I'm flying to Redmond today for PDC10. In fact, I'm on the plane now: Alaska Airlines offers in-flight Wi-Fi. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I might as well get some work done.
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Apple delays the white iPhone 4 until Spring 2011. When, of course, the iPhone 5 will ship. Let's just admit it's not happening and move on, shall we?
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A federal judge finds that Limewire infringes on copyrights on a "massive scale" and orders the service to be shut down. Well, duh.
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Barnes & Noble introduces a color Nook eBook reader. This is the first time anyone other than Amazon has done something interesting in the eBook reader space. I might need to check this out, though I suspect a color Kindle is on the way. LAPTOP Magazine checks it out and reports that "the Nook Color hits all the right notes. The display is capacitive instead of resistive and quite responsive to touch." I trust LAPTOP Mag quite a bit, for whatever that's worth. But if this thing is just a normal iPad-style LCD, eh. It's unclear, but I'd like to know more.
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Yahoo! has apparently overhauled its email service. And when you think about it, email is the place where you go to find out that Denise Richards is "trending" right now. Sigh.
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I've been a bit out of it with the travel today and all, but I assume this CNN article, Microsoft is a dying consumer brand, is causing a fuss today. This is a tough one for me, because I've argued in the past that Microsoft's platforms are no longer automatic hits, as they used to be (witness developer ambivalence at all the Vista-era tech, and the complete lack of big picture API stuff in Windows 7). But ... I don't know. I think Windows Phone is going to be big with consumers. Xbox already is, and Kinect will be. Windows 7 already is. Office is huge, and isn't going anywhere. But I think the advantage of Apple in this realm is that this is pretty much all they do. So they can focus in ways Microsoft can't.
And Apple isn't perfect, by the way. I find it humorous, for example, that reviewers are going ga-ga over Apple's full-screen interface for iPhoto and future Mac OS X apps, when this is the only browser maker that doesn't offer a full-screen mode in tis own web browser. Its iDevice/iTunes sync model is hopelessly outdated and requires a physical connection. iTunes has no sense of folder monitoring, and can't share anything over a network without a user logged on and the application running. These are consumer things that Microsoft does right, and Apple doesn't. Not huge things. But let's not get carried away ceding the world to Apple.
The biggest problem with this CNN article, though, is it's weird attempted connection between a smaller-than-usual PDC and Microsoft's waning influence. Actually, this year's PDC is indicative of a different thing all together. Usually, Microsoft has a PDC in the days leading up to a new platform. (That is, it's not an annual event.) That's not happening now. But they're having one now anyway, out of band if you will, because some of its ongoing initiatives--cloud computing, smartphones/mobility, and others--are important and still warrant attention. So this is really any extra PDC, not a small PDC. So the PDC comments in this article are just cheap.