Hello world! I really mean it!

How you doing?

I hope you are doing really great. Sadly, I’m not that fine. So I’d like to share my story with you all.

First of all: introduction.

I’m Dave; I’m an Italian guy living in Brazil since January. I’m 28. I’m married with a stunning Brazilian girl. And I’m broke

I have a 5 years old Powerbook G4. I know, I know… it’s pretty old and it’s time to change it. BUT it’s a really damn good notebook. It’s still fast (way faster than… you’re gonna see it soon), his battery still holds1 hour and 15 minutes with a single charge, and it runs OsX.

The problem:

My buddy is dead. It doesn’t charge, it doesn’t get power from the outlet. The battery is drained.

The solution:

Fix it is a problem, here in Brazil. For a damn original power adapter they try to charge me R$430 (242$ !!!!!!!!!!) and we don’t even know if the problem lays there or in the Powerbook itself… what a bad situation. Isn’t it?

So, what to do? Buy a new Mac? Nice idea, but I’m really short on $$$. Buy the most expensive power adapter in the world? hahah NO WAY!

And so?

Wait a little bit and use my wife’s Sony Vaio.

Urgh.

I just have to resist a month; I’m going to visit my family in Italy in December. And I will fix my PB there.

Can I stand 30 Days of Vista?

I think yes, but it won’t be easy. This is why I opened this funny blog. To share my adventure with the world.

Stay tuned.

P.S.: note for native English speakers: I’m sorry, my English is not good as yours. So, please, forgive me if you find odd stuff and terrible errors in my text. Ok? Thanks

Snow Leopard에서 Flip4Mac을 이용해서 wmv 파일을 재생하면, indexing 같은 것이 아주 느리게 실행되서, 영상 중간으로 skip을 못하는 현상이 있다.

그냥 다른 Player를 쓰거나 참고 쓰려고 했는데, 역시 구글 찾아 보니 해결책이 있다.

• http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-799290.html

요점은 Flip4Mac Preference Pane의 Player/Advanced 를 눌러서 Quicktime Player를 등록하면 된단다. Import를 열기 전에 수행한다는 내용인데, 영상의 Index정보를 그냥 쓴다는 얘기인지 불확실 하지만 되긴 된다. 단 조금 더 느리게 열린다는 것

• http://imgur.com/3vZqK.png

TechRepublic’s Jason Hiner has a post up with the provocative title “How to Save the PC,” including a reader petition aimed at Microsoft and Apple. From the name, I thought it involved a strategy for keeping traditional PCs relevant in an era of powerful phones and an almost-omnipresent Internet. But Jason’s crusade is both less lofty and very sensible: He thinks that Windows and OS X should invisibly partition hard disks into separate sections for the operating system, user settings, and user documents and other data, thereby helping to shield irreplaceable  stuff from damage and making it easier to get back up and running if you have an OS catastrophe.

Makes sense to me. I’ve always been surprised that operating-system companies in general haven’t put way more emphasis on features designed to protect data–Time Machine, the flagship feature of Apple’s OS X 10.5 Leopard being a notable exception. Microsoft has an amazingly long history of providing Windows backup apps that are unsatisfactory in one way or another: The one in Windows 7 is much better than Windows Vista’s, but only the version in higher-end editions of Win 7 can back up to a network drive. Which seems a little like a car company cheaping out on the airbags in its least pricey cars.

It’s not just OS companies, though. I use Photoshop more than any traditional app that isn’t a browser. The whole point of the program is to create deeply sophisticated documents, ones that can be mighty hard to recreate from scratch. And Photoshop is bursting at the seams with features–but there’s no way to auto-save your work, a simple option that would make it really, really hard to lose your work when Photoshop crashes. (Which it does, at least on my Mac.)

In the world of Web-based apps such as Google Docs and Zoho and Microsoft’s upcoming Office Web Apps, seamless, automatic backup of everything is the default way of doing things. Can anyone explain to me why it’s not that way everywhere there’s software–with versioning and unlimited undo so you can restore your documents to exactly the state you desire?

