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11.27.07 After Thanksgiving Day Sale at the Little Old Lady Store!
# 11.26.07 Another gem from the IHT: "Taking marriage private," on the history of government's recognition and regulation of marriage, and a laundry list of (non-gay) reasons why that regulation should end. # International Herald Tribune: "In a growing world, milk is the new oil." I'm going to write a musical called "Milk!" # 11.24.07 Roseville launches Styrofoam recycling plant; this is fantastic news. As far as I was aware, polystyrene-based Styrofoam was not recyclable at all. Glad someone's making the effort. # 11.14.07 This just in: Music Mogul Sees Face Of God, Reports Feeling "Profound Lightness", Speaks In Tounges, Before Being Struck by Bus. # 11.06.07 Everyone in Mac-land is down on yesterday's announcement from Google & Co. I agree with the central premise of their argument (committees are good for standards and laws but inherently fucked when it comes to developing functional products) but I think it's being wrongly applied here. This thing is clearly Google's baby. Everyone else in the "consortium"? They're what we would normally call "customers". Google makes money from the web. It wants to make money from mobile phones, which means mobile phones need to get on the web. They've already tried their hand at developing applications for: MobileOSX, WinMo, Symbian, Blackberry, Palm and Java. What a nightmare that must be. And even at that, most of those systems (OS X notwithstanding) have crap-ass web browsers, which does Google no good at all. So what do you do if you're Google and you want to develop a market? Build a new market. If you're a mobile phone maker or operator, you're probably shaking right now watching customers defect to AT&T and Apple. And you're probably thinking, "how the hell am I going to get the kind of top-notch developers I need to write a whole new platform/interface to compete with this?" Because overnight, Apple pointed to the future of the handheld market. Google is offering to take these disparate handheld manufacturers there for them. It's an easy proposition: Let Google do the heavy lifting on your OS. It's free, so you don't need to spend ANY money (or risk failure) on development, just roll your own features in (based on clearly defined system API's) and you've got your web-savvy mobile phone of the future. Google benefits by actually owning a new segment of the market. Their web-apps and sites are GUARANTEED to work well on their own software! It's like Microsoft giving away Windows to sell copies of Office, only more sustainable. And by signing all these handset guys on to their "consortium", they pretty much guarantee that they'll get their OS (and thus better access to their products) in the hands of a reasonable percentage of the market. I'm not suggesting that Google and Android are going to take over the mobile phone world. But they don't need to. Capture a relevant portion of the market and Google's got a solid foothold. If this OS turns out to be something workable, and from Google I expect it will, then they've won. # I just noticed this: when reading an article on the New York Times website, in Firefox, if you double click a non-linked word (I just clicked "ingot") a pop-up window appears (regardless of whether you have blocking turned on) and shows you the definition of that word. I hate when websites respond in unexpected ways, but this was something of a pleasant surprise. # « October 2007 | archive index | December 2007 » built with movabletype |
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