Apple and Microsoft: Together Again, on the iPhone?

Rumor has it that Apple may be in talks with Microsoft to displace Google as the iPhone’s default search engine with Bing. Fine by me as long as it’s possible for anyone who prefers Google to switch to it. And better still if Apple implements something like OpenSearch in iPhone Safari to let users choose Bing, Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, or any other engine they’ve got a liking for.

It’s always a tad jarring to think of Apple and Microsoft teaming up, but shouldn’t be–the two companies have collaborated in one way or another for even longer than they’ve been competitors. (That’s why I named them the #1 tech frenemies of all time.)

Despite the combative quality of some of the ads for Windows and for Macs, there’s a level on which the two companies are no longer archrivals. They’ve quietly divvied up the PC market: Microsoft’s operating system runs on most of the consumer computers priced under $1000 and most workplace machines; Apple sells most of the consumer computers priced at $1000 and above. As far as I can tell, both seem to nicely profitable based on the marketshare they’ve got.

And both Apple and Microsoft now have a common rival–I’m not going to use the word “enemy”–in Google. Google’s primary business is selling advertising against search results, a field in which Microsoft is playing catch-up and Apple doesn’t compete at all. But Google is jumping into multiple markets that are important to Apple and/or Microsoft: operating systems, phones, collaborative software, office suites, photos, and much more. Given that, I could see Apple preferring to work with Microsoft on iPhone search, and Microsoft being particularly keen on stealing away Google’s status as the iPhone’s default search.

I only care about this stuff when it impinges on my ability to use technology products from any of the companies in question in the way I’d like to–which seems to be the case with Google Voice and its continued unavailability on the iPhone. So while I’m okay with the prospect of Microsoft nudging Google out of its coveted spot on the iPhone, I want to see Apple and Google maintain some sort of relationship–detente, at least, instead of a cold war.

What’s your take?

An iSlate Docking Station? A Virtual One Would Be Nice

With almost precisely one week to go until the-event-that-everyone-assumes-Apple-will-announce-its-tablet-at, I’m tempted to declare a moratorium on even discussing rumors about the tablet. And I’m instinctively distrustful of rumors reported by TheStreet.com’s Scott Moritz. Among other things, he’s the guy who ran an EXCLUSIVE that Verizon Wireless had decided to pass on Palm’s Pre and wouldn’t be selling it starting in January. Which must have come as startling news to Verizon, which will start selling the Pre this month.

Anyhow, Moritz has another EXCLUSIVE that says that Verizon will be selling the Apple tablet. Let’s just skip over that tidbit (which has been floating around for months) and reflect on another rumor buried in the story:

The Tablet will also include a docking station, according to Northeast Securities’ Kumar. This could be a crucial feature for consumers who harbor an ongoing love affair with keyboards. For those unsatisfied with touchscreen typing, a dock would connect to a keyboard and mouse.

I dunno whether there’s any truth there, which is why this post isn’t called something like Apple Tablet to Feature Docking Station.  But even if Steve Jobs strides onstage next Wednesday and never says anything about a docking station, it’s fun to toy with the idea.

Continue reading this story…

Wisdom of Crowds Webcast

Here’s the video replay of the interview with James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, which I guest-tweeted last week. (The replay version even includes all the tweets folks made commenting on the interview.) Thought-provoking stuff if you’re interested in how tapping the smarts of large groups of people can be a surer strategy for success than relying on the judgment of a handful of experts…

The Tablet Circa 1994

In 1994, newspaper giant Knight-Ridder envisioned a tablet which looks very much like the ones that are finally being built. Too bad there was no way to get anywhere near it with mid-1990s technology…

Okay, Is Now the Time to Dump Cable TV?

A year ago, I toyed with the idea of getting rid of cable and doing all my TV watching online. In the end, I kept Comcast–partially out of lethargy, but mostly because (A) cable is still a much better source of news-related programming than the Web, and (B) I’m very comfortable with my TiVo.

Reason (A) still strikes me as a significant argument in favor of keeping cable. With reason (B), however, I may be at a crossroads. My TiVo HD, which never worked very well, now isn’t working at all–it crashes every few minutes. I’m still trying to troubleshoot it, but I suspect that the drive is bad and will need to be replaced. That’ll require an investment of money and time, and while I may go through with it, I’m also flirting with the notion of retiring the TiVo and giving up cable.

