Reuters: Dell sees room to challenge Apple in tablets

Asked whether he envied Apple’s ability to produce such coveted objects, Felice [Dell’s chief commercial officer] said: “We come at the market in a different way … We are predominantly a company that has a great eye on the commercial customer who also wants to be a consumer.”

What the does that even mean?
If I were Dell I wouldtake the money they were going to use to produce an iPad competitor, and instead give the money back to Dell shareholders.
Couldn’t resist.

Over at paidContent, Robert Andrews sends word that Game Retailer Group is on the brink of collapse.

Europe’s biggest plastic-box video game retailer Game Group has warned its shares may become worthless, as it struggles to avoid the same fate that has beset retailers of physical-format music.

The group says it is trying to renegotiate its lending facilities with banks and its supply shortages with game publishers that are withholding stock while Game tries containing its financial problems.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand how the video game industry, an offspring of the computer industry, can continue to attempt to sell physical media and expect everything to be cool. We’re entering year 5 AI (After iPhone). Things need to have changed by now.
It’s like squatters staying in an apartment, refusing to pay rent, just waiting to be evicted.

Mike Daisy reacts to David Pogue’s response to ABC’s Dateline special on the Foxconn factory producing Apple’s iPads:

You can’t get “informed consent” in a country without real personal freedom. These arguments are pathetic–they’re structurally nearly identical to the ones made in the 19th century justifying slavery. The fact that workers take these jobs because they feel they have no economic, social, or political choice, and this is the only path, is not an endorsement of the current system–it’s actually a condemnation.

It is cute how he makes a point of noting that there are no payroll taxes on your $2 an hour.

Do you think Mr. Pogue verified that, or that he’s spent any time digging through Foxconn’s history of deceptive paying practices–like how it pretended that it raised employee salaries 30% in 2010 by simply moving money around?

No, I don’t think he did, either.

Josh Halliday, reporting for The Guardian:

Sony Music has come under fire after it increased the price of a Whitney Houston album on Apple’s iTunes Store hours after the singer was found dead.

The music giant is understood to have lifted the wholesale price of Houston’s greatest hits album, The Ultimate Collection, at about 4am California time on Sunday. This meant that the iTunes retail price of the album automatically increased from ¬£4.99 to ¬£7.99.

Classy move, Sony. Classy move.
via The Loop

It annoys the fuck out of me whenever I see commercials for a product or company who want you to follow them on Facebook or Twitter. Hey! Check it out, we’re tweeting! We tweet! And put something on our wall too! Like us!
Aside from this annoyance, I could never quite put my finger on why social media doesn’t work for companies, but Randy Murray nailed it:

The opposite is also true: businesses are not people. For a business to be social, it has to be focused and friendly, but it can never be your friend. I really like Apple products, I own Apple stock, but Apple isn’t my friend. I don’t need a social relationship with the company that made my car, where I shop for food, or the local dry cleaners. I do find it useful to get news and information from them, and someone to listen and act when I have a problem, but I really don’t need another channel of happy talk from businesses.

Enrique Allen on The Designer Fund:

For the last few years, I was teaching start-ups to think like designers. But I eventually realized that you can’t simply teach this stuff. If you don’t have a designer in your founding group, you can’t have a culture of design. You see the reasons why all the time: A consultant comes in to improve a design and when they leave, the transformation eventually dies.

This was my aha moment; it challenged whether I was making an impact. My solution? Do the opposite of what I’ve been doing. Rather than spending as much energy training nondesigners, I figured I’d help designers succeed as part of the founding DNA of startups, thus making great design a natural expression of their operations.

The Designer Fund via Co.Design

Ben Brooks responding to MG Siegler’s post on why he hates Android and how Google doesn’t put the customer first like Apple does:

The relationship Apple has with carriers is fascinating to me — Apple seems to outwardly despise them, while knowing that carriers are (currently) necessary for Apple.

I wonder if Mr. Brooks remembers when Steve Jobs was interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D8 Conference in 2010 (around the 4-minute mark):

Mossberg:And another time you talked about, you weren’t going to do a phone because you had to sell them through, I think you called them, ‘The Five Orifices’ at the time.

Jobs: Four, I think.

Good times.

