Tag Archives: iOS

Phone Encryption

Posted on by

It’s been announced that both iOS and Android are going to have fully encryptable phones which will be a huge boon for our 4th amendment rights. As well as to protect us from more mundane things like theft or simply losing your phone. Our phones these days contain as much or more personal information as our computers do these days. The average person doesn’t have any sort of two step authentication on their personal accounts on their phones. In most case people do have some sort of password protection to get into the phone, but once in it’s fairly easy to get into many applications.

For end users there’s nothing better than having a stronger security measures as in many cases companies poorly manage their security. This can be highlighted from the past week of exploits and those celebrity pictures. Encrypting phones might not prevented the celebrity leak, but in many cases it could. It’s believed that some of the hacks of Paris Hilton years ago came from hacking her phone through a BlueTooth connection, so a fully encrypted phone may have protected her from that hack.

All these things are good, however, the Washington Post has decided that this encryption is a risk to public safety because it will help criminals. This is the exact same argument that people make against BitCoin and full disk encryption. BitCoin ended up spawning SilkRoad, which has been shut down and it’s more likely that more crime is committed with dollars rather than Bitcoin. Full Disk Encryption has been used by both criminals and the more technical savvy. With the recent changes where the government can simply take your laptop at boarder crossings without any sort of warrant. Which means anyone at anytime that could have been flagged by the NSA could have their computer searched at will.

It’s more likely that encryption will protect an average person from an arbitrary search than protect a criminal. It’s likely that without everyone being encrypted, having your computer or phone encrypted would have been a huge red flag, however, with these recent changes that can’t happen. Meaning the average person will be safer as well as the fully legal with nothing to hide security conscious individuals.

The Washington Post, FBI, and other agencies are wrong. Fully encryption on our phones protects our privacy, improves our fourth amendment, and give us more control over our own devices. If the FBI and the US government is successful in creating a backdoor the encryption will be worthless and the put us more at risk as we’ll have a false sense of security.

Powerful Microsoft investor wants MS to focus on Enterprise

Posted on by

According to the Washington Post an influential investor is pushing for a new direction at Microsoft. His goal is to get Microsoft to ditch the consumer market and focus solely on enterprise. He wants the X-Box gone (likely sold to someone), Surface gone (either sold or killed), and their other non-enterprise solutions eliminated as well. I think that from a Financial person’s perspective these are something of an obvious option. X-box isn’t killing it in the market, they are expensive and take a while to recoup the cost of development and all that. The Surface hasn’t had great sales – although it’s hard to separate weak sales of the Surface from the abomination of Windows 8 that sold with the bulk of them initially (I’d bet they’d be solid devices with Android on them).

I think it’s important to remember why Microsoft is Microsoft. It’s not entirely because of Enterprise. It’s because Operating systems are difficult to learn and people don’t want to learn more than one if they can avoid it. Only recently have the bulk of people been fluently on two different operating system – Windows/Mac/(few on linux) & iOS/Android/Windows Mobile/Blackberry. The most common interaction would have to be Windows & iOS and/or Android and Mac & iOS.

The reason for strong enterprise Windows sales is because of the massive consumer base that Microsoft has managed to hold on to despite it’s best efforts. If most people had to learn multiple different operating systems between home and work it would increase their stress levels at work. The skills they learned at home wouldn’t transfer well. I think this is also the reason why enterprise is conservative in upgrading their Windows OS – essentially skipping every other one. XP/Seven because those are the products that seem to build a strong enough user base on the consumer side. Most techies don’t like Win 8, so that hurts sales to Mom and Dad or their friends. They’ll tell them to avoid a product or get them to go back to Win 7 over 8 if possible.

The battle for the next OS is going to be fought on tablets and phones, before it’s fought on laptops and desktops. I know there are some tech experts out there calling for the death of the tablet, however, I think it’s far more likely that there will be a convergence between laptops and tablets. Where a tablet can meet our core needs of our laptop.

The more powerful of the two Surface products (Pro) was just that type of product. It was able to do a lot of WINDOWS laptop stuff, but in the form factor of the tablet. Should have sold well, except it cost a ton for a tablet or under powered laptop. I think that this really is the consumer space people will work from. We really don’t need more space unless we’re gaming and then people will build a desk top or buy a console.

Consoles – the X-box isn’t just a console, it’s supposed to be a full multimedia PC replacing the need of a desktop. You pair the Surface Pro with an X-Box and you’ve got everything you need for your house. This is what Microsoft is envisioning. Everyone is still using Office on their Surface, Skyping on both X-Box and Surface, and everything is based on the familiar (sort of) Windows OS. Keeping it front and center.

Let’s say MS ditches the console and Surface. They’d have to license out Windows to run on tablets and wouldn’t have the ability to help shape those conversations. They are competing with 2 Rabid fan bases in mobile OSes, one that many companies are able to use for free (with some licensing fees to MS), Google is pushing to replace MS in netbooks and likely other environments – Chromebook and ChromeBox. All of these could threaten their dominance as the work station in enterprise. For the bulk of the work I do, I could probably do it on a tablet as long as I have a compatible office suite.