This is one of the better ‘Get a Mac’ ads in recent memory, and, as John Gruber notes, no doubt a response to Microsoft’s ‘Laptop Hunter’ campaign.

Elimination

If you want to control a Mac OSX machine -FROM a PC

TightVNC will do the job.

On the Mac – remember to turn on VNC sharing under:

System pref.-> Sharing -> Apple Remote Desktop -> Premissions -> VNC-Viewers may…..

(Here you could also turn on password protection – preferable)

It’s incredibly hard to interpret Steve Jobs’s letter about his health, sent to all Apple employees, as anything but troubling:

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

Every fiber in me, even the ones that irrationally insist that Jobs is fine, is screaming about this. I don’t readily see how this can be good by any measure, and especially worrisome is the ghost that suggests Jobs is really, truly sick — as in, cancer sick — and that this media progression of his condition from bad to worse is planned to ease the impact of the news.

But as I said before, I don’t think going out like this is what Jobs is all about. This would be a flimsy veil to a tremendous deception, and I refuse to believe that’s how Jobs wants to be remembered. That might be an overly-hopeful — some would say delusional — pool of crazy rationalization skills right there, but I’m sold on it. If Jobs is terminally ill, he will not let his last impression to his fans, his employees and his investors suggest he was a cowardly man who intentionally sugarcoated his condition for the sake of…what, exactly?

Nothing. For the sake of nothing.

And that’s why I continue to insist that through all of this, perhaps a cigar really is a cigar and the subtexts, while compelling, aren’t true.

On hopeful note that (very weakly) corroborates my opinion, the NY Time’s Brad Stone writes:

Mr. Jobs offered no new details about the cause of his health problems. In a letter last week that was meant to calm fears about his condition, he called it a “hormonal imbalance” that was robbing his body of proteins and causing him to lose weight. Mr. Jobs recovered from pancreatic cancer after surgery in 2004 but has appeared unusually gaunt at recent appearances.

Two people who are familiar with Mr. Jobs’s current medical treatment said he was not suffering from a recurrence of cancer, but a condition that was preventing his body from absorbing food. Doctors have also advised him to cut down on stress, which may be making the problem worse, these people said.

Whatever the case, godspeed Steve. Here’s wishing you the best.

Just managed to screw up my terminal by going into the ‘Window settings’ dialogue box, and hitting ‘Use settings as default’ – while I was telnetted into something.

For some reason, the telnet session was taken as a default setting too. So every time I started terminal it tried to telnet immediately to the remote host (which wasn’t there).

The only way I could get a command-line session was either to do a CTRL-Z to put the telnet session into the background. The alternative was to switch on the remote host, open terminal, telnet to the remote host and then telnet back!

Fortunately, I found this very useful page and the instructions there fixed it:

http://kleeschulte.blogspot.com/2008/05/apple-regedit-changing-terminalapp.html

Speculation hasn’t stopped since Steve Jobs begrudgingly penned his letter to the Apple community on the issue of his weight loss.  Despite his dismissive tone – which is characteristic of a healthy Jobs, not one staring his own mortality in the eye – I think Jobs did what he needed to do to put the issue to rest at an official level.  Remaining speculation is just that – speculation.

It seems the public won’t be happy unless the man shares every intimate detail of his health with them, which is not his duty nor responsibility.  He issued an official statement yesterday in which he established his position.  If the man is lying to the public about his health and ability to lead Apple, I expect the punishment to the company stock to be swift and rightfully severe.  If that turns out to be the case, any damages AAPL suffers would be fully and completely deserved. 

But behavior like this would be uncharacteristically short-sighted for Apple and its executive board.  This is a team that has doggedly clung to its vision, and as a result is enjoying a renaissance like none other in the modern technology business.

Jobs is many things, but he’s not one to put his company in a position of being utterly flogged by shareholders by lying to sustain the short term.  Many times, Jobs has done things – or refused to do things – against the grain of the street’s desires, and his stock was punished.  The man has his vision, and right or wrong, he stands by it.  As an Apple enthusiast, sometimes that’s maddening, sometimes poetic.  But mostly poetic, as the results speak for themselves.

