zune’s primary advantage over Apple’s iPod – its ability to “squirt” songs to another nearby Zune wirelessly – turned out to be a poor sales strategy for a new product trying to break into an established market. That the songs expired shortly afterward didn’t help, either.

Microsoft built an ad campaign on a function most Zune owners rarely were able to use. It’s hard to be “social” when you’re the only one at the party.

While Microsoft has publicly stated it’s pleased with Zune sales, the product nevertheless sits in fourth place with less than 3 percent of the total MP3 player market It trails Sandisk, which has 10 percent of the market and Creative Labs at 4 percent. The iPod, of course, dominates with over 70 percent.

So on the cusp of the arrival of the new Zune models on Nov. 13 as well as the crucial holiday buying season, Microsoft has decided to bag the old campaign for a fresh one from a different ad agency, according to an Advertising Age article published yesterday.

The new campaign is more than a fresh approach; it essentially inverts the message of the original. From the AdAge piece: “Zune is dropping its original strategy, which painted the iPod as an isolating device and Zune as more social because its tunes can be shared among users. Now the campaign is centered on the individual and tagged ‘You make it you.’ ”

Hmmmm ... probably not a contender for next year’s Clio Awards. It may be worse than “Welcome to the social.” And then there was Vista’s underwhelming but costly “The Wow starts now” campaign. You’d think Microsoft would use its bloated bank account to hire better talent.

Microsoft’s only chance at taking significant market share from the iPod is to promote features of the Zune that are different or better. At least the first campaign tried something along those lines, no matter that it was ill conceived.

But a campaign to convince people the Zune is more personal than an iPod? In what way? In both cases, the user personally chooses every song and video he or she loads on the device. There’s no difference. The campaign makes absolutely no sense.

The Zune is a decent product, but it doesn’t particularly stand out in the crowd of portable media players. As the underdog in this category, Microsoft needs to show consumers why they should buy a Zune over not just an iPod, but over any music player.

The “it’s good enough” strategy only works when you have a monopoly.

Finally, I’d like to point out one more priceless tidbit in the AdAge article. Mike Harris, partner-strategy for T.A.G., the ad agency responsible for the new campaign, derided the iPod as “a superficial status symbol” as he praised the Zune as more personal.

Thus, the objective of Microsoft’s new campaign is to get the ignorant hordes to realize that since they bought an iPod only to impress their friends the only thing to do is to toss their Nanos sheepishly into a trash bin before rushing out to buy a Zune.

Good luck with that.

Posted by David Zeiler at 5:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)
                    

A new Trojan horse directed at porn-viewing Mac users has touched off the usual barrage of “now those smug Mac owners will get their come-uppance” articles. The exaggerated tone – particularly in some of the headlines – is completely out of proportion with the threat.

A few examples:

“New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open" – Wired
"Fortress Mac Is Gone: Malware breaches the Mac moat" – eWeek
“Porn Trojan ushers in new era for Mac security” – ZDNet UK
“Macs seized by porn Trojan” – The Register (UK)

Representatives of security software firms have jumped on reports of the Trojan as evidence Macs are really no safer than Windows PCs, a not-so-subtle suggestion that Mac users need to buy their anti-virus software.

I’m not saying the Trojan, called OSX.RSPlug.A, poses no threat. It’s real and it’s out there. But it’s not spreading like wildfire. A Mac user needs to do a lot of dumb things to get infected.

First, the Trojan is embedded in porn sites, so if you’re not using your Mac for porn you should be safe. If you do enjoy porn on your Mac (I’m not judging you, but you’re the target here), it still requires some effort to get infected.

Here’s how it works: When you click on a booby-trapped porn video, a window pops up telling you that you lack a certain video plug-in and then asks if you’d like to download it. If you click OK, your Mac will download a disk image that contains the Trojan. You then need to mount the disk image by double-clicking on it (this step could be done automatically by your browser depending on how you have set your preferences).

If you double-click on the installer that appears in the disk image window, the Mac will ask you for your administrator password before proceeding. This is a security measure built in to Mac OS X designed to prevent malware like this Trojan from installing itself in the background. If you ignore this red flag, type in your password and click OK, the software finally will install the Trojan on your Mac.

Once on your Mac, the Trojan changes some network settings to redirect your Web browser to fraudulent sites set up to trick users into surrendering personal information such as credit card or bank account numbers. Technically known as “phishing” scams they turn up even more frequently in scam e-mails designed to look as if they were sent from a legitimate business, such as PayPal or a large bank.

