From Mashable.com.
Bill Gates confessed at an event in New Delhi today that he gave up on Facebook because he couldn’t keep up with the friend requests. Gates remarked that there were “10,000 people wanting to be my friends” after he tried out the service, and it was time consuming to decide if he “knew this person, did I not know this person”.
Pity, given that he had such a promising FaceBook page.
“Somewhere down the road”, writes Good Morning Silicon Valley, “somebody should take a whack at calculating how much Vista has cost Microsoft — in lost or postponed sales, missed opportunities and damaged reputation — as an illustration of just how badly off track you can get when you find yourself moving at high speed in the wrong direction at the wrong moment”.
And an annus horribilis it was — the first since the company went public in 1986 that it saw a decline in annual revenue. For the quarter, Microsoft fell short of analysts’ revenue expectations by more than a billion dollars, and the bad news came from all directions. The online business, the Entertainment and Devices division, the unit that makes Office, even the server software group, all slid. And then there was the Client division, the one that makes Windows for PCs — revenue off 29 percent, operating profit down 33 percent. Microsoft blamed slumping PC sales, and while the recession was certainly the major culprit, it didn’t help that Vista gave customers few reasons to upgrade and more than a few to keep waiting. The company said it was also hurt by the growth in the netbook niche. Vista can’t play in that market, so those sales went to the lower-margin Windows XP.
Vista was a self-inflicted wound. But even without it Microsoft would have stumbled: the downside of its monopoly on business customers is that it is bound to be affected by a recession.
This morning’s Observer column.
Up to now, the debate about eBooks has been dominated by technical issues: ergonomics, portability, storage capacity, the readability of display screens, the quality of the user interface and so on. These are important matters, but ignore the biggest issue of all, namely the ways in which the technology enables content owners to assert a level of control over the reader that would be deemed unconscionable – and unacceptable – in the world of print.
Our societies have spent 400 years developing legal traditions which strike a reasonable balance between the needs of authors and publishers on the one hand and those of users on the other.
Compromises like the doctrine of ‘fair use’ are examples of that balancing act. One of the reasons the publishing industry is salivating over the potential of electronic texts is that they could radically tilt the balance in favour of content-owners in a single decade. We’re sleepwalking into a nightmare of perfect remote control. If nothing else, the tale of Amazon, Orwell and the memory hole ought to serve as a wake-up call.
Update: Bobbie Johnson had a good piece about this in the Technology section of Thursday’s Guardian and the following day reported the reaction of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, to the debacle. Bezos wrote:
“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle… Our ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted and we deserve the criticism we’ve received.”
Flickr version here.
“The man who is tired of London”, said Samuel Johnson, “is tired of life”. The same applies to Provence. We’ve been coming here every summer for years, and yet over the English winter the memory of its magic fades, with watercolours exposed to sunlight. And then we step out of the plane and are struck by the wall of scented heat, the chorus of cicadas, the azure sky, the amazing umbrella pines and palm trees and — whoosh! — it’s back.
Yesterday we decided to eschew motorways and big roads and lit out for the hills, picking our way along smooth, virtually-deserted country roads that snaked through valleys and woods and ochre-tinted villages baking in the afternoon sun to St Maximin-la-Ste Baume where we stayed in a converted Dominican monastery next to the basilica of Sainte Marie Madelaine.
This is a vast church, as big as some English cathedrals, built in the 14th century to house the skull of the woman who is supposed to have been one of Christ’s followers. According to the legend, she was the sister of Lazarus (he of the great comeback), was driven from Jerusalem by persecution and wound up in Provence, where she retired to a grotto in the Sainte Baume mountains we had driven through. She died, it seems, in the arms of St Maximin — the Bishop of Aix — in the town to which he gave his name and where we had found lodgings for the night.
Flickr version here.
The relic is a blackened skull encased in a hideous gilt enclosure on a sedan-chair apparatus — which suggests that it is paraded around the streets from time to time, no doubt accompanied by clerics in elaborate frocks. The size and magnificence of the basilica reminds one that possession of a high-class relic with provenance linking it back to Christ must have been the basis for a great business model in the Middle Ages. Just imagine it: all those pilgrims; all those indulgences to be sold. And just think of the spin-off merchandising opportunities.
