Linked List: January 17, 2012

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing ★

Fascinating data visualizations, as usual, from Horace Dediu. Be sure to watch the video — that’s my favorite of the bunch. Dediu:

This last view corresponds to the data in the first graph (line chart). If iOS and Android are added as potential substitutions for personal computing, the share of PCs suddenly collapses to less than 50%. It also suggests much more collapse to come.

I will concede that this last view is extremist. It does not reflect a competition that exists in real life. However, I put this data together to show a historic pattern. Sometimes extremism is a better point of view than conservatism.

The graph in question — extreme though Dediu admits it is — should be terrifying to Microsoft and its shareholders. Maybe Intel too.

(See also: Dediu on Apple as the largest PC vendor if the iPad is included as a PC.)

App Store Economics ★

David Barnard:

Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize user value/entertainment. It’d be a shame if the mobile software industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.

The MacBook Air Turns Four Years Old Today ★

Kelly Hodgkins, writing for TUAW:

Four years ago today, Apple introduced the MacBook Air, then the world’s thinnest notebook. It was Steve Jobs’s last Macworld appearance and the next to last Macworld keynote for Apple.

From an intriguing but impractical high-end niche to the industry standard in just four years.

Headline of the Day, Heartless Edition ★

MarketWatch: “Yang Resigns From Yahoo Board, Shares Up”.

I remember an Internet without Jerry Yang at Yahoo, but I don’t remember a World Wide Web without Jerry Yang at Yahoo.

iTunes Match Expands to 19 New Countries: Latin America, Baltics, Netherlands ★

Looks like the rollout isn’t exactly smooth, though. (Among iTunes’s numerous deficiencies, what’s the deal with the continued use of cryptic numeric “error codes”? Error messages like this seem like a remnant from the ’90s.)

Headline of the Day, Like Something From The Onion Edition ★

“Samsung Commits to Increasing Smartphone Battery Life in 2012, Hopes for All-Day Use.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

How Stanley Kubrick Invented the Modern Box-Office Report ★

Mike Kaplan:

Word quickly spread that Stanley had a computerized system to track theaters and grosses based on technical information he had acquired while developing HAL 9000, the all-knowing computer in 2001. For months these stories persisted in the trades as the roster of Clockwork cinemas was refined. They were neither confirmed nor denied.

Sweating the details.

Google IP Addresses Used to Vandalize OpenStreetMap ★

OpenStreetMap:

Preliminary results show users from Google IP address ranges in India deleting, moving and abusing OSM data including subtle edits like reversing one-way streets. Two OpenStreetMap accounts have been vandalizing OSM in London, New York and elsewhere from Google’s IP address, the same address in India reported by Mocality.

(Via Kontra, who observes that 2012 has been a rather scandal-heavy year for Google, and we’re only three weeks in.)

Update: ReadWriteWeb has a statement from Google:

Google sent the following statement to ReadWriteWeb on Tuesday morning. “The two people who made these changes were contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are no longer working on Google projects.”

‘Hello’ ★

“You know just what to say…”