Krazit on RIM

Good analysis by MocoNews’s Tom Krazit of the challenges facing RIM’s new CEO–and it ends with a great quote from IBM’s Lou Gerstner:

No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.

RIM’s New Boss: Stay the Course

Uh oh: RIM’s new CEO is saying he doesn’t “think a drastic change is needed.” (What does he know that we don’t know?)

Peter Kafka of All Things D reports:

Research In Motion isn’t broken, so no need to break it up. But it needs better internal focus, and better external focus, too.

That’s the takeaway from new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who told analysts this morning that he thinks the company is in pretty good shape, all things considered. Sure, in the U.S., it has been roughed up by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, but it’s still used by lots of people, has lots of fans in big companies and big government agencies, and lots of users around the world.

Windows 8′s Beefy Mobile Broadband Support

Microsoft’s Building Windows 8 blog has another one of its long, geeky, interesting insider posts. This one’s about how the company is building much more ambitious support for mobile broadband right into the operating system–including a phone-like Airplane Mode.

Untitled

Good piece by Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson explaining how the U.S. government was able to take down Megaupload, a company theoretically headquartered in Hong Kong: Megaupload wasn’t just some Hong Kong enterprise that “happened” to be used by US residents. The site had leased more than 1,000 servers in North America alone; 525 were at Carpathia Hosting and were located in Virginia. Between 2007 and 2010, Carpathia received $13 million from Megaupload. (Cogent Communications in the US supplied a few additional US servers and bandwidth.)

They’re Not Ultrabooks. They’re Notebooks

Donald Morrison Melanson of Engadget has a nice piece making a point that resonates with me: There are some nice Ultrabooks, but it’s silly to call them Ultrabooks, as if they were something other than thinnish laptops. The tech industry loves to come up with new buzzwords and to declare new categories of stuff. But I’ll bet that consumers–even if they end up buying lots of Ultrabooks–won’t think of them as something discrete and new.

Google’s Risky Gambit

My latest TIME.com Technologizer column: Why Google’s new search/social mashup, Search, Plus Your World, is so unsatisfying. At least to me.

Reminder: Motorola is Not Part of Google

I keep forgetting that Google, which agreed to buy Motorola Mobility last August, doesn’t yet own it. In fact, anti-trust regulators in both the U.S, and Europe are still going over the deal. Which means that we still don’t know what the implications will be of Google owning one of the largest makers of Android-based devices.

It is, by the way, fascinating how many sites reported the merger as a done deal the moment it was announced in August. Nope. Months later, it remains a proposed deal, and the chances that t won’t go through, while not huge, are more than zero.

Alienware’s Mini-Gaming Machine with Rotating Logo

I’m not in the market for a desktop PC. In fact, I don’t expect to buy another desktop PC, ever. But if I were, this new Alienware box would be tempting.

AMD Readies Ultrabook Competitor

Think that Ultrabooks–which generally go from $900 to $1400–are too pricey? AMD wants to bring the price down to $800, says Digitimes’ Monica Chen. (Machines based on its chips will have to be called something other than “Ultrabooks,” though–that’s Intel’s moniker.)

Fortune on Apple’s Education Event

Wait! Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune says that Apple’s education event isn’t about “a GarageBand for e-books” at all:

MacInnis also mentioned GarageBand in our interview. But what he was describing was a sample iPad textbook, produced in-house and packed with pedological bells and whistles, that would serve as a reference design for textbook publishers, much in the way GarageBand for the iPad showed iOS developers what the new platform could do.

MacInnis does expect Apple to unveil new tools for creating iPad textbooks, along with a new content repository to make e-textbooks easily available to teachers. But the tools are not a “GarageBand for e-books.” And according to MacInnis, they’re designed to support the textbook industry, not to do an end-run around it.

Ars on Apple’s Education Event

Chris Foresman of Ars Technica says that Apple’s education event–which I’ll liveblog at 10am ET on Thursday–is about a “GarageBand for e-books.”

Wikipedia’s Anti-SOPA Blackout

Looks like Wikipedia will protest the proposed anti-piracy legislation known as SOPA by disappearing for 24 hours:

“The emerging consensus of the community seems to be for a global blackout of English Wikipedia,” Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, said on Twitter on Monday afternoon.  “Final details [are] under consideration but consensus seems to be for ‘full’ rather than ‘soft’ blackout… This is going to be wow.”

Wikipedians have been considering the radical measure for several weeks, alongside other sites such as Reddit. This weekend’s statement from the White House, which appeared to side with Silicon Valley – prompting criticism from media owners including News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch – has failed to dissuade them of the need for a blackout, making it a controversial decision among some users and editors.

I’m not sure if the people with the most power to nix SOPA–lawmakers–care that much about Wikipedia. But how would they react if even a small percentage of us who do care about Wikipedia were moved by the blackout to call our congresspeople and voice opposition to SOPA?

CES 2012 Was Big, Very Big

Whenever anyone asked me how my CES was going, I said something along the lines of “It seems pretty darn vibrant for a show that’s allegedly in trouble.” Now the official stats are in, and they report record-breaking numbers for both attendees and exhibitors. Chris Ziegler of the Verge:

The fact that neither Microsoft nor Apple are participating in these kinds of events anymore is certainly a sign of something, but 153,000 press, exhibitors, analysts, and staff are suggesting that the death knell could be a bit premature.

Phineas J. Whoopee, You’re Like Google

TIME’s James Poniewozik makes a point that seems obvious, how that I think of it: Tennessee Tuxedo, the semi-educational 1960s TV cartoon starring Don Adams as a penguin, featured elements that are uncannily reminiscent of Google and the iPad.

Comcast Puts Live TV on Tablets

From CES, a reason not to ditch Comcast: It’s bringing live TV channels to the iPad and other tablets. (The service only works when you’re in range of the Wi-Fi router connected to your Comcast cable broadband at home, and it’s launching only in parts of Nashville and Denver–but it sounds cool.)

Steve Ballmer’s CES 2012 Keynote Live Coverage

I’m sitting in Terminal 2 at San Francisco International Airport. But tonight at 6:30pm PT, I’ll be in Las Vegas at Steve Ballmer’s final Microsoft keynote at CES–and TIME’s Doug Aamoth and I will liveblog it one last time. You can join us at technologizer/ces12, and I hope you will.