On a musical genius

This doesn't really fit the ethos of my particular blog, but I have to just say how sorry I am to hear of Michael Jacksons death. I am not a devoted fan, but grew up in the heady years of MJ. I saw the stories people published about him, and never really gave a thought to which part of the mix - his genius or his madness - was the more important. He wasn't really on my radar much, but now that he has died - and taken his gift with him - I've thought about this dilemma a bit more.

Undoubtedly, the musical legacy that he left behind will live on forever. When an artist is alive, it is easy to overlook just exactly what they give to the world. His looks were odd, sometimes his voice was a bit too high pitched for my liking. Taking these things in isolation, MJ seemed a bit quirky, a bit mad. However, take a huge leap in the air and view his tapestry from above and those images and sounds diminish. What you see overall is an incredible manifestation of talent.

From his concerts to his strings of number one hits, to his accompanying video masterpieces, his amazing dancing abilities and his enigmatic style, this was someone that we can all look upon as reaching the very height of mastery of his talent. I cannot look upon anyone from the modern musical age and say that they can match MJ on all of these aspects simultaneously.

And herein lies the real crux of what I am going to say. When a legend is truly living, and giving as much as they do, our appreciation of them seems to unfold as the reciprocal of their talent. We start to examine other aspects of their heady existence, and instead of rejoicing in what their talent gives us, we villify what we find in their private lives. Never do we stop to wonder what impact we may be having on them, and the possibility that by treating them this way, we may be expediting their demise, and the loss of their gift.

This truly happened to MJ. It is only upon looking back - now that he is gone - that we want to partake of his gifts further than we had done when he was alive. Look at the sales of his music now that he is gone! If only the press, and his life, had been more genuine and normal, maybe he'd now be a picture of health - maybe his gifts would once again have kept on giving for us all to enjoy?

Everyone enjoys watching genius at work, and it is this genius that attracts both good and bad into orbit around such people. The bad is an inevitable sideband to an otherwise worthwhile signal, and some people are more able than others to filter that sideband and get on with producing the signal. It is open to question how affected MJ was by his wretched sideband, given the strength of signal he produced. I think he courted the conjurers of his alter-ego, the man in the hyperbaric chamber. His love hate relationship with this schizophrenic persona - half innocent child, half megastar - led to a dichotomy that even he himself could not resolve, and it gave birth to this monster of transfromation that overtook his life.

It is at the crest of a new rebirth that MJ fell victim to his own innocence. At a time when he appeared to be getting back onto the stage, the sideband of greedy people swirling around him came to bring him downonce more. Ten concerts turned into fifty, and he himself complained of this. Yet in his nature, he went ahead with it to avoid disappointing his fans. I wonder if he was at peace with his decision to go back on the road before the magnitude of his commitment hit him?

MJ, I and countless hundreds of millions of fans will miss what you gave, and be thankful that you will no longer have to live in the shadow of all that ailed you anymore.

Rest in peace.

What can Nokia build....

... with Intel that they can't already build with ARM? The only thing is a device that runs full windows, and even then the arguement for doing so seems doubtful. The smartphone space is doing just fine without Intel and isn't suffering too badly under Microsoft. Eventually, Windows Mobile will become mature, and more feature rich, and there is no reason to think that - coming from a different code base to normal windows - it won't prove to be a cleaner, more usable experience, with less bloating and more efficiency.

If there is any compelling reason why nokia would ever use Intel to create a smartphone, I'm waiting to see what it is!

Turnkey? Reference designs? Who said we want those?

I've been squirming as I watch Intel talk of how they think the mobile gadget future is going to look. They talk about reference designs, and turnkey solutions. These are all fine in certain markets, but they are all edifices of the PC world that hark back to the beginning of computing and the formation of the Microsoft/Intel duopoly. They made standardising the nascent computing market - which, lets face it, needed to be standardised in order for the world to start learning how to take advantage of it - simple, and allowed microsofts OS software become the encumbent very quickly indeed. After all, since every computer would look the same, it was easy to make software work on it.

I guess if we were in a world where there wasn't yet the concept of a portable computer (and I'm talking of the smartphone form factor), then we'd need someone to come along and enforce this. But there is already a huge market of portable device platform manufacturers out there, and each of them are happy to be free to be different to everyone else. It gives the entire portable device eco-system the chance to breathe, and innovate.

Companies like Nokia aren't interested in doing business exclusively with companies like Intel. This was made very clear in their joint announcement. Why would Nokia ever want to go to a single source supplier, at a price-point they cannot control or negotiate on, when they are perfectly happy playing off ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments against each other on pricing, in exchange for winning the order? Competition is healthy, and it allows Nokia - and countless other companies - the freedom to choose where they get their silicon from. It keeps costs down, and encourages silicon suppliers to keep pushing the bleeding edge of system integration.

Who's eating whom?

A lot is being made in the tech press of this deal between Nokia and Intel, and how it surely represents Intel eating into ARMs market share.

Let's put things in perspective here.