News remains the biggest argument against doing so: I still like the idea of having CNN, CSPAN, Fox News, MSNBC, and other newsy outlets readily available. On the other hand, some of this stuff is available in podcast form–albeit after a delay–and it’s not like I’m glued to TV news every night. (I do, however, like to gorge on it when breaking events warrant, whether they involve election night or a celebrity death or the moving tale of a small boy swept away in his father’s experimental balloon.)

If I cut the cable and give up TiVo, what should I replace them with? I’m still not sure. I like Roku. I own an Apple TV that I don’t use much but would probably enjoy if I made an effort to rediscover it. The Boxee Box looks promising.

But the one box that offers access to the widest variety of stuff–including an endless supply of free material–is a PC. So I’m also toying with the notion of connecting a Windows box or Mac Mini to my Vizio and using it for Netflix, Boxee, YouTube, video podcasts, and a whole lot more. The major downside: Even a cheap PC costs a lot more than a Roku or a Boxee Box. But hey, if I’m no longer tithing to Comcast I’ll have some newfound cash to spend.

I don’t need to give up cable. I can afford it, and there are times that I’m very glad I have it. But more and more, I feel guilty about spending as much I do each month given how little of it I end up watching. It feels wasteful, like filling up your plate at an all-you-can-eat buffet when you know you’re only going to take a bite or two.

Here’s the part where I ask for your advice. What would you do? What are you doing?

A New Guy on Twitter

Wow: Bill Gates started using Twitter earlier today, and already has almost 18,000 followers.

Our Live Coverage of Apple’s Tablet Event

A week from Thursday at 10am PT, I’ll be in the audience at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco as Apple announces its iSlate tablet. (Okay, it isn’t telling anyone it’s announcing a tablet, and the evidence it’s going to be called iSlate is extremely tenuous–but we need to call it something for the next eight days.)

As usual, I’ll use the excellent CoverItLive service to share the news as it happens. If you join me, I’ll try to answer your questions, too. These live events are a blast–just ask any of the thousands of folks who have been showing up for recent ones such as our coverage of Google’s Nexus One launch.

Here’s where to go for next week’s Apple coverage: technologizer.com/appletablet. Head there now, and you can request that we e-mail a reminder to you.

See you there, I hope!

5Words: Microsoft’s Very Own Phone Coming?

A Microsoft phone? Like soon?

Microsoft: IE 8 is safest.

How the Times should charge.

No Google phones for China.

The next iPhone: rumor roundup.

Alleged iPhone OS 4.0 features.

Live ESPN for Xbox 360?

All about Verdana (nice font!).

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Windows Mobile Scuttlebutt

CrunchGear’s John Biggs has some alleged Windows Mobile 7 facts from a tipster, who says that it’s based on the Zune HD’s OS (potentially good–the HD is pretty darn slick) and won’t run existing Windows Mobile software. If so, Microsoft is rebooting Windows Mobile rather than upgrading it. Seems like as smart a strategy as any at this point…

More Lala Speculation

Demented genius entrepreneur Michael Robertson thinks that Apple bought Lala to help it quickly offer a service that puts iTunes users’ existing music collections in the cloud. Makes sense that he’d think that makes sense: He founded MP3.com, which offered a similar service almost exactly a decade ago. (It was wonderful–and the music companies successfully sued it out of business almost immediately.)

Interpreting Apple Invites

The tech press covers Apple like it does no other company. And one oddball, ongoing example of Apple exceptionalism is the fact that even its invitations to product launches are treated as major news. They’re also analyzed as if the minimalist words and imagery they contain will reveal precisely what Apple will announce, if only we can crack the code.

All of which gives me an excuse to…write about Apple invites as we wait for next week’s Apple product event to come around. “A Brief History of Apple Event Invites” recaps eight years of such invitations: what they said, what people thought they said, and whether expectations for the events in question had anything to do with the news that Apple actually released.

(Executive summary: Apple is often vague in its invites but never misleading, and it’s sometimes surprisingly straightforward.)

I’ll be at next week’s event and would be pleased to have the honor of your company for our live coverage. And if you’re in the mood to make predictions, participate in Technologizer’s Apple Tablet Prediction Project, and get a shot at winning a $100 Apple Store gift card.

A Brief History of Those Apple Event Invites

Apple may be the world’s most famously secretive tech company, but it’s impossible to be completely secretive about a press conference if you want the press to show up. So the week before the company holds one of its product launches, it issues invitations. With an Apple event that supposedly involves a tablet computer a bit over a week away, it’s instructive to review past invites and how the world reacted to them.

These invitations aren’t a comprehensive record of every interesting product Apple has released–some of the biggies have been announced at Macworld Expo and Apple’s own WWDC, which are held sans cryptic invites. And I haven’t attempted to document every invite here–just a bunch of representative highlights.

