Recently I’ve had several good conversations about exactly what business Apple is in. They have clearly transcended their traditional role as a computer maker. Some people think that Apple has become a media company, or a telecommunications company. What they have really done is to become a luxury brand. As a luxury brand they are [...]

In case people have forgotten, I work at a company I helped start called StreamBase that came out of my graduate research. The product is a stream processing engine, meaning it consumes and processes tens to hundreds of thousands of events per second, from sources like sensor networks, stock markets, or the global interweb, and [...]

When Apple announced the MacBook Pro, my first reaction was not to any of the hardware changes but to the name. This machine represents the end of the PowerBook brand name, a brand that dates back well before the PowerPC processor, to the first Apple notebook computers in 1991. I believed that PowerBook was one [...]