|
Fri Jun, 25 2004
Is Secrecy Apple's Biggest Problem?
From the article:
"1 Infinity Loop, the company's Cupertino, California, headquarters. Like its pretentious address, Apple's haughty attitude simply annoys people."
Um. It is One Infinite Loop, not Infinity, and that is an electrical engineer's joke. Look it up if you're curious. It's not a haughty attitude - it's an inside joke. Geez.
I actually agree that Apple could open up more on some things. As far as pre-announcing products, just look at what happens to innovators who pre-announce: their competitors seize on some obvious statistic about it, make a junky copy before the real thing is released, and claim they beat the innovator at their own game. Example: Google's GMail. They are going to offer 1 GB of email storage, but even more importantly, they are going to have a MUCH better interface. Of course, Yahoo, Hotmail etc are all upgrading their storage quotas before GMail even is publicly released. How many of them are doing the most important thing: making it easier to use? No one, and yet they are going to probably successfully steal a lot of Google's thunder, since most journalists are too lazy to explain why GMail is still much better - one single number is not the whole picture.
permanent link | [0] comments (1869 views) |
[0] Trackbacks | [0] Pingbacks
Fri Feb, 14 2003
Merge Telephone, Internet Numbers
A Reuters report at
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=582&e=3&cid=582&u=/nm/20030213/wr_nm/tech_enum_dc starts with:
"The U.S. government on Thursday threw its weight behind an emerging standard that could simplify personal communications by providing a single point of contact for telephone and Internet communications."
This sounds intriguing, and as the article points out, we'll need a serious consideration of spam/privacy laws before this would make any sense from a user point of view. Who really wants spammers to be able to flood you with unwanted recorded messages, SMS phone text messages, or pages? Actually, this sounds like a really good idea, as this new method of contact will probably be designed to protect against abuse from the ground up, in which case many people could screen all contact through this number.
permanent link | [0] comments (1909 views) |
[0] Trackbacks | [0] Pingbacks
Thu Feb, 13 2003
The Greater Threat?
There is a discussion at QuickTopic.com about whether North Korea is a greater threat than Iraq. This may be the case, but their acknowledged possession of nuclear weapons changes the dynamic. In Iraq's case, we may be able to prevent a dangerous dictator from obtaining them. If we wait until he has them, it will be TOO LATE.
Scary thought: Iraq only needs the ability to hit Israel. They will HAVE to defend themselves, and then Saddam may be able to get other Arab countries to side WITH him. Anyone else want to wait until Saddam has that ability? I sure don't, because that would be almost a worst-case scenario. Anyone think that Saddam would not love to see many countries rally around him? Right now, he has few real allies, and is viewed with distrust by his neighbors.
permanent link | [1] comments (2360 views) |
[0] Trackbacks | [0] Pingbacks