An excellent article on the future of smartphones puts hard numbers to a trend I’ve been watching for two years. In so doing, it points out one of the fundamental competitive drivers in the smartphone market. More than that, it displays a powerful if sometimes less than obvious advantage of open-source software, and implicitly relates… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop
Collabortage
Yes, that’s a new word in the blog title: collabortage. It’s a tech-industry phenomenon that needed a name and never had one before. Collabortage is what happens when a promising product or technology is compromised, slowed down, and ultimately ruined by a strategic alliance between corporations that was formed (at least ostensibly) to develop it… Continue reading Collabortage
The Smartphone Wars: Nokia shareholders revolt!
Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few hours ago I was speculating in a comment thread that Stephen Elop’s cozy deal with Microsoft Microsoft might lead to a fairly near-term shareholder revolt, and lo, it has occurred. Welcome to Plan B. This is pretty dynamite stuff. A group of Nokia shareholders is planning an… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Nokia shareholders revolt!
How to buy an Android phone
Recently there was a request for advice on a mailing list I frequent, on how to choose an Android phone from the plethora of offerings out there. Here’s what I had to say on the matter:
The Smartphone Wars: Nokia’s Suicide Note
Stephen Elop has jumped his company off the burning platform, all right. And, I judge, straight into the fire. No, the choice that seals Nokia’s doom isn’t the tie-up with Microsoft (though that’s problematic enough, and I’ll get back to it). It’s the way Elop has failed to resolve Nokia’s drift and lack of a… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Nokia’s Suicide Note
The Smartphone Wars: iPhone 4V Falls To Earth
So the Verizon iPhone arrives, iOS is finally multicarrier, and consumer first-day reaction is “meh…not interested”. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this. Yes, I predicted, based on looking at AT&T’s 4Q2010 numbers, that Verizon iPhone sales would be “anemic”. There are statistical clues that AT&T has already largely saturated the market of people who really want… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: iPhone 4V Falls To Earth
The Smartphone Wars: Elop’s Burning Platform
Wall Street Journal’s TechEurope is running the full text of an astonishingly candid memo by the CEO of Nokia. Read the whole thing, in which Elop says Nokia’s performance and strategy over the last few years has been a disaster and it’s time to jump off the burning platform before the company is consumed by… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Elop’s Burning Platform
A major secret of effective writing
I’m in the process of editing a document for a technical project that is intended to be an introduction for newbies to certain fairly complex issues. While requesting feedback on the project mailing list, I realized that I had accidentally revealed a major secret of really top-grade writing, exactly the sort of thing that put… Continue reading A major secret of effective writing
Heavy weather and bad juju
Many primitive societies believe that maleficient spirits cause all sorts of human misfortune that in the modern West we have learned to attribute to natural causes – cattle dying, crops failing, disease, drought, that sort of thing. A few societies have developed a more peculiar form of supernaturalism, in which evil spirits recede into the… Continue reading Heavy weather and bad juju
The Smartphone Wars: Android hits #1
The technology press is abuzz with news of a report from Canalys that Android is now the #1 smartphone platform in the world, with its 33% share of sales edging out Symbian’s 31% and far surpassing Apple’s 16%. In the U.S, Android smartphones are now 53% of all sold. Once again, I was expecting this,… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Android hits #1
The Smartphone Wars: AT&T CEO reveals all
Well, well, well. A hot-off-the-press AP article, “AT&T CEO: We’ll push Android phones”, finally sheds light on the vexing question of why AT&T let Apple out of its exclusive a year early. It’s just stuffed full of revelations, but the implication the reporter fails to draw is bigger than any of the fascinating facts on… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: AT&T CEO reveals all
The Smartphone Wars: The Fall and Fall of Windows Phone 7
And now, for a bit of comic relief, let us examine the state of Windows Phone 7. It launched just over three months ago in a cloud of hubris – Microsoft’s first-ship party featured pallbearers lugging a huge mockup of an iPhone (and the rest of what you need to know about that moment was… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: The Fall and Fall of Windows Phone 7
The smartphone wars: Samsung folds under pressure
Some months ago I wrote (in Flattening the Smartphone Market) about the real significance of the Android 2.2 announcement. That was the moment that Google made clear that it intended to take control of the smartphone feature list from the cell carriers. Subsequently, carrier-loaded crapware and suppression of features like hotspot and tethering have been… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Samsung folds under pressure
Embracing the suck
This is a followup to The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers. That post ended “This problem is a Chinese finger-trap for careful and conscientious programmers. The better you are, the worse this problem is likely to hurt your brain. Embrace the suck.” That last phrase is a take on a military objurgation… Continue reading Embracing the suck
True Grit times two
I just got back from seeing the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon. I had prepared by watching the classic 1969 John Wayne film. The similarities and contrasts have some interesting messages about how audience tastes and filmmaking styles have changed in the last 40 years.
The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers
GPS, the Global positioning System, was designed in the 1970s under hardware-cost constraints that would seem ridiculous today. This makes interpreting the data it sends into a black art, and produces some really painful edge cases. There’s one edge case in particular that I’ve come to think of as the Rollover of Doom. This morning… Continue reading The Rollover of Doom: a Trap for Good Programmers
The smartphone wars: Verizon gets iPhone
Finally, after 18 months of busted rumors and false starts, Verizon got the iPhone today. Apple fanboys, still stinging from comShare’s November report that Android had passed the iPhone in U.S. market share, are delirious with joy. People who actually get paid to think about smartphone market trends are less sanguine.
Geeks, hackers, nerds, and crackers: on language boundaries
Geeks, hackers, nerds, and crackers. It’s an interesting indication of how popular culture has evolved in the last quarter-century that the scope and boundaries of these terms are now of increasing interest to people who don’t think they belong in any of those categories — from language columnists for major newspapers to ordinary folks who… Continue reading Geeks, hackers, nerds, and crackers: on language boundaries
Plug and Pray in GPS-land
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another darkly humorous tale of the seamy side of GPS interfacing. GPSD working with USB GPS mice has, when properly installed, lovely plug-and-play self-configuring behavior. That is, you plug a USB GPS into a USB port, the hotplug system notifies the gpsd daemon that the GPS is available, the daemon… Continue reading Plug and Pray in GPS-land
Cultural literacy for hackers
I’ve written before on the hacker culture as a invisible college defined partly by a network of trust, gatekeepers, and certification authorities. Jay Maynard ask the next question: What are the non-technical things every hacker should know?