Apple: What's up with that?

1. Why no A2DP on the iPhone?
2. So, the iPhone does VOIP over wifi, but not over 3G? I suppose you never promised to do no evil.
3. If you format your disk with mixed case, Photoshop (and other Adobe products) won't install or run. This little pissing contest has been going on for years. I wonder if CS4 will fix it. I'm betting no, but it gets released on November 7.

Vista becoming increasingly irrelevant

Windows 7 is supposed to be out in June 2009. My advice is just to skip over Vista. It will linger as a kind of red-headed stepchild like Windows ME. But it will soon be forgotten as Microsoft makes their push for Windows 7, and I doubt they will lose control of the spin this time.

iPhone, gPhone...

The essential aspect of the iPhone is that it finally sets developers loose into a worldwide carrier ecocsystem. Apple was able to kick down a lot of fences for them and flatten out the balkanization (though Asia remains resistent.) Pent-up developer creativity has finally been unleashed.

Much the same will be true of the gPhone. Further, gPhone's consortium approach will excel; there will eventually be dozens of gPhone models, while Apple only has one or two iPhones. Analagous to nVidia's OEM approach to graphic chips beating ATI's. I am betting that Google's generally more open approach to the OS, the manufacturers, and the developers, will prove superior in the long run. The biggest obstacle is the current lack of a gPhone store, developers who want to eat will largely set aside their philosophical objections to Apple's iron fisted control.

While I'm surprised at the vehemence of the Apple cult spin agains the gPhone, try stretching your mind a year into the future. Hear me now, believe me later: Google will let their code do the talking, as they have done so successfully in the past. Apple's lead is not insurmountable. And consumers all benefit from the competition.

I woke up and its 2008

I've been reviewing the last 3 years of internet history, about 4000 stories in TechCrunch. Also techmeme. Some early observations. Often see 10 companies doing the same thing (blog search). Or 10 companies doing the same thing and soon Google will be doing it (ajax desktop/spreadsheet/word processor). Sometimes Google or Yahoo or Microsoft buys them, if they've been swift enough to garner a user base before the all-seeing-eye notices. More often they lose. Another theme: do something 8 other startups are doing, but target the enterprise.

WiMax - Threat or Menace?

I recently attended a presentation on WiMax, which left me feeling quite shocked. The presentation, from a software company, trotted out the usual dog and pony show about a mobile browser. They did have one interesting angle, that it would work the same on a desktop browser, and the mobile version would import bookmarks from it. But after that things continued to slide downhill. I thought I'd toss them a softball, asking "great I want it, when, where, and how much", but the reply was so much dissembling with no actual answer. OK, let's try another fat softball they can hit out of the park "what's the killer app". Shuffling of feet, staring at the floor, ok, um, "location aware is our killer app." As I understand it, the killer app is the engine that pulls along the entire train of adopters. The GOTTA HAVE IT app. "location aware" (nevermind that its not entirely clear to me how you accomplish this with WiMax, unless it uses triangulation, someone help me out here) "location aware" is not a killer app, its an enabling technology. A killer app is "press this button and the location aware will deliver a frosty horchata drink to you for free in 1 minute". A killer app is hotmail, email, iTunes, skype, spreadsheets.

Twine

I wanted to share some bookmarks. Twitter was only useful to broadcast new interesting bookmarks, but useless for organizing them, or having a conversation, or repartee, and, what's up with this 140 character limit? I started trying del.icio.us but jlo said it was limiting and dbrehmer turned me on to twine, which we now all love.

Twitter Redux

I now use twitter and admit that I was wrong. Twitter is a killer app that will be part of everyone's life. Its really just a slight twist on the IM that has been around for a decade. But at the same time its a home-brew citizens-band news-wire connecting us all in real time!

I do wonder though how much milk is left in the social media cow. OK, I'm all for viral, and social media is a mutant of viral, and confers a bonus multiplier to any investment. But how many twitters fit on my screen. Didn't that MBA teach us that an industry has 2 or 3 leaders and then some also rans?

Mobile Apps: threat or menace?

I need to get down with my cell phone compadres and grok this industry. How is developing a software application for the internet network different than developing for a cellular network?

Pro: Its always with you and it knows where you are
Con: The screen is small, the network is balkanized, and the development environment is balkanized.

Twitter

Twitter is a mashup of blogs, IM, and SMS. They've done enough things right to succeed. And they just raised another round http://sarahlacy.typepad.com/sarahlacy/2008/04/twitter-raises.html I'd like to see their demographics. I'm not enough of a 24-hour party people person that I would use it. At my age, the twitter activity and gossip flow simply seems... straining. But god bless twitter and the new new, instant, on your cell, thing. I am actually positive about it as a techno-social phenomenon, ala amihotornot.

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