Monthly Archives: October 2010

Time to rethink Word Processors — Seriously

October 31, 2010 – 6:37 pm

TweetLast Friday, at the Apple Store near the Paris Opera House, I paid my annual Microsoft tax: €140 ($194) for the 2011 edition of Microsoft Office. My hopes: more speed, less bugs, and smarter features. All in the service of producing all manners of text and presentations required by my multiple jobs. So far, no [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in software | Comments (19)

Apple’s Next Macintosh OS

October 31, 2010 – 6:37 pm

Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Operating systems don’t age well. Some have better genes than others or they have more competent caretakers, but sooner or later they are stricken by a cancer of bug fixes upon bug fixes, upgrades upon upgrades. I know, I lived inside two OS sausage factories, Apple and Be, and was closely associated [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in software | Tagged , , | Comments (63)

Expanding Into New Territories

October 24, 2010 – 9:34 pm

TweetIn defining business strategies for modern medias such as online newspapers, the most difficult part is finding the right combination of revenue streams. Advertising, pay-per-view, flat fee… All are part of the new spectrum media companies now have to deal with. The gamut looks like this: As we can see, newspapers mostly consist of one [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in advertising, newspapers, online publishing | Tagged | Comments (24)

Google’s Self-Driving Car

October 24, 2010 – 9:31 pm

Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée I want one! You probably do, too. So do millions of readers of John Markoff’s October 21st NY Times piece on Google’s revolutionary cars that drive themselves—in traffic! (More drooling on this ABC News video here.) Is this really real, or is it a demo, another carefully choreographed PR exercise designed to [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in hardware | Comments (18)

The Facebook Money Machine

October 17, 2010 – 8:51 pm

TweetAn update to this column: According to the Wall Street Journal, any of Facebook’s most popular applications have been transmitting identifying information — in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names — to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. See here (paywall). This year, Facebook will make about [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in advertising, social networks | Tagged | Comments (42)

What If Google Stored All Our Medical Records?

October 17, 2010 – 8:50 pm

TweetRegard the horrified looks on the faces of the attendees at a California Council on Science and Technology meeting in Irvine six or seven years ago. I’m the only member from the Dark Side, from the venture capital milieu, inside an institution “designed to offer expert advice to the state government and to recommend solutions [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (16)

Mark Zuckerberg, The Architect

October 11, 2010 – 3:21 am

TweetThe Social Network is an excellent movie. It’s fast, entertaining. And words crafted by Aaron Sorkin, one of Hollywood’s most talented screenwriter, flatter the Harvard crowd and make it sound wittier than it actually is. In addition, digital imaging enthusiasts will enjoy the Red Camera’s performance, demonstrating its extraordinary low light and depth-of-field creative potential. [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in social networks | Tagged , | Comments (15)

HP’s Board Gets No Respect

October 11, 2010 – 3:20 am

Tweet. And rightly so. You recall: Last August, HP’s Board of Directors dismissed its wunder-CEO, Mark Hurd. Well-loved by Wall Street, although not so much by employees, Hurd turned HP around after the lackluster Fiorina years. He made acquisitions, cut costs, and put the company at the very top of the IT industry. But HP’s [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in hardware, software | Tagged , | Comments (4)

Two situations, two attitudes

October 3, 2010 – 8:00 pm

TweetLe Monde and The Daily Telegraph. Two leading newspapers. Last month, both had parallel experiences when dealing with government leaks. Two delicate situations, two reactions – or, at least, two postures. On September 13th, Le Monde proclaimed it was filing suit against the French government for illegally investigating a leak reaching one of its reporters. [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Posted in journalism | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

The OS Doesn’t Matter…

October 3, 2010 – 8:00 pm

Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Once upon a time, operating systems used to matter a lot; they defined what a computer could and couldn’t do. The “old” OS orchestrated the use of resources: memory, processors, I/O (input/output) to external devices (screen, keyboard, disks, network, printers…). It’s a complicated set of tasks that requires delicate juggling of conflicting [...]

Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée | Posted in software | Tagged , | Comments (76)