Not a heck of a lot going on. Forbes says that Warren Buffet is no Steve Jobs. Thank the maker we have Forbes to keep us abreast of this breaking news. Of course, as you’d expect the article discusses Buffet in terms of Jobs.
Besides being very wealthy male bipeds, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet are fundamentally dissimilar.
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iPad killer. We have reached that stage of the cycle. The term is in use on the innertubes. It’s almost original to be that unoriginal.
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Hawaii did not catch a tsunami.
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Once again, Apple gets no bonus for walking the walk. Other tech companies get up on their back legs and honk about their commitment to fair labor and environmentalism – talking the talk.
Apple fires companies that don’t toe the line.
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It’s possible not to like this track – but only statistically possible.
Most people don’t understand that Steve Jobs’ negative comments on Flash only touch the tip of the ice cream sundae.
Flash may be an industry standard, but there have been many industry standards that have fallen to the onslaught of improved technology. Just to cite one example, the automatic transmission completely displaced the whippletree. Whippletrees today are only used to display historical scenarios that practically no one finds themselves in today. Weddings in Central Park, for example.
Another example is in the field of video display. The Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) used to be the display of choice for most home theater systems. Now, almost every CRT on the continent of North America is connected to a Dell computer.
There are a number of other problems with Flash that people aren’t talking about.
Flash exposes young children to pornography.
Flash shows Freddy Mercury wearing nothing but a neck kerchief and white hotpants.
Flash shows cigarette ads featuring Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.
Flash causes early childbirth, low IQs, converts ordinary polycarbonates into weapons grade plutonium, and causes eyestrain in women.
Flash contains monosodium glutamate, polychlorinated biphenyls, and aspartame.
Flash has been linked to shingles, gout, post-nasal drip, heartburn, gas, that burning sensation, and halitosis.
Flash lied about having sex with Monica Lewinsky.
Flash will stain your carpet.
Pull my finger.
Flash knows where Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa are.
Flash was designed specifically to fuck up your personal day. It knows who you are, and it’s going to get you.
Flash is made with genetically modified tree fruit harvested by immigrants for less than minimum wage.
Flash screwed your mother.
We have to stop Flash before it blocks an aisle in Wal*Mart or turns left against a light.
Dammit.
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The rest of the innertubes are crawling with news that you can match Apple by learning how to run the Apple hype machine. This proves that stupidity is still pretty popular.
Hype is a good way to draw attention to your product. If your product is a piece of shit, hype highlights that fact and your product dies the same way it would have died without hype, except more people notice. The Zune is a good example of this. The Microsoft Surface got lots of air time recently. Have you touched one?
Me too.
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Hey, nineteen that’s Aretha Franklin. She don’t remember the queen of soul. It’s hard times befallen the soul survivors. She thinks I’m crazy, but I’m just growing old.
Yup. Tim Cook made it official today in his keynote address to a bunch of tech punditbots.
Some excerpts from Tim’s question and answer session with the n00bs:
We don’t ever use the term “market share” at 1 Infinite Loop except when we’re answering questions from idiots.
Pull my finger.
The Apple TV is a hobby.
Apple is a mobile device company.
We are both partners and competitors with lots of companies. The tech business is far more complex than many of you are equipped to understand.
Apple says no to good ideas every day.
Your shoe’s untied. Made you look.
The word ‘complete’ is not in our dictionary. We’re innovators. Which means many times we end up obsoleting ourselves. We’d obsolete you, but there’s sport in toying with your feeble minds.
On his way out of the auditorium he gave two punditbots wedgies and a third a dutch rub.
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I’m having a hard time finding a good site with the questions and answers clearly written, but as near as I can tell the questions were inane and the answers were patient.
If you read between the lines, you can tell he wanted to say:
Market share is a stupid metric. The only time I discuss it is when slack-jawed drooling idiots ask about it.
We continue to make Apple TV because we’re making money with it. Zip up your pants.
We aren’t out to kill anyone or anything. We’re in business to make money. Not only are you not equipped to understand the complexities of the tech business, most of you would lose a battle of wits with a ripe canteloupe.
Our partnership with AT&T is not based on them buying Steve flowers or Valentines Day cards. It isn’t based on their cutesy little globe logo. It isn’t based on any ‘cachet’ that doing business with them might bring us. It’s based on MONEY. As long as we’re making money, it’s good. When we stop making money, that’s bad. Then we’ll change something.
We don’t consider M&A a sport for your entertainment.
The iPad is about to change the world. The fact that you don’t get it is not an indicator of anything except your inability to get it, which has already been well established.
