Fortune: Apple granted ‘the mother of all smartphone software patents’:

Both sides of the smartphone wars agree that the 25 patents granted Apple (AAPL) on Tuesday contain some powerful legal weapons.

One patent in particular — No. 8,223,134: “Portable electronic device, method, and graphical user interface for displaying electronic lists and documents” — stands out.

I was ready to use the Obi-Wan line, ‘If you strike me down I shall become more power than you can possibly imagine’, but I realized, Apple is already there. More importantly, Apple doesn’t need this patent to continue it’s trajectory of success.

UPDATE: I incorrectly attributed Harry McCracken as being against the idea of the iPad as a content creation device. I meant Richard Gaywood.
Harry McCrackenRichard Gaywood still thinks content creation on the iPad is a silly idea (via DF).
Apparently he hasn’t talked to David Hockney.

Ars Technica’s headline says, “Google’s Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet”
Why the need for the qualifier ‘$200’? Why can’t it not be just a great tablet?

Back on 5 June, Verge posted a story by Chris Ziegler on the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS. It’s fascinating to read about how closely designers and engineers at Apple, Palm and HP are connected.
In light of Microsoft’s Surface Keynote on the 18th of June, this passage caught my eye:

The demos at CES weren’t faked, but large swaths of critical functionality were still missing under the covers. “The emperor had no clothes,” one source told us. Even though Palm had left webOS’s Prima underpinnings in place to save time and effort, there was still a tremendous amount of work to do in order to get the Pre ready to ship, and everyone inside the company knew it. Palm made the controversial decision to prevent any members of the media from touching the phone after CES prior to launch, a move that raised eyebrows and led many to start asking questions about the company’s readiness.

You could easily replace ‘Palm’ and ‘webOS’ in the quote above with ‘Microsoft’ and ‘Windows 8.’ Danny Sullivan at Marketing Land wrote a great piece on the whole hands off aspect of Microsoft’s event too.
Now Microsoft and Palm are two very different companies so the death of one does not mean the death of the other is inevitable. The important take-away from this story is despite the hard work and creativity of talented people, your product can still come up a day late and a dollar short. Microsoft is up against the same Apple snowball Palm/HP was up against, except now that snowball is farther down the hill and it’s much much bigger.
Here’s another metaphor to throw into the mix: Apple has had 5 years to get up to the speed with iOS and the iPhone and the iPad. Apple didn’t have everything at launch in 2007 (like no GPS, no 3G, no video calls, poor camera, no multi-tasking, no third party applications …), but, as John Gruber wrote in Macworld, they kept iterating and iterating and iterating, cause that’s how Apple rolls down the consumer electronics highway. When you looked at them last, they were doing 60 mph in the slow lane, but now they’re way ahead of you, doing 110 mph in the fast lane.
So Microsoft has to sell something great this fall. Doing the speed limit ain’t going to cut it. They need to drop it into 4th gear and slam the accelerator when they hit the highway on-ramp and at least keep up with Apple. In truth though, they really need some hidden NO2 tanks in trunk.
Matt Bucanan wrote a review of the HP TouchPad and these were his final words:

You’re stepping on my dreams, HP. The TouchPad is so close, closer than anything else, to being good. But it’s also very, very far from it.

Microsoft is dangerously close to getting an identical product review with their Surface tablet. They best be sure it’s fully baked.

Great advice from Stu Maschwitz (via Matt Mullenweg):

TVs are designed to do one thing above all: sell. To do so, they must fight for attention on brightly-lit showroom floors. Manufacturers accomplish this in much the same way that transvestite hookers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district do–by showing you everything they’ve got, turned up to eleven. You want brightness? We’ll scald your retinas. You want sharpness? We’ll draw a black outline around everything for you. Like bright colors? We’ll find them even in Casablanca. Oh, and since you associate “yellowing” with age and decay, we’ll also make the image as blue as a retiree’s bouffant on Miami beach.

Yes, yes, LCD displays have come a long way from the early days in comparison to plasma displays, but a lot of what Mr. Maschwitz says validates a lot of what I’ve already known about television optimization. And he is a filmmaker, so I’m going go ahead and take his advice and make the necessary adjustments on my LG television. Something tells me he might know a bit more about this shit than me. Just a hunch.

