Electronista says the price-slashing of the Blackberry Playbook in the UK is still not helping sales.
I’m confused.
Does poop not sell, even at a cheaper price?

So Microsoft has decided to thrill us with another future vision video. They want to show us what the future is like.
Again.
I wrote about this in 2009 when they released their future vision piece for 2019. Everything I said then applies now.
This is why it’s taken so long to get their new mobile phones and tablets to the masses – they’re too busy planning our future! Cut ’em some slack!

Terrence O’Brien for Engadget on the retirement of Windows XP, or lack thereof:

It’s hard to believe that it was ten years ago today that Windows XP first hit retail shelves. It’s even more astonishing when you realize that it was still the most popular operating system in the world until the beginning of this month.

Windows XP is like when your Grandpa still has a legit driver’s license but you and all your family know damn well he has no business on the road. So you end up hiding his keys for him and offer to take him where ever he needs to go.
“I don’t want you to drive my ass, I just want my damn keys!”
It’s time someone took XP’s keys away from him.

Dave Caolo vents about iCloud in iOS 5 (via The Loop):

iCloud’s Photo Stream feature is handy, in that it pushes photos shot with a compatible iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to Apple’s servers and then back to other authorized devices. Meanwhile, iOS 5 has tweeting built in, so there’s a temptation to shoot photo with Apple’s Camera app and then tweet it from the Camera Roll.

That’s fast and convenient, but also a hindrance. Specifically, my iPhone, iPad and Mac are now cluttered with space-hogging one-offs I shot for the sake of a tweet or a Facebook update. 1 What’s worse is that you can’t delete such throw-away photos from your Photo Stream with an iDevice. Instead, you’ve got to visit icloud.com and click “Reset Photo Stream,” which nukes the lot, good and bad. That’s why I’ve started using Camera+ again for tweeting pictures.

I’ve noticed this too as someone who recently upgraded his first gen iPad and iPhone 4 to iOS 5.
The chain of my reactions to said iCloud issue/feature/bug has been:
1) Awesome! Everything is synchronized!
and then:
2) Shit, everything is synchronized.
The glass-half-full side of me sees this as the iCloud ‘1.0’. Which it is. Like iOS 1.0 (aka iPhone OS), iCloud has issues. It’s missing features, but as far as this specific gripe about synchronization, from the Apple side of things, this is great. Everything is working as it’s supposed to. The foundation has been laid.
I’m not trying to spin things as iCloud being perfect, because it’s not, but things could be a lot worse. This could be MobileMe all over again. Remember, we just learned in the last week of Steve Jobs trying to buy Dropbox in 2009 and being turned down. This meant Apple had to figure out file synchronizing on their own.
So yes, things are very raw right now with iCloud and how it handles photos, but improvements are en route.
I guarantee it.
Remember, that’s how Apple rolls.

Contrary to the plan, technology has limited our choices. When you check boxes that define your preference in a date–say, Latina, between 24 and 27, loves birds, is a Unitarian, oh, and also should have hazel eyes–you’re narrowing your world quite a bit there. We no longer “happen across” anything; we Google. We don’t flip through TV channels; we look at the cable menu and choose by title–or watch things you’ve chosen in advance, then recorded. Don’t answer the phone without that caller ID. Don’t bother listening to that whole CD–you want to hear that one song you already like. In every corner of this newest of new worlds, very little happens that isn’t planned out. Technology has trumped serendipity.

–‘iBone‘ — by Marshall Sella; GQ Magazine, Oct. 2011
via Urban Suburban

It’s be a year since you launched Windows Phone. Where we at, Microsoft?
Horace Dediu tells us:

Windows Phone is in limbo. The company acknowledged that it has performed below expectations. During the last quarter for which we have data (ending June) I have an estimate that Windows Phone sold only 1.4 million units (Gartner’s sell-through analysis suggests 1.7 million). That gives Microsoft a 1.3% share of units sold (Gartner 1.6%), a new low.

John Gruber gives us a nice translation of these numbers:

In other words, for that entire quarter, they sold about as many total Windows Phones in that quarter as Apple sold iPhone 4S preorders last weekend.

My first thought when reading this was how Microsoft has never been in this position before. They’ve never had to fight for the title of “Most Popular Operating System”. This is a company still making most it’s profits from Windows and their Office suite of applications. This is software they created decades ago and they’ve managed to ride the wave into the 21st century.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s it didn’t matter if their software was shitty or great, they had a monopoly on it and because of this, had the muscle to squeeze out any scrappy, innovative underdogs.
Now Microsoft has to prove it’s worth. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android continue to gain momentum in the marketplace. People are voting with their wallets and so far, not many are voting for Windows Phone. On the other side of the OS, developers aren’t voting for it either, unless of course Microsoft offers to pay them to develop.
Microsoft has never had to sell their products to people.
Remember, Windows was designed for businesses, not people.
For the first time in their history, they have to step into the ring and fight.

RIM has worldwide outages the days leading up to and on the day Apple launches it’s new mobile operating system and cloud-based backup service.
It’s poetic, really.
Remember though, RIM has two, count them, TWO CEOs. I’m sure they have this under control.

BlackBerry users revolt against RIM as disruption spreads

Smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM) is facing a user revolt after tens of millions of users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa suffered a second day without services such as BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), as the company struggled with problems at its hub in Slough, Berkshire.

The company also revealed that the areas affected now include South America, with users in Brazil, Chile and Argentina suffering loss of service.

Horace Dediu points out RIM is currently losing half a million users per month, and with only 16 million left in the US, they could all be gone by the end of the year.
While this outage didn’t specifically affect the US, it’s not going to help stop this downward spiral either.
UPDATE: Scratch that last sentence.

