Archive | August, 2011
Googmoto: The Pessimist’s View
The Business Insider’s Henry Blodget thinks the Google-Motorola deal is bold but troubling:
Yes, there’s a chance that Google could pull off a miracle here and transform the Motorola Mobility business into a direct competitor of Apple’s–in which Google gets not only Android distribution, but super-fat iPhone-like profit margins to boot.
But doing that will be super-challenging. Motorola’s current hardware team has displayed none of the magic that Apple’s has. And the more Google tries to mimic that magic, the more Google’s other Android partners will likely rebel against Google’s competitive threat.
Googmoto: The Optimist’s View
15. August 2011
ZDNet’s Larry Dignan has six reasons why Google buying Motorola makes sense. Here’s one of ‘em:
And Android boxes in Nokia and RIM. With Motorola, which has some enterprise credibility and Android innovations, Google can enter the enterprise easier. As a result, RIM increasingly looks like the odd man out. Nokia is already under fire as it waits for Windows Phone 7 to gain traction. RIM is betting on QNX as an operating system. Google is indicating that the wireless market is a two-platform race. And those two horses are going to be Android and iOS.
Google+ Games Has Potential, Just Like the Rest of Google+
15. August 2011
Last week, Google launched its long-awaited online gaming portal as part of its budding social network, Google+.
Like Google+ itself, the big selling point for Games on Google+ is that it respects personal boundaries more than Facebook. Instead of dumping everyone’s game-related status updates into your main timeline, Google+ games are relegated to a separate tab, so your main timeline remains uncluttered.
The less intrusive approach to status updates may be a big lure for some people, but it’s not the hook Google+ games need. And with only 16 titles at launch (albeit with some big names like Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz and Zynga Poker), Google’s social gaming service isn’t catching up to Facebook anytime soon.
My First Ten Questions–of Many!–About Google Buying Motorola
15. August 2011
Apple buying T-Mobile. Microsoft buying Adobe. We’re all used to reading stuff by tech pundits talking about seismic, world-changing acquisitions in a somewhat fanciful manner. But Google buying Motorola Mobility, the recently-spun-off part of Motorola that makes phones and other consumer hardware, is real–and the most potentially world-changing acquisition in many years. (Compared to this, HP buying Palm was positively humdrum.) If I’d been drinking anything when I read the headline this morning, I would have done a spit-take.
It’s not that it’s a completely unthinkable merger–in fact, it’s existed as a rumor for quite a while. It just seemed really unlikely, until it happened.
Mergers that are supposed to change everything have a lousy track record of changing everything–sometimes, they don’t change anything at all, at least for the better. (They also don’t have a perfect track record of actually happening: we should be careful about assuming this is a done deal until it is.) Right now, I’m still processing the news and asking myself questions. Such as…
See Ya, Streak 5
15. August 2011
Dell’s first Android tablet, the Streak 5, is officially discontinued. A strange farewell message now appears on Dell’s Streak 5 web page (“Goodbye, Streak 5. It’s been a great ride.”), with an image of a pretty woman who is not holding a Streak 5.
The general consensus is that the Streak 5 was too big to be a good phone and too small to be a good tablet, but I’m not convinced of that argument. Phone makers have successfully made 4.3-inch screens desirable, and are now pushing toward 4.5 inches with the Samsung Infuse 4G and rumored HTC Holiday. And whenever I write about 7-inch tablets, I’m shocked by the number of commenters who want to use them as phones. I think there’s a niche for oversized handsets. Dell just failed to capture it. In hindsight, it’s easy to see why.
And That’s the Way It Wasn’t
15. August 2011
This famous video from 2006 seemed cool at the time. I thought of it when I heard today’s stunner of a news story and re-watched it. And it’s fascinating how much has changed since it was made. (It mentions Friendster but not Facebook.)
Daniel McCracken, the Greatest Computing McCracken, Has Died
14. August 2011
Shortly after I got interested in computers in 1978, I took note of the fact that there were a bunch of books about then-current computing topics such as FORTRAN programming by one Daniel D. McCracken. His work seemed to be everywhere. He was no relation, but learning of his existence pleased me–there are relatively few of us McCrackens in the world.
