August 29, 2010 – 4:14 pm
by Jean-Louis Gassée Nothing much happens in August, we thought. Wrong. Our three-week break has been filled with a number of “interesting” events. Curious Yellow Let’s start with Mark Hurd’s exit from HP after five years of great financial performance as CEO. If you missed the fireworks, you can get a refresher in this Business [...]
We’ll leave serious industry matters aside this week. (If you must, you can wade into Apple’s Q3 numbers here, or luxuriate in the impending ouster of Nokia CEO OPK and consider the list of possible replacements.) Instead, we’ll look into the fun side of Apple’s antenna, or antennas (not antennae, a solecism from last week. [...]
…and don’t diss your customer, or the media! Rewind the clock to June 7th 2010. Steve’s on stage at the WWDC in San Francisco. He’s introducing the iPhone 4 and proudly shows off the new external antenna design. Antennae actually, there are two of them wrapped around the side. Steve touts the very Apple-like combination [...]
I’ll explain the ‘’-’’ in a moment. Today’s piece is about the power of words to shape thought, to distort, to mislead. More specifically, I contend “smartphone” is the wrong word for the new genre of mobile devices. I’m not completely naïve, however. In the end, I’ll agree there is little chance we’ll settle on [...]
Today, Intel’s x86 architecture reigns supreme on PCs (and millions of servers, such as Google’s, that use the PC organ bank). Anywhere else, the ARM processors have won; they’re in billions of devices, regular cell phones, smartphones, entertainment devices, navigation systems and legions of other embedded applications. Understandably, perhaps, Intel didn’t want to play in [...]
OPK, that is Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s CEO calls his new head of mobile devices, Anssi Vanjoki in his office, hidden inside the company’s research center at 995 Page Mill Road, in Palo Alto, California. On his desk, three devices: a Nokia N900, a Motorola Droid and an iPhone. ‘Anssi, we’re hosed. I assumed the dumb [...]
Daniel Lyons, the Newsweek tech writer notorious for his Fake Steve Jobs blog, penned an epistolary piece last week (R.I.P., Macintosh) in which he asks and answers the question: “Is Apple ignoring its signature line of computers and laptops? Yup.” The columnist claims that with the iPhone and the iPad as the Dear Leader’s new [...]
by Jean-Louis Gassée The eighth installment of the Wall Street Journal’s annual D: All Things Digital conference was held last week outside Los Angeles, your author in attendance. You’ll find full coverage of the proceedings here, and the speakers list here; it was an impressive roster, du beau linge, as we say in France. Staged [...]
You know the business lore joke. The departing CEO meets his successor and hands him three envelopes to be opened in the prescribed order when trouble strikes. First crisis, the message in envelope #1 says: Blame your predecessor. Easy enough. Another storm, the the CEO opens the second envelope: Reorganize. Good idea. And when calamity [...]
With its Cloud Apps, Google tells a nice, simple story: All you need is a browser. Life is simple, we take care of everything, no more fighting with fat, expensive desktop bloatware. You can access your data and our apps Anywhere, Anytime…if you have an Internet connection. If you don’t, as we’ll see in a [...]
