Estimates suggest that if Steve Jobs died or was so ill as to have to retire from Apple, then Apple’s stock price could fall by as much as a 25%. The stock was cut in half by the stock market crash anyway and the price has been falling anyway since the announcement that Steve Jobs will not be addressing Macworld and that the coming Macworld in January will be the last that Apple officially supports.

The announcement jolted the rumor mills into action, because it doesn’t sound like sensible policy – unless Steve Jobs is seriously ill and unlikely to recover. The annual Steve Jobs address constituted free and immensely valuable world-wide publicity for the next Apple device. It could get a piece of the TV News in many countries. But set that aside, we’ll know the facts when the facts are on parade, and in the mean time Steve Jobs has earned his privacy.

Macworld itself is, by its very nature, a reason for rumors. If there are new devices to announce they get announced at Macworld. So here’s a summary of the possible new Apple products from the Apple rumor industry (I’ve excluded iMac refreshes as those are pretty much a certainty):

• A smaller form factor iPhone (iPhone Nano).
• A tablet Mac.
• A Mac Netbook.
• A multimedia hub for the home (or Apple TV upgrade)

None of these would be particularly surprising, but an iPhone Nano might be interesting if it isn’t just a smaller iPhone.

I finally got around to downloading Lotus Symphony for the Mac. Lotus made it available a while ago, so I decided to check it out. Symphony is now based on Open Office rather than the old code base, and, perhaps as a consequence, there are plug-ins you can download along with the software.

I downloaded the software out of curiosity. I have no intention of using it. You can no longer separate me from Apple’s Pages – the best word processor I’ve ever used, although I’m not enamored of Apple’s spreadsheet, Numbers. The point is that I just wanted to take a look.

According to IBM over 3 million copies of Symphony have been downloaded with the numbers rising every month. This doesn’t necessarily translate into millions of Symphony users, but it does indicate genuine user interest. Downloading free software from IBM is, imho, different than downloading from some Open Source provider simply because of customer confidence. So there’s a possibility that Symphony may achieve what OpenOffice couldn’t achieve (even if it has the same code base) and knock Microsoft off balance, or even off its feet.

Symphony is MS Office compatible, up to and including file formats for Office 2007. All of which is good for the user, but there’s another twist to Symphony. It offers additional functionality through plugins, imitating the software models of FireFox,WordPress et al. The Microsoft office apps were overburdened with functionality quite a while ago and it has become truly ridiculous, but it’s not all Microsoft’s fault. The fact is that one man’s word processor is another man’s legal document creator and yet another man’s desktop publishing software.

Plugins, not functionality overload, are the natural answer to this thorny little problem of context – a solution that Sun is also adopting with Open Office. Until recently Open Office had been a clone of MS Office, but it is now possible that it will evolve into a superior product. Given that it’s free, Microsoft ought to be worried – especially as we’re marching into a recession where budgets are getting shredded and many organizations are going to be attracted to inexpensive technology alternatives.

Before we break into 2009 and consider what the future may offer, it is worthwhile looking back, like Janus at 2008 to review the year that passed. So I’ll do that right now in real time.

2008 was a signature year of change – and not just in politics and economics. The changes in technology and the technology market were many and various, and some were profound. Here are the ones that I suspect were the most important.

