Linked List: June 3, 2011

Friday, 3 June 2011

My thanks to iStockphoto for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. iStockphoto provides outstanding stock photography, royalty-free, at affordable prices. Their search feature is excellent, which is good, because their library is huge and wide-ranging. Try it and see for yourself.

Apple vs. Wintel ★

Nice catch from MacDailyNews: as of the close of market today, Apple is worth more than Microsoft and Intel combined. And some tasty claim chowder on this Bill Gates quote from June 1998, regarding Steve Jobs’s return to Apple as CEO:

“What I can’t figure out is why he [Steve Jobs] is even trying? He knows he can’t win.”

According to Wolfram Alpha, using their mean market caps for the entire month of June 1998 (it was a volatile month amidst the boom), the Wintel combination was worth $339 billion, vs. $3.5 billion for Apple. Put another way, Microsoft and Intel combined were worth 96 times more than Apple then. Since then, you get this.

Sarah Palin Explains Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride ★

Student of history Sarah Palin:

He who warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.

Mike Monteiro:

By the time Palin’s campaign is over Paul Revere will be firing AK-47s and setting bear traps.

‘Huge’ ★

Robert Scoble, on Twitter:

Next week will be a huge week for those of us who have lived on Twitter for last few years. Apple is building Twitter in deeply into iOS 5.

Asked then whether he knows something or is just going on published rumors, he says he knows something.

Brent Simmons on NetNewsWire ★

Brent Simmons:

Of all the many, many things I’ve learned in the past nine years, it’s that the best part isn’t money or winning awards or the small fame that comes with a successful app, it’s when people write to say they love the software.

Daniel Pasco on Black Pixel’s Acquisition of NetNewsWire ★

Daniel Pasco:

For many of us, NetNewsWire was the inspiration to quit our jobs, get serious about learning Objective-C, and go indie.

DHH on the Groupon IPO ★

David Heinemeier Hansson:

Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account.

At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper. They’re already projected to make close to three billion dollars in revenues this year. If you can’t figure out how to make money on three billion in revenue, when exactly will the profit magic be found? Ten billion? Fifty billion?

I feel like the Groupon IPO is an elaborate practical joke.

Red Pop — The Big Red Button for Your iPhone Camera ★

Count me in for this Kickstarter campaign from Brendan Dawes and Beep Industries.

(And compare and contrast the production quality of their video versus Microsoft’s first look at Windows 8.)

Why Windows 8 Fails to Learn the iPad’s Lessons ★

Jason Snell:

The iPad, like the iPhone, was a success because it did not attempt in any way to replicate the desktop PC experience in the way that Windows tablets (and Windows Mobile) did. Apple used the underpinnings of OS X to form the basis of iOS, but at no point in iOS do you see anything that could be remotely mistaken for a Mac. On Windows 8, in contrast, Sinofsky says that there’s no way to kill the Windows desktop: “It’s always there.”

Beyond the basic device experience, imagine if Mac developers didn’t need to do any work to get their apps to run on the iPad. Many of them wouldn’t have bothered. The rest certainly wouldn’t have rushed.