Christmas is approaching and with it the end of the first fiscal quarter for many computer companies including Apple. This is the time when these companies make their biggest sales of the year. It’s also the time when J.D. Power & Associates is finishing-up its PC quality surveys which cover initial quality and overall service and support. If you are an Apple customer or a prospective Apple customer pay attention, because this could be a very good time to be you.
Apple is proud of its support operation, which is ironic given that back in the early Apple ][ days Steve Jobs wanted to save money by mimeographing user manuals. I am not making this up. […]
The Mel Brooks movie, then Broadway musical, then a movie of a Broadway musical The Producers are the only such dramatic works I know of that were based primarily on a business model. The plot is a simple scam in three acts: 1) most Broadway musicals fail; 2) greedy investors in Broadway shows want a lot of equity for a little money, and; 3) since the show is likely to fail anyway, why not produce a deliberate turkey but make money (strictly for the producers) by selling 500 percent of the stock? Nobody will know they’ve been scammed because a deliberate failure will never pay any royalties. Except, of course, Springtime for Hitler was an unlikely […]
We’re in the middle of a huge platform shift in computing and most of us don’t even know it. The transition is from desktop to mobile and is as real as earlier transitions from mainframes to minicomputers to personal computers to networked computers with graphical interfaces. And like those previous transitions, this one doesn’t mean the old platforms are going away, just being diminished somewhat in significance. All of those previous platforms still exists. And desktops, too, will remain in some form when the mobile conversion is complete, though we are probably no more than five years from seeing the peak global population of desktop computers. We’d be there right now if we’d just figured […]
Just in case you are an astronaut and need something to worry about, according to NASA there are 18,000 pieces of space junk the size of a basketball or larger right now orbiting the earth. That’s 18,000 chances to slam into the International Space Station (ISS), bump into a U.S. Space Shuttle, or plow into any of a number of satellites in low Earth orbit. Twice the ISS has had to be moved to avoid potential collisions and one other time when it couldn’t be moved the crew huddled in their Soyuz taxicab for danger to pass, with one such near-miss taking place just last week, which is what inspired this column.