"One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates."
— Gabe Newell of game company Valve, creators of Steam
Quora has an interesting look at the capabilities of Bluetooth 4.
Notice that the current range of Macs and iOS devices have incorporated Bluetooth 4? Expect a huge wave of innovative, low-power devices and companion apps come into the fore very soon.
This is the genius of Apple’s philosophy of gradual improvement. Not everything is done big-bang style, and it doesn’t need to be. Competitors will be caught flat-footed yet again.
A Happy New Year to the handful of you who read my humble blog. Here are my thoughts of the significant happenings of 2011. Skip this if you can’t tolerate a little snark!
Apple
- Steve Jobs left behind an insanely great company that values making great products to delight customers, over making money for shareholders. What an idea.
- Apple became the most valuable tech company in the world to the consternation of haters who continued laughing at sheep who buy shit in pretty packaging. Samsung couldn’t resist and joined in the fun with a searing TV ad.
- Apple continues to show their inability to make stable software and fix them quickly enough. iOS 5 has major problems that remains unsolved. Lion is laggy compared to Snow Leopard on hardware that’s 1 year or older.
Google
- A company of this size and revenue would be expected to excite customers and churn out new hit products, but they only managed one: Google+.
- Google+ is a hyped up version of Facebook with a different layout and a bunch of circles that made users do shit work but was nonetheless hailed as an innovation by the press. Facebook quickly copied the circles thingy and made it easier to use and optional. No shit work required.
- People realized that Google was evil just like Microsoft was. 50% of the search results page is dedicated to ads, making it possible for them to continue selling their customers (i.e. you and me) to advertisers and make insane profit.
- Google got so rattled by the patent war that they let Motorola rape them for a crazy $12.5B. Mobile is where it’s at. Still, it’s chump change.
Microsoft
- Despite falling out of favor with the market, Microsoft remains a hugely profitable company due to humans’ risk-averse nature to stick with shit they’re used to (i.e. Office & Windows).
- Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 are refreshing but viewed as “too late” due to the company’s legacy of being reactive, and to “copy and dominate” rather than innovate. This is a critical period.
- Microsoft finally decided to knife their 10 year old museum piece called IE6 due to sagging market share, but still allowed administrators in laggard companies to disable the auto update. They never learn.
Smartphones
- Android continues to dominate in unit sales. Turns out, it’s the new Windows Mobile, taking up the low end of the market consisting of people who don’t realize they bought shit, as long as it had a touchscreen and made them appear different from iPhone sheep.
- Users realized that Android stood for not having an upgrade path to the next versions. All the blood sucking carriers and Android phone makers wanted was their money in exchange for a piece of hardware. The software remains a necessary inconvenience but fortunately they had an “open” one they could repurpose for free, change the search engine to Bing, or totally bastardize.
- Apple unveils the iPhone 4S instead of the iPhone 5 to the amusement of haters who viewed the iPhone as shit in a pretty case. The people who remembered that the iPhone 3GS looked the same as the iPhone 3G went “ahh”.
- Consumers who believed the case had to change in every iteration to appear “new” bought an Android phone instead, while the people who valued the shit that was inside the iPhone (apps and user experience) more than specs and 5” screens bulging out from their pockets queued merrily for the 4S.
Notebooks
- The MacBook Air came into it’s own as a best-seller in Apple’s lineup and ushered in a new product category along with an unbeatable price of $999 that the copycats had problems matching. Who knew Apple could sell well-designed stuff at good prices?
- The copycats started their war cry of “Ultrabooks” but with a slew of compromises like cheaper crappy LCD screens with poor viewing angles, sticky trackpads, and plastic bodies. The Windows licensing cost doesn’t help either.
- HP proudly showed their Envy of MacBook Pros with an uncannily original design while the “Ultrabook” makers aped the MacBook Air’s distinctive taper.
- Apple’s large glass trackpad was finally copied by some PC notebooks. They got the look right but alas they couldn’t get the most important aspects (texture and cursor movement) working.
- Meanwhile, Intel gets richer due to AMD’s inability to compete with their own power-efficient mobile CPUs. More karma for AMD is needed, if you remember the 90s when expensive Intel CPUs was all we had.
- Consumers continue to think that they need a notebook because others are buying them. The buy it, then leave the damn thing on the desk all the time. An all-in-one like the iMac saves desk space and is more value-for-money. Proves people still can’t think for themselves, can they?
Tablets
- Just like the SciFi visionaries before us, consumers finally discovered use cases for tablets. And it was truly compelling.
- Android Honeycomb came into the market with two guns blazing but most reviews said it was an unfinished and unusable piece of shit. Buyers agreed but fans remain befuddled as the platform was more “open” and their motor- plus brain-impairment decreed that they couldn’t tell a laggy UI from a fluid one.
- iPad continues to be synonymous with the “tablet market”, with a market share above 90%. The dismayed analysts readily contorted themselves to churn out reports about “Android market share” while ignoring the elephant-sized apple in the room.
- Amazon came blazing in with the $199 Kindle Fire and analysts hailed it as the iPad-killer. Turns out that the words “cheap” and “shit” continued to go together.
World
- This was a bad year for dictators, but only for those who stood in the way of the USA’s continued quest for dominance.
- The march towards capitalism and the raping of humanity continues, with shit like ACTA and SOPA being slipped under our noses, complicit mainstream media in tow.
- The financial shit storm from 2008 & 2009 remains stuck in the fan. The system has not changed one iota and greed prevails. The numbers game continues to be played, until the day when shit will get splattered on everyone in the form of a depression or worse.
- More people realized that the POTUS is a lying sack of shit but many more remain star-gazed.
- Governments learnt that people can be pissed and start protesting when they feel that the rich are enriching themselves while enslaving everyone else. However, the peasants were roundly shut down since the protests happened too late, when individual rights and freedoms are already severely curtailed.
- There are only two ways forward: Equality or tyranny. Guess which one we humans will let prevail?
The “tooltip appears behind the Windows taskbar” problem has existed for more than a decade, across multiple Windows versions from XP to server editions.
And yet they simply remain absolutely, completely, totally uninterested in fixing it. Ever. If this isn’t the ultimate “fuck you” from Microsoft to all their users, I don’t know what is.
