A few days back TechCrunch had a story about Microsoft putting out a promo video for SongSmith that included a poorly disguised Apple MacBook covered up with stickers:

If you check out the IBM LotusLive site, which I mentioned earlier, it’s also got a stock image of a woman working on an Apple MacBook, but the Apple logo has just been erased:

Not exactly in the same vein, but still one that I found amusing was the (perhaps inadvertent) Mac vs. PC ad in the Facebook Developer Forum back in December:

So why does this happen?  Well, my theory is that it’s usually because people in marketing and creative arts departments typically use Macs, especially since they’re often used for video editing, so they’re just there. No reason to run out and buy a $600 prop, right?

If you have another example I should add to the list, ping me in the comments.

We approach this business as a software platform business. We are watching the landscape. We like competition as long as they don’t rip off our IP. And if they do, we will go after anyone who does.

I don’t want to talk about any specific company. We are ready to suit up and go against anyone. However, we will not stand for having our IP ripped off.

Cook declined to answer whether he was talking specifically about Palm, and the recently announced Palm Pre.

The current speculation is that this might be a personal battle between Palm and iPhone, since Palm’s executive chairman, Jon Rubinstein, used to be Apple’s product chief.  Rubinstein was installed as chairman by Elevation Partners, the company that recently invested an additional $100 million into Palm.

However, it’s much more likely a strong statement to anyone who’s thinking about entering into the already crowded smartphone market.  I would imagine that might actually be Microsoft, especially with so many Zune phone rumors flying around.

The thing that came to mind was pretty short and simple, and that is:  Apple will still be the same company it is today without Steve Jobs, perhaps for as long as a decade.  Despite investors’ fears that Apple will not succeed without Steve Jobs, I believe Apple will still bring fantastic products to the consumer market and continue to innovate for a long time to come.  Why am I so optimistic about this?  Well, despite the fact that I am a notorious optimist, the reason is fairly straightforward.  Jobs’ significant influence on Apple means he has built a company culture that will survive past his time as CEO.  As wise and inspiring of a leader as Jobs’ might be, he is just one person.  Apple is a company of thousands of people, all of whom own some responsibility for the success of the company.

It’s true that Jobs helped re-focus and re-vitalize Apple after they strayed from the core principles in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it was his influence and direction that helped develop the culture that exists at Apple today.  And, perhaps arguably, it wasn’t until recent years that Apple has really perfected their company culture of well thought out, high-quality product designs that have propelled all of their recent ventures, such as the iPhone and iTouch, to such brilliant successes.

There is little question that having strong and outspoken leaders within an organization is one of the single most important factors for success.  But great leaders build a culture of success, and dismantling a dynamic and healthy company culture will likely take just as long as it took to build it up.  Will the folks at Apple who are equally as influential in creating the environment at Apple that exists today flee the company just because Jobs is stepping down for a short period?  It’s unlikely.  Even if Jobs’ departure is permanent, the best and brightest at Apple will likely stick around to keep doing what they have already been doing for the last 5-10 years.  Those most influential people in the company are likely to be fans of their workplace, and abandoning ship is not an option for them.

Any of us who have worked for great company environments (or even bad ones) know how hard it is to shift the working environment in either direction.  Changes in company culture don’t happen overnight, although an organization can eventually collapse when enough of the key people leave at the same time.  But, at least for the time being, it would appear that Apple is in no risk of that happening.  For that reason, Apple will likely remain successful and innovative.

Amongst them:  it costs money to transfer existing purchases to DRM-free tracks, you can’t choose to upgrade just a part of your current iTunes collection – it’s all or nothing.  But perhaps the most distressing part of the DRM-free iTunes tracks still contain personal information about yourself, namely the email address that you use with iTunes.

I’m not sure how to feel about this.  I still believe that Apple’s move was largely one of fashion: DRM is un-cool, and Apple is all about selling hip consumer products.  I also believe that Apple was trying to improve the experience for users, which seems to be a part of their core beliefs as a company.  But I’m not sure what Apple’s aim is by including the email address in their iTunes tracks.  This appears to be a left-over piece of tracking information that has been noticed since 2007.  I suspect that the goal of including the email address in the iTunes track is to identify if you’re a repeat broad-sharing offender: someone who buys tracks from iTunes and then shares them frequently with others.  But what happens if your laptop gets stolen, or if someone you know and share files with gets their data taken from them?  I wonder how Apple might approach situations like that.

In a way, it seems like Apple has potentially gone further in transferring the responsibility of preventing file sharing from themselves to the consumer.  I’m not sure how that will play out with consumers if that turns out to be accurate.

[More iTunes details at CNET News]

Included in the 3.0.1 release: a fix for a crash when right-clicking on a photo, and improved handling of network failures during upload.

This might confirm a suggestion a friend of mine made earlier today: Google rushed the release of Picasa 3 to beat Apple to the punch about announcing iPhoto ‘09.

Is this a sign that DRM is on its way out?

Apple announced today that all music purchased from iTunes will now be DRM-free (digital rights management free), meaning that a track purchased from iTunes can be played on any music device regardless of manufacturer or owner.  In the same announcement, Apple also indicated three tiers of pricing: $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29 USD per track, as opposed to a flat $0.99 per track previously.  Most albums will still cost $9.99 USD.

Apple’s move away from DRM really doesn’t seem to be so much about offering benefits to subscribers.  Customers happily bought from iTunes even without being able to purchase DRM-free tracks, and most people know that you could always burn your purchased albums to CD-ROM and then re-rip them (perhaps at a loss of audio fidelity) back into DRM-free MP3s, amongst many other methods of removing DRM from Apple’s iTunes music.  It would appear, however, that this move is more about getting away from DRM as a mechanism to protect content due to its unpopularity with consumers.

