Linked List: February 5, 2014

Wednesday, 5 February 2014

Rookie: Sports Stories Told by the Players, Coaches, and Insiders ★

New sports site from the team behind Devour and Uncrate, with a novel premise: Rookie’s editors pick a topic and accompanying photo, then curate a thread of comments related to the story. Like a lot of great ideas, it’s very simple, but like nothing I’ve seen before.

(I do not want to know what it cost to score the “rookie.com” domain name.)

Microsoft Employees Fondly Remember Days When CEOs Were So Big They Took Up Entire Rooms ★

The Onion, apt, as usual. (Via MG Siegler.)

Paul Graham in 2007: ‘Microsoft Is Dead’ ★

Prescient analysis from seven years ago:

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little “Web 2.0” bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.

I linked to this back when it was fresh, but it feels relevant again this week, and worth a re-read. Graham’s essay captures well the fear that Microsoft instilled at its peak.

Speaking of Sony Vaios ★

Nikkei:

Sony is in talks to unload its sluggish personal computer operations to investment fund Japan Industrial Partners, part of a business overhaul designed to shift focus to smartphones, The Nikkei learned Tuesday.

Under the plan, the fund will establish a new company to which Sony will sell its entire PC business. The sale price is estimated at 40 billion yen to 50 billion yen ($391 million to $489 million).

Steve Jobs and Sony ★

Nobuyuki Hayashi, from an interview with Kunitake Ando, former president of Sony:

Most of Sony’s executives spend their winter vacation in Hawaii and play golf after celebrating new year. In one of those new year golf competitions back in 2001, “Steve Jobs and another Apple executive were waiting for us at the end of golf course holding VAIO running Mac OS” recalls Ando; 2001 is the year, Mac OS X shipped and I am speculating this is Intel-version of Mac OS X, they hid for four and half years since then. […]

Ando liked Apple. He always felt Mac and VAIO were so close in philosophy. He especially admired the original iMac introduced in 1998. But the timing was bad for Sony, it is just about the time, Sony’s VAIO gained popularity and it is just about the time that VAIO team had finished optimizing both VAIO’s hardware and software specifically for Windows platform. Because of this, most of the VAIO team opposed asking ‘if it is worth it.’ And that was the end of story for this Mac-compatible VAIO.

Talk about ways the last decade could have been different.

(As Hayashi notes in a postscript, the Apple side of this story was told two years ago, by Kim Scheinberg in this amazing story on Quora.)

37signals Goes All-In on Basecamp ★

Jason Fried:

We’re changing our name. 37signals is now Basecamp. “37signals” goes into the history books. From now on, we are Basecamp. Basecamp the company, Basecamp the product. We’re one and the same.

As one of the FAQs states, this is a really unusual strategy. I’ve long admired Jason and his team’s knack for questioning conventional wisdom, for forcing themselves to look at everything from new perspectives. I never would have expected this, but now that they’ve done it, it feels right.