I know they’re smug, but the latest batch of Mac vs. PC ads includes some funny sketches. ‘Group’ is the one that really made me laugh.
Daily Archives: June 15, 2008
An Open Letter to Jerry Yang
From Joe Nocera, in the NYTimes…
It’s completely understandable that you wouldn’t want the company you and David Filo founded 14 years ago to fall into the clutches of Microsoft. You both loathe and fear the Evil Empire, as you Silicon Valley types used to call Microsoft. You don’t want Yahoo swallowed up into the Microsoft bureaucracy. You hate the thought that Yahoo, which once was every bit as cool as Google is now, would lose its status as an independent company. Let’s face it: you and Mr. Filo still think of Yahoo as your baby.
Here’s the problem, Jerry. It’s not your baby. It hasn’t been since 1996, when Yahoo went public. At that moment, you suddenly had to answer to your new owners: your shareholders. In fact, Jerry, as a board member since Yahoo went public, it has always been your job to look out for Yahoo’s shareholders. But we sure wouldn’t know that from the way you’ve acted these past months. I haven’t seen this much contempt for shareholders since Robert Nardelli ran Home Depot…
He’s right. Much as I dislike Microsoft, it seems to me that Yang and the Board failed in their fiduciary duty.
Leading-edge uselessness (contd.)
Hmmm… From today’s Telegraph: golf buggies with sat-nav for players lacking direction .
Each of the £4,000 golf buggies comes complete with a sat-nav system which is programmed with a map of West Midlands Golf Club.
The hi-tech devices mean members could do away with caddies altogether as the buggies’ computers tell players how far they have hit a drive and what distance remains to the hole.
But even these capabilities do not supersede the buggies’ most important function – being able to order a drink remotely from the bar.
John Harrhy, 65, co-owner of the club in the Forest of Arden, near Solihull, explained what led him to introduce the 25-strong fleet.
He said: “We like to think we are a forward-looking golf business. We had been looking around at ways to progress and considered a number of buggy models. They are very popular with the senior members, who are offered them at a cheaper rate, and with visiting golf societies. You can enter your scorecard on the on-board machine and it knows which other buggies are in your group.’
The funny thing is that none of the players who will eagerly embrace this technology can hit the ball far enough to get lost.
Media groupthink and Mr Davis
Here’s a good journalistic rule: whenever you find a consensus, look out for rodent smells. When David Davis stunned the Westminster village with his resignation on Thursday, I watched and listened to most of the mainstream broadcast coverage that evening. It was scarily uniform, which didn’t square at all with my own hunch that Davis’s move is a game-changer. Which is very welcome, because it’s clear that the great British public is sleepwalking into an authoritarian nightmare and something very dramatic is needed to provide a wake-up call. My hope is that the hoo-hah which will surround the by-election might provide such a call.
It’ reassuring to find that my Observer colleague, Henry Porter, sees it the same way, not least because he was been a forceful critic of Labour’s creeping authoritarianism from the beginning. In a terrific column this morning he observes that
The political classes don’t like this sort of thing. There’s too much raw emotion involved. Like nervous prefects, they dismissed Davis as vain, egotistical, narcissistic and irresponsible. He was, said one commentator of my acquaintance, suffering from a mid-life crisis and probably knew he didn’t have the brains to be Home Secretary, which is why he had bailed out.
That very much captures what is wrong with the Westminster village, which is so consumed with the talk of power, the jockeying for power, the acquisition and loss of it, that there is very little space left in the minds of journalists and politicians for principles and ideas. Yet that was what so much of last week in the House of Commons was about. Let us not forget that the Prime Minister won 42 days pre-charge detention by buying votes from nine hard-faced men from Northern Ireland, while 36 members of his own party stood up for the fundamental freedoms of our country. This was a moral defeat, not for Labour, but for Gordon Brown.
Then the unthinkable occurred. Davis appeared like Cyrano de Bergerac with his sword drawn at St Stephen’s entrance to the House of Commons – a venue occasioned by Speaker Martin’s undemocratic refusal to allow him to address the chamber – and challenged anyone and everyone…
Like Henry, I am sending Davis a cheque and a letter of support.
Where I’d like to be today
I’d love to see if Tiger Woods can win, despite still having a wonky knee. Torrey Pines is a bit like Lahinch or Ballybunion, but with better weather. (I grew up playing those courses and have loved them ever since.) Tom Watson famously described Ballybunion as “one of the best and most beautiful tests of links golf anywhere in the world”.
Later: I realised belatedly that the Lahinch site has a nice virtual tour of the course and the description of the 18th hole suddenly brought back one of the nicest memories I have of my golfing career.
A par five of five hundred and thirty-four yards. The drive crosses the line of holes four and five, to find a magnificently undulating, turbulent fairway alongside the road. These undulations continue right on up to the green, which has bunkers left and right. The green is sited close to the out of bounds, with mounds on the right and deep hollows on the left. It is a fine green on which to end the Lahinch experience.
I was playing a tense match and my opponent and I were level as we teed off. We were playing into the wind, so it seemed like a brutally long hole that day — so much so that for my third shot I needed a three or a four iron. In one of those magical moments that golfers never forget, I hit it perfectly and watched the ball ‘bisect the pin’ as it flew. It pitched onto the front of the green, braked and came to rest a foot from the hole. There was nothing my opponent could do about it, and I won the match. Pure magic. One of the most satisfying moments of my life.
How Ireland voted
Interesting that the only constituency on the Western seaboard that voted Yes was Clare. Wonder what made the difference there.
Email addiction: companies search for a fix
Nice NYT piece by Matt Richtel.
A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.
The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work…
It’s an interesting counterpart to Nick Carr’s complaint that Google rots your brain.
Mcdonalds outsourcing burger manufacture to Burger King
Well, that’s what one observer said when he heard about the Yahoo-Google agreement. I also wrote an Observer piece about the deal. Excerpt:
Since Icahn has eaten other corporate boards for breakfast, it would be foolish to underestimate him. Especially as he’s claiming that Yahoo!’s standoffishness has destroyed ‘shareholder value’. Yahoo!’s leadership then looks for ways to undermine his campaign and ensure a Microsoft-free future. Since the date with Google seemed to go okay, they reason, why not ask them for a live-in partnership? Not a conventional marriage, you understand, but still the kind of relationship that makes you feel good at the end of a long day in the markets. Google may be awkward in an adolescent way, but it’s fabulously rich and successful. And it scares Microsoft to death.
Last week’s episode involved Yahoo! and Google signing their prenuptials…
Apple’s Trojan Horse
This morning’s Observer column about the long-term implications of the iPhone.
There were murmurs of discontent that the camera delivered a measly two megapixels, still declined to do video and lacked a flash. There was a frisson of excitement when it was revealed that the phone had onboard GPS, and contented murmurings as some new games and other third-party applications were demonstrated. But the only big news was that Apple is to halve the price in a dash for market share.
Of course this is bad news for Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and others, none of whom have yet managed to come up with a device that can compete head-on with the iPhone. But in fact the possibility that Apple might become as dominant in the mobile phone market as it is in the online music business should ring warning bells everywhere…