So for only the second time since late August I managed to swim today. Travel, colds, Colitis and diarrhea have interfered with all my efforts to get back to swimming since Worldcon except for one day (I came down ill the following day and haven’t been up to it until today). Having been out of it for so long I took it easy and only did 30 lengths, with a break after each ten. Excluding the breaks I was just over 18 minutes for the 30 lengths, though, which is a pretty good time considering I’m still not feeling like I’m 100% and that it’s been close on four months since I last swam. I wasn’t exhausted afterwards, either, which is good. It means I didn’t overdo it.
I think I’m not going to try to get back to every day from this point, but I would like to make it three times a week for the long haul.
The third Peter Grant urban fantasy detective novel by Ben Aaronovich. It’s quite good, but not quite up to the excellence of the first two (Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho). This time Peter is seconded to an almost normal murder enquiry, with just a hint of weirdness. The weirdness escalates slowly through the case, to the dismay of the murder investigation team. There’s a sub-plot following up on the ongoing story arc about illicit magicians and there’s nice character follow-on with Peter and new recruit to the team Lesley. Another of Peter’s many relatives is introduced as a probable ongoing character (a mouthy thirteen year old cousin). As the name suggests this novel dives into the London Tube system, lovingly used by many for supernatural fictive inspiration before by the likes of Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere, soon to be revamped as a radio play by BBC Radio 4/Extra). It’s a decent read but just felt slightly thin compared to the previous two. The plot plods along ((pun intended) as a more-or-less normal murder enquiry, just with added magic. It’s all a little bit mundane. Still a cut above many in this oeuvre, but I hope Aaronovich can raise his game back up to the first two in the future.
Despite their own advertising claims and hype, Apple did not invent the personal media player, the smartphone or the tablet computer. However, their second or third generation mass-market devices in these areas have clearly captured the market at a crucial time becoming the single largest provider of such devices and relgating their competitors to mostly fighting amongst themselves for second place. While Android devices outsell iPhones by more than 3:1 no single manufacturer was able to beat Apple for sales until Samsung pulled out of the Android pack in 2012. By this time, however, the name of the game was iSomething. Ask a teenager what type of mobile they have and they’ll often say an iPhone, even if it’s Android device. Similarly iPod and iPad have become the standard term for media players and tablets. With the release of the iPad mini, even mid-sized tablets no longer seem distinct from the fruity products.
This all seems good for the Cupertino mothership, with brand recognition supporting their product with much higher product margins than anyone else (Samsung sells more but makes less), while their tied-in software and content distribution system also buoys up their profits more than in the more open Android marketplaces.
But this is a double-edged sword as at least two companies have learned before: Kleenex and Hoover. They became so ubiquitous and their products so associated with the product class that they effectively lost much of their trademark protection due to genericisation. Google made a strong effort to prevent this, although both the OED and Miriam-Websters include the verb “to google” as a synonym for searching the Web, particularly but not solely with the Google search engine.
I am hearing a lot of usage of iPhone, iPod and iPad to refer to smartphones, media players and tablets, particularly at places like airports where we’re told to take our iPads out of bags and iPods/iPhones out of pockets for security screening, and on planes where we’re told to switch off our iPods/iPhones and iPads for take-off and landing, and only use our iPhones in airplane mode while in-flight.
While it may seem a boon to their current business model to be the poster-child of the current generation, becoming too generic can lose your edge in law and undermine your position in the market as the brand people will pay more for (which seems to be and remain the core of Apple’s approach [pun intended]).