This morning’s Observer column…
Wall street made an interesting discovery last week. Apple, the iPod and mobile phone company, also makes computers! Shock! Horror! This elementary fact had hitherto escaped the notice of investment analysts, hypnotised as they were by the glamour of the iPod, the implosion of the music industry and the belief – ably fostered by Dell & Co – that making computers was a low-end, commoditised business…
From this morning’s Observer column…
Meanwhile, on the West Coast of the US, Microsoft’s hilarious pursuit of Yahoo! has already yielded a dizzying sequence of counter-moves, feints, bluffs and evasions to the point where it’s looking like an episode of Friends. So why not cast it as a soap-opera, with some minor gender changes? The synopsis goes …
Steve (Ballmer, Microsoft CEO) is having a mid-life crisis. Once irresistible to women, he now finds he’s regarded as passé. Just down the road, Jerri (Yang, CEO of Yahoo!) has also been having a bad time. She once had star quality, but is looking a bit faded. And she’s running out of dough. Deep down, though, she’s still alluring….
Later: I’m a bit miffed about the way the column was sub-edited (‘subbed’ in newspaper lingo). The last para, as filed by me, read:
In the latest episode, as ‘Good Morning Silicon Valley’ imagines it, Jerri and Eric ‘are in the bedroom next to Steve’s, both fully dressed but banging the headboard against the wall and dramatically moaning, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”‘
But in the paper, this appeared as:
In the latest episode, Jerri and Eric ‘are in the bedroom next to Steve’s, both fully dressed but banging the headboard against the wall and dramatically moaning, ‘Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’
In other words, the attribution to Good Morning Silicon Valley (one of my favourite blogs) has been dropped, making it seem as though I was lifting their joke without attribution. Bah!
This morning’s Observer column…
For some months, strange goings-on have been reported in branches of Toys ‘R’ Us. Shifty-looking middle-aged men and younger males wearing ponytails and Grateful Dead T-shirts have been observed leaving the premises with small cardboard boxes which they then gleefully tear open upon reaching the safety of their cars. Exclamations of ‘Yes! And ‘Yeehaw!!!’ have been heard by security guards, who are as puzzled by all this as their checkout colleagues.
‘I can’t figure it out,’ said one store manager, when quizzed by this columnist a few months ago. ‘The things are just walking out of the store. They sell out the minute we get a delivery.’
This morning’s Observer column…
To date, three UK ISPs have signed up for the Phorm system: BT, Virgin Media – and TalkTalk. This suggests that Dunstone’s rage against the BPI may have impaired his capacity for joined-up thinking. On the one hand, he declines to monitor his customers’ behaviour at the behest of the music industry; on the other, he seems content to monitor their behaviour in order to take a cut from advertising whose targeting has been improved by such monitoring. It won’t wash, Charlie. Make a clean break and see how it improves your argument.
Update: Rory-Cellan Jones emails to say that Dunstone told him that Talk Talk will make the Phorm snooping something that users have to opt in to. If that’s true then it means the Phorm system is dead — it’s unlikely that BT and Virgin will not also make it opt-in for fear of losing customers to Talk Talk.
This morning’s Observer column…
From further along the arcade could be heard shouting, whistling and general sounds of excited hubbub. Further examination revealed a 100-yard queue of people. Every so often, a steward would motion the 10 people at the head of the queue to enter a store. As they did so, the staff applauded them. Many of the customers took photographs of themselves as they entered. Inside they were greeted by more applauding staff and given a white box containing a complimentary T-shirt, after which they proceeded into the seething centre of the emporium. As they left, a smiling staff member thanked them. And from the expressions on the departing faces, it was clear that they had had what in marketing cant is called ‘a great retail experience’. This was the only shop in the entire arcade that had generated any excitement…
This morning’s Observer column (about voting machines)…
It’s not just the accuracy of the machines that is questionable, it’s also their security. Several projects have demonstrated how voting machines from all the major makers can be hacked into with comparative ease. This is not an argument for not using machines: who would want to replicate the ‘hanging chads’ fiasco of the 2000 election? But before a society entrusts its central democratic process to machines, it ought to take reasonable steps to instil public confidence in the technology.
This requires only two very basic provisions…
This morning’s Observer column…
Flickr is a classic Web 2.0 story. In the first place, it was an unintended outcome of another project. Its co-founders, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, were designing Game Neverending, a massive multi-player online game, and realised that they would need a photo-sharing module. In the end, the photo-sharing took on a life of its own and the gaming project was quietly shelved. Secondly, it required no complex technical infrastructure, and could be marketed virally as users began to circulate Flickr links in email and instant messages.
Flickr’s designers also displayed a shrewd grasp of the essence of Web 2.0 thinking – namely that the big rewards come from making it easy for other developers to hook into your stuff. So they were quick to publish the application programming interface (API), the technical details other programmers needed to link into Flickr’s databases. This then made it easy for bloggers and users of social networking sites to create links to their Flickr ‘photostreams’. The results are clear for all to see. On 12 November last year, Flickr images passed the 2 billion mark. At present, between three and five million photographs are uploaded to the service every day…
This morning’s Observer column…
Many people believe that cloud computing is the logical next step for the industry. It’s the proposition on which the vast Google ranch has been wagered. (It’s also the reason why Microsoft – a platform-based company – is so eager to acquire Yahoo.) The prominent technology commentator Nicholas Carr has just published a book called The Big Switch in which he argues that what’s happening to computing now is analogous to what happened to electricity generation a century ago. Once upon a time, every industrial firm had its own generator; but eventually organisations plugged into a grid with cheap electricity pumped out by specialist generating companies. Something similar, Carr claims, is happening now to computing: it’s becoming a public utility, rather than a service that firms provide for themselves…
This morning’s Observer column…
Chutzpah, according to a famous definition, is a chap who, having murdered his mother and father, then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan. It might have been coined with Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, in mind.
Last week the budget airline had to take its website offline for three days to enable a massive upgrade of its computer systems. You’d have thought that it would be a source of acute embarrassment for the ‘ticketless airline’. Not a bit of it: instead, anyone logging on to Ryanair on Wednesday found a cheery message. ‘Web Closing Down Sale’ it screamed: ‘Cos the website will be closed we need your bookings today’. Cheeky, eh? No wonder they make money…
This morning’s Observer column…
The award for Fatuous Statement of the Month goes to Geoffrey Taylor, chief executive of the quaintly named British Phonographic Industry, aka the BPI. (Note for readers under 65: a ‘phonograph’ is an instrument that reproduces sound recorded on a grooved disk.) The winning statement reads: ‘For years, ISPs have built a business on other people’s music.’