All I’ve ever read since the launch of Apple’s MacBook Air are two complaints: it’s underpowered and it’s only useful as a second computer. Both of these assertions are flat out wrong.

As a software development and web design company we do quite a lot of work that requires various types of tools: compilers, operating system emulators (i.e. Windows and Solaris), web development tools (e.g. Coda, TextMate, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks), design tools (Adobe Creative Suite, iWork), photo editing and video editing software. All our Adobe and Macromedia software runs under Rosetta – Apple’s PowerPC to Intel dynamic code translator. All of this software works fine on our Macs, so what Macs do we use?

First generation MacBooks. Running Mac OS X 10.5.1.

That’s right: ones that are underpowered compared to the MacBook Air. Laptops too!

I don’t expect our experience to be typical – most businesses need even less computational power and storage. So why the uproar?

Because people don’t want to be ordinary. They don’t want to admit that their needs are about the same as everyone else. My assertion is this: the MacBook Air suits the computing needs of 90% of the population. For personal or business use.

The benefit MacBooks bring our business is striking: we can hook up an external display to them – I use a 23” Cinema Display. We can take them on visits to clients. No hassle or need for synchronisation. We can take them on holiday with us – when a customer needs a quick tweak or change to their website or software, we can do this remotely. It makes us more efficient and available.

And.. it amuses us when we see the junk that other people use.

Our business sometimes gets asked to advise on either computer software or web applications that could help a business improve its efficiency or communications. Invariably, the opinion of clients is that problems will be solved, in one way or another, by software.

The truth is different: an inefficiently run business will only become better at being inefficient, by using software or a web application. In most cases adopting this technology will always make a business less efficient, at best, in the short term, at worst, forever. Instead attention should be given to what a business has or doesn’t have. In particular, there are three things that a business should have before it even starts to consider technology:

• The right Policies
• The right Procedures
• The right People

Technology is only there to empower and enable people to carry out procedures more effectively. There is no simple solution or quick fix.

The spies have reported:

What does “There’s something in the air” mean? And why the unusual font?

I don’t know and at this moment I don’t care. What I want from Apple next Tuesday are products and services that acknowledge these two symbiotic axioms:

• If content is easier to steal than to buy, some people will steal it
• If content is easier to buy than to steal, most people will buy it

It’s ironic that when it comes to digital content, most content is still easier to steal than to buy.

Don’t believe me? Okay, why is it that to buy a CD from a Norwegian artist, I had to buy it from Switzerland. Or why when I wanted to buy a CD from an English group, did I have to buy it from the US? Or when I wanted to buy a CD from a Swiss group.. I couldn’t. Two of these CDs were readily available on P2P networks. This complaint is directed to everyone involved in the music business – musicians, their record labels and the stores.

But the music business isn’t nearly as screwed up as the film industry. It’s bizarre that you can steal a genuine DVD-rip of a Hollywood movie before it receives its cinema debut in the UK. The staggered releases of films propagate and extend the promotional rounds, intended to get more people to the box office. Instead it serves as an ideal opportunity for people to subvert the industry and reduce its revenue.

Why not have a ‘release once, release everywhere’ philosophy, and sell a film online at the same time? Is the industry scared of lost revenue, or perhaps of closures of cinemas? Despite the success of the iTunes Store and other online music sellers, 80% of music is still purchased on CD. I would suggest that given the current (but reducing margin) between the experience of watching at cinema and at home, films could be released simultaneously, offline, online and in stores, without much consequence. Some people, like myself, may even prefer watching films at home.

Here are some ideas that the industry could consider:

1. One-time viewing or permanent purchase of a film, delivered online, released at the same time as its cinematic debut.
2. Redeemable voucher for cinema-goers for subsequent purchase of DVD or online purchase of film, thus making it worthwhile to go to the cinema.
3. Corresponding e-voucher to allow an upgrade from one-time viewing to permanent ownership.
4. DVD (film only version) released at the same time as its cinematic debut.
5. Corresponding voucher for on-line delivery of the extra features once available (or perhaps make these available for purchase separately).
6. Full DVD release with extra features.
7. All DVDs and online purchases to be transportable to other devices (this is something that Fox appears to be considering with DVDs) – and without restriction.

I was going to find some space in my review of 2007 to throw into the mix my prediction for the word of 2008 – something I’ve never done before. I’d noticed it burbling around blog posts and other media, especially in the latter quarter of 2007.

However I felt it would be too much out of place just to chuck it out there. Until today, because Seth Godin has posted something that includes that word, right at its very core. So here goes:

Trust.

