Category Archives: Observer

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?’

iNews

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This morning’s Observer column…

The saga of the Apple iPhone continues. Last Thursday, AT&T’s chief executive, Randall Stephenson, was asked at an industry gathering about the prospects for a future iPhone with a faster net connection. ‘You’ll have it next year,’ quoth he. Those ‘familiar with the matter’ (as US newspapers quaintly put it) are amazed that Mr Stephenson still lives and breathes – or at any rate was doing so when this column went to press. For there are two things that Steve Jobs, Apple’s mercurial – not to say explosive – CEO, cannot abide. The first is anyone other than himself making product announcements. The second is announcing forthcoming upgrades while there’s plenty of old stock to be shifted over Christmas. After all, who in their right mind would buy a steam-powered iPhone now when they can have a 3G one in a few months? Answers, please, on the back of a death warrant, to Steve Jobs, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014, USA.

Kindling for a new market?

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This morning’s Observer column…

It’s the end-of-the-book story again. Last week, Amazon launched its Kindle electronic book reader, amid corporate hopes that it would become the ‘iPod of e-readers’. Strange, isn’t it, how everyone now aspires to create the ‘next iPod’?

The Kindle is a neat gadget that is the size of a paperback book, weighs 10.3 ounces and doesn’t beep. Its display gives a good approximation of the clarity of print on a six-inch screen. Of course it relies on battery power, but Amazon claims that you can get up to 30 hours of reading before having to plug it in for a two-hour recharge. It can hold up to 200 books. In sleep mode, the device displays tasteful images of ancient texts, early printing presses and classic authors like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen….

Radiohead: gold in them thar downloads?

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This morning’s Observer column…

A few weeks ago, the band Radiohead made waves by making their new album In Rainbows available online as a free download. But people could also decide how much they wanted to pay for it. This experiment was greeted with gleeful incredulity by many cynics, who opined that Radiohead had showed a touching but naive faith in human nature, and predicted that freeloaders would so outweigh the paying customers that the experiment would be a financial flop….

The Ferrari and the lawnmower

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This morning’s Observer column…

Until now, phones have been relatively primitive devices, so the corrupt absurdity of the closed systems operated by networks has not been obvious to most. The arrival of the iPhone lays it bare. Having an iPhone locked to a network which doesn’t provide 3G connectivity, and is unable to make VoIP calls despite having good wireless networking built in, is like buying a Ferrari and finding that the only thing you can do with it is power your lawnmower. It’s nuts – and our regulators have allowed it to happen….

Missing column

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As a result of some — as yet unexplained glitch — yesterday’s Observer column didn’t make the leap from print to Web. If you’re interested here’s a pdf.

Who said there isn’t life after death? Hard on the heels of Radiohead’s ‘pay what you like’ experiment — in which fans were able to decide how much (or how little) they wanted to pay for the group’s latest album — comes news that Cliff Richard is also testing new online business models. He’s asking his fans to determine the price of his forthcoming meisterwerk, ‘Love, the Album’. The maximum anyone will be charged is £7.99 (the price of an album on the iTunes store) but the the final price will be determined by how popular the album is — as measured by the volume of advance orders.

Ingenious, eh? It just shows that there’s still life in these old codgers. Sir Cliff says he had no choice but to embrace new technology. ‘Who’d have thought I’d get a buzz from creative marketing?’ he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘As artists we face a stark choice. We either keep one step ahead of the technology which is changing our industry so radically – or we throw up our hands and quit. Personally I’m not for quitting.’

Right on…

Correction: The column was published on the Web edition, but in a different location. Phew!

Facebook and the Groucho problem

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This morning’s Observer column…

Pssst … have I got a deal for you! Send me a cheque for £10 and I will sell you a 0.000001 per cent interest in NetworkerColumns Ltd, a privately held company which produces copious quantities of mildly irritating prose. I will then release a press statement announcing that we are both partners in a £1bn company!

Daft, isn’t it? Well, it’s exactly the same logic that has led the mainstream media to hail Facebook as a $15bn company – that is to say, the fifth-most valuable internet company after Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon. What happened is that Microsoft, after months of secret negotiations, announced it was paying $240m for a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook. Multiply 240 million by 100, divide by 1.6 and out pops the ‘valuation’…

In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering | Business | The Observer

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This morning’s Observer column…

Storm has been spreading steadily since last January, gradually constructing a huge botnet. It affects only computers running Microsoft Windows, but that means that more than 90 per cent of the world’s PCs are vulnerable. Nobody knows how big the Storm botnet has become, but reputable security professionals cite estimates of between one million and 50 million computers worldwide. To date, the botnet has been used only intermittently, which is disquieting: what it means is that someone, somewhere, is quietly building a doomsday machine that can be rented out to the highest bidder, or used for purposes that we cannot yet predict…