Just because there are “questions” remaining doesn’t mean Jobs is softcoating the issue or lying to the public.  Even if Jobs released more medical data to the world, endocrine issues are very hard for all but specialists to interpret, and therefore more information would lead to even wilder speculation.  People would Google and armchair-doctor every snippet of data, and then come to their own uneducated conjecture and interpretation of complicated medical circumstance.

That’s a no-win in this age of the Internet, where everyone has a voice and your average idiot could produce a viral meme that spreads across the blogs and damages the company anyway.  Specialized, complex matters like those of a cancer survivor’s endocrinology are not fit for layperson consumption or analysis.

I think Steve has done his duty.  There is always speculation about him and his health, and that is the curse of being a celebrity CEO.  If Steve is lying, then shame on him AND Apple management.  The consequences will be brutal, and the entire executive team will be implicated in what essentially is stock-manipulation fraud.  The lawsuits will be terrifying, and I’ll be right there in the condemnation chorus.

And at that point, Steve’s lasting legacy will be that of a coward and a liar.  Being an egomaniac, that’s no path to immortality.

And because of all this, I think Steve Jobs has told us the truth.

BGR: RIM’s Q3 results beat expectations:

Just after the North American markets closed this Thursday, RIM announced its Q3 earnings. While many analysts believed that RIM would have a hard time meeting its adjusted earnings forcast, RIM actually exceeded them, but just barely. In this day and age, exceeding a forecast is nothing short of a coup, even if by a fraction of a percentage point. RIM’s revenue came in at $2.78 billion, up 7.9% from Q2, while net income totaled $396.5 million (adjusted net income stood at $477.3 million). Earnings were $0.83 per share diluted, which beat expectations by $0.01. As for Q4, RIM is expecting strong sales which strangely enough is thanks in part to previous delays for the Bold and Storm. Because both devices were released at the tail end of Q3, it is expected that the high demand for them will help RIM weather what has been predicted by some to be one of the worst holiday retail seasons in recent history.

No matter how you cut it, RIM has an incredibly strong foothold with BlackBerry. If you look around in just about any public place, chances are you’ll see BlackBerries more than anything else. RIM’s consumer campaign lacks the sexiness and shine of Apple’s push into mobile phones, but it’s there, across several models and wireless providers.

RIM’s lead over the iPhone isn’t to be taken for granted, but for now, good on RIM — they pulled off a good quarter in the middle of horrible macroeconomic times. I think the Bold will do well for 2009, but I have my doubts about the Storm. I realize that software updates are out there that improve the experience, but all they do is fix bugs that shouldn’t have shipped in the first place.

On the flip side of this rivalry, I fully expect Apple to do well with its post-holiday numbers as well.

In the ultimate analysis, I stand by my original opinion: the iPhone will eventually eclipse RIM’s smartphone market share. Such is the strength of a real platform as opposed to a family of good devices.

Ever since writing my piece on why the BlackBerry Storm is a fairly lousy smartphone — perhaps, in fact, a massive mistake — I’ve been deluged by email asking why I switched back to a BlackBerry when I had an iPhone. Here’s my answer.

I’m a BlackBerry guy and have been since the BB 7130. Verizon is my carrier, and for all the idiocy they seem proud to display, their service is indeed excellent. For the longest time, the BlackBerry had been the best mobile phone platform I had ever used, and while its interface might not win any awards and its Java-based OS occasionally becomes considerably retarded, I loved each new BlackBerry I got.

Until the iPhone came along, at which point I got serious, hardcore phone envy.

Being an Apple guy, I was completely intrigued by the iPhone, but didn’t move to it right away. At the time I was working in a large corporation where Exchange was the groupware norm, and moving to what was then considered a first-gen concept phone with no Exchange support would have been counterproductive. So, I decided to wait.

The iPhone started kicking all sorts of ass, I changed jobs to a local consulting firm where being plugged into Exchange wasn’t a requirement, the iPhone SDK was announced and then the iPhone 3G made its debut. The stars aligned.