Randy Murray gets poetically hyperbolic on Steve Jobs and the future of Apple:

Isaac Asimov wrote a very interesting series of novels called “The Foundation.” In them, his character, Hari Seldon, developed a science called psychohistory, with which he was able to accurately predict the large scale course of human events. It’s a great series, and was added to by some other popular science fiction writers over the years.

This idea, that one man could both predict and influence human events, is both fascinating and incredible.

And yet we have our own Hari Seldon. It’s Steve Jobs.

Matt Legend Gemmell gives us SEO for Non-dicks:

The key thing to understand is that the rules of SEO aren’t magic or arbitrary. They’re based on the goals of a search engine, which is to find relevant results. Relevance implies genuineness, and genuineness implies trust. So, shockingly, you should try to make your site’s content trustworthy, genuine and relevant. All of the rules have come about due to their utility in detecting those three positive metrics. Good SEO is a by-product of not being a dick on the internet.

via daringfireball

Dan Lyons has been hit and miss since retiring his Fake Steve Jobs shtick (ok, mostly miss), but I liked his reaction to Facebook’s F8 Conference:

And now suddenly we are living in that future. That future which only yesterday was the future now today is the present. Just like we mark eras using BC and AD, now we will have BF811 and AF811. Where were you on Sept. 22, 2011, when the world changed? I, unfortunately, was holed up in my grubby little office in a small town in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, I will never forget this day. Never. Ever. How could I? This is the day when Timelines was introduced. Timelines! It is, in a word, profound. Deeply, profoundly profound, in fact. “Facebook Just Schooled the Internet. Again” is how MG Siegler put it on TechCrunch. Which is a pretty amazing feat, coming as it does just a year and a half after “Facebook Just Seized Control of the Internet” as MG Siegler wrote in April 2010. It is pretty amazing, after all, to seize control of the Internet. That was bad-ass enough. But to then school the Internet that you’ve seized control of? Who but Facebook could do that? Good Lord I have to sit down and just think for a minute because my mind is reeling …

Yes, he lays it on extra thick, but it made me laugh. Probably because I’m a wise-ass too.

Electronista: Dell CEO claims post-PC era is ‘complete nonsense’

Michael Dell in an interview Sunday [free reg. required] took a stance that there was no such thing as a post-PC era. In spite of struggling PC sales, he argued to the FT that the PC industry was still growing, particularly in developing countries like China. Smartphones and tablets weren’t “necessarily” replacing PCs, and long-term forecasts suggested that would stay the case for years to come, he said.

“There are a billion and a half PCs in the world and while Gartner change their estimates here and there, they also estimate there will be two billion PCs in the world by 2014,” Dell said. “So when I look at that, I think the idea that the PC is no longer here is complete nonsense.”

Isn’t this the same douchebag who said Apple should shut down and give the money back to the shareholders?
Michael Dell doesn’t seem to understand that “post-PC” doesn’t mean “no PC”. As Jobs said on stage at D8 in 2010, PCs will still be around and provide a lot of value in the post-PC era, but they’re not going to be the primary machine people will be using to check email, read, look at pictures and browser the Internet.

It seems artificial intelligence is gaining some serious momentum.
NYTimes: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 … . “

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

And over at IBM Watson is offering medical advice to doctors:

IBM has inked a deal with health insurer WellPoint that will let the latter use the technology behind “Jeopardy”-playing computer Watson to suggest patient diagnoses and treatments.

IBM claims the Watson technology can process about 200 million pages of content in less than three seconds, which no doubt makes the system intriguing when it comes to reviewing various medical literature. The WellPoint system will display excerpts that identify the data sources behind the particular suggestions the Watson technology offers up, the Journal reports.

Where are we headed?

On the 12th of August, the IBM PC turned 30 (via). I remember when my father bought our family an IBM PC when it came out that year. My father told my mother and me this was the future. My mother was skeptical about the $3,000 machine.

I remember him spending entire weekends transferring and backing up data to 5-and-quarter-inch floppy disks. Single-density disks only stored 160K, double density, a whopping 360K.

Before you shut down the computer, you had to park the head. My father couldn’t stress this enough to me. I could ruin the hard drive if I didn’t do it. The thought of not parking the head terrified me. There was no Windows Operating System. The screen was black with green characters. Everything was performed at the command line. If you’ve ever seen DOS on the Windows machine or the Terminal on an Apple, this was the entire experience on the first IBM.

In the early days the only game my father played was Microsoft Flight Simulator. This was after he bought a CGA display. It had 16 colors. I used to always ask him to fly by the Empire State Building and between the Twin Towers. I thought the graphics were amazing. In order to play games you had to either run them off of floppy disks or install them on your hard drive. I remember having to navigate directories in DOS, trying to find “FLIGHTSIM/Install.exe”. If I ran a game off of a floppy I had to navigate to the A Drive (the internal hard drive was the C Drive).

During high school I figured out how to type in phrases in DOS through the SoundBlaster card in order to prank call my friends with the computer’s robot voice.

Typing “cd ..” navigated you up a directory from where you were. The F1 key was always “Help”.

Control-Alt-Delete rebooted the computer without needing confirmation. It was fun doing this key command on the computers in Sears at the Rockaway Mall.

The printer we got with the PC sounded like a gatling gun when it printed. It just printed text. No graphics. No colors.

These early, crude days with the first PC gave me a big head start with understanding computers and helped shape me into the designer I am today. It has informed everything I’ve done from print design to web design to iOS design. I understood not just how something should look but how it worked behind the scenes. This didn’t mean I didn’t get frustrated when computers didn’t do what I wanted them to do, but it gave me the patience to know how to troubleshoot them.

It didn’t just make me a great driver, but a good mechnic as well.