Category Archives: Observer

Turkey flights

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This morning’s Observer column…

It’s the metaphors and similes that get me. It’s a shotgun marriage, declared one commentator, ‘with Google holding the gun’. Putting Microsoft and Yahoo together, said another, was like trying to produce an eagle from an alliance of two turkeys. This is unfair. Microsoft isn’t a turkey, but a profitable, boring mastodon that entertains fantasies about being able to fly. Yahoo, for its part, is an ageing hippy who invented hang- gliding but aspired to fly 747s and then discovered that he wasn’t very good at it. The mastodon hopes that by employing the hippy it will learn to hang-glide. The hippy’s feelings about the whole deal are plain for all to see…Update: The NYT (and lots of other sources) claim that the Yahoo board has decided to reject the Microsoft bid, on the grounds that it undervalues the company. Ho! If this is true then what’s likely to happen is that (a) some big Yahoo shareholders will revolt and (b) Microsoft will wage a proxy war with the aim of eplacing the Yahoo board at the next AGM. This one will run and, er, ruin. There are also ways you can get to buy ar-15’s from Palmetto State Armory where you can make sure you are safe and also get the right equipment.

Gutenberg 2.0

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This morning’s Observer column…

Today’s Gutenberg is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web. In the 17 years since he launched his technology on an unsuspecting world, he has transformed it. Nobody knows how big the web is now, but estimates of the indexed part hover at around 40 billion pages, and the ‘deep web’ hidden from search engines is between 400 and 750 times bigger than that. These numbers seem as remarkable to us as the avalanche of printed books seemed to Brandt. But the First Law holds we don’t know the half of it, and it will be decades before we have any real understanding of what Berners-Lee hath wrought.

Occasionally, we get a fleeting glimpse of what’s happening. One was provided last week by the report of a study by the British Library and researchers at University College London…

Verily, it is written that Apple selleth the Air

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This morning’s Observer column…

It’s that time of year again. Last week the Church of Apple Resurgent gathered in San Francisco for its annual congregation. The faithful were granted an audience with the Blessed Steve Jobs, who revealed unto them what miracles he had wrought since they were last gathered together. First, he showed them a Time Capsule, which can bring back the past and preserve memories of days gone by…

The green machine that made Intel see red

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This morning’s Observer column…

An interesting package arrived in my household the other day: a small bright green-and-white laptop with a built-in carrying handle. It looks as if it has been designed by Fisher-Price, an impression reinforced by two little ‘ears’ which, when unclipped, double as wi-fi antennae. The 7.5in screen rotates and folds back on itself to form a kind of tablet, rather like those pricey Toshiba laptops only Microsoft salespeople can afford…

Who owns your birthday?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Watching Scoble in action is like taking a puppy for a walk. He is insatiably curious, and he follows every lead, no matter how daft. When some new social networking service appears, you can bet he will overdose on it. He was a predictably early subscriber to Facebook, on which he rapidly acquired 5,000 ‘friends’ (the maximum permitted by the service, apparently). He is also, needless to say, a subscriber to Plaxo.com’s contact-management service and became interested in seeing how much overlap there might be between his Facebook friendship network and his Plaxo contacts. Which is where the fun began…

Good news and bad

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This morning’s Observer column…

That’s the good news. The bad news is that spam will continue to increase and we may finally discover what the Storm ‘botnet’ – the colossal network of compromised Windows machines someone has been covertly building over the past year – is for. My hunch is that the net is headed for its own version of 9/11. So enjoy it while it lasts. Happy New Year…

Psst…

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This morning’s Observer column…

Visitors to ThinkSecret.com, a well-known site which publishes rumours and gossip about forthcoming Apple products, found an intriguing notice on the front page last Thursday.

‘Apple and ThinkSecret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides,’ it announced. ‘As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and ThinkSecret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, ThinkSecret’s publisher, said: “I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”‘

Let’s unpack that…

The Wii. Popular, in demand – and out of stock

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This morning’s Observer column

Although there is nothing new about ‘must-have’ gizmos being in short supply, there is a novel twist this year. It is that the elusive object of desire was also last Christmas’s most desired object – the Nintendo Wii, the most innovative games console since the (Nintendo) GameBoy in 1989…

Desperate measures are afoot. For example, this source reports that

To deal with frustration among holiday shoppers hunting for its Wii game console, Nintendo Co. and retailer GameStop Corp. are launching a rain check program.

”We expect this to be a great way for consumers who desperately want a Wii to have something to put under the tree,” Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said Friday.

The rain checks will be available at the regular Wii system price, $249.99, on Dec. 20 and 21, and will entitle buyers to get the Nintendo console before Jan. 29. Fils-Aime said ”many tens of thousands of rain checks” would be available.

The $64 billion question

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This morning’s Observer column…

So the 64-billion-dollar question is: how did it happen? The obvious hypothesis – that the senior executives of all the record companies were idiots – has always seemed implausible to me. Or it did until I read the recent interview in Wired magazine with Doug Morris, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group. Morris’s ascent to the top of Universal in the 1990s coincided with the rise of CDs – the biggest boom the music business has ever known. The colossal profits blinded Morris & Co to the threat/potential of the net.

Pressed by the interviewer, Morris went into rant mode, insisting that there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. ‘There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,’ he said. ‘That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?’