Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android by Pebble Technology — Kickstarter.
Category Archives: Technology
“I saw the best minds of my generation writing spam filters”…
The tech world has changed so quickly…
Jon leaves FlightBlogger…
FlightBlogger – Aviation News, Commentary and Analysis: Pilatus Archives.
It’s been a fun ride watching Jon move from a lone man with a blog to something better. He choose his moment perfectly the A380 and the Dreamliner made great stories.
Those stories have ended and Jon has left so I’ve unsubscribed. The end of an era.
Lift Off: The Last Rocket Development Diary…
Lift Off: The Last Rocket Development Diary by Shaun Inman.
I’d buy it if it was on my Kindle. However, PayPal means I won’t. Shame.
HP’s Culture…
“HP’s executives used to have a barbed wire fence separating its top executives cars from the rest of the company’s employees.”
The corporate view…
If you really want, I’ll give you my view on baseball. I’ve never played it, watched it once, read a book about it and I may have seen Field of Dreams.
Watching Gruber (who I love reading) try and understand corporate clients, is like me writing on baseball.
“There’s a kernel of wisdom here, which is that the Office 15 apps should be the best selling point in favor of Windows 8 tablets versus the iPad, for those buying tablets for use as a secondary or even tertiary computing device in a job that’s already dependent upon Microsoft Office. When I travel, I see gobs of corporate businesspeople using iPads; with a real version of Office, many of those people may well be using Windows 8 tablets a year from now. It’s a genuinely compelling hook.”
Daring Fireball Linked List: Paul Thurrott Giveth Common Sense, Paul Thurrott Taketh Away.
What I think that Gruber and Thurrott both misunderstand is actually why things are like they are.
Two words… “Installed base”.
The reason that people are still wandering around with corporate PCs is that they don’t have the choice. Lotus Notes still has a double digit market share for email, Windows XP is still deployed massively and SAP is everywhere.
People can’t just drop their PCs for iPads because the apps aren’t there and won’t be for years.
However, Thurrott is equally mistaken. I know of nobody that’s actually waiting for an Office version that runs on tablets. They’re waiting for a version of Offices that works, or even better something else.
Spend a day in an Office and you’ll understand how much people hate this stuff.
UX…
“This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.”
Future Concept Videos…
Gruber seems to have started a fire storm.
“I’m not arguing that making concept videos directly leads to a lack of traction in the current market. I’m arguing that making concept videos is a sign of a company that has a lack of institutional focus on the present and near-present.”
Daring Fireball: The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos.
This is all about this video.
Now I’ve nothing against concept videos as such. I wouldn’t put them 20 years out in the future however because who knows what the world will look like. One three years out would really upset the Product Manager but would actually be useful.
However, the biggest problem here is the lack of business case for enormous amounts of this technology.
At 35 seconds there is an electronic taxi window. It looks really, cool. Ignore the fact that this would be a nightmare when there are two people in the cab or how it would work out the geometry for your eyes when the movie studios can’t even do 3D in a cinema.
How would this be paid for? Which taxi driver is going to empty his pockets and give money to Microsoft for this so that they can show where your meeting is tomorrow? What’s the business case for him? I can only see two; people will refuse to ride in taxis without cool windows or adverts.
So let’s rewrite this with a business case. In 20 years, your going to get in a cab and adverts will be projected onto the passing landscape blocking the view and giving a false image of where you’re travelling. Great, thanks.
And the transparent fridge door! How much are you willing to pay to avoid opening the fridge door?200 euros, 400?
Hell freezes over…
Hell freezes over: Forrester urges IT to support the Mac – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech.
We’ll see how long the IT departments can ignore this one. They’ve been pretending for years that there was no difference between Windows and OSX.