Tag Archives: technology

By James Kwak

From The New York Times:

“Consumers will be able to integrate the new phones with a number of Microsoft products, including Zune music and video content, the Bing search engine, business products like Microsoft’s OneNote software and the Xbox gaming platform.”

Apart from possibly the Xbox, who cares? How can it be that the master of bundling now has nothing that anyone wants as part of a bundle?

By James Kwak

The recent New York Times story on Facebook Credits was just one of a slew of articles that have been coming out recently on this topic. (Hint: When that happens, it’s usually because the company in question is putting on a PR campaign, which means they are pushing stories to the media in an attempt to build buzz.) According to the generally positive reporting, Credits are “a virtual currency system that some day could turn into a multibillion-dollar business.”

As far as I can make out,* Credits are points that you can buy with real money and that are stored with your Facebook account data on the mother ship in Palo Alto (just like your bank keeps track of the Dollars you have on account there). You can use Credits to pay for a variety of stuff in Facebook apps, and Facebook takes a cut (currently thirty percent) of the value of any transaction using Credits. The story is that in the long run, you may be able to use Credits to buy anything, not just stuff on Facebook, positioning Facebook as a potential leader in electronic payments.

Continue reading →

By James Kwak

(This is Part 2 of 2; Part 1 covers the shift in personal computing from the age of the standalone PC to the age of cloud computing.)

We left off with the idea that personal computing was inexorably, though slowly shifting toward a Web-based model in which our computers’ main purpose is to run browsers and we spend most of our time on the Internet. A decade ago when this idea became popular it was not particularly practical, because you simply couldn’t do very interesting things in a browser; it was originally designed, after all, for reading static web pages. But in the past decade, web sites have become much richer and interactive — think about something like Gmail, with its automatic refreshing and keyboard shortcuts, or Google Documents, which allows multiple people to edit a document at the same time — to the point where most of what people do most of the time can be done in a browser.

But then there was Apple.

Continue reading →

By James Kwak

This week, Apple passed Microsoft to become the most valuable technology company in the world (measured by the market value of its stock).* I’ve been wondering about Apple and, in particular, why “apps” — which at first glance struck me as a giant step backward in computing technology — have gotten so much buzz in the media. Then I bought an iPad, and while I understand apps a little better, I’m still perplexed. But since this isn’t a particularly technology-savvy audience, this is going to take some setting up. The background is here in Part 1; Part 2 will be coming shortly.

(Note that here I’m talking about personal computing, which is what people like you and I do on our own; enterprise computing is something very different that I’ve written about before, and still largely takes place on mainframe computers.)

A Little Background

Rather than recap the entire history of computing (hilarious synopsis here, hat tip Brad DeLong), I’ll start in the early 1990s. At this point, many people had personal computers, but for the most part they weren’t connected to anything except maybe a printer. (Actually, in the early 1980s my father brought home one of those primitive modems where you actually placed your phone receiver into a socket to communicate, so we could log into the mainframe at his university, but that was the exception.)

Continue reading →

By James Kwak

So, after questioning the iPad, I bought one.* My primary motivation was that I wanted to be able to watch old TV episodes on the commute to and from my internship this summer, and I think an iPod Touch is just too small. I also bought an Android phone, because my three-year-old Motorola RAZR2 v9m (who comes up with these product names, anyway?) developed a crack in the hinge, and because I wanted the best camera I could get on a phone. (My #2 use for a phone is not email — it’s taking pictures and videos of my daughter.)

Anyway, catching up on the last three years of mobile technology has provided ample food for thought. I have a long post on the Apple-Google(-Microsoft) war rolling around in my head somewhere, which I will hopefully write down later this week. In the meantime, here’s John Gruber‘s verdict on Microsoft:

“Three years ago, just before the original iPhone shipped, here’s what Steve Ballmer said in an interview with USA Today’s David Lieberman:

‘There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.’

“Not only was he wrong about the iPhone, but he was even more wrong about Windows Mobile. Three years ago Ballmer was talking about 60, 70, 80 percent market share. This week, Gartner reported that Windows Mobile has dropped to 6.8 percent market share in worldwide smartphone sales, down dramatically from 10.2 percent a year ago.”

Continue reading →

By James Kwak

“I’ve given lectures on incivility around the globe. When I ask audiences whether anyone considers sending e-mail or texts during meetings uncivil, almost everyone raises their hand.

“Then, when I ask whether anyone in the audience sends texts or e-mail during meetings, about two-thirds acknowledge the habit. (Presumably, there are still more who don’t want to admit it.)”

That’s Christine Pearson, from her article in The New York Times.

Continue reading →