Daily Archives: July 3, 2008

Is The iPhone Making Us Stupid?

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Hmmm… This is beginning to turn into a meme.

That’s one of the topics Walter Mossberg gestured at this afternoon in a talk on “the Future of the Internet and Rise of the Cell Phone,” in which he declared that the PC has peaked, and that the future of the internet belongs to pocket computers like the iPhone. The future of the internet, and the future of us: “The internet is a grid,” he remarked, “and we’re all going to be living on it, and carrying it in our pocket all day long.” Mossberg delivered this assessment with a strong note of techno-pessimism woven in: A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge (“people hate iPhone users,” he remarked, “because you can never have an argument about facts without them whipping out the phone and looking up the answer” – a description that I’m afraid I resemble, even though I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone) and deep reflection (in the future, Mossberg noted, we may never be free of “that subtle feeling that maybe you need to check Slate, or Facebook”)…

Psst… want to rent some Windows?

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

For people who are too wary of commitment to shell out upwards of $375 for Microsoft Office Professional or $100 or more on the Home and Student edition, Microsoft is introducing a subscription version. For $70 a year, you’ll be able to rent Microsoft Equipt, a package that combines Office with Microsoft’s Live OneCare security package, with free upgrades when new versions arrive and access to the already free Live Workspace and other online products. The Equipt package can be installed on up to three PCs at a time. Whether this represents a good deal depends on the nature of your needs for Office and the worth to you of OneCare, but it does lower the entry barrier for holdouts.

The curious part of the move is Microsoft’s choice of a retail channel — initially, at least, Equipt will be available only through the nearly 700 Circuit City stores. Microsoft believes that the concept of Equipt represents a “complicated value proposition,” and that the staff of Circuit City has the ability, according to Office group product manager Bryson Gordon, to engage customers in a “kind of a high-touch scenario. Equipt is better sold than bought.” Circuit City undoubtedly appreciated the kind words, especially as its stock dropped to a 17-year low after Blockbuster came to its senses and dropped its $1.35 billion takeover offer.

Flash pages to be searchable

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From Technology Review…

The Web would be useless without search engines. But as good as Google and Yahoo are at finding online information, much on it remains hidden, or difficult to rank in search results. On Tuesday, however, Adobe took a major step toward opening up tens of millions of pages to Google and Yahoo. The company has provided the search engines with a specialized version of its Flash animation player that reveals information about text and links in Flash files. It’s a move that could be a boon to advertisers, in particular, who have traditionally had to choose between building a site that’s aesthetically pleasing and one that can be ranked in a Web search.

The new software is required only to index Flash files, not to play them, says Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player. Web surfers don’t need to download a new Flash player, and content providers don’t have to change the way they write applications. “For end users, they’re going to see a lot more results and a lot better results,” says Everett-Church. “The perfect result may have been out there but trapped in a SWF [Shockwave Flash file]. But now they can find it.”