Vanity Fair has a sneak peak (via DF) of the new article on ‘Microsoft’s Lost Decade’. The next 5-10 years are not going to be a fun time for Microsoft fans. Check out Horace Dediu’s charts of Windows lead over Macs steadily deteriorating since it’s peak in 2004.
This statistic from the VF article slapped me in the face pretty hard:

Today, a single Apple product–the iPhone–generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined.

As MG Siegler noted, there’s a lot of smoke around the supposed iPad ‘mini’. Things are only going to get harder for Microsoft as it gets up to speed and merges onto the tablet highway. I have plenty of popcorn in my cabinet. This is going to be a fun show.

via Drewbot

Speaking of successful companies, if you want a good laugh, go view the source code to Berkshire Hathaway’s website.
Goes to show you don’t need a great site to be a billionaire.
Seriously, that code is straight from 1996.

I’d love to know the companies who’ve figured out how to do seamless presentations using videos, screen-sharing and conference calls. There’s so many companies out there who describe themselves as ‘bleeding edge’ and ‘innovative’ but can’t figure out how to do a proper presentation with GoToMeeting and a telephone.
In my experience, there’s always a problem with dongles, Powerpoint crashes, stuttering video over GoToMeeting screen-sharing and people trying to figure out how to switch the monitor they want to share.
One of these days, someone’s going to figure this all out.

I want to check out the video of the Windows 8 Summit, but I when I try, I get to this screen:

Oh, Microsoft. You’re so cute with your Silverlight plug-in requirements. You just won’t give up, will you?

In the last half of the movie The Graduate, Benjamin, played by a young Dustin Hoffman, tells his parents he’s marrying Elaine Robinson—the daughter of the older woman he’s been having an affair with. Ben’s parents excitedly suggest they call the Robinsons to celebrate. Ben matter-of-factly tells them Elaine doesn’t yet know of his intentions and that he’s driving to her place in Berkley to ask her. He even acknowledges Elaine doesn’t like him very much.
Upon hearing this Ben’s dad confesses, “Ben, this whole idea sounds pretty half-baked.”
To which Ben naively responds, “Oh, it’s not. It’s completely baked. It’s a decision I’ve made.”
The movie doesn’t quite end horribly, but we’re left with the impression that their future isn’t certain either. What we do know is Ben could have handled things much better and he didn’t.
…
After watching the whole Microsoft Surface keynote and letting it marinate in my head I’m realizing that despite all of Microsoft’s good intentions and motivations for making a tablet computer, their picture is incomplete. Yes, the cues they took from Apple were smart. From the integrated approach to software and hardware to their presentation style, the student has definitely been learning from the teacher.
First, the hardware. It’s uncertain how many (if any) of Microsoft’s hardware partners knew this product was coming: a product being built by Microsoft, not by them. Ballsy move. It’ll be interesting to see what the hardware partners think about this move. It’s like going into an auto body shop before a race, installing all of the best modifications on your car, then leaving the scraps for all the other drivers, but asking them all to race you. Because it’ll be “fun.” So the hardware looks great. Sure they copied Apple’s Smart Cover, but one-upped them by turning the cover into a super-thin keyboard (I personally don’t find this feature the game-changer many in the tech press do, but that’s for another post).
But the solid hardware isn’t what has me perplexed. It’s the complete lack of software demonstrations. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Here’s a company that has made billions of dollars selling software for over 30 years, and when it comes time to debut the device launching them into the future, they don’t bother to allocate even a few minutes to showing off how well software runs on it? No games. No movies. No software. All we got was a 2 second glimpse of a custom Netflix application and a glitchy Internet Explorer. What about the ecosystem? The companies and people outside of Microsoft? What about getting a bunch (hell, even a few) developers and content providers in early on so you have great things to showcase on your product?
Microsoft forgot the part where you show everyone how fun it is to use their device. They forgot to show how it fits into peoples’ lives. The first thing Steve Jobs did after presenting the iPad was to sit down and start playing with it. He opens up web sites, plays movies, checks email.
All Microsoft did was storm into a wedding to steal the bride without proving himself to her and then asked her for blind trust.
To me this whole idea sounds pretty half-baked.

