Thirty years and 50 pounds of blubber ago, between various teaching jobs and being fired from computer companies, I wrote for a New York-based magazine called The Runner, which was long ago absorbed by Runners World. I took the gig to force myself to get in shape and it worked, which is why one year I ran the Boston Marathon. Understand that my editor at the time, a guy named Amby Burfoot, had won the Boston Marathon, so my finish well back in the pack was professionally meaningless, but that memory gives me some sense of the scene yesterday in Boston when those bombs went off. I know what the air was like, what the […]
Why elite marathoners don’t (yet) wear wristwatch mobile phones
Apple is greedy says Fallon Cringely
My son Fallon, who is six and still hasn’t lost any teeth, has a beef with Apple, iTunes, and the iOS App Store. “Apple is greedy,” Fallon says. But he has come up with a way for Cupertino to improve its manners through a revised business model.
Fallon would like to buy more apps for his iPod Touch, but the good ones cost money (what Fallon calls computer money) and he has been burned in the past by apps that weren’t really as good as the reviews suggested, probably because the reviewers weren’t six.
“If I buy an app and I don’t like it, I want Apple to give me my money back,” says Fallon. “Or maybe they […]
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is damage control
Was I the only one to be surprised by Apple this week announcing the arrival in the summer of yet another new version of OS X? It’s my belief OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion doesn’t represent an Apple triumph but is more damage control and preparing us for iTV.
This OS X release was not only unexpected, it’s an aberration in Apple’s relentless process of showing that it isn’t Microsoft with Redmond’s tortured OS releases. A new OS version from Apple has come every 18-24 months, yet here we are with Mountain Lion — POW! — less than a year after the launch of OS X 10.7 Lion. What gives?
For all the hype, Lion […]
For Mobile OS's, Three's a Crowd
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, 10 percent break even while 85 percent lose. Turning these numbers on their head and applying them to mobile OS revenue, IOS (iPhone, iPad, iGizmo to be named later) will generate 85 percent, Android 10 percent (because it is Open Source and free) leaving only five percent max for mobile OS number three, which could be Blackberry or Windows Phone 7 […]
For Mobile OS’s, Three’s a Crowd
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, 10 percent break even while 85 percent lose. Turning these numbers on their head and applying them to mobile OS revenue, IOS (iPhone, iPad, iGizmo to be named later) will generate 85 percent, Android 10 percent (because it is Open Source and free) leaving only five percent max for mobile OS number three, which could be Blackberry or Windows Phone 7 […]
