Linked List: August 4, 2011

Thursday, 4 August 2011

Another Google Innovation 

Jordan Kahn for 9 to 5 Google: “Google Adds Tablet-Like Preview Panes to Gmail Inbox”.

Not iPad-like. Tablet-like. Uh-huh.

Update: Many dozens of readers point to “Outlook”, an email program from Microsoft, which added a similar three-column layout with short message previews in the middle column, back in 2003.

The Problem With All-Star Teams 

Matt Drance:

Facebook’s moves suggest it wants to succeed here. It’s gobbling up a remarkable amount of talent — an All-Star Team, if you will. The problem with all-star rosters, of course, is that as a team they often suck. It’s an odd phenomenon, but if you put too much greatness in the same room, things don’t always turn out so… great.

The One Rule 

Michael Lopp:

It might not seem like a lot of change, but after religiously trying Exposé and Spaces for years, Mission Control finally feels like my desktop and not a set of sexy but poorly integrated tools that were fun to demo but hard to use.

Microsoft Further Exposes Google’s Patent Hypocrisy 

This is not in dispute: Google could have joined the consortium for the Novell patents and taken them off the table, but declined, because they wanted those patents all to themselves to use them to negotiate deals for all the other patents Android already violates.

Totally Not Bogus 

PC World, back in March:

Google has acquired a U.S. patent for its popular cycling logo system, also known as “Google Doodles.” Patent 7,912,915 was granted on Tuesday, nearly 10 years after its initial submission in 2001 by Sergey Brin.

The patent is entitled “Systems and Methods for Enticing Users to a Web Site.”

It Does Remind Me of a Previous Antitrust Case 

Paul Thurrott:

And I’d also point out that Google licenses Android for free. So by raising the price of Android by imposing licensing fees on technologies Android is in fact using, Apple, Microsoft, and others are arguably simply leveling the playing field and taking away an artificial Android advantage, forcing the OS to compete more fairly. Arguably, by “dumping” Android in the market at no cost, Google—which has unlimited cash and can afford to do such a thing — is behaving in an anticompetitive fashion. In fact, one could argue that Google is using its dominance in search advertising to unfairly gain entry into another market by giving that new product, Android, away for free. Does this remind you of any famous antitrust case?

Google in a Nut 

Brian S. Hall, “Google Are Pussies”:

If you have a monopoly business and generate monopoly profits and take those monopoly profits to another industry and gave away what your competitors (must) charge for, which led you to quickly capture the dominant market share, would you…

…whine like a bitch?

Fireballed: Cached here.