In Taipei (Computex 2009), we saw countless ARM based chipsets being touted by companies like Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Freescale, Samsung, Texas Instruments and others, each boasting a sizeable number of Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs) . These weren't just any slouches, either - Asus, Acer, Pegatron, Inventec etc. Household names in many cases, and typical PC industry stalwarts. These are companies who have been manufacturing laptops forever, or are breaking into the game in a big way. And here they all are, one year on, allowing chipset vendors to display devices bearing their name. Sitting in those booths were missed-design wins for Intel; capacity in factories diverted into manufacturing ARM-based equipment, displacing Intel.

If you like, Taipei was the show that really splattered it on the wall for Intel. They finally saw that their dominance of the computing market is at last being challenged, and all at a time when the world is turning sour for them with one of the largest anti-trust judgements in history levied against them.

I found the following blog on ARMs website, which has some pretty interesting dissection of how the current computer manufacturing business could be changed if choice were introduced into the market place for these ODMs in taiwan.

But away from the ODMs and onto Intel again, who continually claim that standardisation is what they'll bring to the mobile device market. They claim that if they standardise the platform on which mobile devices are made - and by the way, be the only supplier of that platform - then OEMs won't have to work as hard at differentiating their devices. This is tantamount to the death of innovation in the mobile space. If the arguement is purely based on the fact that all of the peripherals in the SOC that they lay down will always be in the same part of the memory map so that an OS will always know where to find them, this arguement doesn't hold any water.

All OSes have layers of software that abstract the underlying hardware (a HAL, or hardware abstraction layer) so that they don't need to care where the graphics processor is, or how much memory it has etc.. Intel are dreaming with this arguement, since the countless ARM silicon providers all have HALs for their given SOC platforms on a number of OSes - it isn't something an ODM or OEM needs to care about. So on that front, Intels arguement may seem clearcut to Intel - it merely requires that every other processor architecture and platform disappear, so that there is only theirs left standing!

With the Atom cutting into the sales of their higher cost laptop processors - adding confusion to the market - and with ARM devices eating their market share come the end of this year, I predict a great fall in Intels profitability at the end of 2010. ARMs business model is less volatile than Intels, and the analysis suggests that - for now - it is Intel who is getting eaten, both by itself, and by ARM.

Intel and Nokia - big deal!

So, Nokia decided they needed a way to survive, and intel came along just at the right time!

Intel are the master of inking meaningless deals. The release of information about Nokia forming a technology partnership with Intel is scant on substance, and from a business perspective I'm wondering who the winners and losers are here.

ARM doesn't really lose anything, because the deal is non-exclusive. Nokia still deals with ARM and its partners in exactly the same way that it always has done. Judging by Nokias results last year, and the way that it is slowly transforming itself from purely a handset maker into a service provider and software platforms company, teaming up with Intel will simply add items to the balance sheet. Nokia doesn't have to do a lot since I suspect Intel will bear most of the development costs, and intel gets their name on a nokia device. Nokia will sell these devices, and make a profit from them.

Intel also gains from this, since they'll have access to lucrative 3G IP necessary to connect their future Atom platforms to mobile telephony.

With the advent of full internet on ARM (see any news search engine, or this blog, for information on flash availability for smartphones in October this year), there is no compelling reason for Nokia to adopt Intel across the board. The last of the holes have been plugged as far as the internet on ARM goes, and the only compelling reason left for Nokia to work with Intel is in creating a Netbook class device. Even then, the cogs are in motion for many ARM based smartbooks to appear on the market before years-end.

The obfuscatory language used around the Nokia/Intel announcement leads one to suspect that they are trying to muddy the waters sufficiently to make poeple think it's all about smartphones, when in fact its probably just another netbook announcement. There have been Nokia netbook rumours floating since netbooks were in their infancy.

Although this is a small victory fo Intel, it is a paper tiger soon to be shrivelled.

Has apple missed the cart? (no flash on iphone)

Adobe announced today that full flash 10 will be making its beta release in october on the ARM architecture. Support will be available up-front for Windows Mobile, Google Android and Symbian.

Great! That's the majority of smartphones and upcoming ARM based smartbooks covered. But what about the iphone?

According to this, Apple claims that the iphone is under powered - from a processor perspective - to cope with flash. At the same time, Adobe has said that Apple are working to their own schedule on flash. (hang with me here - I'm making a point). A third observation is that NVIDIAs tegra (which has a very similar ARM11 processor to the chipset used in the iphone prior to the Iphone 3Gs) makes a delightful rendition of flash. So why can't the iphone?

The processor - even in pre-3GS days - looks to be sufficient, even if NVIDIA have re-written chunks of the flash player to run on their GPU. The iphone chipset pre-3GS had a graphics processor - couldn't Apple be bothered to do the same thing? Or maybe they were just too early to market to have access (under the open screen project) to be there in time to do anything about it.

But now that they have the iphone 3GS, with it's superscalar Cortex-A8 processor and GPU, surely this announcement of support on every ARM mobile platform EXCEPT iphone puts Apple at a disadvantage?

Were apple caught with their pants down? I for one think they have got a version of flash being readied within their walls in cupertino, and that it would be a good thing for Steve Jobs to announce when they next do an update of the iphone OS.