Furthermore, MS isn’t the only option in many of the enterprise spaces. They aren’t the only OS, Office Suite, or Enterprise service company (Dell, IBM, Accenture, SAP, etc…) it’s not a guarantee this process would work. Furthermore, people are already talking about an Android server for some activities. These are all threats to MS core business OS and Office Suits. Leaving the consumer space only opens them up to more threats as people will want to stay in a similar environment.

This is another example of the Innovator’s Dilemma and MS should look to use Lean to help solve their cash and process challenges. Both the Surface and X-Box are good products. They just need to figure out how to find the right market for the Surface.

Disrupting Mobile Phones – Google’s taking the lead and Apple is going to lose

Posted on by
http://news.phonebloks.com/

Photoblok’s high level picture of their design

For some people, Motorola’s Project Aria, in partnership with Phonebloks, is going to be a game changer, while others are kind of like, meh. I think that the end result of this phone will actually be a game changer, but not everyone will switch to this format of phone. Many people will continue to buy phones that have been designed for the full experience. However, I do think that theses phone will significantly impact in how many people think of phones.

These phones represent a disruptive shift for the phone industry. Why are these disruptive when I said that Kayak isn’t disruptive? Well, in the book Innovator’s Dilemma Dr. Christensen argues that when new industries are formed the leaders are companies that are able to combine all the pieces that are needed for producing that good under one roof. In the case of airline travel all the booking used to take place through the airlines, eventually this was outsourced to Travel Agents which were something of an extension of the airlines. The first disruption came when other groups were able to use the internet to book reservations. The act of reserving a seat on a plane became decoupled with the actual flight and service.

So, in the case of mobile phones, specifically smart phones of course, the most successful firms were the ones that were able to combine everything you needed for the phone to be useful. Blackberry did this, but Apple was clearly the best at it. The original iPhone was basically an iPod with a cell antenna in it. This was an amazing thing though. Apple had disrupted the music distribution industry with iTunes and was able to leverage that innovation into smart phones. This of course was a disruption in that industry because everyone was focusing on productivity first, Apple approached it from a content perspective. Content always beats out productivity. In a very real sense, the market changed over night. Apple owns everything in their cell phone, the OS, the design of the chip, the distribution network for apps, music, movies, etc. This is a very classic example of fully integrating as much of the supply chain as possible.

This is exactly how computers started. Large companies like DEC and IBM built everything for a computer. The boards, the operating system, the software, and the interfaces. These companies were large and structured in a way to make money from extremely expensive mainframes which had a very small market. Between Xerox and IBM the personal computer as we know it today was invented.

Our PCs today are modular, which means that every portion of the computer can be built and designed by different firms. This allows a lot more innovation across the platform because it doesn’t rely on one firm to create everything. It allows specialization and diversification for an assembly company. It was because of this modular nature that Intel, Dell, and Microsoft became successful. They were able to leverage the platform that IBM delivered with the PC and grow and develop new capabilities.

This modularity also allowed just about anyone that wanted to the capability to built their own custom made computer. This has become less so with laptops – you can’t buy an empty laptop but you can customize it from a company. This just isn’t the case with smart phones – which are essentially mini computers. The new tablets coming out are as powerful as computers from the early 2000s.  The modularity of PCs offer an additional benefit, you have the ability to easily fix them. If your processor dies or your graphics card does you can buy another and simply pop it in. Even if the motherboard goes, you can still replace that and plug all your existing components into the board. The case is the only thing you don’t have to change if you don’t want to.

With phones the screen is like the case. You don’t really need to upgrade your screen every time. Especially with how hard the screens are unless you drop the phone and crack the screen you don’t need to replace it. Furthermore, we’re getting to the point we are with TVs that the resolution of the screen isn’t going to make much of a difference. Yes, we’re in a DPI battle between Amazon, Google, and Apple but we’re getting close to the point where we can’t tell the difference. Which means that the screen is a perfect thing to act as the phone’s “Case” for modularity purposes. The modularity will help immensely with repariability, which current scores pretty low, if you’re interested in those scores check out iFixit.

So, how does Phonebloks come into all of this? They are essentially pulling an IBM by creating a system that can be modular. Google’s Android will be the operating system of choice, but it’s likely that even this could be flexible in the manner that PCs are today. It’s unlikely that iOS will be on these phones legally, although I’m certain someone will figure out a way to install the operating system on these phones. This will hurt Apple in the long run as people will not be using their operating system will leave their ecosystem and prevent them from making as large of revenues in the future. People will still buy their products, but there will be much less sales. Apple could be repeating history if they don’t offer to sell their operating system for phones like this.

Why do I think that these phones are going to be winners? Well, it will increase the longevity of the phone. With phones costing upwards of $600 for the top of the line phone anything that can increase the length of time that a person is using one is a good thing. Secondly, as Android and other OSes evolve they require more capabilities from the phone which means older phones aren’t able to use the latest operating system. Buying a much cheaper CPU to install would be a lot better for end customers. This will also disrupt the supply chain as companies like Qualcomm aren’t used to selling directly to customers. Finally, as long as the design is good, then it won’t seem as much of a burden to have the same phone year in and year out. It will require people to think differently, but that’s something that I believe Motorola and PhoneBloks can over come.

These phones are going to change the industry and possibly enable other companies to develops phones in the same way. Hopefully they pick one standard interface like the Motherboard that all companies conform to. This will allow companies like Google and Microsoft to go back to innovating on operating systems and to get out of the phone building business.