Linked List: January 22, 2009

Thursday, 22 January 2009

CNN Money:

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company reported an 18% jump in fourth-quarter revenue to $5.7 billion for the period ended Dec. 31. That’s up from $4.83 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

My Setup ★

Daniel Bogan is conducting a series of interviews called The Setup, asking about the hardware and software people are using to get their jobs done. Today’s interview: yours truly.

Microsoft Defends Return to DRM ★

PC Pro on Microsoft’s latest music initiative:

While companies such as Apple and Amazon have finally moved to music download services free of copy protection, MSN Mobile locks tracks to the mobile handset they are downloaded to.

And:

Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK: “At the moment, to be honest with you, we don’t have the functionality in-house to provide a mechanism for transferring between mobile phones and PC. We don’t have that functionality available.”

Methinks whoever is behind this ought to be on the Microsoft layoff list.

Layer Tennis 2009 ★

Coming soon: the second season of Coudal Partners’ viciously fun Layer Tennis. Get your free season tickets now.

No Oompa Loompas ★

Gary Hustwit, director of the upcoming Objectified documentary:

We did a follow-up interview with Jony Ive at Apple in California last week, and enjoyed the opportunity of filming inside Apple’s design facilities.

You Stay Classic, Mac OS ★

Short piece I wrote for Macworld’s “25th Anniversary of the Mac” issue regarding what Mac OS X could learn from the Classic Mac OS.

Microsoft to Cut 5,000 Jobs ★

Growth slowed, but they still reported $4.17 billion in profit for the quarter.

Update: And this interesting news:

In a stunning announcement, Microsoft will offer no forward guidance for the remainder of fiscal 2009. Clearly, the global economic crisis has become a Microsoft crisis.

‘Like Going From an Xbox to an Atari’ ★

Obama administration officials meet the existing White House tech infrastructure:

The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

Senior advisers chafed at the new arrangements, which severely limit mobility — partly by tradition but also for security reasons and to ensure that all official work is preserved under the Presidential Records Act.

Notes App Doesn’t Train iPhone System-Wide Auto-Correction Dictionary ★

Interesting find by Erica Sadun: the iPhone’s Notes app doesn’t seem to add new words to the system-wide auto-correction dictionary. Sounds like a bug in Notes to me.

Sony Projects Record $3 Billion Loss ★

Again, context for Apple’s results.

Nokia Profit Drops 69 Percent ★

Helps put context around Apple’s results.

Oblivious, Eh? ★

Brian X. Chen, in a piece for Wired regarding Apple’s quarterly conference titled “Apple Still Oblivious to Netbook Opportunity”:

During its quarterly earnings call Wednesday, Apple reinforced its skepticism in netbooks, saying their low-powered CPUs, cramped keyboards and small displays are not enough to satisfy customers.

Here’s what Tim Cook actually said, from Macworld’s transcript:

We’re watching that space, but right now from our point-of-view, those products are based on hardware that’s much less powerful than what we think that customers want, software quality that is not good, cramped keyboards, small displays. So we don’t think people are going to be pleased with those products, but we’ll see. We are watching that space. About 3% of PC industry was in this netbook kind of category so it’s a category we watch. We’ve got some ideas here. But right now, we think the products are inferior and will not provide [an] experience to customers that they’re happy with.

Sounds to me like Apple’s about as oblivious to the netbook opportunity as they were to the smartphone opportunity around, say, 2006.

Chen adds:

Apple would be ignoring trends seen in its own earnings report if it refused to offer a device in the netbook category. In Wednesday’s earnings call, Apple announced it sold a record number of iPods in the quarter: 22.7 million. With iPods priced no higher than $400, it’s clear the netbook price range is attractive to consumers.

Apple sells a lot of copies of iWork, so maybe they should make a $79 netbook, too.