By painting Apple as a new untouchable in the CE industry, has Dave Morgan taken the liberty to show us that the consumer experience trumps just about everything else?   After a decade of losing Apple vs. IBM comparisons (in which I,  as a boy, defended Apple to the ends of the earth, aided by my weekly infusion of MacWEEK) can Apple have a further decade of dominance? Eerily familiar to descriptions of IBM in the 1960s or 70s.

Apple: The First Trillion-Dollar Company? 01/13/2011:

Apple is out-innovating and out-executing the entire market. No other company is delivering better consumer electronics products with better content and communications experiences to the market, and iterating them constantly, than Apple.? Not only that, but no one else is delivering consumer electronic products and related software and content at the scale, and with the degree of customer service, that Apple is today. Not Sony. Not Samsung. Not LG. Not Google. No one.

The business of video on demand was possible and eminently doable in 1994-95.  Most of the cable companies buried their heads in the sand.   IBM was content selling servers, having lost the DOS vs. Windows battle (or even OS2/Warp!)  Yet we didn't see it for more than a decade in most US Cable households.  

Great products and ideas die, all the time.  I personally never owned a mac clone, but some of those machines were really insipiring piecves of machinery.  Gil Amelio couldn;t save Apple, but Jobs did.  He rebooted the company.

And that's why the powerhouse that Apple has become, can't last forever.  What IBM has build doesn't rely on one person, ditto to GE, Comcast, Verizon.  Apple has a lockup on the fringe, but it can't take the mass.  The mass just won't tolerate it.

David Pogue suggests this morning that CES was a sideshow of Apple copycats.  His money quote from an industry insider:

“These companies are like 6-year-olds on a soccer team,” one company representative told me. “The ball goes over here, and they all run after it in a blob. ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ”

The innovation, however, is moving to the cloud- the services on top of the devices.  That will keep shiny, new things on our TVs for now.  See InsideFacebook's The Best Facebook-Integrated Devices from CES 2011.

But it can't last longer than Steve Jobs.  Even as Steve keeps the fanboys cheering (and even some day clicking the "like" button) he hasn't build anything that can outlive him.

Well, maybe, just maybe, it's fixing the news business! (via Fake Steve Jobs)

The news business has descended into the gutter in a pathetic attempt to stay alive. It’s been a horrible race to the bottom. This is turn has polluted our politics, and now we’re seeing the result of it.

Fortunately for the world, we’re going to change all that, with iPad and the apps model. But that’s a story for another day.

Editors Note (1/7/11): I’ve now posted my guide to learning how to code – The HoPE Manifesto.

The other day, my friend Charlie O’Donnell wrote a post challenging the NY tech industry to recruit or educate 250 new engineers to the NY early-stage tech ecosystem this year.

Today, Fred Wilson upped the stakes and called for 1000.

I have a different challenge: Can 1000 of us learn how to code in 2011?

I already did. It took me one solid week of really, brutally hard work, and then an ongoing passion and interest (which has translated into two solid months of coding and learning on Ohours when I have the time).

For as long as I’ve been involved in the NY tech industry we’ve made cries for more engineers to a) move here; or, b) abandon/avoid Wall Street so they can join our silly startups that are “changing the world.”

What if instead of calling on others to do things we just looked to ourselves? Aren’t we the change we are waiting for?

If you’re willing to put in the time to learn — and if you’re really passionate about something, the time and energy comes freely — then learning to code really isn’t that hard.

Once you can code, the entire dynamic changes. Instead of early ideas needing more money so we can hire more engineers, startups founded by people who can do the work become more self-sustaining.

Example Ohours:
Ohours is a great idea with some early traction I’m excited about. If I didn’t know how to code and was paying — in financial or social capital — a developer each time I needed a change or update to the site, a) the site would be a lot worse then it is today, because we really couldn’t make updates that often; and b) our risk/reward profile would be way out of whack. I’d go raise angel financing, deluding myself and the investors that *now* was the time to invest in what’s still a stupid-early project, I’d then I’d use that money to tie up an engineer in a non-proven startup. In the current model, everyone is over-invested and a great engineer is out of the market.

Sure, it would be great if NY tech was able to recruit more engineers and keep college hackers away from Wall Street — I 100% agree — but it’s not going to happen just by wishing it to happen. And, the more “business people” (like me for the past 4 years) whine about the lack of engineers rather than turning themselves into engineers, the less I see us attracting people.

So you know what would really turn things on its head? If every damn “business person with a great idea” in this town decided to take a bit of time and actually learn how to code and built it themselves.

1. First, we’d alleviate demand put on the talent pool by non-proven businesses.
2. Second, we’d have an increased yet more sustainable rate of creation and creativity in our market
3. And last of all, I guarantee that — when the startups founded by newly minted hackers actually needed to expand and hire talent — we’ll be a heckofalot more attractive place to move to/work for (’cause if you were a hacker, would you really want to work for people who didn’t have it in them to learn to code?).

So who’s coming with me? Can 1000 of us learn how to code this year? Sign below in the comment thread if you’re with me.

And after 1000 of us learn to code, I’m sure we’re get those 1000 new engineers the old-fashioned way.