What goes around comes around…
03.02.10
I remember vaguely about 20 years ago I used to have an Atari 1200XL. I wrote my first code on it at the age of 13. It did something funny involving a line. My mother was really impressed. It was effectively copy and paste code; I think it was about 10 lines of BASIC that turned up in one of the Atari user magazines. In the way that we have PlayStation and iPod mags, then we had BASIC magazines for each of the main manufacturers.
I own an iPhone. I buy most of my music from iTunes and yesterday I started digitising a couple of useful to have personal data on the phone rather than in the back of a notebook where I’d been noting stuff for 15 years or so. One of the big successes on the iPhone are applications – or iPhone apps as they’re more commonly known. Little ickle bits of software that are basically iPhone only. I just wonder if the age of interoperability is slowly dying. All my music is played through iTunes at the moment. Given you can’t read some of the older data formats, I wonder how that’s going to work out for me even in 10 years time. I still listen to music I heard first 10 years ago…but anything I bought on tape then I just can’t play any more.
I came across two reports that interested me today, both from Le Monde (note to self, Le Monde really is a hell of a lot better than pretty much every single Irish newspaper on the market). The first one related to market share for downloaded applications. Key information: Apple is the market leader but strangely enough, more to the benefit of the iPod Touch than the iPhone. In fact, the iPhone is nearly neck and neck with the Android and on average, three quarters of the applications downloaded for each of those two devices is free. The report covered two studies and the interesting thing about the second one, which seems to have concentrated on the financial side of things is that on average, Blackberry users spend more money on the applications that they download than do either the Apple or Android users.
The disappointing part of this is that I dont’ have a whole lot of information about the basis of the surveys that formed the basis of that report although the initial one which was carried out by one of Google’s companies was based on a survey of around 900 people worldwide. It would be interesting to see what the feed back would be if the survey sample was ten times larger.
The second report related to the fact that Apple are suing HTC for patent infringement in Delaware. This interests me in light of what I said about the system lockin that appears to be appearing on mobile devices for the moment.