We think the internet isn’t a web page or a destination for your PC any more. It’s an infrastructure and a delivery vehicle for communications and experiences in entertainment. It’s about ease of use and open platforms that connect the internet to any device that you will be manufacturing.
Terry Semel, Yahoo Chairman, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas, January 5, 2006. (Reported in Financial Times January 7 2005.)
… was the most implausible idea I’ve heard in years, yet it was all over the mainstream media ahead of Larry Page’s CES Keynote. Where did it come from?
… Ballmer for the White House? Excitable rumours are circulating based on alleged sightings of Bill Clinton in Redmond. Is he being lined up to be Microsoft’s next President? Or just an ordinary Board member? Will he be able to swear “I did not have relations with that software company”? Curious. It would make sense in one way, though: Gates & Co think their company is at least as important as the United States. On the other hand, having Clinton on the Board would alienate the Republicans. Hmmm….
Tony Banks has died, unexpectedly, while on holiday in Florida. We’ll miss him: he was one of the few genuinely funny men in British politics. There’s a rather po-faced Obituary in the Guardian which doesn’t do him justice.
Banks could be fabulously rude. He once said of a Tory MP (I think it was Terry Dix) that he was living proof that “a pig’s bladder on a stick could be elected to Parliament”. His advice to a new MP was to “remember that your opponents are in the other party; your enemies are in your own”. For some of us, his greatest quality was his capacity to make Margaret Thatcher incoherent with rage when she was trying to kill the Greater London Council, of which he was (with Ken Livingstone) a leading light.
The Guardian obit quotes one of his most celebrated parliamentary interventions:
In a debate on organ transplants shortly after the Tory minister Cecil Parkinson [a Thatcher favourite] had been involved in a sex scandal, he asked: “May I put in a bid for Cecil’s plonker – one careful owner.”
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As he said about himself: “Good taste was never one of my qualifications”. Life will be duller without him.