Linked List: December 18, 2010

Saturday, 18 December 2010

Joel Henderson Reviews the Nexus S 

He doesn’t like it:

Slow UI: the graphics are jittery and staccato as if the graphics chip can’t keep up with scrolling. To my eye, the jitter is on par with the Galaxy S; it’s noticibly slower than an iPhone 4. Edit: other people are reporting this too, and the issue seems to be that the Nexus S is not utilising a dedicated graphics chip, and instead trying to do all the graphics on the main CPU. Source.

Mat Honan Reviews the Nexus S 

He likes it:

So how does all that work? Let’s start with the Hummingbird processor: It’s fast. Really fast. Apps fire seeming instantly, everything loads well, and we never had an issue with it hanging or stalling to process something. Yet, it does this without being a battery hog. We were very pleased with the performance and power tradeoff.

Paul Buchheit: The Cloud OS 

Paul Buchheit expands upon his prediction of doom for Chrome OS:

I actually like the idea of ChromeOS, so why did I predict its demise? The answer is that we already have millions of devices that almost meet the same ideal, and they are running iOS and Android. In the 1.5 years since ChromeOS was announced, Apple launched the iPad, which quickly became one of the fastest selling new devices ever. Google will necessarily respond by building Android tablets, which means Android will be running on larger, more powerful devices. All of the benefits of ChromeOS (security, instant-on, etc) should apply to Android as well, and I expect that any new Chrome features (mostly under the umbrella of HTML5, but perhaps Native Client as well) will also be added to the Android browser, since platforms succeed by being as large as possible. 

24 Hours 

Andre Torrez:

Someone on Twitter suggested that a group of engineers should get together on a weekend and build a Delicious clone. In anticipation of this mystery group of people sitting down and doing this, I thought I’d make a quick todo list for them.

Cash Cow Disease 

Interesting argument from Ron Burk:

Cash cow disease arises when a public company has a small number of products that generate the lion’s share of profits, but lacks the discipline to return those profits to the shareholders. The disease can progress for years or even decades, simply because the cash cow products produce enough massive revenues to distract shareholders from the smaller (but still massive) amounts of waste.

For example, with Microsoft, Windows and Office carry the company, roughly speaking, allowing the company to lose billions (that’s with a ‘b’) on failed projects without incurring any serious backlash from stockholders. Without cash cows, Microsoft could not have launched a new cellphone, then canceled it a few weeks later, all while pouring more money into yet another generation of cellphone. […]

Meanwhile, at Google, the cash cow is search-driven advertising. That allows the company to encourage engineers to waste 20% of their time on “projects”, like Google Wave.

He’s not arguing that companies should stick to one thing. He’s arguing that each new product or service should be expected to pull its own weight. (Thanks to DF reader Tim Ambler.)