Marketing
Displacing entrenched technology
Successful technology — and I’m using the term broadly here, not just limiting myself to digital tech — has a propensity to entrench itself and then become very hard to displace, at least directly. A classic example is the internal combustion automobile (which I’ll call the “gas auto” for shorthand). Commercial production started over 130 […]
iPad Mini: the Goldilocks iPad for kids
With the growing swell of articles about the still-hypothetical iPad Mini — see, for example, this thoughtful analysis over at Vodkapundit — I find it interesting that I see very little written about one of the hottest consumer niches for the iPad: kids. Which is surprising, since kids desperately want to get their hands on […]
Why Apple wins
Last spring, I bought an Apple TV device to go along with a new large-screen TV in our living room. Setup was simple, and I kept discovering new things that I could do with it. It gets used a lot more than either the Blu Ray player or the DirecTV satellite box also attached to […]
So long, Steve, and Godspeed.
The second personal computer I ever owned[1] was an Apple II, with no floppy drive. I bought it, along with a small color TV, from my close friend Robert Trammel while we were both living in Houston sometime around 1980.We had already spent hours together programming on it, then carefully (though not always successfully) saving […]
Fascinating look inside Microsoft
The KIN debacle (product canceled after five weeks; reports of actual phones sold range from 8,000 all the way down to 500), followed by Microsoft’s announcement of layoffs, has triggered on-line discussion among Microsoft employees, past and present. Even recognizing the self-selecting and inevitably self-serving nature of those comments, they still reflect serious, serious problems […]