For business use, the difference between an iPhone and a BlackBerry is rapidly apparent, especially if you’re used to the lightning-fast, whizbang efficiency of a BlackBerry. First, the AT&T service where I work was very spotty, and it wasn’t because of the early iPhone 2.0 and 2.0.x firmware 3G glitches. I was dropping three calls a day from various areas, which, when your mobile phone is your only phone, is unacceptable.

Carrier issues aside, the navigation and usage of the iPhone turned out to be frustrating to me. I hated how the phone would lock itself constantly, even on the longest time-delay setting. I didn’t care for how easy it was to misdial someone, especially when on the road. While I was decent two-thumbing the virtual keyboard, it took a good deal of concentration and was no substitute for a physical one. I hated the lack of one-key speed dials and shortcuts to apps.

But the biggie for me is more esoteric: I couldn’t stand the slowness of navigation — not that it was laggy or unresponsive, but moving from one task to next was a slow experience because of workflow design. Open email, hit check, wait 20 seconds, exit back to home. Hit SMS. Wait for it to load. Back to home, watch pretty fade animation. Open Mobile Safari, scroll, back to home. Hit phone again, then wait, back to address book because I forgot something.

The single-threaded, no background apps nature of iPhone made everyday business-type events far slower than on a BlackBerry, which has background processing. If you’ve seen a modern BlackBerry in the hands of a power user, you should: you can get an absolute dizzying amount of stuff done in a very short time. RIM’s got that down cold.

And the push email, the coup de grace and RIM’s claim to fame. Since I don’t use Exchange anymore nor do I have MobileMe, I had no push email. It was like being back in 1999, waiting for the iPhone’s email client to poll my multiple accounts to retrieve email. On the BlackBerry — and this really can’t be understated — email just flows in, reliably, perfectly, all the time. Once you get used to this, it’s almost impossible not to have it.

So that, all told, is why I decided to move back to the BlackBerry. I’m back on Verizon using a Curve.

So, do I hate the iPhone or think it a teenager’s toy?

No. In fact, I predict Apple will surpass RIM’s smartphone marketshare sometime in 2009 or, at latest, early 2010. And there is virtually nothing RIM can do to stop it.

As I’ve said several times before on this blog, the iPhone is a platform, not a device. The app ecosystem is already huge, and it’s not just stupid proof-of-concept games. The SDK is robust and tuned. Developers can make real livings writing quality iPhone apps. The iPhone is more a pocketable computer with phone functionality built in than it is a phone with application and internet capability.

The iPhone is a computer with an SDK and vibrant, eager developer community.

RIM can’t compete with that, no matter how often it says it’s going to have an app store and OTA app installs and boy howdy we’re going to out-Apple Apple.

No, they won’t. I quite like RIM’s stuff (Storm notwithstanding) and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future, but before long, the most dominant smartphone platform on planet Earth will be the iPhone.

Look, I’ll just cut to the chase, because sites like Boy Genius Report, Engadget and Gizmodo have all the details covered in gory detail.

Bottom line: the BlackBerry Storm isn’t all that great.  And this is coming from someone who had a bunch of BlackBerries, moved to the iPhone, and then (gasp!) went back to BlackBerry.

At this point, Apple should send a nice basket of wine and chocolate to RIM with a pleasant, holiday-themed thank you card.

Why?

Even IF the Storm’s OS wasn’t unpolished, and even IF the UI metaphors are completely new to most BlackBerry users, and even IF a lack of a real keyboard won’t eventually come to be known as a deterrent to BlackBerry users expecting a BlackBerry experience, the real problem is that the phone is just a device, not a platform.  Regardless of RIM’s SDK efforts, this is the only touchscreen BlackBerry on the planet, and here in the States it’s only available on Verizon.  And there’s no real buzz about a robust SDK, and there’s no gathering swell of users dying to write apps for a phone that, thus far, has been completely lukewarm.

Contrast that to the iPhone.  Yes, it’s only available on one US carrier, but the SDK has been here for quite some time, and it’s real and polished and usable.  The app market for the iPhone is quite real, as any decent iPhone developer could have told you after the first month or two of enjoying brisk downloads and word-of-mouth interest.  And the keystone of it all is that Apple is behind it: they have the marketing savvy and development resources to truly build buzz and erect an entire ecosystem around the iPhone to draw people into the fold.

