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In my Thursday evvening IS 7010 class, we keep coming back to Starbucks and McDonald’s as examples of distinctive competencies. Starbucks does coffee and coffee-flavored milk very, very well.

As a music store, Starbucks is not that great.  I do not understand why Starbucks has to litter its counters and floors with CDs and DVDs for sale. Most Starbucks customers want coffee, not entertainment.

In the fast-food industry, breakfast is battle to satisfy some very specific key success factors. Coffee has to be hot and acceptable. The food has to be quick and reasonable. McDonald’s figured these issues out in the 1970s and has dominated fast-food breakfast ever since.

Starbucks has announced that the company will dump its recently introduced line of breakfast sandwiches before this fall. The items were selling, but counter staff had to spend time microwaving the refrigerated sandwiches.

Frankly, this idea sounded more like a McDonald’s scheme. After all, McDonald’s uses distribution as its driving force. The food can be assembled in the restaurant with a minimum of skill. The factory plays an important part in preparing the food to be shipped to each restaurant.

As McDonald’s rolls out its McCafe coffee counters, Starbucks is planning a 19 March announcement of five “bold” new features. I’m wondering what Starbucks will try next. Perhaps they’ll have breakfast pastries that actually taste good.

From VNUnet.com and UPI: Earlier today two undersea cables that carried Internet traffic to the Middle East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent was damaged. The outage is most noticeable in India, Pakistan, Kuwait and Dubai. Internet traffic has mostly be rerouted to slower cables, and the damaged cables may not be repaired for another week.

No word yet on how this has affected outsourced operations in India. A CNN report claims that Dubai’s financial sector, television stations and telephone services have been affected by the outage. CNN also quotes sources who state that the damage was caused by a ship’s anchor.

Heather Paulson of revenews.com posted a comment that software development firms and their clients are panicking a bit over the situation.

From Forbes: developers are readying programs that will actually run on the iPhone, instead of just in the Safari web browser. There’s a wide variety of web-based applications available, but these programs don’t offer the speed and features that an application that is actually running on the iPhone could provide. Web-based applications also have to respect firewall and security rules in order to access any Web-based data.

Apple has not released a Software Developers Kit (SDK) that contains tools that help programmers access the iPhone’s resident applications like the address book and calendar.

Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian mobile phones do run applications directly. The operating system developers released SDKs long ago.

Apple has maintained strict control over the iPhone application market through the company’s exclusive agreements with mobile carriers. Carriers either want to sell the iPhone or sometime like it, as I discussed on 13 January 2008. It’s widely assumed that Apple will let programmers sell their iPhone applications through iTunes, which is the management software for iPhone users. Ars Technica revealed that an iPhone application installation key – a very long string of numbers – has been identified by some programmers and released on the Internet as an image file.

Of course, Apple would take a percentage on any software sold through iTunes. The Forbes article mentions 30 percent as a possible fee. As Marc Hedlund pointed out last November, the Sidekick uses a similar business model. As a Sidekick user, I agree with Marc – I hate paying for features on my phone. The Sidekick 3 doesn’t include a world clock, for example. Users have to navigate to the phone’s download screen and buy a clock.

One of the Sidekick’s original developers, Andy Rubin, now works for Google on its Open Handset Alliance project. I mentioned the project on 5 November 2007. Here are some other articles about the rumored gPhone.

There are third-party iPhone applications available, of course. Some of these are designed to unlock the iPhone, or to add an application installer feature.

But Apple can break these unauthorized applications or change the application installation key at any time by updating the iPhone firmware, as I mentioned on 26 January 2008.