Inevitably the iPhone is my product of the year. I thought I was possibly overstating its importance when I wrote about it early in 2007, but I think I underestimated its impact on my life. It now travels everywhere with me. I read more blogs than I used to thanks to Google Reader’s iPhone interface. I also have reduced stress when it comes to work because I know that I can keep in contact with clients and the office regardless of location. All the iPhone really needs to be complete is a keychain mechanism for passwords and a Terminal application. If Apple doesn’t provide them, you can be sure that third parties will once the SDK is released.

One of the things I promised to do when getting the iPhone – indeed it was part of the cost justification – was to stop subscribing to newspapers. Blogs and RSS feeds provide more direct and timely access to information and comment than newspapers can and, unless you want it, without the ludicrous headlines:

With blogs and shared feeds everyone can gather, write and broadcast their own news. Yes, I only thought that physical newspapers were dead. I was wrong. More on this next year.

When it comes to my work, my long term dependency on jEdit ended with the launch of Panic’s fabulous Coda. But then things went weird and I ended up back with TextMate with which I had previously dabbled on a number of occasions. Apple finally released Mac OS X 10.5 later than scheduled. Time Machine, Spaces and under the hood improvements to memory management make it an essential purchase. Agile web development framework Ruby on Rails reached version 2, whole heartedly embracing RESTful development and in the process making application development even easier.

Organisational tool Remember The Milk launched two great services this year: integration with Google Mail, so you can link Mail with Tasks and write stuff like “Call George next Thursday,” and a great looking (and working) iPhone client. These two things made me switch from Apple Mail to Google Mail and ditch my various other attempts at time management.

Support for offline web applications is growing. Google Gears (PC World’s innovation of the year) is available for Firefox and can be built for Safari. If and when Safari officially gets Gears support, I’ll expect to see more web services to support offline access. There’s irony here: a fair number of service providers (including Google, Amazon and Facebook) now have iPhone versions of their products, targeted towards EDGE and GPRS network speeds. JetBlue has launched WiFi access in its planes. Yes, just as technology is being provided to support offline access of applications, we’re getting to the stage where offline access is becoming less necessary. Just as I predicted.

Now time for some predictions for next year. The iPhone will continue to dominate, um, everything. Besides this, software as a service will grow more popular. With the recent introduction of Amazon’s SimpleDB, Amazon now provides all that’s required for scalable, reliable web architectures. Many providers already use one or more of their services. RightScale assists this further by providing management tools. If this seems too scary there are integrated development and hosting services such as Heroku. I desperately need (and want) to start playing with this stuff.

Seth Godin strongly believes – and he’s right – that every time you interact with a customer you’re marketing.

But marketing goes further than this. Everything you do which affects others (people, companies, your pet dog), is marketing.

When I worked at Siemens, I used to give sweets to members of my software development team. Sometimes I gave them, sometimes I let people choose, sometimes I threw them. I had no favourites – everyone got them. Each method of delivery was a subtle hint. My team members rightly took these a little ‘thank you’ messages, but I was also marketing myself.

Few companies that I worked at understood that Fun was important. I think smaller companies are more guilty of this error than larger ones. Fun is considered an incompatible companion to Work. (In the same way that Beer and Pub are.) But the truth is Work requires Fun. Fun is where you find things about yourselves, others and solve problems, come up with ideas and generally innovate.

Still, I caught myself reading a recent blog from Last.fm about their new ballpit and thinking “so that’s what my subscription gets spent on!” (It wasn’t, by the way, which is somewhat disappointing.)

A follow-up post describes how they actually built their ballpit. It took them 19 hours from planning to completion – and it’s quite a ride.

You’ll never get that in a company that doesn’t do Fun.

It’s totally shocking to me that Google and Microsoft are just letting Amazon take developers over this way.

So writes Robert Scoble. And he’s correct, but their behaviour isn’t surprising because Google and Microsoft are not in the same game. Unfortunately, this could be their undoing.

Google and Microsoft are driven by technology, by things that they think are ‘cool’. This is evident in their scattershot approach to product development, either by releasing products that contradict and supersede their own, or by random purchases of other companies, or by ‘innovating’ through ‘emulation’. Their suite of internet offerings are for people who use the internet.

Amazon however have had several years’ head start when it comes to their web services. They’ve had to solve problems whilst building up the company and their increasing customer base. The result is a set of architectures that support their massive e-commerce system and they have realised that these architectures can be packaged and used by others. Their suite of internet offerings are for people who build the internet – developers and innovators. It’s these people who can disrupt Google and Microsoft’s agenda.

What do Google and Microsoft need to do to prevent this from happening, or at least ensure it doesn’t affect their long-term revenue? Buy Amazon. It’s interesting to note that in Wikipedia’s definition of Googlezon Google has the storage infrastructure and Amazon the social networking. In reality, the opposite is becoming true.