2. Give Users Something Shiny In Snow Leopard
Apple plans this year to introduce its next significant operating system update -- "Snow Leopard," a follow-up to the Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" operating system introduced in fall 2007. Apple's been making a big deal about how Snow Leopard won't have new features. Instead, they're focusing on performance and connectivity.
Snow Leopard will endear itself to IT managers by including out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal. It supports new standards for multicore processors, increased memory, and faster performance of media and Web applications. And Snow Leopard is designed to be slimmer than previous versions of Mac OS, creating more room on hard drives for documents, photos, music, and other data.
But performance improvements are boring. Fast performance is impressive for about a week. Then we just take it for granted.
Users don't just want performance out of an OS upgrade -- they want features. New, bright shiny things to play with.
Fortunately, I expect that Apple will include new features in Snow Leopard. Sure, they're saying now that Snow Leopard is just a performance upgrade. But this is exactly the kind of little white lie that Jobs loves to tell -- he'll go on and on about how Snow Leopard is just a performance upgrade, end-users will be bored by it, nothing to see here, move along, move along ... and then on the day of the announcement, he'll say, "One more thing..."
And if Apple can't deliver new features, at least it can cut down on the bugs. In the months following the Leopard upgrade, Mac users got hit with the "blue screen of death" and "green screen of death." When Apple upgraded to 10.5.6 in mid-December, users reported widespread crashes and blue-screens of death.
Mac OS X upgrades seem to be like Let's Make A Deal' -- sometimes you get a valuable prize; sometimes you get a live chicken. You run the "Software Update" utility and hope for the best.
3. Add Basic Features To The iPhone
The iPhone is like a brilliant genius who can perform calculus in his head but can't tie his own shoes. I like my iPhone a lot -- it lets me access most Web pages, do e-mail, keep up with Twitter and other social networks, take notes, keep a calendar, manage to-dos, take pictures, read magazine articles, manage my passwords, check the weather, listen to music, and watch videos. It's a pocket-sized miracle device.
It does all those amazing things really well -- so it's amazing that there are simple things it can't do.
The iPhone needs a clipboard, so you can cut and paste text and images between documents.
It needs
* A to-do list that synchs with iCal
* To support multimedia messaging(MMS)
* The ability to synch text memos between the iPhone and desktop. (The free Evernote application provides this capability and a lot more -- but the iPhone needs native memo synching.)
* Better email handling. The iPhone's Mail app needs to provide a unified view of multiple mail accounts -- all new mail in one folder, rather than separate folders for each account. And the iPhone Mail app needs to be support messaging flagging.
