Linked List: April 2, 2013

Tuesday, 2 April 2013

‘Has To’ 

This tweet by WSJ reporter Jessica Lessin epitomizes everything that’s wrong with the Journal’s coverage of Apple of late:

New iPhone heads into production soon amid a new reality: Apple has to act more like Samsung if it wants to thrive.

Here’s the story. Now, if it’s true that Apple is heading into production on a new iPhone in the next few months to go on sale in July or thereabouts, it would be a change, insofar as each previous new iPhone has debuted a year or longer after the previous one. And if they unveil another new iPhone this calendar year — a lower-cost model — that would be an even bigger change.

But none of that is exactly Samsung-like, strategically. Samsung’s U.S. website currently lists 145 different cell phones. And Apple did the exact same thing with the iPad last year — a new top-of-the-line model just six months after the iPad 3, and a second lower-cost model in the iPad Mini.

As for “has to”, here are the last two sentences of the report:

Last year, Apple captured nearly two-thirds of the profits in the industry, up from 62% in 2011. Samsung’s share rose to about a third from 19%.

Poor beleaguered Apple, right?

The Man Taking on Google and Bing 

Nice profile of DuckDuckGo and founder Gabriel Weinberg by Max Slater-Robins for Neowin:

But what sets DuckDuckGo apart from Bing or Google? According to Weinberg, it’s simple: Privacy. DuckDuckGo promises to never track a user’s clicks, or use previous searchers to aid current results. They describe the practice of targeting results based on past searches as placing a user in a “bubble,” where everything is controlled based on what you want to see (e.g. if you visit Fox News frequently, results for Fox News will rank higher than those for MSNBC).

The Latest Apple Scuttlebutt 

Smart thread on Branch. Two nuggets from yours truly:

  • What I’ve heard: iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it. (Let me know if you’ve heard this song before.)

  • Regarding Jony Ive and iOS: Word on the street is that iOS engineers with carry privileges all have some sort of polarizing filter on their iPhone displays, such that it greatly decreases viewing angles, thus making it difficult for observers to see the apparently rather significant system-wide UI overhaul.

And regarding that system-wide UI overhaul, I hear the same thing as Rene Ritchie: “Ive’s work is apparently making many people really happy, but will also apparently make rich-texture-loving designers sad.”

Amazon Hires the Aptly-Named Charlie Kindel 

Todd Bishop:

Charlie Kindel, the Seattle tech veteran who left his job as a Microsoft Windows Phone general manager in 2011 to join the startup world, has now been hired by Amazon.com as the director of an undisclosed project inside the company.

“I’m building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon. I’m hiring cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers, he writes on his LinkedIn profile, which describes the position as director of “something secret.”

Interesting, to say the least.

Post-Android, Andy Rubin Has Been Busy on Facebook 

And utterly silent on Google Plus. Read into that what you will.

Nicholas Carlson on Andy Rubin’s Ouster From Android 

Interesting piece by Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider:

The week after the news came out, we spent a few days in the Bay Area, talking with ex-Googlers and other plugged-in sources. We asked each of them about Rubin’s sudden demotion. […]

What we heard is that Larry Page doesn’t mind employing gruff types... so long as they serve his purpose. Page must have decided that the way Rubin was running Android no longer served his purpose, and that an Android run by Sundar Pichai would. So the question becomes: What does Pichai bring to Android that Rubin does not?

Some interesting speculation. The gossip echoes what I’ve heard, which is that this leadership change was not amicable. Page was “sick of the fighting” is the way I heard it. And the thing is, Sundar Pichai was the guy Rubin fought with the most — look no further than the curiously long time it took to make Chrome the default Android web browser, despite the fact that its predecessor, the plainly-named Browser, was nowhere near as good an app. Pichai may well be the last person Rubin would have wanted as his successor.

The part of this gossip that doesn’t add up, of course, is that, as announced, Rubin isn’t leaving Google, but instead is staying within the company to start something new. That doesn’t jibe with Rubin having had his baby wrested away and turned over to his archrival. So take it all with a grain of salt for now.

‘Finding Dory’ Sequel to ‘Finding Nemo’ Set for 2015 

On the one hand, I worry that Pixar is making too many sequels. On the other, I’d love to see another Incredibles movie.