Posts by It Wasn't Me, I Swear.

Nokia after the purge: It's so unfair

Well... not quite...

Andrew I understand the analogy between Jobs' moves and Elop's but there is a fundamental difference:

What Jobs did not do is intimately connect the performance of Apple's toys to the performance of another company - he instead chose to control all the things that made the Apple toys tick (even while the OSes - old and new - were creaking).

The comparison would have been apt if Elop junked everything but Meego, or bought another OS and slotted it in (though that last part would have been madness given that Meego was at-least good-enough). He lost Nokia's loyal supporters by not doing so (imagine Jobs putting Windows on the Macs and skinning them) and failed to capture the imagination of everyone else, who is left then to champion the devices in circles where it matters?

As you suggest, given the economics of mobile refresh cycles Nokia simply doesn't have enough runway left to give their products enough 'Nokia' personality (if it is even possible in the agreement they have with Microsoft).

Let's hope that Apple stumbles and Windows Phone 8 has a killer innovation beyond anyone's expectations and the timeline is there for Nokia to take a breath... I just don't see it right now.

Yellow Pages targets zombie survivalist market

Re: insufficient

I'd guess that the YP thinks that people will do it for the "fame". Maybe a student that wants to experiment... hence the 'zombie' all-the-rage-these-days-donchyaknow.

Good luck with that. These people paid $124K for a magazine app, http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40319/ and didn't get much out of it - YP hope they can do it on the cheap.

iPad maker to replace 1 million staff with robots

Hmmm.

If Stevie J. finds out that this is actually cost effective he will bring production back into the fold at Cupertino... Robots don't leak prototypes, see?

Microsoft becoming Apple with Windows 8 control freakery?

MeeGo is the escape hatch here..

You forgot to mention MeeGo and that quite a few suppliers are now experimenting with it (Acer, Asus etc). That should balance things out if manufacturers decide that they have increasingly restricted choices (and should also not allow MS or HP to force people too hard especially until(if) the OSes become popular.)

Also, if MS follows through and does require new window apps to be built with HTML5+JS i can't imagine it would be hard at all to port them to any other OS on any other hardware platform including MeeGo (not sure how they that giving them a competitive advantage - I would imagine special API hooks, but still these could easily be copied).

Having said all that it shouldn't be too hard to meet minimum requirements for Win8 given that they are the same as Win7.

Microsoft holds Androids hostage in open source wars

How exactly?

Yes it's a bitchy move by MS to ask for royalties from Asustek et al. for Android, but I think it is more to scare them into hedging their bets with proprietary software (i.e. MS Windows - not condoning it BTW).

And what you say all fine and well Matt, but why don't you lay out for us exactly how Microsoft is supposed to make money out of software? Because other than hand-waving I don't see anything concrete in your article.

Sell ads (i.e. sell out their user privacy), sell hardware or sell services?

Because all other competitors you mentioned are making money out of selling something to someone. So who do you propose should foot the bill here?

I love Ubuntu, but even you guys have to make money somehow. And you seem to be planning on doing it by selling services (are you also going to take a cut out of the software store?). Whatever, you are still a tiny player in the OS market.

I think the world needs a company like MS just like it needs companies like Google and Apple each servicing a different kind of consumer. For MS to follow the path of the others is for MS to drop their core-strength.

It also seems to me that Apple has clearly demonstrated that people don't mind paying for seamless integration through the roof.

So the only question is how is MS going to make their software/brand more/as much as desirable and fully integrated.

They've shown they can do it with Win Phone 7 and XBox I don't see why they can dig themselves out of the hole they're in.

Jobs savages 7-inch tablet competition

It needs to be at least 10" to satisfy Mr. Jobs.

It seems to me that the iPod Touch is a mini iPad. I don't know how it slipped-by Mr. Jobs - oh wait. it didn't.

-- Paris, because size is of primary importance.

Google boss turns Wave demise into success of sorts

In a world of asynchronous threats.

Does he mean Asymmetric?

"Governments will demand it" - and Google will begrudgingly comply, hey Eric?