Author Archives: Jean-Louis Gassée

HP Kicks webOS To The Kerb

December 11, 2011 – 10:25 pm

TweetWe strongly believe that the best days for webOS are still ahead. Thus spake Meg Whitman in her memo to the troops, an intramural rendition of HP’s official announcement that webOS will be “contributed” to the Open Source community. …the executive team has been working to determine the best path forward for this highly respected [...]

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Behind RIM’s $485M Write-off

December 5, 2011 – 5:54 am

TweetOn December 5th, three days ago, RIM announced a $485M write-off “related to its inventory valuation of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets”. Wall Street didn’t like the news and dumped the stock, it went down 9.7% in one session. One of the last analysts supporting RIM, Scotia Capital’s Gus Papageorgiou, finally gave up and turned vocally bearish. [...]

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A Facebook Smartphone – Why?

November 27, 2011 – 10:53 pm

TweetAt the end of last week’s Monday Note, I briefly wondered about the rumored Amazon smartphone. Would it follow the Kindle Fire strategy: Pick Android’s lock and sell the device at or below cost in order to lubricate the wheels of Amazon’s e-commerce of tangible and intangible things? This week, we have the rebirth of [...]

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The Apple Wireless Carrier (Part 2)

November 20, 2011 – 8:40 pm

TweetSpurred by years of frustration with AT&T, Verizon, Orange and the like, I wrote a half-serious Monday Note a few months ago (Steve, Please Buy Us A Carrier!) that imagined an Apple wireless universe. Simple pricing, no-surprise phone bills, no-tricks agreements. There would be dancing in the streets… Unfortunately (I concluded), if Apple were to [...]

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iTV: Where’s The Money?

November 13, 2011 – 5:58 pm

TweetIn reaction to last week’s technical speculation on the putative iTV, several commenters raised questions about content providers, distributors, and “pipes”. Does iTV help or harm NBC, Netflix, and Comcast? How does the [one last time: “putative”] iTV make money, and for whom? Indeed, the column ignored an important – perhaps the most important — [...]

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From Heaven: iTV

November 6, 2011 – 9:14 pm

TweetSearch for the word ‘‘cracked’’ in Walt Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs (or flip to page 555 if you have the bricks-and-mortar version). The second hit yields the following: It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it. “It” is the mythical Apple iTV. Even though Walt’s report of the [...]

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Steve’s Bio: A Personal Perspective

October 30, 2011 – 9:19 pm

TweetLet me jump to the conclusion: This is an extraordinary book on many levels: informative, entertaining often, insightful, sympathetic but not indulgent; it rises to its unusual subject and manages to render its complexity in a straightforward manner that attests to the biographer’s talent. Get thee to a physical bookstore, if you can find one, [...]

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Mobile + Cloud + Social

October 24, 2011 – 3:28 am

TweetThese are the three interdependent forces that power the biggest wave of growth, change, and destruction I’ve seen since I have been allowed to take part in the high-tech industry. In the beginning (or mine, anyway), back in 1968 when I was, miraculously, offered a salary to be part of HP France there was the [...]

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Premature Evaluation: The iPhone 5 Introduction

October 16, 2011 – 11:08 pm

TweetOn October 4th, after months of speculation, Apple finally introduces the iPhone 5. The kommentariat are ecstatic and approvingly list the new smartphone’s strongest points: Twice the processor speed; seven times the graphics oomph; a new camera with an Apple-designed lens, 8 megapixels and improved image processing; the power of the new iOS 5; iCloud [...]

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Too soon…

October 9, 2011 – 7:48 pm

Tweet‘Humor is the politeness of despair’, an approximate, googlish translation of l’humour est la politesse du désespoir, a saying attributed to noted post-WWII Left Bank jazzman, writer, and engineer, Boris Vian, So, let’s start with the reverent, despairing humor of Chris Calloway in Wired Magazine’s memorial to Steve Jobs: “Heaven got a major upgrade today…” [...]

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