Accidental Empires, Part 3 — Preface to the original 1991 edition

accidental-195x300The woman of my dreams once landed a job as the girls’ English teacher at the Hebrew Institute of Santa Clara. Despite the fact that it was a very small operation, her students (about eight of them) decided to produce a school newspaper, which they generally filled with gossipy stories about each other. The premiere issue was printed on good stock with lots of extra copies for grandparents and for interested bystanders like me. The girls read the stories about each other, then read the stories about each other to each other, pretending that they’d never heard the stories before, much less written them. My cats do something like that, too, I’ve noticed, when they […]

Who’s your daddy? Intel swoons for Apple

Just days after I wrote a column saying Apple will dump Intel and make Macintosh computers with its own ARM-based processors, along comes a Wall Street analyst saying no, Intel will be taking over from Samsung making the Apple-designed iPhone and iPod chips and Apple will even switch to x86 silicon for future iPads. Well, who is correct?

Maybe both, maybe neither, but here’s what I think is happening.

Apple is dependent on Samsung for making most of its Cupertino-designed chips, yet Apple has grown to hate Samsung over time, seeing the Korean company as an intellectual property thief. So Apple wants out of the relationship, this much is clear to everyone.

Hear that? It’s HP founders Bill and Dave spinning in their graves

 

Corporations, especially big American corporations, file lawsuits all the time for many reasons. Often they sue to force others to comply with agreements or to punish non-compliance with the law. But sometimes they sue, well, just because they can. I suspect that is what’s happening in Hewlett Packard’s current fight over Autonomy, the UK software company HP bought two years ago for $11.1 billion. The HP board seems determined to demonize Autonomy founder Mike Lynch for being smarter than they are.

Given the smarts that HP board has shown in recent years, we may all be at risk of being sued by the company.

HP, its business faltering with no mobile strategy to speak of and its stock dropping, has been looking like stupid-on-a-stick for years […]

Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview available for preorder on Amazon.com

This DVD won’t ship until October, but it is ready for preorder right now on Amazon.com and might make a good Christmas gift for someone.

Additional material on the DVD not available anywhere else include a commentary audio track and my 2005 NeRDTV video interview with original Mac system programmer Andy Hertzfeld in which he talks about his Apple experiences and recounts the hilarious story of what happened when Steve Jobs apologized to Bill Gates for telling me that Microsoft had no taste. This 65 minute interview with Andy has never before been available in full resolution and is well worth having […]

The DARPA Way

Depending on who you are talking to there were several very different reasons why the Internet was created, whether it was military command and control (Curtis LeMay told me that), to create a new communication and commerce infrastructure (Al Gore), or simply to advance the science of digital communications (lots of people). But Bob Taylor says the Internet was created to save money. And since Bob Taylor was, more than anyone, the guy who caused the Internet to be created, well I’ll believe him.

Bob Taylor, probably best known for building and managing the Computer Systems Laboratory at XEROX PARC from which emerged advances including Ethernet, laser printing, and SmallTalk, was before that the DARPA program […]

Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview is on iTunes, but don’t tell anyone

My little film about Steve Jobs has finally made it to iTunes (now on Amazon and YouTube as well!) as a $3.99 rental, but you wouldn’t know it. Deeming the film “too controversial,” Apple has it on the site but they aren’t promoting it and won’t. The topic is “too sensitive” you see. It isn’t even listed in the iTunes new releases. You have to search for it. But it’s there.

Maybe I’m not even supposed to tell you.

Of course there is nothing controversial or insensitive about this movie, which everyone including the critics seems to like. It’s a different look at an interesting guy and some people seem to take […]

The tablet computer rumble

Last week Microsoft kinda-sorta announced its new Microsoft Surface tablet computer. This week will come a Google-branded tablet. Both are pitted against the mighty iPad. Both companies see opportunity because of what they perceive as a Steve Jobs blind spot. And both companies are introducing tablets under their own brands because they can’t their get OEM’s to do tablets correctly.

For all the speculation about why Microsoft or Google would risk offending hardware OEMs by introducing name branded tablets, the reality is that neither company really had any choice but to make the hardware.  In the commodity PC market, no one company is likely to be willing to make the investment necessary to compete with the […]

Is There a Google News Blacklist?

My relationship with Google News has always run hot and cold. No make that cold and tepid. From the very beginning of Google News as an experiment back in 2001, they refused to index my work, which they said was my fault, not theirs (“they” being an algorithm attached to an e-mail box, of course). But new evidence has recently come to light suggesting to me that Google News has an actual blacklist.

For those not familiar with the expression, “blacklist” usually refers to Hollywood screen and television writers from the 1950’s McCarthy era who were thought to be communist sympathizers and were banned from working openly in the entertainment industry as a […]

The Smell of Entrepreneurism in the Morning

Today is a great day for I, Cringely and for me. It is the day we launch the special web site for Cringely’s (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour. I wrote a column last month announcing the Tour, which you can read here, but today marks the actual start of this summer’s adventure, because it opens nominations.

Visit the new web site here, but please remember to come back and finish reading this column.

This new web site is strictly for readers to nominate startup companies, discuss them, vote for favorites, then see the results as we come up with the top 24 companies in six different categories.

You have to […]

New Cringely Posts on AOL

If you care about real estate, politics, or economics, you might find interesting this pair of posts I made this week on AOL’s Housingwatch blog:

http://www.housingwatch.com/2009/12/28/fannie-and-freddie-more-than-politics-as-usual/

http://www.housingwatch.com/2009/12/30/fannie-freddie-ii-the-wrath-of-obama/