Linked List: September 30, 2013

Monday, 30 September 2013

Delta to Use Microsoft’s Surface 2 Tablets in Place of Paper Manuals 

Ina Fried:

Delta said on Monday that it plans to buy Surface 2 tablets using the Microsoft hardware to replace paper flight books for the airline’s 11,000 pilots.

The deployment will start later this year with pilots of 757 and 767 aircraft, with the goal of having all cockpits paperless by the end of next year. The Surface tablets will contain charts, reference documents and other information. Delta estimates that it can save $13 million in fuel costs by replacing the paper manuals.

Nice coup for Microsoft.

Intriguingly, AppleInsider reports:

“We fought hard for iPad,” a pilot working for the airline told AppleInsider. He described the Delta deal as being about money, travel contracts, and Delta’s Information Technology staff historically being “in bed” with Microsoft.

I’ll take that with a grain of AppleInsider-sized salt (i.e. a big chunk of salt) for now. Would love to see someone else report something similar.

Android Police: Ads Are Coming to Gmail for Android 

Artem Russakovskii, writing for Android Police:

The most significant under-the-hood and probably not active yet addition to Gmail 4.6 is ads. Yup, ads are most definitely coming to Gmail for Android which managed to stay ad-free all this time, unlike its web counterpart. […]

The above appears to suggest that you’ll be able to save ads as messages. Like an ad? Save it, and it’ll become part of your inbox. Don’t like it, and it’ll get dismissed. Very interesting, isn’t it?

“Interesting” is one way to put it.

‘Black to the Mac’ 

This week’s episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, featuring special guest John Moltz. Topics include Martha Stewart, patent trolls, Touch ID and the iPhone 5S, making booze in prison, and more.

Brought to you by three great sponsors:

  • Bartender: Organize, hide, and rearrange your OS X menu bar items.
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  • Mailroute: Innovative cloud email protection.
Four Rules to Make Star Wars Great Again 

If I could add a fifth it would be: Star Wars is about camaraderie.

Apple Passes Coca-Cola as Most Valuable Brand in Interbrand Rankings 

Stuart Elliott, reporting for the NYT:

Not only has Apple replaced Coca-Cola as first among the 100 most valuable brands based on criteria that include financial performance, this is the first time that the soft drink known for slogans like “It’s the real thing” has not been No. 1.

Number two: Google.

Steve Ballmer’s Emotional Goodbye to Microsoft 

Goodbyes are hard. Ballmer went out his way, that’s for sure.

Mariano Rivera: The Perfect Athlete for Our Time 

Joe Posnanski, on Mariano Rivera:

But I do wonder if this misses the real story. How does someone close games in New York for 16 years and come out of it adored? How does someone who wears nothing but Yankees pinstripes his entire career — can you even picture Mariano Rivera without his Yankees cap on? — get honored at Fenway Park? How does someone in today’s Twittery, bloggy, First Take, Facebook, chat board, talk radio, GIF-infused world come out of a long career as universally beloved?

See, even people who loathe Mariano Rivera love him.

Scandal? Not a hint of it. Gossip? Never heard any. Embarrassing moments? Didn’t happen.

How BlackBerry Blew It: The Inside Story 

Splendid investigative report by Sean Silcoff, Jacquie McNish, and Steve Ladurantaye, for The Globe and Mail:

Mike Lazaridis was at home on his treadmill and watching television when he first saw the Apple iPhone in early 2007. There were a few things he didn’t understand about the product. So, that summer, he pried one open to look inside and was shocked. It was like Apple had stuffed a Mac computer into a cellphone, he thought.

To Mr. Lazaridis, a life-long tinkerer who had built an oscilloscope and computer while in high school, the iPhone was a device that broke all the rules. The operating system alone took up 700 megabytes of memory, and the device used two processors. The entire BlackBerry ran on one processor and used 32 MB. Unlike the BlackBerry, the iPhone had a fully Internet-capable browser. That meant it would strain the networks of wireless companies like AT&T Inc., something those carriers hadn’t previously allowed. RIM by contrast used a rudimentary browser that limited data usage.

“I said, ‘How did they get AT&T to allow [that]?’ Mr. Lazaridis recalled in the interview at his Waterloo office. “ ‘It’s going to collapse the network.’ And in fact, some time later it did.”

Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. That earned them a reputation for being cocky and, eventually, out of touch. “That’s marketing,” Mr. Lazaridis explained. “You position your strengths against their weaknesses.”

Apple had brought a gun to what had until then been a knife fight. And then BlackBerry wasted a few years trying to turn their knife into a gun.