Linked List: July 7, 2010

Wednesday, 7 July 2010

AT&T Claims Not to Be Capping 3G Upload Speeds ★

They just suck.

Mini-Microsoft on the Kin, Ray Ozzie, and Layoff Rumors ★

Regarding Ray Ozzie:

Meanwhile, Ozzie has made enemies of most of the leaders of the actual products that pay for his “Labs”. He’s made no secret of the fact that he thinks that Windows is run terribly, or that Office is dead technology. Behind closed doors, he is openly dispariging of Microsoft development practices and Microsoft technology. His efforts to build product display a stunning lack of a caring about how much things cost to run, or whether they will ever make money. To my knowledge, he doesn’t care in the slightest about the enterprise businesses at the company.

I don’t know if Ozzie is out to lunch, or if he’s the only executive at the company with an eye to the future instead of the past.

Microsoft’s Kin Humiliation ★

An unnamed Microsoftie talks to Jay Yarrow:

“We had a huge launch party on campus and I bet that party cost more than the amount of revenues we took in on the product. As an employee, I am embarrassed. As a shareholder, I am pissed. It’s one thing to incubate products and bring them to a proof-of-concept to see what works, but it’s something else to launch. I suspect we launched because we felt like we HAD to so we could save face because we were trying to build buzz, but overall — HUGE fail.”

I can’t vouch for the following, but a well-placed little birdie told me over the weekend that they sold a grand total of 503 Kins before they pulled the plug. 503.

New MobileMe Calendar Beta ★

The iPad-ification of the MobileMe web apps continues. I like the trend.

Apple’s New Shanghai Store ★

Another striking store design.

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning ★

Fascinating (but, for a parent, scary):

The Instinctive Drowning Response — so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D. — is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.