Because the iPhone is a mobile computing platform, not a phone.  Amazing how many people don’t yet understand that this is Apple’s coup de grace.

The BlackBerry Storm, in my opinion, is a wonderful illustration of how Apple’s innovation and market appeal can force a smart company like RIM to invest millions of dollars in a product that’s way outside its core competency.  You don’t see Apple trying to create a full-on enterprise/e-mail device, do you?

You don’t, and you won’t.  Apple will just continue to gather mindshare as dozens of imitators try to absorb their share of the touchscreen multimedia pie.

So what exactly did RIM just do with the Storm?

Validated the hell out of Apple’s innovation, technology and — because RIM fell short with the Storm — position in the market.  Like every other company that released its ‘iPhone killer’ only to see it heavily discounted after six months of slow sales.

I’m a BlackBerry guy, and I wanted to move to the Storm and love it like a brother.  Unfortunately, even I wasn’t prepared for how unfinished (read: rushed) it is.

I have a feeling Verizon will be getting boatloads of returns on the thing.

Related:

A cloud hangs over BlackBerry Storm

RIM cuts profit and sales goals

Over the past two days in various stores, I have noticed a trend as prominently as I have ever noticed any shopping behavior before: netbooks are the real deal.  Costco, Best Buy, name it – the most popular products are in this new genre of PC, and they’re drawing interest from all types of everyday users.  You can’t stand at one for very long without a line forming behind you, and everyone who walks by one invariably mentions how they would love to have one for the coffee table or bedroom or kitchen.

If you look at Amazon’s top sellers in computers, you’ll notice netbooks’ impressive showing: they command the top three spots as well as the tenth.  In the mix are two Macs and a few TVs/monitors that have huge incentives against them right now.

It’s come to the point where mobile technology has advanced enough that offering  such a small, cheap computer is entirely viable. The keyboards and screen sizes are tiny and not something you’d want to use to edit photos, but they are entirely functional for a majority of everyday computing tasks.  This post is being written on a borrowed Acer Aspire One with 8.9” screen using MS Live Writer, and it’s completely serviceable.  Yes, I’m far more comfortable on my Mac, but seeing how this machine costs something like $350 retail, it represents a value and statement of commodity computing that Apple can’t touch.

I would guess that Apple won’t be ignoring this segment much longer. I know they’ve expressly said they won’t get into low-cost utility computers, but I don’t see how they can ignore it outright while these machines continue to blow the doors off sales numbers from more “traditional” notebooks.  Netbooks are where PC manufacturers are investing right now, and that means this market will mature quickly.  I hope Apple gets in the fray after the early cruft of the market flakes away and some real trends emerge; they could be the game-changer.

Cupertino, give us a cheap netbook Mac, and we’ll be all over it.

A friend asked me to test out the newly launched Samsung Omnia SGH-i900. But rather than do the usual indepth product review I thought I’d look at it from the angle of the common user – my wife. If you still want to read one of those in-depth product reviews, click on the links below:

TrustedReviews: Samsung Omnia i900
CNETAsia: Samsung Omnia SGH-i900 (8GB)
Wassup: Samsung Omnia – New 3G iPhone Killer?
Pocketnow: Review – Samsung Omnia i900

So what do I like about the Omnia? It comes in a beautiful box that reminds me of those expensive luxury watches from Switzerland. Thanks to the Samsung heritage of great LCD panels, the Omnia boasts the best LCD screen I’ve ever come across barring those beautiful Samsung LCD computer monitors. Beats the iphone and every portable wannabee when it comes to crisp, clear display.

I only have a couple of gripes about the Omnia: (1) it takes close to 1 minute to power up. If I were to come across someone having a heart attack and I needed to make a call and unfortunately my Omnia was powered off, the guy will be close to death’s door before I can reach someone on the emergency hotline; (2) the back panel gets warm when the display is on – not toasty hot – but warm. Which is great for winter when you need something to warm your hands but very lousy during hot summer days in Hong Kong. 