A Trojan for the Mac is a bad thing, but it relies on the user’s ignorance for success. You can’t get infected just by browsing the Internet or even just by visiting particular porn sites. With a lot of Windows malware, the user gets infected quietly in the background, without any of the user interaction the new Mac Trojan requires.

This does not mean, as some articles have implied, that Macs are now just as likely to be infected by malware as Windows PCs. There are still hundreds of thousands of viruses, worms and Trojans in the wild that target only Windows. Despite the appearance of this Mac-specific Trojan, there are no Windows-like worms or viruses that can spread from Mac to Mac without the knowledge of the user.

That said, no system can be made immune to malware that employs “social engineering” – that is, user gullibility -- to do its dirty work. That’s as true of Macs as any computing platform. A new Trojan targeted at OS X is an incremental increase in the malware threat to the Mac, but nothing to panic over.

Mac OS X may not be invulnerable, but the hackers have not yet shown it’s so easy to crack that ordinary users need live in fear.

Posted by David Zeiler at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)
                    

In the corporate world, it’s usually bad strategy for a CEO to pick fights with other large companies. It makes that CEO look petty and desperate. Worse, it makes any issues between the companies harder to resolve, leaving everyone a loser.

Which is why I’m still scratching my head over NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker’s incendiary remarks about Apple and the iTunes Store he uttered on Monday.

First Zucker said that NBC wanted to “experiment” by charging $2.99 for a hit show rather than Apple’s standard $1.99. “We made that offer for months and they [Apple] said no,” Zucker told the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta at a benefit for Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.

OK, fine, we already knew NBC U resented Apple’s ironclad rules on pricing. But then Zucker dropped his bomb: “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money. They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.”

Zucker actually asked Apple for a cut of iPod sales, which explains Apple’s unusually harsh public response when negotiations broke down in August. (Apple announced it would not sell new NBC shows the day after NBC U said it would not renew their contract in December.) NBC U apparently was inspired by last year’s Zune deal: Microsoft shares $1 with Universal for each Zune sold.

Zucker had to know how much such a request would infuriate Steve Jobs. It’s clear now that he wanted a public war with Apple. But what did Zucker hope to achieve?

He had to know that Apple would not bow to the pressure and suddenly cave to his demands. Judging from NBC U’s maneuvers over the past six months or so, it appears Zucker’s goal is to rally all the other content providers – both of music and video – to abandon the iTunes Store.

Universal has led the way in promoting alternatives to iTunes. Over the summer Universal announced that it would start selling DRM-free music at just about every other music retail download site except iTunes.

This week it launched the beta phase of Hulu.com, a Web site that will offer ad-embedded NBC shows for free. While Hulu will appeal to some users, the content will be tied to the user’s PC. You won’t be able to watch it on your TV or download it to your iPod. Anyone who prefers the iTunes way of paying for the download to watch it where they want it is out of luck.

You’d think NBC U would want as many types of distribution as possible. Cutting off iTunes to spite Apple will have the undesired side effect of angering a lot of fans of NBC U programs. It’s bad business.

The situation reminds me a bit of the struggle between Pixar Animation Studios and Disney a few years ago, which was more a war of wills between then-Pixar CEO Steve Jobs and then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Pixar needed Disney’s distribution system and Disney needed Pixar’s box office successes. That conflict was only resolved because Eisner resigned, and was replaced by Robert Iger. Jobs got along so well with the new Disney chief that he elected to sell Pixar to Disney outright.

Apple won’t be buying NBC Universal or vice versa, but the principal is similar: feuding with a partner with whom you have a mutually beneficial relationship is costly and stupid. The longer the battle goes on, the more both companies stand to lose, financially and in terms of public opinion. Customers care less about who’s right than having a system that serves their needs.

Jeff Zucker thinks he’s working in the interest of NBC U and for that matter, the entire entertainment industry by fighting Apple. Somehow he’s forgotten that the iTunes Store was the pioneer in offering legal paid music downloads, providing a legal alternative to the rampant peer-to-peer file sharing that was undermining their business model. The contribution of the iTunes Store to the video world has not been as dramatic, but even NBC credited the support of fans using iTunes with saving “The Office” from early cancellation.

True, Steve Jobs isn’t the easiest CEO to deal with, but others have shown it can be done. If Zucker wants to show us leadership worthy of a CEO, he’ll try treating Apple as an ally rather than an enemy.

Posted by David Zeiler at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)