Christmas is approaching and with it the end of the first fiscal quarter for many computer companies including Apple. This is the time when these companies make their biggest sales of the year. It’s also the time when J.D. Power & Associates is finishing-up its PC quality surveys which cover initial quality and overall service and support. If you are an Apple customer or a prospective Apple customer pay attention, because this could be a very good time to be you.
Apple is proud of its support operation, which is ironic given that back in the early Apple ][ days Steve Jobs wanted to save money by mimeographing user manuals. I am not making this up. […]
Last time I wrote about the business and technical context into which Apple would be bringing its long-rumored tablet computer, which many of us now believe will also be some form of e-reader. That column stimulated a lot of lively comments, thanks, but now I have to put up or shut up, giving my thoughts on both the still-secret Apple device and the possible content strategy behind it.
It’s not that hard to predict what will happen in the future (I will die; Fifi, my son Fallon’s stuffed orca, will eventually need restuffing, etc.) but it is very hard to predict with any accuracy when things will happen. For technologies, I tend to see events happening long before they actually do, which makes me something of a prophet, though a pretty useless one. This may be proved yet again in the coming months as Apple and other companies attempt to take most of the paper out of publishing, something I thought we were about to do 15 years ago, but didn’t.
This column has a global audience so sometimes I have to defend my tendency to see things from an American perspective. But I’m not sure there even IS a defense for this particular item so I’ll just jump into it, because I think even readers from Kazahkstan and Kuwait (my two big K’s) may ultimately find it interesting. It’s about Apple and Hulu and the direction Internet TV is going in the United States. 