Everybody in enterprise is a consumer. Every consumer is not in enterprise. Enterprise is a subset of the set ‘consumer.’ Hello? Is this thing on?
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Silicone Alley Inside ‘er has presumed, based on their expertise at running a $40,000,000,000.00 company, to explain to Apple what features they must (MUST) include in iPhone OS 4.0.
They missed several important features that I think are vital.
A stain remover
Eliza
The Complete Works of Da Vinci’s Notebook
Multifinder
Cyberdog
Grammar checking
Beta, gamma, and alpha detection with 50 keV resolution, and no beta-alpha crosstalk.
Shufflepuck Cafe
It never ceases to amaze me that pundittards feel the need to tell Apple what they must do.
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I guess I should explain what Tim Cook made official today:
If he’s as good at rehab as he is at golf, he’s going to be fine.
The great thing he said was that he used to think the normal rules didn’t apply to him. He thought he was entitled because he had worked so hard all his life.
Yeah. Me too.
The rules are the same. Following the rules is harder for Tiger than it is for most of us, and as we have seen, the consequences for breaking the rules are way bigger for Tiger than for you and me. He has farther to fall.
It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but it does explain a lot to understand that everywhere Tiger Woods goes, there will be women wanting to say, “I did Tiger.” Most guys don’t have anything approaching that. Not that most of us would mind.
He’ll get over it.
None of us are qualified to criticize Tiger Woods because we haven’t walked a mile in his moccasins – and most of us would like to give it a try.
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Not much news on the Apple front. I think I read somewhere that the iPad will have a Flash-based, Windows Mobile 7 operating system. The first apps for it will be Access and IE X.
(Or possibly I’m full of crap.)
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Have you read anything about the first Windows Tablet? I read somewhere that it is as fast and responsive as a slate floor tile, but not as useful.
In short, the Archos 9 will suck the coins out of the couch cushions. And it’s $50 more expensive than a low-end iPad.
There doesn’t seem to be a review of the H-P offering that debuted at CES. We shall see.
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PC World is starting to worry me. They’re turning into Apple fanbois. Seriously. Look at this.
Kodak is suing Apple, now. It only stands to reason. Have you noticed that several Apple products have sides at right angles to each other? Kodak invented that. Also, most of Apple’s products have buttons. Kodak was putting buttons on their shit years before Apple even existed.
I’m frightened, Auntie Em.
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The iPad SDK is on the street and it’s just like the iPhone SDK except it’s bigger. Everybody is all stirred up. Here’s how bad it is. A bunch of other companies are banding together to try to attract developers to make apps for their busted-ass, third-rate, chump-change, iPhone wannabe crap.
It should work out fairly good for them. All the disgruntled developers who couldn’t get their stuff on the App Store are going to be looking to sell their stuff somewhere. There are six or seven decent programmers who didn’t get their programs onto the iPhone, so there may even be some non-crapware in the mix.
Probably not much.
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Apple is reportedly banning iPhone hackers from the iTunes store. I saw this over on ZDNet, I think. Adrian-Kingsley Hughes thought this was news. Apparently some functionally illiterate chuckleheads think this makes Apple “bad.”
Apple deliberately denied server access to overtly malicious security threats.
1. It isn’t news.
2. If someone is trying to steal from you, undermine your service, and violate user agreements, and you try to stop them, that is called “correct,” not “evil.”
Feel free to disagree in the comments. How come I can’t ever generate a good flame war in the comments?
The best I can muster up is Caped Cod telling me I’m full of crap. Like that’s news.
The New York Times has two units arguing over how to price their content for the iPad.
The print guys want to charge a dollar a week, while the digital guys want to keep it below five dollars a month.
We’ll see how this goes.
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The Master is reported to have authorized his biography. Of all the things that have happened in the last couple of years, this is the most worrisome. This looks like the official acknowledgment of mortality. Although, at some point, Master Jobst Fimil had to want the real story of his life to get out there. All that crap that has been written so far can’t possibly have been accurate.
The flaming dungwagon that has been popularly portrayed as Steve Jobs can’t possibly have been closely related to the REAL Steve Jobs. It is impossible for the fictional Steve Jobs portrayed in the press to achieve what the real Steve Jobs has achieved.
Impossible.
There is no way that a totally self-centered, dismissive, belligerent autocrat could assemble the talent Steve Jobs has ALWAYS had around him. Further, there is no way NO WAY, all that talent creates the ground-breaking products Apple has routinely produced motivated only by fear of the Wrath of the Asshole.
