Iomega, an EMC company and a global player in the data protectionmarket, announced it has entered into a strategic partnership with MSI-ECS (Phils.) to market and distribute Iomega’s consumer, SOHO (small office/home office) and SMB (small-medium business) storage solutions for the Philippine market.
“The Philippines is fast becoming an IT-savvy population as broadband penetration increases, and the need for safeguarding personal digital data becomes a key customer concern,” says Rajeev Mukul, Iomega’s Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan. “This represents a huge market opportunity for Iomega’s simple-to-use, reliable and feature-rich personal storage devices for PC users in the country. Similarly, with exponential data growth of data in the SOHO and SMB environment, there is a pressing need for easy-to-install, inexpensive and high-performance network storage solutions.
Under the agreement, MSI-ECS will market and sell Iomega’s full range of smart storage solutions, including the Portable and Desktop drives for both Windows and Mac users, Multimedia & Optical drives, and desktop and rack-mounted network storage solutions.
“Iomega’s full suite of storage products adds to our impressive portfolio, creating new business opportunities for our resellers to capture the fast-growing demand for simple and affordable personal storage solutions,” says Jimmy Go, MSI-ECS President and CEO. “In a country where the economy is largely driven by small- and medium- size business sectors, offering Iomega’s full range of storage line enables us to broaden our offerings for these segments, allowing us to increase our customer reach.”
MSI-ECS will soon be able to offer a wide selection of Iomega products and solutions through its reseller network in the Philippines, giving customers more choice to match their application, industry and budget.
When you buy an Apple device, you’re often locked in to buying other Apple products that are compatible with it. Here are five examples, and some advice on what to do. Oh, wait–there’s nothing you can do.
By Dan Tynan November 4, 2009
4. Installed Software and Extra, Unwanted Apps Apple has a history of taking advantage of its iTunes-iPod/iPhone headlock to promote its other products and services. For example, in March 2008 many Windows users were surprised to find Apple’s Safari browser installed on their systems–a little gift left by the latest iTunes update.
At the time, Mozilla CEO John Lilly lit into Apple for the practice. “It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad–not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web,” Lilly wrote.
After enough people complained, Apple made an infinitesimal change, creating a “new software” category in its update app but leaving installation as the default.
In July 2008 Apple’s iTunes update began quietly installing the company’s MobileMe online data-sync service without any notification to the user.
In September of this year, Windows blogger Ed Bott noted that again Apple tried to use updates to an existing software program (Boot Camp) to install an iPhone Configuration Utility, even though he had never used an iPhone. Apple subsequently removed that program from its Windows Update utility. To this day, if you update the QuickTime video player, it will also look to install iTunes, regardless of whether you’ve ever owned an Apple device.
With the exception of MobileMe, none of these software programs generate revenue for Apple. But they do serve to pull users further into Apple’s ecosystem.
4. Shoes and Spies In March 2007, Apple applied for a patent on technology that allowed it to pair a garment with an electronic sensor, as it had done with the Nike iPod Sport Kit. That kit allowed owners of Nike shoes to track their speed, mileage, and other data on their iPods. Apple’s objective in the patent: to prevent users from removing the sensor from the Nike shoe and putting it into shoes from a different manufacturer–what New Scientist’s Paul Marks called “DRM for your wardrobe.”
Two months later the company filed for a patent on technology that would prevent Apple devices from accepting a charge during certain circumstances. This tech would prevent a thief from recharging your iPhone or iPod, but it could also keep you from charging the device if you tried to sync it with an “unauthorized” PC. And last August the company filed for a patent on sensors that would record “customer abuse events” on Apple products; the data from these sensors would presumably be used to deny warranty repair claims by documenting damage that was the customer’s fault.
Apple is certainly within its rights to patent such technologies; what these applications show, though, is that there is seemingly no limit to what the company wants to control.
Many such lock-in examples exist, to be sure, and we’d like to hear yours, in the comments below.
The question is, do Apple fans care? Widman, for one, says, “Choice is overrated. As a consumer, I’m more interested in something that works.”
It’s a reasonable argument–but also a costly one. Is it really worth it?
When you buy an Apple device, you’re often locked in to buying other Apple products that are compatible with it. Here are five examples, and some advice on what to do. Oh, wait–there’s nothing you can do.
