Linked List: February 4, 2010

Thursday, 4 February 2010

The Official Microsoft Blog Responds to Dick Brass’s NYT Op-Ed ★

Why in the world did they respond to this? And even worse, without refuting any of his claims, most especially his core premise that Microsoft is divided into dozens of bureaucratic fiefdoms that fight against each other to protect their turf?

App Store Previews Now on the Web ★

I’ve been waiting for this for so long — a way to link to App Store entries without requiring iTunes.

Jonathan Schwartz Tweets His Resignation in Haiku ★

Ran Sun into ground.
Schwartz cracks cute with jokey tweet.
Ignominious.

AT&T Gives Green Light to Sling TV Over 3G ★

Brad Stone:

AT&T announced Thursday morning that it will now allow the SlingPlayer iPhone app to stream live over its 3G network. “Since mid-December 2009, AT&T has been testing the app and has recently notified Sling Media — as well as Apple — that the optimized app can run on its 3G network,” said the carrier in a press release.

Comcast Rebranding as ‘Xfinity’ ★

Bob Fernandez, reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Comcast Corp. said yesterday that it would re-brand its TV, Internet, and telephone services as Xfinity on Feb. 12 to signal to customers that this isn’t the same old company. […]

This re-branding comes as Comcast has struggled to rebuild its reputation because of poor service and problems with its network that resulted in telephone and Internet outages. Its customer-satisfaction rating is among the lowest in the industry, but it has improved slightly in the last year. Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said the re-branding was not an attempt to distance the service from the Comcast name. “This is about our product. It is about providing our customers with products that just keep getting better.”

Many companies walk away from household name brands just for kicks. Sure.

James Kendrick Gets Poor Results From Palm Mobile Hotspot ★

James Kendrick:

My findings are disappointing to say the least. I found that both the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus performed virtually identically in the testing, which was expected given the similarity of the phones. The problem is I could never get anything above abysmal bandwidth with either phone.

I hope it’s something Palm can fix in a software update. It’s a killer feature on paper.

‘They Want the Thing in the Movies’ ★

Mike Monteiro gets it.

‘Microsoft’s Creative Destruction’ ★

Former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass, on Microsoft’s internal culture:

Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

Can you imagine the head of Apple’s iWork team declaring by fiat that there wouldn’t be versions of Keynote, Pages, and Numbers for the iPad because he didn’t like the concept?

Speaking of Gays in the Military ★

Speaking of which, this piece from The Economist is delightful.

Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Tweets His Support for Repealing ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ Policy ★

Is there a more iconic sign of the times?

Firefox for Maemo RC3 ★

Stuart Parmenter:

We’ve decided to disable plugin (not to be confused with add-ons, which are supported) support for this release. The Adobe Flash plugin used on many sites degraded the performance of the browser to the point where it didn’t meet our standards.