Shannon Love

Where’s the Chatter About Microsoft?

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This article on the Kindle Fire versus the iPad inspired my previous post. Reading it again I noticed something else…

… there is no mention of Microsoft.

This article isn’t unusual. Microsoft seems to be disappearing from the casual computer related “chatter”, such as the Wired article. I’m not talking about the Microsoft specific press like PC World or the like but rather the less specific and more general press and blogs that sometimes writes stories about computer issues.

Five years or more ago, you simply did not see computer stories that didn’t mention Microsoft. When Apple did something there was always some notice paid to how Microsoft might respond. More importantly, Microsoft showed up in political, economic or cultural writing that weren’t computer specific. Microsoft was on the minds of the general public, not just computer geeks.

Today, Microsoft is almost invisible.

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Cleaning Up the Android Fragments

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Compare and contrast ads for Apple’s iOS/iPhone/iPad and ads for Google’s Android.

The Apple ads center visually on products themselves. The Apples ads just linger on showing the Apple hardware and software in use. Apple believes that the products speak for themselves and all Apple has to do is show the products in action. Basically, the ads just say, “Here’s our stuff. Isn’t it neat?” This works because the Apple products are finely tuned by a focused and discipline design, production and support system. There is a definitive iPhone, a definitive iPad and a definitive iOS operating system.

The Android ads by contrast don’t show the actual devices or Android itself in use. They are not Android specific at all. They might as well be snippets cut from some Sci-Fi movie or video game. The actual Android products are largely hidden. Instead of showing the hardware and software in action, they instead nearly try to associate the Android brand with cool and exciting Sci-Fi imagery.

Most Android ads, regardless of who makes them, fit this pattern. Android devices are seldom seen, when seen they seldom hold prolonged focus and are seldom seen in use.  Basically, the ads say, “Look at the girl in leather fighting robots! That’s cool right? So, Android must be cool too!”

The two different ad styles reveal the problem with fragmentation that Google faces in making Android a trusted, respected and widely adopted OS brand.

I post to StackOverflow, a site/community for answering technical programming questions. One of my highest rated answers addressed the question of which mobile OS a startup should target. Back in Oct 09  I observed:

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Forty Years Old and Living in My Mom’s Garage

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Watching the older members of the Occupy movement always puts me in mind of this Austin Lounge Lizard song. I can’t find a complete online rendition but you can listen to the second stanza.

I think the last stanza sums up the emotional lives of these people. They are all convinced they are special somehow and that the greatest proof of the current world’s inherent injustice is that they don’t get the income, status and regard they innately deserve. They really do believe they’re better than the business people who actually provide all the material benefits of modern life. They chafe that mere executives, bankers and inventors get the money and status that should rightly go to them.

They dress all their rage up as concern for the poor and victimized but they’re really only upset about how the world treats them individually. Their “concern” is really thinly discussed selfishness.

That selfishness is the base reason why all their policies always hurt more than help the nominal targets of their concern. Their selfishness means that any policy or programs must first and foremost advance their interest. Any program that doesn’t do that is violently resisted regardless of its potential or proven ability to help those who need help.

All this rage, rioting and posturing is really just a thinly disquised shout of, “me, me, me!”

It’s Time for the Grownups to Send the Children Home

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Every year, thousands of boy and girl scouts head out into the wild and set up camp sites. They even do so on a scale of thousands when they have Jamborees. Even more impressively, the vast majority of the people organizing and doing the work are just teenagers. We see the same level of impressive self-organization when natural disasters hit. Strangers instantly come together to pool limited resources and help each other out. Within hours, they can create a physically safe and emotionally supportive ad hoc community while they wait for outside help to arrive.

Given all that, just how pathetic is it that the various “Occupy” mobs can’t even come close to providing the same level of effective self-organization in their little campground cum shantytowns?  Even the most trivial decisions take hours of protracted debate that often end without deciding on an action. The “Occupiers” in many cities have rioted, attacking random individuals and destroying businesses large and small.  Almost all of the sites nationwide are plagued  internally by violence and theft.  The New York Occupy campground has even had to establish a women’s only tent to prevent rapes.

Do these pathetic, immature, egocentric twits actually expect the rest of us to allow them to influence any major public policy? When people are losing jobs and homes and entire communities and even states are sliding into bankruptcy, why would we turn to such overt incompetents for leadership? If they can’t manage a campground or honestly manage 500,000 donated dollars, why would we think they can manage a city government or regulate a bank?

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Blame Shifting Indicates Incompetent Mayors

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With violent crime in New York on the rise, nanny mayor Bloomberg has involved himself in Virginia’s internal legislative process in an attempt to restrict the Second Amendment rights of the people of Virginia. His rationale for doing so is that New York criminals buy guns in Virginia, and since Bloomberg can’t control those criminals in New York itself, the law abiding citizens of Virginia have to give up some of their rights.

In reality, Bloomberg is just another impotent and incompetent big city mayor with a expensive, bloated, unionized, dysfunctional and often corrupt police force who cannot provide basic civil order to many parts of the city they notionally “serve and protect.” Rather than admit that he can’t actually perform the most basic duty of his office, Bloomberg desperately tries to shift the blame to some group outside his jurisdiction over which he can plausibly claim he has no control.

Bloomberg’s message boils down to: “Hey, you can’t blame for me runaway crime in New York because it’s all the fault of those ignorant rednecks in Virginia over whom I have no control!”

Blaming outsiders for internal woes is the oldest political trick in the book.

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