By Dan Tynan November 4, 2009
2. iPhone and the App Store It’s sad but inescapable: if you want a sexy iPhone in the US, you also have to make do with AT&T (or Globe Telecom here in the Philippines — ed). Your alternatives? Take your chances with iPhone unlocking software (and hope that Apple doesn’t release an OS update that turns the phone into a brick), or move to Europe, where you have a somewhat broader choice of carriers. Locked (though heavily subsidized) phones are an unfortunate fact of life in this country, a situation not unique to the iPhone.
The iPhone’s software shop, on the other hand, is a dictatorship. Apps for the iPhone are available only from the App Store in iTunes. And North Korea’s Kim Jong-il has nothing on the people who run the App Store, whose decisions about what apps may be sold seem more capricious as time goes on. Apps that duplicate (or improve upon) features available from Apple or AT&T are strictly forbidden–hence the ongoing controversy over Google Voice, an application that would allow VoIP calls over the iPhone, if only Apple would approve it.
iPhone owners have had the option of jailbreaking the handset, which allows them to install apps not approved by Apple while voiding the warranty (see the dangers of unlocking, above). With changes that Apple has made to the iPhone 3GS, however, jailbreaking may no longer be possible.
Apple claims that jailbreaking the iPhone violates its copyrights and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Digital-rights organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation beg to differ.
The EFF’s Fred von Lohman argues that iPhone owners should be free to tinker with their phones, especially when they can add capabilities that App Store programs don’t yet provide. He notes that “the courts have long recognized that copying software while reverse-engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software, a body of law that Apple conveniently fails to mention.”
By comparison, things are slightly different for the open-source mobile OS Google Android, whose owners can buy apps from multiple online stores (including AppVee, Handango, and MobiHand). Android apps also undergo an approval process; Google says about 1 percent of apps are rejected. Still, according to Wired, several iPhone developers booted from the App Store are opting for the friendlier environs of Google’s mobile OS, which some say allow them to be freer with both the OS code and the phone features when they’re creating apps.
With each major mobile platform developing its own app stores, more differences may emerge. As its competitors grow in popularity, the iPhone App Store may have to relax some of its restrictions or risk driving away more developers.
3. Mac Computers and the Mac OS Ever since the Second Coming (aka the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997), the Mac has been a tightly controlled, closed system. The result? High prices and limits on the options you can get with Mac hardware.
For example, you still can’t buy an Apple machine with support for Blu-ray drives. And although Apple has cut prices–in part due to some aggressive Microsoft marketing–the average Mac still costs more than the average Windows PC, according to the latest figures from The NPD Group‘s retail tracking service.
“The Mac showcases the traditional lock-in method of tying software to hardware,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst with The Enderle Group. “This is the act of making the OS and certain core software inexpensive or free, and subsidizing it by high-margin hardware. It’s a classic misdirection, and it works as long as there isn’t a third party who can compete with a more reasonably priced package (which is what Psystar is trying to do).”
Psystar’s attempts to market hardware capable of running the Mac OS have resulted in an ongoing legal battle between it and Apple; few observers give Psystar much chance of winning that fight.
The main advantage to the marriage of Apple hardware and software is “a unified source of service,” notes Jake Widman, who has written about Apple for two decades, most recently for bMighty’s blogs. “You made everything in this box; you fix it.”
Reopening the Mac OS to third-party manufacturers, as Apple did in the mid-1990s, might lower prices but increase support pain, Widman adds. “I recently compared the cost of a Psystar with that of a Mini (and the old Mini, before the recent bump), and ended up wondering how much hassle one was willing to put up with in order to save $120.”
When you buy an Apple device, you’re often locked in to buying other Apple products that are compatible with it. Here are five examples, and some advice on what to do. Oh, wait–there’s nothing you can do.
By Dan Tynan
November 4, 2009
Art by Luis Anthony Oliveros
Once you enter the Big Tent of Apple, it’s exceedingly hard to find the exit.
Over its 33-year history, Apple has consistently elected to limit consumer choice, creating a situation known as “lock in.” As soon as you start buying stuff from Apple, you’ll find it difficult to move to products made by someone else without losing everything you’ve already paid for.
