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 – 6:07 pm
I’m not through with the iPad. Actually, I’m just warming up. For today’s column, let’s focus on the perils of a closed system.
I live in a country (France) where censorship is a big deal. It comes mostly from greedy celebrities (sorry for the truism); they use a legal system that largely favors them. Often, [...]
January 31, 2010 – 5:19 pm
Let me start with an important caveat. For this I’ll refer you to a post from my favorite high-tech blogger, David Pogue. “Don’t pass judgment until you’ve tried it!” Wise counsel: three years ago, industry sages “knew” Apple had no business making a phone. Normal humans voted with their wallet.
Customers come in two categories: [...]
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 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 [...]
November 29, 2009 – 12:57 pm
Let’s rejoice: French teachers embrace the internet. Well, calm down. I’m not saying they embrace it the way I would like them to. This week saw two technological breakthroughs at my son’s Parisian high-school. The first one is a decision-support tool on the school’s website: it helps parents decide whether or not to send their [...]
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 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 [...]
September 27, 2009 – 8:10 pm
Last week’s Intel Developers’ Forum brought the expected crop of new CPU chips. The simplest way to summarize what’s taking place is this:
We’re stuck at 3GHz, so we add more processors on the CPU chip.
Intel continues to lead with small “geometries”, 32 nanometers today, 22 nm tomorrow.
The company pitches its x-86 processors for mobile devices.
More [...]
September 20, 2009 – 11:07 am
In an “Entrepreneurial Thought Leader” lecture given at Stanford University earlier this year, Tom Siebel argues that all of the great technological advances and development of great companies are behind us – and the growth rate for the tech sector is just on par with the rate of current economic growth.
The previous sentence introduces [...]
September 13, 2009 – 8:43 pm
I’m quite fond of kremlinology, the metaphorical one, not the literal sort. For me, it started as a hobby and ended up making me decades of fun and money. Allow me to explain before we proceed with an attempted decryption of recent Apple events and statements.
Working in Paris in the seventies, I struck an acquaintance [...]
August 23, 2009 – 9:45 am
Finally, reason is about to prevail over marketing machismo. Specifically, Canon and Sony are coming up with more advanced cameras featuring less pixels.
Why? In these new cameras, less pixels translates into better pictures in low light. (You might want to refer back to two Monday Notes on digital photography: Pixels Size vs. Number and More [...]
August 9, 2009 – 11:54 am
It was long overdue: Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO) finally resigned from Apple’s Board of Directors. Usually, these resignations are handled in the smoothest of ways: Thanks for the distinguished service and the like. This time, Steve Jobs issued a pointed statement: “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome [...]
If you went on vacation and renounced Internet access for the duration, you might not have heard the latest rumors concerning the iTablet a.k.a. the Jesus Tablet, Apple’s eagerly awaited entry into the putative bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook segment. I’m avoiding the n-word: for Apple, this is the no-book category…
As [...]
Web Apps are the future: modern, light, run and updated in the Cloud, they will progressively replace the antiquated, bloated, expensive to buy and manage desktop “client” applications.
So says Google. And walking the talk, they put their Google Apps against the reigning champion of desktop applications: Microsoft Office.
Microsoft never gives up and, as expected, announced [...]
Here’s what I think its taking place:
Microsoft executives and Board members are no dummies: they know Cloud Computing threatens the Windows + Office + Exchange gold mine, the biggest in our industry’s history. They know the future is Office + Exchange running in dual-mode. From the Cloud when a Net connection is available; locally when [...]
In the (now waning) days of analog photography, much was made of which film was best: Kodak’s Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Fuji’s, Konica, Agfa, Ferrania… to name but a few of the old standards. Today, a similar debate goes on regarding the altogether simpler digital sensors. In the April 5th Monday Note #80, I took a first [...]
