For me the London riots are a bit too close to home with rioting, looting and disorder just a mile down the road. Like many people in my situation I haven't been able to get enough of the news coverage. I want to know exactly where the rioters are and what they're doing.
I've found that the news is about an hour behind twitter so I've just been sitting watching my twitter feed. This is the first time I've used twitter like this and it's quite exciting, but it's also full of rubbish. About half the tweets are about the Nandos and Krispy Kreme being set on fire which I'm sure is just a lie (the live TV feed is showing them still up). And the same picture is being used as evidence for both, though the building on fire looks nothing like either of them.
But twitter could be doing something worse than spreading misinformation. Local people tweeting live about what they can see from their windows are telling potential rioters where all the action is (assuming they're one of the unfortunate rioters who didn't get the blackberry message). In fact the unfounded rumours they spread on twitter could start focal points of rioting where there was no previous plan to be.
What's the answer? I don't think it's reasonable to prevent people from tweeting about what's happening, and I think it would be very difficult to stop the word getting round on any type of social media. Maybe instead of stopping all messages the police should go the other way and flood social media such as bbm and twitter with messages dissuading the rioters. Obviously messages from the police won't work but if they could get respected community leaders involved then they just might have a chance...
Monday 8 August 2011
Tuesday 2 August 2011
The flaw in Apple's business model
Apple can do no wrong at the moment - it's even reported that they are holding more cash than the USA. But I just can't believe that their success is going to last. And here's why.
Apple's business model seems to be:
(i) Release new hardware
(ii) Hardware is very cool so people flock out to buy it (even though it's much more expensive than competing products)
(iii) Protect the brand by tightly monitoring applications that third parties develop for the hardware
(iv) Take 30% of any revenue the developer gets
(v) Repeat 6 months later.
All this hardware development must be very expensive for Apple but they can't take a break and rely on their older products because they seem to be actively discouraging third party developers (cf. (iii) and (iv)). Developers want to write software for Apple products because it is new and cool and thus they have a big market. But after a few months other companies have caught up with Apple's hardware and, crucially, they aren't going to take 30% away from the developers. So the developers move over to the other platforms and so the application offering on the Apple hardware stagnates. We already see this at the moment with the Android app store being predicted to overtake Apple's app store later this month.
Thus the reason they need point (v).
But what happens when they release a bad hardware platform (it has to happen eventually!) or they just run out of ideas for new products that people might want?
That day, I believe, will be the beginning of the end for Apple.
Apple's business model seems to be:
(i) Release new hardware
(ii) Hardware is very cool so people flock out to buy it (even though it's much more expensive than competing products)
(iii) Protect the brand by tightly monitoring applications that third parties develop for the hardware
(iv) Take 30% of any revenue the developer gets
(v) Repeat 6 months later.
All this hardware development must be very expensive for Apple but they can't take a break and rely on their older products because they seem to be actively discouraging third party developers (cf. (iii) and (iv)). Developers want to write software for Apple products because it is new and cool and thus they have a big market. But after a few months other companies have caught up with Apple's hardware and, crucially, they aren't going to take 30% away from the developers. So the developers move over to the other platforms and so the application offering on the Apple hardware stagnates. We already see this at the moment with the Android app store being predicted to overtake Apple's app store later this month.
Thus the reason they need point (v).
But what happens when they release a bad hardware platform (it has to happen eventually!) or they just run out of ideas for new products that people might want?
That day, I believe, will be the beginning of the end for Apple.
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