Recently, I had two problems come up. Neither of them are really horrifying but the experiences that I had show why Apple dominates the markets for consumer-oriented electronics, and why RIM’s Blackberry, Obamania aside, is declining.

I should start out with a confession: I’ve been a systems administrator at a variety of levels on several network OSes, including Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT, some Linuxes (“Lini?”), and a couple of DEC variants, along with supporting or creating support for other systems like Mac OS and Windows desktops. I’ve even had a DEC Alpha and a Sun Enterprise 2 sitting under my desk. All that to say that I’m not a technical idiot, although I am now old enough to want somebody else to do all the heavy lifting. Still, I’m used to the software and system upgrade procedure and with problems with hardware.

Here’s the story:
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The Str4 artist at work: Little Birds. © 2008 Dawn Wheat. Used by permission.

Part of Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” theory is that the world has become “spikey”: certain cities draw almost all the top talent in the world, leaving everyone else to languish. (He who has will be given more; for he who has not, even what he has will be taken from him.) It’s much like what they have found on Web sites: some sites get all the links.

Florida describes the Creative Class City (CCC) in a 2006 interview in Rotman Magazine (Spring/Summer 2006). He cites as evidence some then interesting real estate numbers:

Joseph Gyourko, the great real estate economist at Wharton, shows the rapid rise in appreciation of housing prices in 15 ‘superstar cities’ in the U.S. – growing at two, three, or four times the average rate, and not coming down. Yet people aren’t decentralizing out of these hyperexpensive superstar cities and moving back to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or St. Louis; they’re not moving out of Toronto or Vancouver and moving to other Canadian cities.And why is that, given the costs associated with living in these cities? It’s the fact that we as human beings gain enormous productivity increases when we are located next to one another. When we locate together in concentrated, densely-packed cities like Toronto, New York or Bangalore, we increase each other’s productivity; that’s really the motor force of economic growth. And as a result, the world is developing a couple of dozen ‘spikes’.

The problem is that the real estate market has imploded.
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