I was speaking recently at a software company very interested in mobile apps. One of their concerns had to do with which operating systems to support.  Should they do them all?  Just a couple? My advice was that three’s a crowd. Technical markets tend to divide like bettors at the racetrack where five percent win, [...]

WebOS, first from Palm and then from Hewlett Packard, came and went so fast most mobile software developers never even got a chance to play with it. Now HP has declared WebOS to be Open Source, placing the project (it’s really not a product anymore) under CEO Meg Whitman to show they haven’t totally given [...]

Microsoft last week lost a potential European customer for its cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 product over concerns about the Patriot Act allowing U.S. government access to to private data. UK defense contractor BAE Systems said they’d changed plans on advice of their lawyers. Smart lawyers. If we have to rely on lawyers for data security advice, [...]

Just a short thought. Apple has lost control of the iPad trademark in China but retains it in the rest of the world. Readers warn that China will be soon awash in iPad clones. ProView Technologies, the Taiwanese company that presently controls the iPad trademark, was near bankruptcy until yesterday. Apple has $80 billion in [...]

Verizon Wireless announced Friday that it was paying $3.6 billion to three cable TV companies — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks — in exchange for wireless licenses the companies bought in an FCC auction in 2005. Pundits are describing the deal, and especially its cross-marketing provisions, as revolutionary with the potential to [...]

Note — Reader consensus below seems to be that I’m the one drinking the Flav-r-ade in this post, so proceed at your own risk. That’s not how I see it, of course.  CNN asked me about this issue yesterday and I think it is pretty clear, but that may be in part a reflection of [...]

Sitting here in Santa Rosa drinking too much coffee while the turkey cooks I’ve been reading the Black Friday sale fliers and you know what’s missing? Desktop computers.  Radio Shack doesn’t even have a desktop on sale tomorrow and even Walmart has only one. This season marks the triumph of notebook and tablet computers I’d [...]

– I’ve been so busy getting my little movie ready for theaters I’ve hardly had a chance to write. So for a change here’s something not about Steve Jobs. Thailand is flooded, as we’ve all read, and the Thai hard disk industry has been adversely affected. But for all the doom-and-gloom stories I’ve read so [...]

Of all the reader suggestions for what I should do with my little film Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview, not one involved showing the movie in theaters. Yet that was the first thing that came to my mind. How old media-like of me and how new media-like of you.  So we’re opening November 16th for [...]

That young man with the waxed mustache and gallic countenance is my son Cole, age seven. We’ve been studying division, going on long walks with Sadie the dog, and thinking about walking together all the way across the USA, which would require by our calculation 138 days of walking with no days off. This has [...]