Snow Leopard pricing

Vista Home Basic: 99.95 USD

Vista Home Premium: 129.95 USD

Vista Business: 199.95 USD

Vista Ultimate: 219.95 USD

Expected Windows 7 Home Premium: 50 USD

Expected Windows 7 Professional: 100 USD

OS X Snow Leopard upgrade: 29 USD

Why is Snow Leopard upgrade so cheap?

Snow Leopard for End User is only a tuned OS. Faster, smaller, slightly prettier. Oh there is QuickTime X with YouTube upload.

In case of Corporate User it looks a bit better. We have, out of the box, Exchange support. Which definitely will help in getting Apple into Corporate world.

Nevertheless it's still little for Home User, Creative Agencies. All the new amazing functionality (Open CL + Grand Central Dispatch) is hidden deeply inside. No visible fireworks. Moreover this technology will only be available when developers will adopt it. Then we will have fireworks. Our existing Mac will be faster. We'll be getting more horse power from the existing equipment. I know it sounds unbelievable but that's what GCD + OpenCL brings.

(GCD: faster thread creation, threads scheduling on OS level - optimized for available CPUs, OpenCL: High level standard for performing calculations on GPU - graphics card, 64bits is a minor player here)

So the only issue is how to motivate programmers to re-implement their existing code (not just recompile) for the new OS. Definitely with this move backward compatibility will be dropped, so we need the OS to be deployed as wide as possible. We have to somehow promise the developers/software houses that this OS will be the most popular and they can safely build their apps on Snow Leopard fundament.

To sum up: despite this OS is a great technical masterpiece it has no WOW factor, it's not selling itself to Home Users. As long as it is not popular there will be no programs using GCD & OpenCL.

How can it be sold?

Add tiny gadgets and cut the price.

(Maintaining less product lines is always cheaper, let's not forget about recession...)

Find my iPhone

Locate My iPhone - works perfectly (another good reason for Mobile Me).

7 days to the official start feature roll out and I already know where I am :)

Firmware 3.0 Seed GM.

Quite useful functionality is for sending yourself not-mutable message that beeps for 2 minutes. A way to find your phone in the house.

Next step would be to embed RFID chip and reader into the phone.

PS: Kids are un-trackable using this functionality.

Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

There is a book. The book about persuasion. 50 ways, or even better wording would be methods, how to be persuasive.

In fact book is about 51 scientifically proven ways how to be persuasive. The last one is book structure itself. What is more convincing for you?

Standard semi-casual book about persuasion or a semi-textbook containing list 50 methods, well documented, with full bibliographics notes? If you're not convinced yet add a word "scientifically" to the title. Still not enough? Lets add Robert B. Cialdini as a coauthor and bold his name on the cover.

I've bought it. It's definitely worth reading.

I'm using this book to play around with twitter. So for couple of following weeks you can follow my 140 characters maximum summaries of the book chapters/ways on the Twitter.

This will not replace a book for you but I'll try to wetten your appetite.

http://twitter.com/munhitsu/

See you on Twitter!

Twitter: "Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity..."

Gmail ops

There's not email when gmail's gone...

Polish-Japanese contacts

Do you remember Aibo? The famous robot roy made by Sony. We've recently had a chance to play with its first generation (I was asked to refresh the programming).

Toy is still funny but more interesting is a reaction of a real animals. So far he has proven that our cats can still be jealous :)

Create the Future (NASA Design Contest)

Two things I wanted to share,

Wow, I've just got qualified. In fact not me but my idea - it did it! 

Idea is about combining cheapest GPS with paper map. A suggestion that paper map was, is and will be the best interface.

In case I've wetten you appetite: GPS on paper

Today is a last day to submit your idea. I've written down mine just last evening. Basically do it. Open your drawer, wipe the dust out and sell it. There is nothing to lose. Well,... you lose while it's being kept in your drawer!

Good luck.