Of course, many people don’t want to leave Apple’s tent. After all, it’s filled with iPhones and MacBooks and other cool stuff. And Apple is hardly the only business that tries to lock in customers–wireless carriers are probably the worst offenders. Nor is Apple the only vendor to use one product as leverage to push others onto consumers (let’s declare Microsoft the champion there).
But no other technology company exercises the same amount of control over what its customers can and can’t do with the things they bought. Part of this approach is due to Apple’s deep belief that a closed digital ecosystem with limited options benefits both Apple and its customers. Part of it is due to an all-consuming desire for control on the part of the ringmaster, otherwise known as Steve Jobs.
The bottom line: Apple makes great products, but its marketing practices limit your choices and cost you more money. Here are five classic examples of how the company has done it.
1. iPod and iTunes
When the iPod arrived in fall 2001, followed by the iTunes Music Store in spring 2003, few early adopters realized the commitment they were making by buying their media player and their media from the same source.
Due to Apple’s digital rights management setup, until April 2007 any music you bought from iTunes could play in only three places: on an iPod, within registered iTunes software on a limited number of computers, or on certain Motorola phones (that nobody bought).
If you wanted to move the songs you bought at a buck apiece to a cheaper player from a competing manufacturer, you had two options: an onerous process in which you burned your songs to a CD and then reripped them as MP3s, or quasilegal software that essentially did the same thing using your hard drive instead of a disc.
The last vestiges of DRM-protected music vanished from iTunes two years later. Apple offered to remove the DRM from the music that iPod owners had already bought, as well as to bump up the sound quality, for an additional 30 cents a track. (Gee, thanks, Apple.) Of course, movies and TV shows sold on iTunes are still copy-protected and cannot be legally converted to a DRM-free format.
Locking content to hardware cost consumers money–especially when first-, second-, and third-generation iPod batteries began failing. Consumers could either shell out the cash for a new iPod or pay Apple as much as $100 (plus shipping) to put a new battery in their existing device. In June 2005 Apple settled a class-action suit filed by iPod battery victims, offering a $50 voucher toward future Apple purchases (excluding downloads) and another year of warranty support.
Over the last three years, consumers have filed multiple antitrust suits against Apple alleging that the tight connection between the iPod and iTunes constitutes a monopoly; these have been consolidated in a federal class-action suit currently under way in Northern California [PDF].
Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber acknowledges Apple’s lock-in advantage with iTunes, but echoes what many Apple supporters often claim: The company’s hands are tied by content providers.
“When you buy a movie through your Apple TV, and the movie is in a DRM-protected format that will not work on home theater systems from other companies, it makes you less likely to switch,” he says. “But what choice does Apple have? They can sell DRM-protected movies, or they can sell no movies at all.”
Actually, Apple has at least two other choices. It could license its Fairplay DRM technology to other hardware manufacturers and allow multiple devices to play media purchased on iTunes, as Amazon does with its video-on-demand service. Or it could use its market power to push for one of the industry-wide DRM schemes proposed by Disney, Sony, and other parties. (Given the close ties between Steve Jobs and Disney, though, Apple might eventually endorse the digital rights scheme that the Mouse House favors.)
Sandboxes, rock stars and clean rooms mean something entirely different at Intel Corporation, and a new integrated branding campaign by the leading silicon innovator will tell the world how.
Representing Intel’s biggest marketing campaign in nearly three years and the first that spotlights the promotion of the Intel brand and not a processor product, “Sponsors of Tomorrow” will launch May 11 in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom with limited teaser ads starting today online. Over the next month the campaign will expand to more than two dozen countries with Brazil and Japan rounding out the planned markets in the third quarter. The ambitious campaign conveys the message that gigantic advances of the digital age have been made possible by silicon – the key ingredient in microprocessors – and the vast majority of this silicon has come from Intel.
“For more than 40 years Intel has been delivering tomorrow’s ‘normal,’ and our new marketing campaign is a way for the world to be made aware of this fact,” said Deborah Conrad, Intel vice president and general manager, Corporate Marketing Group. “We’re hoping to convey that we’re not just a microprocessor company, but a move-society-forward-by-quantum-leaps company.
“Our image, our brand are far too powerful to just be a microprocessor when, in fact, the greatest strength of the Intel brand will always be what is still to come. What Intel develops today leads the path toward a better tomorrow.”
