November 14, 2010 – 11:24 pm
Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Two weeks ago, I argued that iOS will evolve into the operating system for future incarnations of iMacs and MacBooks. The comments on the article provided abundant food for thought, so much so that I decided to argue the opposite point of view: Yes, OS X and iOS share some bits of [...]
November 8, 2010 – 12:34 am
TweetOnce upon a time, Microsoft reigned supreme, they were IBM 2.0, having wrestled control of the PC from Big Blue. According to some critics, Microsoft took over the office application market through a combination of embrace, extend, and extinguish and tied sales. The MS M.O. followed this trajectory: First, Bill Gates and his troops would [...]
October 31, 2010 – 6:37 pm
TweetLast Friday, at the Apple Store near the Paris Opera House, I paid my annual Microsoft tax: €140 ($194) for the 2011 edition of Microsoft Office. My hopes: more speed, less bugs, and smarter features. All in the service of producing all manners of text and presentations required by my multiple jobs. So far, no [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