Daniel McCracken died at the age of 81 on July 30th of this year in New York, but his passing only made the news last week, and I only became aware of it today. Here’s Friday’s New York Times’ obituary, by Steve Lohr, who calls him the Stephen King of programming books.
McCracken ended up writing or co-writing more than two dozen books, including ones on major programming languages such as ALGOL, COBOL, Modula-2 and Pascal, as well as Web site development. They sold a total of 1.6 million copies. McCracken also taught programming at the City College of New York until his death. His biography there says that he wrote the first programming textbook in 1971; I don’t know for sure that he did, but he was surely the first important author of such tomes. He received numerous honors from the computing industry and co-edited a book with Margaret Mead. Given his success as an author and long career as a teacher, he may have showed more people how to program computers than any other one person.
I’ve long known that his work had made a major impact because people in tech industry have frequently asked me–as recently as a couple of weeks ago–whether I was related to him. Some have assumed he’s my father. One correspondent, in fact, even remained convinced that I was the FORTRAN textbook McCracken, even after he saw a photo of me that made pretty clear that I wasn’t writing books during the heyday of mainframes He seemed to suspect some sort of conspiracy; I took it as a compliment.
Two Words: “Apple Wireless”
14. August 2011
Apple doesn’t buy big companies. And of all the big companies it doesn’t buy, the big U.S. wireless carriers feel like the ones it’s least likely to want to purchase. But it’s still fun to play with the idea, as Jean Louis Gassée has done.
How a Thin 2011 Notebook is Like a Chunky 1970s Calculator
13. August 2011
PCWorld’s Jason Cross explains how the MacBook Air is like HP’s HP 35 calculator from 1972, and why that’s bad news for today’s PC makers (HP included):
HP’s market research said they shouldn’t make and release it – it was going to cost at least $350. At twenty times the cost of a slide rule, nobody was going to buy it! Bill Hewlett said, “I don’t care, I want one of these things” and pushed the project through. It was so revolutionary, so visionary and transformative, that even at a cost of $350+ (that’s 1972 dollars!) the orders were over 10,000 a month.
Not the Light Bulb, But an Interesting Idea Nonetheless
12. August 2011
Every once in awhile, an old Technologizer post gets rediscovered and read all over again. That’s happening today over on Reddit, where someone linked to “Mr. Edison’s Kindle,” a story on unsuccessful visionary inventions which I wrote last year. The Reddit user liked Thomas Edison’s dream of 40,000-page books printed on nickel rather than paper. And so do I.
The Truth About Restaurant Sites
12. August 2011
This is from earlier this week, but you need to read it if you haven’t: Slate’s Farhad Manjoo explains why restaurant sites suck.
Someday, There Will Be a Great 7″ Tablet
12. August 2011
With all due respect to Steve Jobs, I’ve never been convinced by his stance that 7″ tablets are a bad idea. But I haven’t been able to mount a convincing case that he’s wrong, either. The original 7″ Samsung Galaxy Tab suffered from using a version of Android meant for phones. RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook had even bigger problems. Neither one was a 7-incher you could use to refute Jobs’ argument. On the other hand, though, it was factors other than their screen size that hurt them–so I continue to hold out hope that someone will make a 7″ tablet that’s just plain nice.
A World Without the IBM PC
12. August 2011
Apple's famous ad.
On August 12th, 1981, IBM announced its first PC. That makes today the thirtieth anniversary of the platform that’s sometimes been called the PC clone, IBM PC compatible, or Wintel…but is most often simply called the PC. We started our celebration on Thursday with Benj Edwards’ look at PC oddities such as Bill Gates’s donkey-avoidance game. But thinking about some of the weirdness that the PC inspired got me to thinking: what if IBM, which took a long time to decide to do a PC at all, had decided not to do one? What if it had decided that microcomputers were a blip and it should stick to mainframes?