Over at GigaOM, Michael Wolf says 2012 will be the year the artist-entrepreneur.
Headlines look great with declaratives in them, but the truth is artist-entrepreneurs have been doing quite well for a whille now. In 2007 Radiohead circumvented the middle men and told people to pay what they want for their album, In Rainbows, directly from their site. Prince made a similar move in 2007 with his album Planet Earth and again in 2010 with the album 20Ten. In both these cases though, he gave away his album for free in national newspapers in the UK.
You might say Radiohead and Prince are big names so they can get away with bold moves like this. And this is true. You could also say this about the recent
experiment Louis C.K. did by selling his latest stand-up special, DRM-free on his website for $5, grossing him over one million dollars in a few weeks.
But what about the artist-entrepreneur nobody knows? The guy or girl with an idea, who executes the idea and then gets people interesting in backing it and ends up raising thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Wolf doesn’t address this group and it’s unfortunate, because I think it’s one of the most exciting areas on said topic. How he managed to not at least mention Kickstarter in his article boggles my mind.
I’m not saying this because I happen to have a project on Kickstarter. I originally wrote about Kickstarter and Craig Mod’s inspiring story in November 2010.
I’m happy Michael Wolf wrote his piece. It’s important to see prominent individuals taking this DIY approach, I just wish he showed this approach can work all the way down the spectrum.

Brian S Hall tells us Blackberry ($RIMM) is worth less than the Apple App Store. Just the App Store.
Not iPhone.
Not iPad.
Not Mac.
Not iTunes.
Just the App Store.
Related: John Gruber called it back in 2008.

Louis C.K. did alright with selling his Beacon Theatre special for five dollars, DRM-free, on his website (via SpatF)

As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.
I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked.

Fucking awesome.

I don’t think Kickstarter is a great service because my project is up there. There’s some amazing projects up there. Lots of them.
I’ve already backed PenMoto, which is magnetic ring to hold your Wacom pen. If you use a Wacom tablet and pen, you need this. Just watch the video if you don’t believe me. The project successfully ended, but I have feeling they won’t turn you down if you try to buy one.
This morning I also backed Typestache Playing Cards. Some of the nicest playing cards I’ve seen. The creators claim these cards are being made to help promote their Typestache iPhone app. It’s ironic because I think the cards are the real product. While I know I’ll use playing cards over and over, I’m not sure how many times I’ll put typographic mustaches on people with my iPhone.
Twine also looks super cool. They say, “Twine is the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing.” And they’re already over 800% funded. Insane.
I wrote about Kickstarter around this time last year and I’m just as excited about it now.
I think about Kickstarter like I think about iOS. They’re both strong, well-designed platforms that attract the best talent. There aren’t just a few great applications on iOS and there aren’t just a few great projects on Kickstarter. There’s great work in every category on each platform.
Welcome to the new economy.

John Paczkowski at AllThingsD reveals Acer CEO J.T. Wang has a plan:

“We will shift our strategy to improving profitability from pursuing market share blindly with cheap and unprofitable products,” Wang told Dow Jones. “Ultrabooks will become our key growth driver next year as customers want a lighter, thinner notebook with longer battery life. Selling more ultrabooks will also help improve our profit margins as they command higher prices.”

So you were (still are) shipping cheap, unprofitable products?
I’m proud of you, Wang. Acknowledging you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.
I still find this whole ‘ultrabook’ category hilarious. Once ‘netbook’ became a bad word, PC makers needed a new word for the (supposedly) new category, when in reality it only came into being when they realized the MacBook Air was a serious threat to their laptop businesses.
This whole process to stop shipping crap could have been started years ago, but it seems PC makers are only interested in improving the quality of their products after they’ve bottomed out and their back is up against a wall.
Did I mention I’m tired of writing about Apple?

From Mike:

…it is clear that we did not do a good job of communicating why we are are making this shift in strategy. I know how frustrating this has been for the Flash community, and for that I want to apologize. Our goal was to be very clear about WHAT we were doing, but in doing so, we didn’t pay enough attention to explaining WHY we were doing it.

Read More
This begs the question: Why aren’t people like Mike at the boardroom table and helping to communicate to the public?
I vote for Mike Chambers as CEO of Adobe.