Envision Apple’s Tablet, Get a Shot at a $100 Apple Gift Card

Once again, I’m going to give you guys a chance to make Apple predictions in the days before an Apple press event. (You’re no worse at it than most of the folks who get paid big bucks to do so.) This time I’d like you to take a stab at figuring out exactly what sort of tablet device Apple will announce next Wednesday, assuming it does indeed announce such a device. And if you still think Apple won’t make such an announcement–which is a pretty gutsy prediction at this point–you can make that opinion known, too.

To participate in what I’m thinking of as Technologizer’s Apple Tablet Prediction Project, click here and answer the multiple-choice questions you’ll find. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and here’s an incentive to take part: We’ll draw one entry at random and give the person who submitted it a $100 gift card for the U.S. Apple Store.

You can fill out our T.A.T.P.P. survey through 5pm on Thursday, January 21st, at which point we’ll close it, crunch the results, and publish your aggregate guesses. If the machine you envision as a group ends up bearing much resemblance to the one Apple announces–probably!–next week, it’ll be impressive. And even if you’re way off base, this should be entertaining.

The Apple Tablet As Game Device: A Brief History

We know so very little about the Apple tablet, but the invites to a January 27 Apple event that arrived today add a new wrinkle to the story: Among the invitees was Kotaku, a prominent gaming blog. That suggests there will be enough gaming related news to merit Kotaku’s attendance.

Could the tablet be Apple’s biggest push into video games yet? Let’s look at the clues.

In April, Gizmodo reported that Apple hired two gaming executives within a week’s time. There was Richard Teversham, former senior European director of business, insights and strategy for the Xbox, and Bob Drebin, chief technical officer of AMD’s graphics group and creator of the graphics chip for Nintendo’s GameCube. Tablet rumors had been around for years at that point, but the story was finding new momentum thanks to a Wall Street Journal story on Steve Jobs’ health and ongoing projects.

August yielded a juicy rumor from an unnamed analyst, who told Barron’s that Apple’s tablet would emphasize multimedia and gaming. Another analyst, Jon Peddie, added that gaming “will be a big part of what this is about.” Grain of salt: The unnamed analyst projected a November 2009 launch.

In November, an Apple job posting appeared, seeking a game designer for the iPhone and iPod Touch. One potential theory held that this was actually a covert gig for tablet game development.

It’s also worth mentioning that Apple talked up gaming in two press events last year. The unveil of the iPhone’s OS 3.0 included support for microtransactions, and Apple made a point of knocking Sony and Nintendo at its iPod event in September. Not tablet-related, but proof that Apple now sees gaming as a lucrative business.

Revisiting my reasons Apple shouldn’t get into gaming, I still think a dedicated game console doesn’t make much sense, and a tablet whose primary purpose is gaming would disappoint a lot of people. But if Apple indeed reveals the tablet on January 27, and a significant chunk of Steve Jobs’ presentation demonstrates some new ways of playing video games, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Desktops? Dead? They Don’t Have to Be

I haven’t bought a desktop PC in three years–and the one desktop I still own that’s still in service spends most of its time sitting alone and unused. Nothing extraordinary there: Laptops now outsell desktops, and you’ve gotta figure that the most likely scenario is that desktops’ share of the market will continue to dwindle over the next few years until they’re archaic oddities, like floppy disks or dot-matrix printers.

Or maybe not. For my latest guest post on WePC.com, “The Future of Desktop PCs (and How They Can Have One)”", I propose six things that PC manufacturers can do to revitalize the desktop market–or at least get me intrigued by the category again. I hope you find my ideas thought-provoking enough that you’ll leave a comment over there with yours…

Hey, Nokia’s Having an Event, Too

I just got invited to another San Francisco press event. This one’s being held by Nokia this Thursday at 9am, and as with Apple’s event next week the invite aims to be cryptic but tantalizing:

I don’t know whether Nokia’s unveiling a specific product–it could just be previewing its announcements for Mobile World Congress, the Barcelona phone megashow a month from now. And the fact that the event’s being held six days before Apple’s bash in the same city may or may not be a coincidence. Let’s find out together–I’m attending this event, too, and will provide live coverage here.

[UPDATE: Nokia UK is sending out invites to an event, too--and theirs specify that it's about Nokia's Ovi service platform. Logical assumption: Nokia is announcing the same news in multiple venues. Engadget speculates that it involves a new version of the Ovi application store.]