The announcement of the PC was one of the most important moments in tech history, since computers based on the PC’s design quickly flooded the market and established a standard which lives on to this day in every Windows PC. As I played around with the idea of the IBM PC suddenly vanishing from the history books, I started asking myself questions, and trying to come up with answers. (Hey, the whole subject is so unknowable that there’s no such thing as a wrong answer…)
These Teens Know Tech
11. August 2011
Ben Lang demos MySchoolHelp.
Last Friday, I attended the Teens in Tech conference at PARC in Palo Alto, an event aimed at entrepreneurial young folks who want to turn ideas into startups, or at least be part of the startup culture. (No, I’m not a teen–but it’s a good conference, and I was invited.)
The highlight of the day was an hour devoted to teens–who were part of an incubator program sponsored by Teens in Tech–demonstrating their startups. Most of their ideas were clever, and many of the demos were as slick as typical grownups-in-tech conferences such as DEMO and TechCrunch Disrupt. (That’s probably both a sign that the teens practiced a lot and that some adult entrepreneurs don’t practice enough.)
My favorite startup was MySchoolHelp, a Web-based system that lets high school students share their class notes. The site was created by 17-year-old Ben Lang and developed by 14-year-old Jake Essman, and looks slick. Their goal is to work with schools, particularly private ones–which should help alleviate any concerns that this idea is a form of cheating rather than collaborative learning–and they hope to reach 500 schools in the not-too-distant future. (The idea is a spinoff of RamazHelp, a site Ben started for his own school.)
Help Me Help My Mom Pick Her Next Phone
11. August 2011
My mom, sans BlackBerry.
My mother isn’t the sort of person who craves the latest smartphone just because it’s the latest smartphone. Actually, she remains smitten with her BlackBerry Curve 8900, which she’s had for a couple of years. But it’s developing an odd shadow effect on the screen, and so she rightly thinks she may be in the market for a new phone soon.
She asked me for advice on what to buy. And now I’m asking you for advice.
When it comes to decisions like this, I’m not a missionary. I don’t instinctively want to steer mom off the BlackBerry platform, or onto a particular OS. (For the record, I use an iPhone 4 most of the time, and a Verizon Fascinate some of them time.) I just want her to own a phone she’ll like at least as much as her BlackBerry.
Here’s what’s important to her:
- She does a lot of e-mail on her phone.
- She loves reading Kindle books on her BlackBerry. Very important to her.
- She’d use a browser if she had a decent one.
- She might dabble in Facebook.
- She might take photos if her phone had a respectable camera.
- She might well make video calls on Skype if she could.
- She might listen to music if someone showed her the ropes. Video, probably not. (Unless it’s of her grandchildren.)
- She’s not going to play games, do any social networking other than light Facebook use, or install apps willy-nilly.
- I don’t think she’ll detect much of a difference between 3G and AT&T’s “4G”
- As far as I know, she has no desire to leave AT&T. (I think she’s nearing the end of a two-year contract and might be able to wangle a new handset at full discount.)
- I don’t think she has a specific price in mind. But when I mentioned phones being available for a penny on contract, she sounded happy. And when I talked about the iPhone 4 costing $199, she sounded alarmed.
I don’t think mom has had real hands-on experience with any modern smartphones. But my dad has (and likes) an HTC Aria, so she has some sense of the world beyond the Curve. And she told me she’s intrigued by touchscreens. She’s not adverse to trying something new.
Is Apple Considering Adding Mini Projectors to iOS Devices? Could Be Cool!
11. August 2011
Patently Apple is one of my favorite sites to watch for news on Cupertino’s latest and greatest, and its latest post is no obsession. The site has dug up patents that indicate the company has worked on the idea of integrating pico projectors into iOS devices, as well as developing some type of projector accessory for Mac devices.
What’s a pico projector? The devices have become popular as a low-cost way to project an image anywhere. I’m seeing more and more of them at tech shows lately, although typically as a standalone device and not integrated like we’re seeing here.
There’s definitely a cool factor: as well as offering the projection capabilities you’d expect, Apple’s patent involves making the projected images gesture enabled. Say you have two iOS projecting devices side by side, for example. You could transfer the projected content from one device to the next by swiping. Pretty cool, eh?
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15. August 2011
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