Last time we looked at Apple’s conversion from a computer company to a phone company that also makes computers. We considered why Apple doesn’t give a damn about enterprise sales, which explains their embrace of third-party enterprise components like Microsoft’s Exchange Server. Now we’ll look closer still at what plans — if any — Apple even has for personal computers in its future.
With impeccable timing, Mrs. Cringely last week stood in line four hours at the Apple Store to get her new iPhone 4. The line was cheerful, she said, Apple provided umbrellas to protect customers from the sun, bottles of water, and even pizza. I […]
Accidents happen to the best of companies. It is how those companies respond to big industrial accidents — how they learn and change as a result of those lessons — that shows the quality of an organization. One of the many readers to comment to me this week on BP’s situation in the Gulf of Mexico put it in the context of his own experience working as an engineer at Monsanto Chemical. His lesson is so compelling that I have reproduced it below in its entirety — Bob.
Readers reacted strongly to yesterday’s column about how to use Google AdWords/AdSense to punish BP through its web advertising effort aimed at influencing public opinion. Rather than respond through the comments I think this subject warrants a column of its own because I’d rather address the AdWords/AdSense click fraud aspect of the subject and leave BP and oil spills out of it for now.
Financier George Soros became famous for breaking the Bank of England. You can do the same thing right now to BP and help clean oil-covered birds in the process.
BP — the company accepting responsiblity for the current environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began as Imperial Oil, became Anglo-Persian Oil with its discovery of vast reserves in present-day Iran, then Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum, and now just BP — a huge multinational company that includes two of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil companies — Amoco and Sohio. BP has a lot of America in it but remains in many ways a very British concern, which is to say plodding and bound by bureaucracy. They tend to rely too much on tradition and good luck.
These are the first 100 questionnaires from the Cringely (NOT in silicon Valley) Startup Tour. Yes, I printed them out and stapled them together. Sometimes a man just has to do such things, even in the Internet Age. It helps me to get a visceral sense of an editing job that lies ahead. Throwing piles of paper around and feeling their heft brings a much greater sense of reality to this job. These first 100 total somewhere between 900 and 1000 pages and there are close to 200 questionnaires still to go!
Next week Apple is expected to announce a nifty new iPhone with true videophone support, so AT&T — for now Apple’s sole iPhone network provider in the USA — has preemptively imposed new smartphone data plans with a lower base price but also what appear to be restrictive caps on the total amount of data users can send and receive per month. While pundits like me are arguing whether this is better or worse for iPhone customers, the real AT&T strategy is being so far overlooked. It’s to get us all using smartphones, stupid.
