August is the month of punditry. With many workers on vacation—this year, many are unemployed or on unpaid furlough, too—tech companies tend to hold back big announcements. So news and blog sites have to fill the space with something, seeing as how there is less news. Five minutes before Midnight EDT, yesterday, Business Week posted analyst Jack Gold’s Windows Mobile-ending prediction. It’s Microsoft punditry at its scariest.
Is there some relationship between razorfish and stingrays? About the time I started to blog about Microsoft selling digital ad agency Razorfish to Publicis Groupe, a phone call came that a stingray had stung my daughter. So I raced north to Del Mar beach, where the wonderful lifeguards cared for my wounded 15 year-old. We’re back home, and I am, finally, ready to offer my intrusive opinion about Microsoft’s sale.
ZDNet blogger Ed Bott has some crazy notion that the Windows 7 upgrade chart is nothing more than a marketing blunder. But his reasoning is more complex than the chart. Has Ed never heard of Occam’s Razor?
Yesterday, I expressed my dismay about what the chart means in a commentary here and today in a Betanews story with response from analysts (They were less concerned than me). On Tuesday, Microsoft sent the chart to veteran tech reviewer Walt Mossberg in response to a query about upgrading to Windows 7.
In the interests of transparency and fair disclosure, I must make two of three confessions. Several people have asked, via comment, e-mail or tweet, whether or not my wife and daughter stuck with Windows 7. There’s appropriateness to responding the day Microsoft released the operating system to MSDN and TechNet subscribers.
Themes for Chrome 3.0 beta got me to thinking about Google’s sudden personalization push. You can skin Gmail, and there are comic-book heroes and other themes for iGoogle. Now there are Chrome skins, and what about that Android-powered MyTouch from T-Mobile? The marketing push is big customization and personalization.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps the same can be said of the right chart. The one below is so wordy I won’t have to write my usual 1,000-post. In reviewing the chart last night, I had one of those dreaded OMG moments.
How good is Windows’ security? Costco either doesn’t think much of it or perhaps wants customers to think more about it. Yesterday, while shopping at my local Costco, I was surprised to see that security was the biggest software category stocked. I mean really big.
TechFlash’s Todd Bishop did some good sleuthing of regulatory filings and turned up a so-called Yahoo escape clause to the Microsoft search deal. Two, actually.
But while they might comfort Yahoo that there is a way out of the deal, I promise you there is none.
We have low share, by the way, in the investor audience. I can see the Apple logos versus the PC logos. So we have more work to do, more work to do. Our share is […]
I spent the last two days at Comic-Con 2009 here in San Diego. I sacrificed Day 1, and not happily, to cover Microsoft’s fiscal fourth-quarter and year-end earnings. Several big Microsoft stories broke on Friday, but I refused to give up another day at Comic-Con; it’s the 40th show. Comic-Con is fun and chaotic. More importantly, for a journalist, people are willing to talk—and why not? They’re playing a role and ready to perform.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMpwJn_4NtE]
Damn, I must read Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price. Based on the WNYC video (below) and Q&A—”The Gift Economist”—in the July 19, 2009 the New York Times Magazine, I must disagree with Chris’ concept of free as applied to digital products. Free and the Internet go oddly together, and not necessarily well together.
Chris may be right, but for other reasons than he presents here. In the video above, Chris asserts that on the Internet “free really can be free.” Nobody has to pay. He presents his view, which does allow for combo free and paid models, by way of marketing and economic history and theory.
Finally, I took some test shots with the PEN E-P1, the exciting new Olympus micro four-thirds camera; I got the camera on July 7, 2009. This camera can swap lenses. Oh, yeah. I have the […]