Linked List: October 4, 2013

Friday, 4 October 2013

Bloomberg: ‘Microsoft Said to Ask HTC for Windows on Android Phones’ 

Tim Culpan, Dina Bass, and Peter Burrows, reporting for Bloomberg:

Terry Myerson, head of Microsoft’s operating systems unit, asked HTC last month to load Windows Phone as a second option on handsets with Google Inc.’s rival software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. Myerson discussed cutting or eliminating the license fee to make the idea more attractive, the people said. The talks are preliminary and no decision has been made, two people said.

Any port in a storm, I guess. But what a terrible idea.

Anyway, think about how fast this industry changes. Four years ago, HTC was, by far, the number-one Windows Mobile handset maker in the world.

Igloo 

My thanks to Igloo for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Igloo bills itself as “an intranet you’ll actually like”, which is a perfect description. Igloo offers blogs, calendars, file sharing, forums, microblogs (think: private Twitter), and wikis. Everything you’d want. It’s all modern (including responsive design for mobile devices), and all configurable.

Igloo is free to use with up to ten people — free! — so you can start building your own Igloo today.

Elon Musk on the Model S Fire 

Elon Musk:

For consumers concerned about fire risk, there should be absolutely zero doubt that it is safer to power a car with a battery than a large tank of highly flammable liquid.

Really admire the way Musk and Tesla respond to incidents like this. Clear, plain language.

Behind the Scenes of the Original iPhone Launch 

Fascinating piece by Fred Vogelstein in The New York Times on the development and launch announcement of the original iPhone, largely based on remarks from Andy Grignon, who was then the engineering manager in charge of the iPhone’s antenna systems (and who obviously no longer works for Apple; it’s rare to see the company’s code of silence broken even by former employees).

A taste:

It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs.

The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

I don’t want to spoil the ending; it’s a great story.