John Martellaro

Forrester Research reported on Monday that an analysis of Apple’s credit card sales showed that iPods are no longer driving iTunes sales. Another site interpreted this as iTunes sales “collapsing.” However, Blackfriars’ Marketing took a look on Tuesday at cumulative iPod and iTunes Store sales and concluded that the Forrester analyst may not have done…

The combination of the Trusted Platform module (TPM), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and customary business rules mandated by law could make it illegal for software other than Microsoft’s to read future Office documents. That conclusion was reached in an Information Week article posted Tuesday. Historically, important business documents have been saved in some…

"…the hardest thing to do is change an organization that’s been around a long time, has thousands of workers and has a set corporate culture and way of doing things. Even if the employees know intuitively that the government is bloated and archaic, very few would vote to slim down and flatten out the organization.…

Apple is in an interesting financial position right now, and they’re doing what most companies do when they reach a certain level of success — they roll the money upwards. Here’s how it works. Just about any company can manage to justify the diversion of roughly 0.5% of its revenues to some consensus cause, championed…

What the Agenda Tries to Achieve Everyone likes to make predictions about the WWDC Keynote. That’s the easy part. I’m going to do something a little different. My motivation is that while Steve covers a lot of ground, and it’s a very entertaining show, very little of it is deeply technical. So I’m going to…

"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult." – E.B. White Preparation Whether you’re preparing to attend Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) for the first time or you’re doing an encore visit, or if you’re…

"The definition of a civilized computing platform: the time required to learn how to use it is less than the time required to complete a major simulation on it." – Bill Buzbee, Arctic Region Supercomputing Center The BeginningsIt was the summer of 2003, and university staff members in the computer science department at Virginia Polytechnic…

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. – Abraham Lincoln Every once in awhile I read a story on the Internet that just doesn’t seem to sync with my experiences at Apple. Most of the time, the story is derived from what the author…

"Had him, and we lost him." — Apple "Restarting" TV commercial There is a lot going on in the new Apple TV ads that hasn’t been discussed. No one has really analyzed them from a no-nonsense marketing standpoint, so I think it’s time to do that. To get some perspective, let’s look first at what…

"Customers set up a hierarchy of values, wants, and needs based on empirical data, opinions, word-of-mouth references, and previous experiences with products and services. They use that information to make purchasing decisions." — Regis McKenna When I was selling Apple products to the Federal Government, I reaffirmed that it’s often difficult to get beyond the…

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. — Steve Jobs to…

One of the ways to get ahead in the world of high technology is to have a good understanding of all the key components that make up a technical ecosystem, understand the customer, understand the weaknesses of the competition, question easy and familiar assumptions that may not really hold, have a coherent plan, and then…