Last night in the Microsoft Surface Keynote, during his attempt to convince us why Microsoft would be able to create great hardware products to run it’s software, Steve Ballmer explained how the #1 revenue source in 1980, the year he joined Microsoft, was a hardware device called Softcard. It’s around the 4:15 mark.
I Googled ‘Softcard’.
It turns out, Ballmer wasn’t lying. Softcard was Microsoft’s #1 revenue source in 1980. What he didn’t mention was that Softcard was a hardware device designed for the Apple II computer (via Wikipedia):

The Z-80 SoftCard was a plug-in card supplied by Microsoft for use with the Apple II personal computer, which did not have a Z-80 compatible processor and could not run CP/M. It had a Zilog Z80 CPU plus some 74LS00 series TTL chips to adapt that processor’s bus to the rather different bus system used in the Apple. The card was eventually renamed the Microsoft SoftCard.

How bout that.

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Just go to this page and plug in one of the codes above and you’ll get $15 off a 1-year signup or $100 off a 2-year signup. If the code doesn’t work, it means someone used it already.
Not only is Dreamhost reliable, but they’re great for both geeks and non-geeks. If you want direct access to MySQL databases and cron jobs and ssh and all that crazy shit, you got. If you want easy, 1-click installs of WordPress blogs, well, you got that too.
While their hosting is solid their great customer service seals the deal for me. ‘Really Helpful Geeks’ is how I would describe them. Like the people at Apple’s Genius Bar, but without the chip on their shoulders.
Bonus tip: I register my domains at Dreamhost too. They’re cheaper than other companies and don’t trick you into services you don’t need, like Register.com does. Oh, and they don’t charge you extra to keep your name and address info private.

Microsoft has announced their new tablet, the Surface.
No, not the multitouch coffee table they launched in 2008 (ooh look, they just changed the name to PixelSense on Wikipedia!), no the new competitor to the iPad. Complete with magnetically attached keyboard/cover. Well played Microsoft, well played.
A quick digression: Microsoft is like a Jedi-in-training. But one who’s been doing whippets all day. They’re watching Apple and learning the Force, but they’re fucking up everything in the process. Repurposing another product’s name? Launching on a Monday evening? In LA?
Let’s continue….
We’ll grab a few details from The Next Web’s coverage:

First let’s look at what Surface is. It’s a tablet form factor, but it has the guts of a PC, at least in its higher-end form. The lower-end version, with the ARM processor and running Windows RT, is going to be a niche item at best. The Pro version, which will run a full Windows 8 installation, is going to be more in line with what users are looking to buy.

Woah, woah, woah. Hold up. You’re selling to consumers. And you’re already complicated matters. Don’t you remember your Jedi training? Keep choices simple for people. Didn’t you learn anything from the whole Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate thing with Windows 7? C’mon, dude.
Sorry, let’s keep going…
From The Verge’s live blog, here’s Steve Ballmer spinning the story that Microsoft was always about hardware (?):
“It was always clear that what our software could do would require us to push hardware, sometimes where our partners hadn’t envisioned.”
“Our number 1 revenue product when I joined Microsoft was a hardware product. Let’s take a look back at the role of hardware at Microsoft.”
Wow. So let me get this straight. Apple has built the whole kit and kaboodle from Day 1. Microsoft has done only the software and established relationships with hardware companies to build the computers on which Windows has run for over 3 decades. What hardware companies? Dell, IBM, Compaq, Hewllitt-Packard, Acer, NEC, Samsung, Sony, Asus… and many, many more over the years (I’ll date myself – my friend down the street growing up had a Leading Edge computer running Windows). Now Microsoft is saying they’re always been a hardware company at heart? And you’re going to compete against your partners? Really? Balls, Ballmer. You got balls. Big, dumb, balls.
Ok, let’s forget the past. Microsoft’s Surface looks like it could be really good. When can I get one, what’s the battery life like and how much will it be? Oh, I see, you didn’t tell us any of that.
If we go back in time to 2006, I coincidentally wrote about a similar situation with, of all companies, Microsoft, and their announcement of the Zune. The Zune, like the (new) Surface was late to the game and we know how the Zune story ended.
Let’s hope Microsoft’s Surface fares better, but I ain’t betting on it.
Why? OK, let’s recap: Microsoft pre-announced a product with no specifications on battery life, ship date, or price and have built the hardware themselves despite a 30+ year history of focusing solely on software (their peripherals biz is chump change to their bottom line) while in the process, shunning companies who would normally be building the hardware for their Windows software.