1. The GPU and the CPU: The GPU (graphics processing unit) is in the process of usurping the CPU on client computers and access devices (but not servers where a GPU has no relevance). This is bringing Intel into direct competition with Nvidia. (see What is a GPU and Why is it Important?)
   Why important: This is causing a genuine divergence in the computer market between PCs and other “client access devices” and server computers. In all probability, they will no longer follow parallel paths. Additionally, this is shaking up the chip market, with NVIDIA threatening Intel’s hegemony.
2. The Evolution of the CPU, by other means: There are other disruptive developments occurring in chip technology. They include HP’s recent announcement of the memristor (a new on-chip component that will change the architecture of the cpu itself) and advances in using graphine, which promises chips that run 100x faster than now. Both show sufficient promise to suggest they could have an early impact on the industry.
   Why important: The cpu is the engine that pulls everything else. If the cpu changes in a significant way, then everything else is affected sooner or later.
3. Flash Memory gets faster and cheaper. Flash memory is falling in price fast (it used to be 100x the cost of disk a few years ago, now it’s 8x and falling) and the speed differential is increasing. Flash speeds overtook disk speeds recently.
   Why important: Flash takes less space, consumes less power and has no moving parts. The age of the spinning disk is coming to an end – and yet most of the applications we run are engineered for spinning disk. So it is likely that this will provoke a consequential revolution in database software.
   Note: USB is now updated to USB 3.0, which will be 10x faster USB 2.0. So thumb drives are here to stay, probably in a big way.
4. Apple Triumphant. In 2008 the Apple Mac ceased to be a niche platform. Its commercial success was boosted by the remarkable success of the iPhone. In my last posting on PC market share (see Apple Market Share: The Sound of Breaking Windows) I noted that, without even trying, Apple is now making in-roads into the business market on the desktop.
   Why important: The Windows monopoly has been broken and is unlikely to be re-established. The  market has grown beyond the point of Apple being just a niche vendor and the market is diversifying.
   Note also: The appearance and popularity of netbooks (sub-notebooks). They are also undermining the Windows monopoly by forcing the price of Windows down.
5. The iPhone Revolution. While we’re on the subject of Apple, we need to hail the success of the App store. It is transforming the mobile market – and all Apple has done is to implement it’s end-to-end iTunes music model to sell software. It has had the effect of turning the iPhone into (optionally) a games device.
   Why important: It’s not just the fact that it’s good for Apple’s business, although it is – notice how quickly Google (with Android) and RIM followed suit. What it demonstrates clearly is that the mobile carriers are ultimately in deep trouble. They have no value to add beyond temporary and (in the long term) trivial capabilities like SMS. They own the railroad track but not the trains and they don’t even have a monopoly on the railroad track.

I’ve tracked Lotus Notes for years. It has a good email capability. When I used it, about a decade ago, it’s calendaring was clunky and so was everything else but the email was good. The administration was frustrating for our administrator and one day we just abandoned it in favor of the Netscape bundle, which was a little better and involve almost zero admin effort. Not that it mattered much, Notes was not a small company product. IBM pushed Notes and has succeeded in keeping it relevant but not (imho) deeply compelling.

IBM didn’t purchase Lotus for Notes. It bought Lotus in a desperate attempt to ensure that there would be office applications for OS 2 (remember OS 2?) but the value it got from Lotus was, in reality, Notes – the product created by Ray Ozzie, whom Microsoft have entrusted their technical future to. IBM grew the Notes business through the 1990’s and although there was a dip in sales a while ago, it has had 17 quarters of solid (often double digit) growth.

IBM may do even better with Notes 8.0. Notes 8 is the attempt to fix the UI, which has always been a bit broken or, to be honest, badly broken. I won’t be able to comment on this until I’ve played with it, but never mind. IBM has long known that the UI needed more love and attention.  The real challenge for Lotus comes from “left field”. It has pretty much neutralized the threat from Microsoft  (they share the corporate market). The problem is that the new wunderkind of the web (B and Google Apps & Gmail) will gradually, but irreversibly, take the market away.

Lotus is fighting for relevance in a market that is being redefined. It has its own version of just about every Web 2.0 capability I’ve ever come across. What it doesn’t have is a web site that is gathering millions of ad hoc users – and that’s what it needs.

I’ll try to be brief. The question I’m trying to deal with is this:

There have been many financial crises in the past 40 years. What’s so different about this one?

The problem with economics (the dismal science) is that, in the main, it studies the aggregate behaviour of people in respect of there financial activity. People, in the main, go with the crowd. When we’re in the mood to spend (as a population) it affects most of us. Nearly all of us tend to spend. It’s the economic zeitgeist. When we’re in the mood to be frugal, we save or pay down debt (which is the same thing in economic terms).

The world just went through a psychological shock and now, suddenly, everyone is in the mood to save. If you could suddenly make people switch from spending to saving you could wreck an economy overnight, but you can’t. It’s events and the reaction to events that cause that. There has been a bursting of two bubbles in America – the subprime bubble and the credit bubble. Less has been said about the second of these – but basically the level of savings in the US (and the UK too) had fallen to almost zero and the population had become highly indebted. It couldn’t continue and a sea change was inevitable anyway. The subprime crisis triggered it.

What’s different about this economic crisis is the extent of the psychological change of the population, particularly the US population. Most likely it will take a long time for consumer confidence (by which we mean the tendency to spend) to get back to healthy levels. The only antidote to all of this is government spending and money printing, which is what the US is now preparing to do. The government has to compensate for the wary consumer and it’s only available tactic is to spend.