Not that the merchandising opportunities were confined to the Middle Ages. In recent times, Mary has become a staple of bestselling fiction: think of the role she plays in, for example, The Da Vinci Code.
The report of Alan Milburn’s inquiry into social mobility in contemporary Britain is deeply depressing. It charts the extent to which this is an unequal society. As Ian Jack observes.:
Many of its statistics are shocking. Only 7% of the population attended private schools, but 75% of judges, 70% of finance directors, and one in every three MPs went to one. And unto those that hath, etc: among nine out of 12 professions examined, particularly medicine and the law, the proportion of entrants coming from well-off families has been increasing; doctors born in 1970, for example, typically grew up in families with an income nearly two thirds higher than the average. Connection matters. ‘Soft skills’ in interviews matter: how to be confident, how to please. Unpaid internships and work experience schemes, particularly in glamorous professions such as the media, tend to be monopolies of the well-connected. Milburn describes it as “the closed shop society”, with a geographic bias towards London and the south-east.
Jack is as astonished as I am by one finding of the report relating to the mainstream media:
Figures 1F and 1G in the report. The first shows that more than half of “top journalists” were privately educated. The second shows how this proportion has actually increased since the 1980s – alone among eight professional categories, including barristers, judges and vice-chancellors.
As far as this phenomenon is concerned, the decline of the print media looks like a consummation devoutly to be wished. Once the stranglehold of the print and journalistic unions was broken by Murdoch & Co, the closed world of British national newspapers was transformed into an environment tailor-made for shoehorning well-connected Oxbridge kids into cushy roles. With a bit of luck this agreeable system of outdoor relief will wither on the vine: these brats won’t find the online world quite so accommodating to folks whose main qualification is an assumption of entitlement and superiority.
But the wider problem laid bare with scarifying clarity by the Milburn report remains. And nobody — and this includes Milburn — has any real idea what to do about it.
Hmmm…. Growing like crazy.
Well, I’ve heard of ‘set-aside’, i.e. getting subsidies from the EU for not growing anything on your land, but this is ridiculous. Sit-aside, perhaps?
Spotted today on my drive home. Flickr version here.
Photograph by Tillers1
The only sport I’ve ever really loved is golf, so there was a special poignancy for me in the outcome of the 149th British Open today. I badly wanted Tom Watson to win, not just because of the wonderful way he played over the four days, or because he’s nearly as old as I am, but because he was a hero of my golf-obsessed youth. He came sooooo close to pulling it off, and the way his second shot to the 18th ran off the back of the green and lodged in the half-cut grass was nothing short of tragic. The play-off was cruel because he was understandably disheartened by the fact that he had — literally — thrown away the chance to equal Harry Vardon’s record of six Open wins, and also because he was clearly exhausted — hardly surprising after 72 holes of nerve-wracking competitive golf.
One thing I loved about this year’s event was the way the Turnberry links tamed the world’s finest players. Links — i.e. seaside — courses are wonderful because they are never static: a slight change in the wind can transform a straightforward hole into a nightmare of distance, hollows and cavernous bunkers with precipitious sides. And the rough at Turnberry defied description. I’ve never seen so many first-class players having to hunt for lost balls — a rare reminder for them of what life is like for ordinary mortals.
One good joke emerged from the commentary.
Q: What’s the difference between praying in church and praying on a golf course?
A: On a golf course you really mean it.
Churlishly, I was rather pleased that Tiger Woods failed to make the cut. He’s obviously a great golfer, but somewhat deficient in common humanity. At any rate, his interactions with the public have a clinical air, and he often displays a kind of sulky petulance when his expectations — either of himself or of a particular course — aren’t met. One suspects that the softest part of him is the enamel on his perfect teeth. Tom Watson is, like Jack Nicklaus, a real, accessible, gentlemanly human being. He was very dejected after the play-off, but at the award ceremony his good-humoured courtesy was much in evidence.
And like most Irishmen I’ve loved him ever since he said that his favourite golf course in all the world was Ballybunion in Co. Kerry, which is a course I knew well in my childhood because my father was a member there and I often caddied for him — and later played the course myself.