One more thing: I am not a geek but certainly after 22 years of being in the IT industry, I am no newbie either. But I can tell you that you can get really frustrated trying to connect to your WiFi with this phone. I’ve been trying to do it for two days now and I still haven’t found the magic sequence to connect to my WiFi at home. My iPod Touch took about a minute to find and connect to my WiFi. My favorite BlackBerry Pearl managed to get connected in under a minute as well. So why can’t I get the Omnia connected? Beats the hell out of me. Fortunately I am not alone. Lots more folks shouting for help out on the WWW (just type – I can’t connect to WiFi on Omnia).

So we go back to the topic of this article: Do you buy a phone for its features or ease-of-use? Apple has shown that if you can make a phone easy-to-use while still being cool, people will buy it. Manufacturers like to think that if you stick a supercomputer on a handheld device, people will buy it. Yes, I am sure a few geeks would love to get their hands on such a device. But time and again, consumer statistics and common sense tell us that people like to use things that are simple to use, and oh yes, it does as advertise (OSX vs Windows).

I’m not taking a swipe at Windows. I am writing this blog on a Windows XP PC (I have a Mac too). But when it comes right down to it, the more elegant and simple a device is, the more people are drawn to it. Wll you buy a sleek, sexy, curvey jacquar or a tank? Both can bring you from point A to B. But you only need to know how to steer, where the gas and break peddals are to drive a Jag.

So you tell me!

Arguably, the funnest animation movie I’ve seen so far. It’s amazing how they’ve managed to tell a story with so little dialogue. The Mac references are a great touch, and all the pristine white robots on board the Axiom look like they will turn into Mac designs in the near future.

Must watch movie.

Now I have to twiddle my thumbs until they finally release Tropic Thunder and The Pineapple Express in Singapore.

I finally made the jump and I am a proud iPhone owner. Impressions after a day of usage:

• It has to be the single-most gorgeous thing I have held in the palm of my hand. It is really really beautiful.
• It did feel heavier than I thought it would when I first held it, but now, it feels very comfortable.
• Typing on it in the first few hours, did make want to pull my hair out, but like Apple likes to claim, once you learn to trust the keyboard, it becomes easy. I definitely prefer this over T9.
• Haven’t gotten to really speed-test 3G, but WiFi speed is quite good for browsing and email.
• That said, YouTube performance is lacking – I haven’t been able to watch YouTube as seamlessly as I had hoped to watch.
• I’m not sure if this is a feature per-se, (but if it is, it’s a nice little touch) – 3G is completely switched off if you are connected to a WiFi network. Apart from the benefits of not having to pay for 3G, it should defnitely help battery life too.
• The AppStore is really awesome – the whole experience of downloading and installing applications – is so clean and so well thought-out.
• Talking about third-party apps – the most impressive ones so far are FaceBook and Pennies. I also bought Super Monkey Ball, but haven’t gotten the hang of it yet. Twitterific is nice too, but feels kinda clunky. An app which I think would really use a lot (while commuting) is Instapaper (downloads all your Instapaper bookmarks for offline reading)

More later, as I need to get back to admiring the iPhone.

Here’s a great discussion thread over at MacRumors Forums about real-world (i.e. non-journalist) iPhone 3G reviews. Let the early adopters speak.

The first iPhone 3G reviews are in, courtesy of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

General verdict: worthwhile upgrade, especially for new iPhone customers. iPhone 3G is an iterative upgrade over the original iPhone. Some major features still missing (MMS, cut-and-paste, voice dialing, video recording, improved camera). 3G speeds impressive, if a bit taxing on the battery. The GPS functionality is impressive. The real star of the show, however, is the iPhone 2.0 software, which can be had for free on any first-gen iPhone.

As I’ve said all along, the iPhone 2.0 software marks the end of the iPhone as a solitary device and the beginning of it as a mobile computing platform in earnest. If you think the iPhone ecosystem is good now, just wait until what the development community comes up with over the next six months.

AppleInsider reports that Microsoft, fed up with Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign, is planning a major anti-Apple advertising blitz to help build the image of Vista, Redmond’s flagship OS.

