I want to make a point here, but I need to make it carefully, gently, so as not to rile people up. I’m not here to start a fight, folks, but it seems to me not nearly as many workers are throwing themselves off the roof of that Foxconn factory in China as I would expect.
Foxconn is the largest contract manufacturer in China and the world, making products notably for Apple and for other American companies, too. The company has been in the news lately because of very public worker suicides by jumping from the factory roof.
Were these people worked to death? Were they worked insane? In one case was the suicide the result of […]
“The step after ubiquity is invisibility,” my old friend from Apple Al Mandel explained to me years ago. And it’s true. Telephone service was once rare but is now universal and anything truly universal eventually become a commodity. No wonder phone companies no longer make money from long-distance calling nor — as Verizon’s sale of its New England landlines business confirms — even make enough money from local phone service. Now it is all about mobile and thank God for texting and ringtones, the telco execs say… for awhile. Well I think the same thing is about to happen to Facebook — privacy issues or no.
Internet-y as the next blogger, I’d like to point out how 
YouTube made two fascinating announcements recently: 1) viewers are now downloading an average of two billion videos per day on the service, and; 2) YouTube is almost showing a profit for Google, its owner. Think about the glorious inefficiency embodied in that latter statement: two billion downloads per day just to break even. And this is supposed to be the future of television? Hardly.
Update — Startup questionnaires go out this evening (Monday, May 17th). If you don’t receive one and think that you should have, please contact ma@cringely.com or courtney@cringely.com to that effect. The list of MIA nominees below is current as of Monday afternoon. — Bob