Topics on businesses, good and bad.
Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame, has been in the computer industry for a long time. He’s also a smart fellow who knows how to write, and he has just posted an insightful article on where it looks to him like the computer industry is headed. If you’re in charge of your software company’s …
Interesting… according to this article, not only is Vista not selling well, but there has been a huge jump in sales of Office for Mac, which he’s suggesting indicates that a large number of people are switching to the Mac. I’ve said it before: Windows Vista is the best thing that ever happened for Linux …
Over the weekend, and quite by accident, I saw my first iPhone. I expected to be underwhelmed. The iPhone, after all, has been so overhyped in the past several months that it would be nearly impossible for it to live up to it all, even though I’ve ignored the vast majority of it. And I …
Continue reading ‘The iPhone — Does it Live Up to the Hype?’ »
Oh, lovely. Microsoft falsely accuses twelve thousand people of piracy over the weekend, and considers it nothing but a “glitch.” If my company had a “glitch” like that, we’d likely be out of business come Monday. I hadn’t noticed the problem here, but that may have something to do with the fact that only two …
Continue reading ‘“Windows Genuine Advantage cries wolf (again)”’ »
A major win for customer service! The customer may not always be right, but if you plan on keeping his business, you’d damn well better treat him with respect.
I just received notice from our cable Internet provider that they’ve boosted our office connection speed, from 5Mbps to 7Mbps. This is the second such notice that we’ve gotten since we moved in here; a few years ago they bumped it up from 3Mbps. There will probably be a slight rate increase soon, to go …
Do you remember the major stink a while back over the DRM-crippled Sony CDs? Apparently Sony has decided to try to get some of their money back from the company that sold them the spyware packages. Frankly, I think they deserve each other.
“Once upon a time, children, there was a whole industry built on nothing but distributing music.” “Grampa, what’s disturba… distrab…?” “Distributing? It means that a person takes music that other people make and sells it to people who want it.” “Why couldn’t people buy it from the people who made it, like we do?” “Because …
It should come as no surprise, but APC, the manufacturers of the uninterruptable power supplies that I use, has just confirmed that they track their e-mailed newsletters. The message at the top of the one I got today was: Hi HEADGEEK, we noticed that you haven’t opened our PowerNews e-mail newsletter in 6 months. PowerNews …
Anyone who studies Microsoft quickly figures out that it’s collective corporate personality is paranoid. Anything that even might be competition someday is either bought up or crushed mercilessly. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but that’s how it viewed the Internet at first, and why it moved to kill off Netscape. It …