Category Archives: software

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Science Fiction: An Apple-Curated App Store

September 6, 2010 – 6:46 am

TweetIn an alternate universe, Apple has announced the App Store Guide and Blog. Choice morsels from the PR material follow. “We came to realize that a quarter million apps meant worse than nothing to Apple users”, said Apple’s CEO. “I get confused too! Reviews are often fake, lame, or downright incompetent. PR firms have been [...]

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Curious Summer

August 29, 2010 – 4:14 pm

Tweetby 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 [...]

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Under the hood: Google Apps and Apple

May 24, 2010 – 5:28 pm

TweetWith 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 [...]

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The Adobe – Apple Flame War

April 11, 2010 – 6:45 pm

TweetThe short version: Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform application development tools control his (I mean the iPhone OS) future? Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as [...]

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Software and Brakes — Part II

March 14, 2010 – 6:10 pm

Tweetby 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 [...]

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Honey, I shrunk the Tax Code!

March 7, 2010 – 6:13 pm

TweetIt’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 [...]

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Soft Brakes on the Prius

February 7, 2010 – 6:06 pm

TweetOnce 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 [...]

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