by Jean-Louis Gassée
This week, no iPad disquisition, no large companies engaged in contorted Kama Sutra embraces, no Google-Apple-Microsoft love triangle. We’ll revisit these topics in due course but, for the time being, let’s go back to a geeky topic unadulterated by geopolitics or markitecture: software and brakes. Last month, we looked at the software invasion [...]
It’s really about another kind of code, but read on a bit…
This is an old dream: making the tax code shorter, simpler. From time to time, a politician of the populist persuasion comes out and promises to get things right. The ultimate expression for this drive towards simplicity is the Flat Tax movement: a single [...]
February 21, 2010 – 10:48 pm
It happens all the time: when CEOs don’t know what to do, they create a strategic alliance. Alone, they’re exposed. As a group, they must be doing something right because everyone else in the herd does it too. In the early nineties, my friend Denise Caruso, a NYT columnist and editor of the Digital Media [...]
February 14, 2010 – 11:45 pm
Once again, Apple, or, getting to the point, Steve Jobs defies common wisdom. This time it’s about communication, positioning, propaganda. Never let others take control of the story, don’t let anything go unanswered, ever. (Well, almost anything, there is the ‘When did you stop beating your wife’ exception.) The recent and still on-going –raging might [...]
February 7, 2010 – 6:06 pm
Once upon a time, I took my Wehrmacht staff car to the Palo Alto service shop. As I mentioned a barely perceptible change in the feel of velvety autobox when it shifted gears, Ernesto, the all-knowing, all-seeing tech nodded: ‘Yes, we need to load a new revision of the software in your automatic transmission…’
When [...]
January 17, 2010 – 7:46 pm
Legends die hard. In the pre-Web days, they got printed and reprinted, told and retold and so became official, like spinach being good for you because it held the iron your red cells needed. After decades of the disgusting veggie inflicted upon young kids - I remember, a scientist went back to the bench and [...]
January 10, 2010 – 5:49 pm
Let me state it at the outset: I understand the buzz generated by the Google Phone a.k.a Nexus One. But, the more I look into details and their ramifications, the more I’m puzzled. What exactly is Google trying to do? Make Android, their smartphone OS platform the “Windows” of the new era of really personal [...]
January 3, 2010 – 5:52 pm
Looking back at last year’s “Things to watch in 2009”, I’ll narrow the field a little bit: no more discussion of the auto industry, electric car markitecture notwithstanding, nor disquisitions of congress shenanigans, too much raw sewage material. Let’s stay with safer and generally cleaner/happier computer industry topics.
Microsoft 2.0 a.k.a. Google.
What is known: In its [...]
December 20, 2009 – 8:17 pm
by Jean-Louis Gassée
As promised last week, let’s dig into a venture fund’s key numbers.
Limited Partners, LP, institutions or individuals put money into the fund. We, the General Partners, GP, make and manage the investments and we split the profits with the LP as the sole compensation for our services.
Over time, the split has varied with [...]
December 13, 2009 – 4:11 pm
Two weeks ago, I discussed what I called The Other French Paradox, that is how French taxpayers and French companies are at a (curable) disadvantage in Silicon Valley. Last week, I “shared” (we’re in California) my own plans to deal with the twin problems: a venture fund whose profits reverse the flow of money back [...]
November 29, 2009 – 12:56 pm
by Jean-Louis Gassée
Foie gras, crême fraîche, butter, red wine — and lots of it! All these excesses leading to a higher life expectancy, to say nothing of the joys of sinning. That’s the legendary now official French Paradox. Scientists strain to explain the phenomenon: ‘It’s the phenolic compounds in the red wine’, they say. Me, [...]
November 22, 2009 – 8:47 pm
As you know, Google proceeded with the second announcement of its Chrome OS this past week, the first one took place on July 7th, 2009, and the ship date being a year away, we can be sure to have more launch events: one of the first beta, a couple more for applications and partnerships agreements [...]
November 15, 2009 – 6:48 pm
Last Friday November 6th, the much-awaited Motorola Droid came out. Powered by the latest version of Google’s smartphone OS, Android 2.0, the new handset is exclusively distributed by Verizon. The carrier backs Motorola’s handset with an aggressive marketing campaign on its website and on TV ads.
For such a “gifted” (Motorola + Verizon + Google) product, [...]
November 9, 2009 – 9:00 am
Last August, I wrote about picture quality finally winning against macho marketing. In other words, it seemed Canon, Nikon and Sony were giving up the simplistic escalation: my camera has more pixels than yours, therefore it is better. In the P&S (Point & Shoot) category especially, the facts were that more pixels ended up producing [...]
November 9, 2009 – 8:59 am
You probably heard of Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons, the former Forbes writer. He’s built a justified reputation for using his blog to do a kind of Steve Jobs pastiche, by turns analytical, satirical, occasionally vulgar and, yes, insulting every possible target in the Valley and in the MSM (Mainstream Media).
You’ll recall I criticized [...]
November 1, 2009 – 11:26 pm
Literally, Droid is the new Motorola phone sold by Verizon and running Google’s latest Android 2.0 release. The early reviews are good and, cleverly, Google issued a new turn-by-turn navigation application for the platform, also well received, complete with voice control and street view pictures. The Droid starts selling later this week, on November 6th, [...]
October 25, 2009 – 7:44 pm
Lots of earnings reports this week, mostly good ones. Apple did better than expected, even by the most enthusiastic earnings seers, so did Amazon whose shares went up 26.8% today, adding more than $10B to its market cap in one day. I’m happy to see a quality company, one that treats its customer better than [...]
October 19, 2009 – 9:10 am
This is going to be a busy week. Monday we have Apple’s earnings and, later in the week, Windows 7’s release. The deafening noise will make it hard to understand the real, lasting consequences of these events. Fortunately, deep into the bowels of a server, a smaller happening, a bit flipping from 0 to 1 [...]
October 12, 2009 – 5:01 pm
At the end of my August 9th Monday Note, “War in the Valley, Apple vs. Google”, I committed to get into Google’s potential weaknesses in this conflict. Since then, things have gotten a tad more complicated.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
As discussed last August, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, had to leave Apple’s Board [...]
October 5, 2009 – 3:46 am
In the US, if Apple gave up on the AT&T exclusivity, the iPhone’s market share would double. So says Morgan Stanley’s anal-yst Kathryn Huberty. See this PC World piece here. And a CNN/Fortune Magazine piece here.
Let’s not throw stones at Ms. Huberty but, instead, question her bosses’ wisdom, work ethics or wakefulness. Is anyone editing [...]
