People have told me they feel sorry for Microsoft these days, that we should be thanking them for all they have done for the industry, that Bill Gates should be praised for “placing a PC on every desktop.” I see what you did there. You almost got me. You see, I think about what the…
The Secret app is a new iPhone app for sharing photos and text anonymously. The sharing model of Secret is unusual and intriguing to me. According to their FAQ: Your secrets are delivered anonymously to the people in your Contacts who are on Secret. Ok, so right there, although it may not be obvious on…
Back in 2010, when Twitter was changing their API from Basic Auth to oAuth (the first Twitter-pocalypse) we had various conversations with the Twitter dev team regarding challenges that micro-controller environments have with implementing such protocols. John Kalucki (@jkalucki now ex-Twitter) made the following suggestion: Why not have the controller proxy through a full-featured webserver…
Microsoft was hoping the exclusive availability of “real Office” would be enough to give their Surface tablet an advantage. It turned out that wasn’t enough and, after a year of sluggish (non-existent) sales, Microsoft had to write off almost a billion dollars in inventory that they couldn’t sell. Recently, they slashed prices to try to…
I think I’ve mentioned it before, but my wife watches a lot of TV. She does not, however, particularly like watching “TV” on her computer or iPad etc. She wants to watch TV on a TV. One day, she saw something about Chromecast and so she went online and bought one. Usually I research and…
Tim Bajarin is a wonderful and vastly experienced PC analyst, but his story, A Look Back and A Look Ahead for Microsoft misses the point as badly as Microsoft and Ballmer themselves did, and ironically, for much the same reason: only looking at the world through a PC lens. Microsoft had a chance to remain relevant, and…
I’ve been critical of Google on this blog. I’ve been critical of Apple, and others too. These companies deserve praise for what they have done. But that shouldn’t give them a free pass forever. I take grief for bashing Google (nobody seems to mind when I bash Apple). But I wanted to take a moment…
The recent post from Drew Crawford “Why mobile web apps are slow” has received a lot of attention and provides a rather powerful argument for the topic. I’m not here to dispute anything in that post; it’s good information, go read it if you are interested in the topic. The point at the end of the day is…
By now you have probably seen the screen shots of iOS 7. It is extremely white, wow, and yes, it’s “flat” too. I have not taken the deep dive into all the features and changes yet, but already I can see that it’s a much bigger shift than I first thought. There have been some…
There are a steady stream of posts about which platform makes more sense to develop for, in terms of market size, chances for success etc. This post isn’t about that. This post is about the development experience itself, what it’s like building apps for the two platforms. A few years ago I would have said,…
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