DRM as a technological concept has caused much heartache for consumers.  Much of the early complaints about Microsoft Windows Vista had to do with the excessively restrictive DRM requirements around high definition content, and the hardware connections required to view it – through video cards and monitors that supported HDCP.  Gamers have been miffed with unrealistic DRM requirements as well, with EA fighting a publicity backlash over their decision to only allow a limited number of installations of their much-anticipated game Spore, which ultimately led to them making a DRM-free version available as well.  Spore still sports a 1.5 star rating from Amazon.com, with most complaints being about the DRM restrictions.  And many sites that sold DRM-enabled content, such as Yahoo Music, have recently gone under, leaving many customers with unplayable music tracks.

DRM seems like a shortcut to solving the real problems around monetization of digital content – in whatever format it might be, including videos, music, and software content.  Publishers seem to think that the only way to keep people "honest" is to overload content with restrictions and limitations, even ones that clearly impinge on fair use.  But the market seems to have spoken loudly about DRM: it doesn’t work (in its current forms), and there must be a balance of fair use.  Hopefully the news from Apple today represents a signal to content publishers that DRM is broken, in more ways than one.

Best Buy also sells refurbished 3G models for people that want to upgrade.

Personally, I’m still sticking with my iTouch until the iPhone gets a full keyboard.  I just can’t type worth a dime on the touch screen.

[c/o Reuters]

After having downloaded it and tested it out myself, I can confirm that it does indeed look and operate pretty much the exact same way that it does on the other supported platforms (Windows and Linux).

Probably the best feature of Picasa 3: the retouching tool.  If you’ve ever used the Healing Brush in Adobe Photoshop, you’ll be instantly familiar with the way the retouching tool works: pick a brush size, click on an area that you want to fix, and then click on an area where you want the brush to sample from.  I found it to be generally more user friendly than the Healing Brush in Photoshop, although perhaps a bit less powerful.  But for most intents and purposes, the retouching tool in Picasa 3 can easily fix any minor blemishes in your digital photos.

Other great features that were in previous versions: the ability to auto-correct color, contrast and brightness, straighten photos, and crop.

[Google Picasa for Mac]

In a letter delivered January 5, 2009 to Apple customers, Jobs explained the cause of his recent weight loss, along with his decision to not deliver the Macworld keynote address this year:

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

Jobs’ explanation seems to be going over well with investors.  Apple is trading up about $4.20/share, a 4.6% boost on the day, a solid gain considering the otherwise tepid mood of the market today.

Steve Jobs had previously been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, although he underwent a procedure to have it successfully removed without chemotherapy.  Apple had previously explained Jobs’ recent health problems as him having a bacterial infection, and that he was undergoing antibiotic treatment to remedy the problem.

Read Steve Jobs’ full letter at apple.com.

A lot of tech news sites have been theorizing that the “browser wars” may begin again, with Chrome, FireFox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 all competing for the highest chunk of the browser market.

While it might create some new innovation in the market, and drive much needed new features into Internet Explorer, I doubt this will re-ignite the same war that happened between Microsoft and Netscape.  The late 1990’s battle of the browser titans, Netscape and Internet Explorer, was primarily about one thing: personal revenge.  Bill Gates and his team at Microsoft were personally upset with Marc Andreessen’s comments about Windows (being a “poorly debugged set of device drivers” and so on), and the refusal by Andreessen to sell Netscape to Microsoft.  Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc. and built Internet Explorer in response to the growing challenge from Netscape.  The comments from Andreessen helped fuel the team at Microsoft to work extra hard to come out on top, and the fact that Microsoft could bundle their browser with the OS just helped to seal the deal.

Today, the browser market is a little more crowded.  Internet Explorer, FireFox and Apple’s Safari are competing for the top three spots, with Opera and Chrome following close behind Safari.  And despite FireFox’s steadily growing usage, up to somewhere around 20-25% of the browser market today, it’s important to remember that 65-70% is still Internet Explorer usage.  It’s simply a fact that there are people that use the Internet that don’t really care what browser they are using to get there.  It’s all the same Internet to them.  Google may be able to use its brand and broad reach to push Chrome usage up, but it will probably come at the cost of FireFox usage first before it affects much of the Internet Explorer user base.

But beyond that, it doesn’t look like Microsoft is that worried about anyone eating away some of their browser share.  More and more of their web applications are being cross-certified on FireFox and Safari (and since Chrome uses Safari’s WebKit rendering engine, it’s likely that Chrome will work fine for the most part).  And the unfortunate reality is that there isn’t much money in the browser market.  Google’s Chrome gives Google the ability to do what Microsoft has done with Internet Explorer: tailor experiences on their web applications to have proprietary hooks so that you get that “it just works better” feeling when using Google Chrome with Google web applications.  But there isn’t any money being made: Chrome is free, there’s no additional advertising being displayed (at least not yet), and Google’s one and only business model is to sell advertising.

So what will happen next?  Internet Explorer 8 will come out, it’ll probably make webmasters unhappy (and maybe even a few Internet Explorer 6 users that have never experienced Internet Explorer 7’s UI), but it will be a step forward because it adheres to web standards better than any version of Internet Explorer before it.  People will use it, and the market share will probably stay around 60-70%.  FireFox usage will decline once Chrome gets add-ins, as discussed in an earlier post.  And FireFox 3.1 will come out and be faster and better than ever.  But not much will change, at least not over the next 3-5 years.

The real war isn’t really about browsers.  It’s about what powers the desktop.  If Google goes one step further and starts their own Linux desktop, and then pushes Chrome onto it along with a host of productivity tools, that would be the point where we’d see the same kind of massive war that we saw in the late 90’s, with amazing advancements in technology in such a short time.