This is amusing on several levels, not the least of which is the fact that a push like this is roughly a year late. And Vista has turned out to be a fairly nauseating disaster and users are begging for XP to hang around. And Microsoft has actually created a Vista SKU that’s a downgrade license to XP but can still be tallied as a Vista sale. Aside from those, yes, Vista’s woes are all about insufficient advertising. When in doubt, blame marketing. Is this what happens when Bill is gone?

Some key quips from the AI article:

The company’s VP of Vista marketing, Brad Brooks, told attendees at a Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday that the next few months will see a major advertising push that promises to “free the people” through what Vista has to offer and that Microsoft wouldn’t take Apple’s repeated attacks on Vista reliability without a fight.

Okay Brad. Free the people? Really? Does anyone know what that even means? And what exactly prompted you to start fighting back on Vista’s behalf a year into reams of bad press and unprecedented Mac marketshare/mindshare gains?

The people have been freed, and they’re making personal technology choices that don’t involve Microsoft.

Hate to say this, but I think it’s pretty clear Vista’s going down without much of a fight. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t have so much talk about Windows 7 already.

“You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it’s time to take our message forward,” Brooks warns Apple. “There’s a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it’s just plain awful. We’ve got to get back on the front foot.”

My god. Let’s see, you have a tired Pearl Harbor cliche, some management horseshit about ‘taking a message forward,’ a trendy reference to the modern word-of-mouth marketplace where companies don’t get to tell us what to think about their products anymore, and finally some more meaningless management speak.

Hey Apple, are you listening? Are you? Well we’re sick of your shit! We’re sick of Justin Long and John Hodgman! We are gonna place ads, boy, and this here sleeping giant who is, um, no longer sleeping is going to grab a quick coffee and take our message forward! We’re going to take it forward right up your ass!

He acknowledges, however, that Vista’s rough launch has cost the company significant ground and that the ads will as much be about damage control as touting the brand. In a rare glimpse into Microsoft’s own view of the launch, Brooks recognizes that Vista “broke a lot of things” and triggered “a lot of pain” in partners trying to support the newer Windows edition.

Oh, absolutely. I think this is a stellar approach. An OS with an admittedly ‘rough start’ that ‘broke a lot of things’ and ’caused a lot of pain’ will yield an ad campaign that will be about ‘damage control’ and ‘making up lost ground.’

Nothing like ‘touting your brand’ when you’re already a few miles underwater.

I have an idea, Microsoft. Hear me out. Instead of announcing that you’re going to do something, how about you just do it and dispense with the saber-rattling? Because honestly, at this point along the Vista adoption curve, nobody worth his salt is taking you seriously.

The greed of mobile phone companies and their willingness to fuck their customers at every turn never ceases to amaze me.  Somewhere, up on high in some boardroom, a bunch of clueless idiots come up with these plans, laugh their bloated laughs, and think about their bonuses.

Know what?  Fuck you.  Take a swim in some seriously hardcore negative word-of-mouth.

Fuck You Rogers: An Online Petition

also

Check out the signatures and comments

Update: behold the beautiful power of word-of-mouth.  Go interwebs.

(via DF)

I have resisted the iPhone for a solid year now, instead sticking with my BlackBerry 8130 on Verizon. But increasingly the BB isn’t doing it for me, and I find myself lusting after iPhones even more than when they launched. I told myself some time ago that I would wait until iPhone v2 arrives, and assuming it has 3G capability, I would take the plunge then.

Tomorrow at WWDC might be the tipping point for me. If the new model amazes — and I think it will, but not NEARLY as much as the 3rd-part software demos will — I will buy one and make the move to AT&T.

I found some purported (‘leaked’) images of the 3G iPhone over on Engadget, but I have my doubts as to whether or not these are real. In fact, I agree with John Gruber: before WWDC, all ‘leaked’ info should be assumed false, as leaked Apple images/news are amazingly viral before any headline Apple event.

If you are an iPhone user, what are your impressions of the device (and network) after owning one for some time? Any insight into the whole iPhone vs. BlackBerry debate?

(crossposted on clusterflock)