Posts by Christian R. Conrad 4 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010
"...I massively resented how the ThinkPad backlight was missing – even though the key sticker told me it was."
Given ordinary English grammar, that truncated "it was" would mean the key sticker told you it was missing.
What mr Orlowski actually _meant_, though, was of course "...even though the key sticker told me it was there."
HTH!
One can't help but wonder how old mr Orlowski is: For all the Googling on the OS/2 history he does, one certainly doesn't get the feel he was there to experience it as it happened.
I was never a reporter with my own sources in the business and all; I only read their work... But I read quite a lot of them back in the day, and I am still not too old to have a fairly clear recollection of the aggregate impression it all left on the interested reader. That impression does not tally with mr Orlowski's view now, that OS/2 died of itself and Microsoft had nothing to do with it.
Likewise, his comment to the effect that "MeeGo is dead in the water and could never save Nokia, not because it isn't a great OS, because it is, but because it lacks an ecosystem" [Sorry for paraphrasing half your article into a single sentence] is also tecnically correct, but it leaves out an ever-so-vital little bit of the truth: Of course it lacks an ecosystem, because mr Elop's pronouncements that Nokia wouldn't use it, would concentrate on Windows Phone, and (in a recent Helsingin Sanomat interview) wouldn't ever take it up again even if it were to become a sales success -- that's WHY it won't have an ecosystem. Because he deliberately MADE SURE IT WON'T.
Then again, mr Orlowski is of course also technically correct that neither of these were really "conspiracies". A conspiracy means a plan hatched in collusion between at least two different parties, and in both of these cases the succesful plan had only one author: in the first case, Microsoft, and in the second, mr Elop (or as some would have it, Microsoft again).
But that's really hair-splitting, isn't it?
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