Smalltalk with James Robertson

Steve Rubel asks for a Digital Pony from Apple:

Edelman Digital calls on Apple and all companies to support consumer choice to allow consumers to have the same experience they are accustomed to on the desktop. Where once mobile devices were not powerful enough to run rich media technologies, that’s no longer the case. Why ban Flash and WMVs yet support Quicktime and PDF two other standards. It makes no sense.

For good or ill, Apple has decided how they're going to play the game, and it's hardball. I just don't see a hand holding, kumbaya moment coming on between the various internet players.

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The price is high ($4k), but wow - a 1 TB solid state drive. As prices drop, this should really help laptop and portable device battery life out.

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I think you could say that Adobe's Flash evangelist, Lee Brimelow, is not happy with the new iPhone OS terms of service.

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Spotted in PCWorld Latest Technology News

Microsoft is ending its support for Intel's Itanium processor with the current version of its Windows Server OS; according to a Microsoft blog posting Friday.

The death throes of the iTanium have to be the slowest moton thing in the tech space ever...

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The scaling issues aren't all solved yet:

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Forrester makes the point that Yahoo and Technorati both headed downhill once they forgot their core businesses and started getting enthusiastic about being "content providers". Is Facebook in danger of going the same way? Well, they are adding RSS/Atom news reader capability to the news stream. Now, this could end here, and be the live "river of news" that Dave Winer always talks about... or it could go down the road to hell:

If there's any risk of the content provider tragedy happening again, someone in the PM team at Facebook needs to speak up now. Why do people use Facebook? To connect with friends. The applications are cute ways to connect with them in more ways than just posting and poking. Anything that interferes with that activity dilutes the core value of Facebook.  (And news feeds aren't the only source of potential dilution, by the way.)

Technorati Tags: business model, management

I hope no one tells John Dvorak that the smart phone in his pocket has more power than the laptop he carried a decade ago. Oh, wait - that's unpossible, since he claims that there's been virtually no tech progress over the last ten years....

And then there are the people who just don't like Apple at all:

Do you believe that Apple is 100 percent evil in every way? Well we're here to help. Due to the overwhelming demand of 16 commenters, we present to you the Apple-free Engadget!

Heh

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If you watch the show "Better off Ted", you recognize the title of this post as one of the fake ads from Veridian, the workplace on the show. It became obvious yesterday that Apple has tendencies in that direction - McGraw-Hill's CEO talked about the iPad a day before the event on CNBC, which brought on this:

McGraw-Hill is bigger than most of the publishers on this slide. But insiders say as soon as Terry shot his mouth off on CNBC, Jobs had the company cut from the presentation. We won't know for a few weeks if McGraw was only wrist-slapped, or if he's been thrown out of the game.

So does that make Steve Jobs the Veronica Palmer of Apple?

I mentioned yesterday that I was having trouble getting to various sites covering Apple's iPad event, but it spread well beyond coverage of that:

And it wasn't just tech sites suffering: Some Internet service providers, such as the UK's Level1 Internet Services, told customers all the iPad attention was putting pretty much the entire Internet in a chokehold.

Steve Jobs killed the internets :)

Technorati Tags: apple, iPad