The Last of the Netbookers

Farhad Manjoo says the netbook is dead, and Farhad Manjoo says good riddance.  He didn't ask me.  I'm typing this right now on my Acer Mini which is, at least for the moment, my only working computer.  I say "computer" in a sense that excludes my Iphone which is really my ebook reader and audiobook listener; also my paleo-Ipad which spends most of its quiet life in the kitchen as a cookbook and a source for the New York Times at the breakfast table (not eager to spill coffee on the phone).  I had a desktop--actually a very large laptop--until it went kerplunk a couple of weeks ago.  Mrs. Buce hopes I will replace it with a Mac so I will better understand Macs and thereby equip myself to better help with her Mac. I may do precisely that and for precisely that reason but for the most part, I feel no (other) strong inducement in that direction.

Thing is that I, apparently unlike Farhad, can actually type on this thing.  And since this is about the only thing for which I need any mini/laptop/desktop, I'm actually doing fine. 

I Don't Understand the Information Age (Browsers Dept.)

Why does anybody use Opera?

Why doesn't everybody use Opera?

Online Hell with AT&T

If you're being forced to get one of those new upgraded internet connections from AT&T--well, it may improve your life, but on installation day, you might want to scrub all other appointments.  Took me  an evening and a chunk of a morning, mostly spent in online chat with "helpers" whose best advice seemed to be "try again in a couple of hours."  And did they call me back as promised?  No, they did not.

Okay, I'll spare you further details. We've all been there and the particular indignities are of interest to no one except the sufferer.  But it did set me to thinking--are there people who are good at this sort of thing, providers whose online help can actually help?

Well actually--you know on the whole, I'd have to admit that most outfits get better at this sort of thing over time.   Back in the 90s, people were launching web help without any practice or guidance. And as if to complicate things, they were buying whole new businesses, trusting themselves to learn to service the customers later.  But as life settles down, some of them actually do learn a thing or two.

From my own experience, I'd like to give the Golden Handset to two in particular--Vanguard, and American Express.   In both cases, I've never had a bad experience:  answerers who pick up before the 25th ring, techies who seem to have ready and relevant responses, even some who can identify and flag problems before you see them coming.  The interesting question is--why can't everybody be like that?   I suspect that Amex is a bit smaller than some of the relevant points of comparison, and so has less to cope with.  Vanguard isn't "small"  by any measure, but they do seem to have a knack for finding a stable and dependable business model that works, and then sticking to it--like Volvo making the same car for twenty-plus years.    Anyway, whatever they've got, I wish they'd have it bottled and retailed.

Meantime, as to AT&T I suspect part of the problem is that they are one of those who haven't digested all the business they've swallowed: they still don't seem to have grasped that they run two phone companies (land and mobile), not just one (and if I understood right, they'll now be breaking their land billing into two parts--phone and data--so total of bills in all, three).  The other problem is that this is a techie business and the geeks probably just can't get their minds around the idea that their customers aren't as geeky as they are.  Actually, I think I can count myself as a paid-up member of the cadet branch of geekdom--and a good thing, too, or three hours might have been just the beginning.

Update: From chat with the neighbors, I think I got off easy.  Lots of chat about cancelled appointments, missed appointments, an installer who said he couldn't install unless the customer agreed to an upgrade--one house that went without for about a week. 

Uh-oh:  Now we're having stability issues. Pages crash, ;pages load, lots of links (but not all) tell us that we must have an unfiltered line somewhere (but we've looked and looked).  If this is general, they've got a problem on their hands.   If they regard it as as problem....

Conversation in the Computer Lab

Athos: So, when is Amazon going to come out with a new Kindle, to try to claw back against Ipad?

Porthos: You kidding?  They don't need to claw back against Ipad, they're doing fine.  People like something that just reads books, without all the bells and whistles.

McGinnis:  You're both nuts.  Kindle was a big mistake.  They can make all their money selling books through apps. I read mine on my Iphone.  They don't need the device. They'll drop it.

d'Artagnan:  You're all missing the point. Amazon needed the Kindle to introduce people to e-books--to show them how they could be used.  They knew they'd be upstaged on hardware by Apple but that's fine.  They've established themselves as the dominant player in content, and they will stay there.  So, they did need the Kindle, and it did its job. And now they will let it drop.


[They drink up, pay their bill, and depart for a merry round of swordplay.  The matter of who, if anyone, is correct, is left as an exercise to the reader.]

Just Askin': Cloud Software

If Steve Jobs is going cloud, will there be any further need for DropBox?  For Evernote?  Oh, and Instapaper, which I just started using last week?

Update: NYT Bits says maybe so.   In the short term I get that, but it's beginning to look like this is another soupbowl in which she sharks will swallow the minnows.

They Can't Do That, Can They?

I mean, scrub Xmarks?

I jest.   Sure they can. Still, haven't we all grown accustomed to enjoying free stuff that drops from the sky on us,  not so used to seeing it disappear because it doesn't make any money.

Ah well, but I'm betting that will still find a home in the clouds somewhere (trans.: I'm still in denial).

Afterthought:  The only comparable episode that comes to my mind right now is the abandonment of Lotus Agenda (though Agenda had a long afterlife, perhaps still survives).  I note that the man behind both of Xmarks and Agenda was Mitch Kapor).

H. Edward Roberts, RIP

The death notice of the day in the New York Times is another instance of a favorite theme: the almost complete disconnect between intellectual property rights and creativity. The subject is H. Edward Roberts, inventor of the MITS Altair--as the Times describes it, "the first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer," and an early mentor to the bad boys of Seattle who went on to join the list of the world's richest men.

The point of this story is not so much that Bill Gates & Co "stole" anything from Roberts. The point is--well, two points. First, that if anybody here had a spark of creative insight, it was not Gates & Co but Roberts, the son of a guy who ran an appliance repair company, who looked at a mainframe and said "what if this were available to everybody?" Roberts created the company, built the computer--and then took his money off the table and moved on. He spent most of his life as a country doctor in Georgia.

Which brings me to my second point which is that the difference between Gates & Roberts is not simply that Roberts had more creative spark. It is that Gates really wanted money. And Roberts simply didn't want it that bad (or, as I suspect some of his grandchildren would say, "enough").

So there is nothing sinister about this story, as there may be in the stories of others who simply ripped off the ideas from which they went on to profit. But next time somebody tells you how much we need patents to protect creativity, remember Doc Roberts and the Altair 8000.

This Could Be the Start of Something Big...

Scientific American shows you the beginnings of the internet on a cocktail napkin. Okay, I exaggerate, but not by much. Thanks, BAM.

Who Needs Second Life...

When we have DarkMarket? Oh, but I guess we don't have it any more, sorry.

Afterthought: They blew his cover? Doesn't that mean he is toast? Does he get a new identity under the Federal Witness Protection Program?