No other explanation makes any sense.
Certainly there is no supply problem that could keep Apple from introducing a white iPhone. But what if white is a Verizon exclusive in the USA? That would to a certain extent pull the branding rug out from under AT&T and even put a bit more oomph behind those iPhone users who might choose to jump carriers.
It’s silly, I know, but as Mrs. Cringely always says, “Husbands die every day.”
As promised, here are my technology predictions for 2011. These columns usually begin with a review of my predictions from the previous year because it annoys me that writers make predictions without consequences. If we are going to claim expertise then our feet should be held to the fire. But last January I didn’t write a predictions column, thinking we were past all that (silly me) so there is nothing with which to embarrass myself here. More sobering still, after last year’s holiday firestorm over our naked card Mrs. Cringely won’t let me post this year’s card. We have become so dull.
We also seem to have become verbose, because my first prediction (below) took 1400 words to write. So tell you what: […]
There’s a premise in big business that no single person is essential to the success of an organization. If I die on the job, microscopic cringely.com dies with me, sure, but if Steve Ballmer kicks-off during a sales meeting tirade, Microsoft will move smoothly onward, or so the idea goes — as far as it goes. Because of course it is frequently wrong. There are many instances where a single person can bring about a sea change in a company or an industry. In the 19th century that meant John D. Rockefeller in oil or Andrew Carnegie in steel. In the 21st century it means Steve Jobs at Apple and Pixar, or Larry Ellison at […]
I have worked from home since the first time InfoWorld fired me in 1994. When you work at home you live at work, which is precisely why telecommuting has been so embraced by non-smokestack industries that love the low office rents and longer working hours. But the tide may be turning against working at home for some larger companies. Lockheed-Martin, for example, effectively banned the practice recently, sucking nearly all the company’s telecommuters back into the office. IBM, too, is rethinking its work-at-home strategy.
Lockheed earlier this year told its managers they all had to work from plant sites, then followed that by canceling any telecommuting services paid for by the company. In theory workers can […]
It wasn’t so many years ago, remember, when AT&T (the old AT&T, the U. S. national telephone monopoly) owned the phone wire in your walls. You put the wire there, or your builder did, and you certainly paid for it, but once dial tone filled the lines those lines became the physical property of Ma Bell and you couldn’t legally touch them. Everyone longing for the bad old days should remember when you couldn’t touch your own phone lines under penalty of law. Today or tomorrow, we’re told, the FCC will vote under the guise of net neutrality to re-instill some of those old ways of doing business, at least for wireless networks.
Well it won’t work.
The short story of what’s happening at the FCC […]
