HOW do you make amends without admitting you’re wrong? How do you offer millions of your customers a solution to a problem you say hardly matters? Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs gave it a good shot at a press conference Friday (http://bit.ly/jobs_antennagate) aimed at addressing user complaints that gripping the new iPhone 4 in a certain way would dramatically reduce signal strength.
ONE of the cool things about Google is its informal motto, “Don’t be evil.” When Google was still an upstart, the motto was a jab at its more established competitors, who were seen to be exploiting their users, said Paul Buchheit, a former employee who suggested “Don’t be evil” in a 2000 meeting on company values. Microsoft, which used its dominance in operating systems to stifle competition, surely comes to mind. But now a decade later, Google is a dominant force on the Internet. Is it beginning to look like the new Microsoft?
ONE of the biggest back-from-the-brink stories of the 1990s was IBM. After suffering a staggering $8.10 billion loss in 1992, the lumbering giant turned its declining fortunes around by transforming itself from a hardware company to a dominant provider of software and services. Now, it appears the company has become too dominant, and is under scrutiny by antitrust authorities in the United States and the European Union for a business segment few people think about these days--mainframes.
A DISGRUNTLED reader, Paul, recently accused me of being a Microsoft hater or “just a Linux fanboy.” I am neither, but let’s listen to Paul first.
THE press loves a clash of titans. Pit the Internet search giant Google against the software behemoth Microsoft and you’ll have them chomping at the bit. So when Google announced on its blog last week that it would be developing its own operating system, most news organizations pronounced that the undisputed king of search was gunning for Microsoft where it lives.
I downloaded a pre-release version of Bayanihan 5, the upcoming version of the state-sponsored Linux distribution, hoping to put it through its paces. Unfortunately, a few technical snags prevented me from making all but the most cursory review of what is by nature a complex product. After all, to get a fair reading of an operating system, you ought to have installed it and used it for at least a week. I only had two days, if that.
IT’S time once again to take stock of the year in technology and figure out what’s in store as 2009 approaches.
I was sad—but none too surprised—to learn that PC Magazine, once a heavyweight in technology publishing, would stop printing next year, another casualty in a rapidly changing industry. Back in the day when processor speed was measured in megahertz and a megabyte of memory was more than most people had, PC Magazine was required reading for anyone tracking the rise of personal computers. In the early 1980s, the magazine practically invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews and quickly developed a reputation as a leading source of information about PC and PC-related products.
HISTORIC is how most people will describe the US elections this year. Coming after eight disastrous years that weakened the United States and damaged its reputation abroad, it’s no surprise that change was the big theme for both presidential candidates. And what a dramatic change these elections portend. The Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, is poised to be the first African-American to become President, but much has already changed even before the last ballot is tallied. From the start, the contrast between Obama, 47, and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, 72, was stark. It wasn’t just black on white, but the new kid versus old school, digital versus analog, the iPod user versus the Luddite who never learned how to send an e-mail.
MOST people who pass Manila City Hall every day hardly pay attention to the the old clock tower that rises above it. The beige structure with two red clock faces capped by a brick-red dome is a fixture, a decades-old landmark from another era. Fewer people, still, will realize that the clock tower was put there by a pioneer of the technology business—IBM.
Google Chrome runs in a Windows XP virtual machine inside Ubuntu.
LEAKED pages from a 38-page comic book tipped off most Google watchers that the Internet search giant was about to announce its new browser, Chrome, last week. “As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit ‘send’ a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome,” wrote Sundar Pichai, vice president for product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director at Google in their company’s blog. As it turns out, the comic-book introduction was strangely appropriate for Google’s unconventional open-source browser that could shake up the market. The beta test version of Google Chrome for Windows is available as a free download (http://www.google.com/chrome) but Linux and Mac users will have to wait longer.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
Made the switch to Linux? Tell me about it here and get your own penguin! Click here for a high-resolution image.
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