There’s been a lot of talk about Louis CK directly marketing his recent concert online and how he made a million bucks at it in little over a week, and I think it’s well deserved. I paid 5 bucks for a video that at times is fantastically funny and other times (much fewer and further between) is just “pretty funny” and I have zero regrets whatsoever for the purchase. And I get to keep it forever – no rental approach here.

It’s funny, though: if I’d paid ten bucks perhaps I’d be a little ticked, I don’t know. What I do know is when Radiohead let their customers choose the price I bought In Rainbows off their site, and then I turned around and bought it the full definition bits from Amazon in CD form when they were released. In other words, Radiohead got paid twice by guys like me for being incredibly flexible in their approach to selling and distributing their works.

And I think that’s the point to take away from all this. I hope more performers remove the middleman and simply sell their performances at a price that empowers their audience to be truly empowered and connected. Fifteen or twenty bucks from Best Buy isn’t that solution, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say Apple’s fairly high and inflexible pricing might not be the complete long term solution either. For most of us competitiveness and elasticity drive secondary purchases like these, and frankly we’re the “gravy” that makes the entertainment market lucrative.

I just took a quick gander at an old Apple iPhone Service Guide that was sent to me, along with a replacement phone, when I called with problems recently.  I never noticed before, but the staples on the white booklet are also white.

Who cares about details like this?  Apple, that’s who.  Despite receiving tons of multipage white documents in my life I don’t think I’ve ever seen a white staple in my life and I doubt I ever will again unless it’s on a document that comes from Apple.

Thank goodness we all have 600 bucks lying around to spend on a pile of soon-to-be-dumped HP products within 24 hours of receiving a super deal like this one.  Thanks a bunch, guys!

DC’s hometown boys make good.

Who carves an Apple symbol into their head when most kids would probably prefer a mohawk?

This kid.
I love this story.

It surprises me that no one has talked at all about Tim Cook joining Apple’s board at the same time he’s stepping into the CEO role.  This has been speculated since Eric Schmidt vacated his seat in August 2009 (see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125019983643730309.html).  One can only infer that this succession plan has been in place for at least two years despite public pressure for the company to reveal a plan.

Steve J doesn’t do anything without a ton of detail, and you’ve got to believe his press release jab was more than just a passing reference to succession plan demanders.

Robert Scoble pens this Steve Jobs retrospective.

The big question in the interim is ‘how’s his health?’ and I’m not sure we’ll have the answer anytime before we hear any really bad news.  He will continue to drive product in his new role as chairman and employee – ain’t collecting COBRA alone.  What he has done is provided Cook with a fantastic opportunity to employ brilliant supply chain dynamics that assure Apple’s competitive product advantages give them far more runway and net profit than any similar company in history, and that alone will buy a ton of time even if they lose some of that creative force.  I’d contend much of their unique product DNA will remain intact and what will remain unanswered is how they identify and implement features from here forward.  Theory is there’s at least one more product in the kitty – perhaps 2 or 3 – that are ready to go and waiting for the market to systemically green light them.  When you consider the iPad was around 4-5 years before any touch device was released that wouldn’t be surprising.  There’s touch-hybrid line of computers, some kind of TV-style media device, and loads of cloud products that are at least 80% assured of showing up in the next couple years alone, and their transition to Apple-developed CPUs will at minimum lock their trajectory for several years while they continue to lock-in their adjusted executive chemistry.

Sometimes when I’m using an Apple device I feel like I’m being taken for a ride – literally.  It’s like there’s some feature or ability missing that I really want now, but I’ve either been told or I strongly anticipate it’ll be there very soon in the next release… so I continue going on the sometimes long, never strange, and always intense trip.

When I’m saddled with a Microsoft powered device/box/server/whatever I feel confident what I’m pretty sure  what I need is there, somewhere, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to find it – and if I do, I’ll very likely be highly disappointed with what I find…. or, I’ll regret using the feature later when it eats my work or blows up.

Apple’s approach to feature development has turned me into an addict, fixing on some dark street corner.  Microsoft’s approach forced me into that addiction.  Neither are ideal, but only one brings me peace, even if it requires me being catatonic in the process.

After Apple’s widely publicized developer rules were updated for iOS, attention immediately returned to what appeared to be a retreat in Apple’s longstanding war with Adobe over Flash’s exclusion from the iOS platform.  First attention turned to the threat of government action, then the press seemed to call in the techies to assess Apple’s A4 chip and its ability to crunch a lot more for a lot less juice, and then attention started to shift to an improvement in fortunes for Google Voice apps at the App Store ‘altar of acceptance’.

Amidst all this comes word that there will likely a be a newspaper store (and loads of newspapers hoping to jump on board to stop the red ink).

Standing alone or in broken choruses each of these developments doesn’t necessarily appear in concert.  But we’re thinking they’re very much in line with Apple’s confidence in the maturity of its platform and logical next steps for it, rather than some whacky fear of legal reprisal.  Considering Apple never backs down from anyone, we’d doubt they’d be scared of the government or anyone else this time either.

The real reasoning behind all these moves is logical: an airtight opportunity for continued dramatic platform revenue growth without some of the old risk.

Through the App Store, iBooks, and now Game Center, Apple has well-founded confidence that they can control the most important aspects of the iOS user experience, which virtually assures them consistently high profit lock-in of their native customer base.  No, not the group of folks that buy their hip devices and use them quite functionally, buying some apps or media here and there.  Rather, we’re talking about an extension of those same, loyal customers that helped Apple survive their near death experience a decade ago.

But this time that group is much larger in number despite having all the profit power of the smaller founding subset.

Apple didn’t protect its newest operating system for no reason.  It kept the spector or Flash-like development platforms and third party voice apps off the air because this level of confusion, platform disintermediation, and lack of singular focus by their loyal base on Apple’s ‘it just works’ functionality would have been devastating.  Imagine the truest of Apple enthusiasts having to choose between identically confusing phones with software developed by Apple and Google?

Despite iOS’s continued meteoric growth Apple knows the loyalists are now firmly on board.  It’s time to take some of the low lying fruit from Android based phones while shoring up the base even further.

For Apple fans who love the iOS interface and the ability of Apple’s core apps to make our lives far more efficient this means two things: media stores for everything (newspapers are only the next step on the way to magazines, or maybe they’ll go down at the same time) and easy access to our own stuff.

That’s why Print Center shows up in iOS 4.2 and MobileMe has its own massive datacenter being prepped for the next phase of personal cloud computing.  Can you imagine how many hard drives are getting dropped in that sucker right now?

And Mac OS X isn’t going anywhere, either.  Neither is the ‘hub concept’.  Home desktops and laptops will become a more tightly coupled, superpower version of iPad, iPhone, and touch.  Think Dropbox – because frankly iDisk sucks compared to it – on steroids, with everything in your Mac OS X user profile completely mirrored in North Carolina (and maybe somewhere else) at all times and rapidly synched to every iDevice you use, wherever you go.

The next battle isn’t about Flash versus the core iOS, or even the web versus apps.  It’s about how the cloud removes any need to understand where my stuff lives and how awesome my user experience is in the process of exploiting it.

(Meanwhile, in the background, let’s hope some really smart data elves are continuing to figure out how to make all these databases logically work together toward something smarter than storing and synching their contents.)