To ring in the new campaign – literally – a group of Intel employees will ring the ceremonial opening bell for the NASDAQ Stock Market at 9:30 a.m. EDT on May 11. The ceremony will be broadcast live in Times Square on the video screen of the seven-story NASDAQ building and at www.nasdaq.com.
The multi-million-dollar marketing campaign is the largest for Intel since “Multiply,” the September 2006 campaign that supported the then-new Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo. “Sponsors of Tomorrow” is expected to have a lifespan of 3 to 5 years, and was created by Venables Bell & Partners in San Francisco. It is the first campaign for Intel by the agency since being awarded Intel’s master brand account in January.
“Most of the world knows Intel as a huge, multi-national chipmaker, but the company is much more than that,” said Paul Venables, the agency’s founder and co-creative director. “The more we learned about Intel, the more we realized how narrow our perception had been. This company is forging the future in so many unfathomable ways, and what a shame it is that the general consumer has no idea.”
“Sponsors of Tomorrow” includes print, online, outdoor and other advertisement placements, plus such additional marketing efforts as in-store and online retail campaigns, all focused on helping consumers choose the best Intel processor that meets their needs. Global media planning was handled by OMD.
An example of a print ad debuting May 11 in the initial markets is driven by the line, “Your rock stars aren’t like our rock stars.” The two-picture visual is, at left, a grunge rock ‘n roll band looking cool in sunglasses and jeans behind bright stage lights; and, in the photo at right, two bespectacled computer engineers are sporting white lab coats in their techy environment. But these aren’t just any engineers. As the ad copy explains, they are the designers of the very first microprocessor. “Back in 1969,” the ad says, “their Intel® 4004 blew people’s minds wide open – a tradition that’s still very much alive” at Intel.
“Rock Star” also is the basis of a video for broadcast and online. For this concept and other creative in which Intel engineers are identified, the engineers are personified by hired actors, a practice common to marketing campaigns of a quirky, tongue-in-cheek nature. A bio of each engineer portrayed in the ads is on the campaign Web site, www.sponsorsoftomorrow.com, that goes live later today. The employees may be part of future campaign elements.
“Several of the engineers we’re personifying confided that acting isn’t within their comfort zone,” said Sandra Lopez, Intel’s global consumer marketing manager. “We respect that and in the spirit of developing tomorrow’s ‘normal’ we appreciate that their focus is on winning patents, not Clios,” a reference by Lopez of the global advertising awards competition.
Another video, titled “Oops,” is set at a technology convention, where Intel is about to reveal a new microprocessor to a packed auditorium. As the dramatic unveiling is about to happen onstage, Intel employees and reporters struggle to find the tiny chip on the floor, and have the impossible task of finding it. The tagline: “Our big ideas aren’t like your big ideas.”
“Clean Room” is a print ad that shows an adorable little girl beaming over how tidy her bedroom is, and to the right is another photo of technicians in a fab, all wearing special uniforms called “bunny suits” that help keep Intel’s cleanrooms 10,000 times cleaner than a hospital operating room, a critical step to reduce the chance of airborne particles harming the chips.
Out-of-home, or outdoor ads, also debut May 11 in the three initial markets. In what is likely an advertising first, a digital billboard in New York’s Times Square will feature scrolling messages from texters at the famous Manhattan intersection and those in Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco and other locations where storefront digital signs are linked for a multi-site, international texting experience. The campaign Web site ties the “Text for Tomorrow” effort together. Traditional billboards and bus stop shelters in various markets will bear witty factoids along with the “Sponsors of Tomorrow” slogan next to the Intel logo. Examples are “Today is so yesterday” and “Our sandbox is the size of a fingernail. And 41,000 engineers play in it.”
The phased launch begins May 11, as noted, in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom. The campaign debuts in China and India later this month, and in June is scheduled to be introduced in the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam. Additional parts of Latin America and Africa are scheduled for June introductions, and Brazil and Japan are slated for August and September, respectively.
Retail campaigns encompass a range of executions, from merchandising materials and in-store demos to online ads and training for retail salespeople. The essence of “Sponsors of Tomorrow” will also be incorporated into Intel’s online materials developed to assist consumers researching PC purchases. A heavy internal campaign is already underway at Intel campuses throughout the world.
Intel [NASDAQ: INTC], the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom and blogs.intel.com.
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