Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me

timesdetailA couple times per year the New York Times calls me up asking for an Op-Ed column on some technology topic.  I don’t know how they found me but I’ve been writing these pieces since 1995.  I think they call because I’m good at meeting tight deadlines.  Lord knows that if there was a piece I actually wanted to get in the Times (my idea, not theirs) I have no confidence that I could get them to run it.  Op-Ed at the Times — at least to me — is a sort of black box.

Here’s the column they asked for on Google’s Chrome OS: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html

The opinions expressed, as always, are ruthlessly my own.

Atomic Warfare

nuke2Intel last week bought for $884 million Wind River Systems, a venerable embedded operating system company — yet another of the chip giant’s recent forays into software. The reason for this purchase is both simple and grand — to help Intel vertically integrate and to further its Linux ambitions.  Intel’s ultimate target with this purchase is Microsoft.  It’s all about kicking Redmond out of the netbook business.

Netbooks are the big hardware success of 2009 and most are powered by Intel Atom processors.  The problem with PC’s in general and netbooks in particular is that they aren’t very profitable for Intel campared to the good old days.  Microsoft makes more profit from every Windows PC sold […]

The Future of Television (part II)

predicta2My last column generated a lively debate on the prospects for various business and technical options for the delivery of Internet TV so it makes sense to continue this topic and build it into a more full-featured model.  I used to write quite a bit about this back when I was trying to get NerdTV going.  The core of what I’ll write here can be found in a couple dozen columns from back then — columns that would seem to have been for the most part forgotten given the direction last week’s discussion took.  You see the future of television IS Internet television.  There is no other in sight.

No business or technology exists in a […]

The Neokast Mystery

 

technologyevangelist-neokast179What happened to Neokast?  It’s a mystery to me.  But I suspect the answer will surprise us all soon enough.

Neokast, as readers of my old PBS column will recall, was a peer-to-peer live video streaming application developed by graduate students from Northwestern University near Chicago.  That’s me talking about it there on the left, back in 2007.

I loved the company instantly. It was out of the Silicon Valley limelight, away from the technical mainstream for such software (Neokast was a .NET application and therefore pretty much Windows-only), but most important of all, it seemed to actually work.  The potential was extremely compelling.  Here’s how I described it back then:

“…the more people who watch your Neokast […]

The Bentonville Mafia

kevin-turner-microsoft

As promised, here’s part three of my series on fixing Microsoft for the 21st century.  This assumes we’ve already spun-off the Internet properties to Yahoo as I suggested a few days ago and a Bank of America/Merrill-Lynch analyst quickly copied.  Does that copying qualify me for a Federal bailout?

The big Microsoft news this week, at least from the press it has received, is Redmond’s decision to open a chain of stores.  Nearly all the pundits think this is stupid, while I think it was merely inevitable, given the nature of current Microsoft management, which seems to be more and more from Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Wal-Mart.

See that guy in the picture?  That’s […]