Category: punditry

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Thirty Days of Posts: Wherein I Introduce The Project

A lovely centered picture that's totally fair use of a thing that most people will hopefull recognize.

Friends,

Today is the first one of June in the year we’ve all agreed on, 2012. As you most likely are aware, I’ve been letting this field go fallow and, well, dammit, that’s gonna change. Therefore, I vow (not wish, not hope, not sorta) to post something new and interesting (big boast, big fella. interesting? – ed) every single day this month.

If you think that this is some stunt, be assured that it is. It’s a gimmick to trick me into getting back into the habit of making something of this site. I have the opportunity to get a new URL for free for the blog from the nice people at Squarespace (who are not a sponsor, but who will end up hosting the blog at the end of this exercise), so I thought that I should make it worth everyone’s while to actually show up for the switch.

I guess this is the part where I should thank Blogger for their platform all these years. Back in the early 1850s, when I started this, they were easily the most and best and biggest platform to self-publish on the web. I even bought a subscription and labored away during those terrible first years, but as president Zachary Taylor wisely said back then, “You gotta git, son.” So I’m moving away from the Google empire that has treated me well to a smaller and more responsive empire where I get to actually own my stuff from now on.

The topics covered during this month will be old favorites (or favourites, as you say), things that vex me (as usual. – ed), the old cast of characters will make an appearance, and there will be new features that I can’t talk about now. Of course, I can’t talk about them now because I don’t know what they’ll be yet, but they’ll surely be amazing (or amazeballs, as you say).

Check in tomorrow when I’ll make an incredible pronouncement about something very interesting!

Your best pal in the whole wide world,

– bob

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Well, That Took Long Enough

A lovely centered picture.

Friends,

News has come down today that newish Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker, in a financial call today, killed the company’s PC and mobile device business (not the calculators! Nooooo!) in favor of their server, software and services business. This, dear readers—even though I’m not at all bitter—comes a little late, don’t you think? Carly’s purchase of Compaq ten years ago cast my life and the lives of my dear friends into a wee little bit of turmoil, so only now I can sit back here in my Secret Alpine Laboratory and gloat a little. But only a little.

I’ve spent the day thinking about how the timeline was damaged by the HP/Compaq merger. We’ve all figured out how to deal with it in the ensuing decade, but what could we have done together if we’d been allowed to continue on an unperturbed path? It’s a fun thought experiment.

Not that I’m bitter,

– bob

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An Ad Agency Buys A Handheld Radio Manufacturer

 

Friends,

News came out this morning that Google is buying Motorola Mobility (the smartphone arm of Motorola) for twelve and a half billion dollars. That’s a premium over how Motorola shares were valued last Friday and carries with it, I think, the overwhelming odor of desperation.

Of course, everybody’s making a happy announcement about the sale, like how the synergistic metrics between the longtime global partner teams are now forming a more tightly integrated new paradigm, or somesuch, but doesn’t this mean that Google is now directly competing with LG, HTC, Samsung and all the other Android handset manufacturers? And won’t those same highly valued partners continue to wonder how Google is sandbagging every time an Android release comes out? If this is a reaction to the Nortel patent grab of a couple weeks ago by Apple, Microsoft and others, it seems to me that it’s a bit like putting out a camp fire by urinating on it without warning all the other campers to pull their marshmallows out first.

– bob

P.S. I use the first generation Motorola Droid for work and am as impressed by it as this guy.

UPDATE: Super creepy and eerily similar plaudits for the marriage here. We welcome the news!