Skip navigation

Nokia and Windows Phone, Google Docs Silliness, Windows Thin PC, More

Good morning.

I think I'm going to dispense with the "Daily Update" naming convention now and see how that goes.

Nokia CEO’s biggest hurdles: speed, accountability, and laziness. And that's just when he's dealing with the Windows Phone guys. (Cue drum roll.)

On a more serious note, Bloomberg has an excellent article describing the very real issues Nokia faces as it migrates to Windows Phone. I'm particularly heartened by Rob Sanfilippo's comments that they can't move quickly enough to right the ship. Exactly right.

PC World is off the rails: "A common criticism of Google Docs when it first launched was that it was primitive," Keir Thomas writes. "In some ways this was part of Google's plan." Insightful. Head's up: Google Docs is still primitive, sorry. And doing less is never a plan. It's a stopgap.

Microsoft shipped a CTP of its thin client version of Windows 7, called Windows Thin PC, yesterday. It's described as a "locked down" version of Windows 7, which is true enough, but I don't think that enough people understand it's also a virtualized package that requires server infrastructure to work. It's not a smaller, lighter version of Windows 7.

Nathan Newman offers up an interesting look at Google's products and how this new way of doing business impacts the future of antitrust.

MSNBC says that Firefox 4 is slaughtering Internet Explorer 9 from a downloads perspective. And while Microsoft is no doubt looking for the silver lining in this, I feel this situation is easily explained: The browser wars are not a short term battle, they're a long term fight. And let's be serious, Firefox 4 is not going to beat IE 9 long term. It won't even be close.

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to reevaluate my NYTimes subscription in the light of the recent pay wall stuff, and how the company had yet to announce its plans for Kindle (and Nook) subscribers. Since then, I tried the iPad app (hate it, I'll write about this) and have decided to stick with the superior Kindle experience. And then Amazon and the NYTimes announced some details about what, exactly, Kindle subscribers will get as part of the paywall plans: free access to the NYTimes website. Pretty much the minimum I'd expect, IOW.

There's a weird new trend in Android tablets (and smart phones, actually) where hardware makers are extending the devices with clip-on keyboards, effectively turning them into pseudo-laptops. (Here's a new recent example.) Please, stop. What we really need are iPad 2-thin PC tablets that work this way, since what you want when you clip on a keyboard is a real computer. And no, the Eee Tablet or whatever it's called does not qualify.

Java creator James Gosling has joined Google. Which makes some sense: Java is the development environment behind Android which, if I'm reading the tea leaves right, will soon be one of the world's most dominant computing platforms alongside Windows.
Hide comments

Comments

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <blockquote> <br> <p>

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Publish