iPad – Still loving it, still hating it

Posted on September 29, 2011 by CC

This is an update to my previous post on the iPad. Every time I glance through the posts in this blog, I wander how someone who just found the original posting (written after one day using it) could react to my rant.

After all, with hype about the device still exploding, calling the iPad a like-warm gadget, from a company that lost its gonads, may sound to many in the complacent lynch mob like “yep, another missed shot”.

Yet, regardless of my ability to deliver my opinion well, I believe that the assessment in my original post is still dead-on: Continue reading →

Clueless: should humans have only one leg, and which side?

Posted on February 10, 2011 by CC

A recent article on Information Week titled “Global CIO: How Gen Y can kill collaboration projects” spends a page or two justifying why “pleasing Gen Y workers” is the wrong reason to deploy collaboration, and how instead CIO’s should be concerned about engaging their customers better (???!!!)

Of course, the article in question is clueless, just as the title of this one is. Couldn’t resist ranting about it… Continue reading →

The future is for nimble collaboration platforms, like box

Posted on January 21, 2011 by CC

I have always liked box (used to be box.net): nimble, reliable and totally unobtrusive cloud-based content management (CBCM). A simple idea, a simple implementation: store your files in the cloud, keep them automatically synched to your devices, collaborate on them with a small group of people. That market is both crowded (all sizes of players, from Google to Microsoft to Zoho to Dropbox to…) and quickly evolving to adapt to the impact of social networking. box‘s latest announcements seem to indicate that the company’s is moving to adapt, and I like a lot the point it’s heading to.

Continue reading →

Crowd wisdom or mob idiocy?

Posted on January 18, 2011 by CC

It’s hard to get clean impartial perspectives into the social computing wave that has engulfed consumers and is conquering businesses as well. So, how do we go about trying to develop a price/benefit rule of thumb for deploying social platforms? One possible way is relying on our own experiences. Yes, it may not have a lot of scientific rigor, but I (as many others) prefer a gut feeling supported by my own experience (recognizing myself as just an average, common guy, the kind that changes lanes just to see that everybody else just did the same) to an elaborate rationale from a pundit that has a lot invested on remaining in that category.

Let’s take, for example, “Crowd Wisdom”, that magical emerging characteristic of social networks whereby the aggregate collective brain becomes supposedly much more intelligent than my own. Continue reading →

iPad: a timid, luke-warm, defensive move from an Apple with no gonads

Posted on April 4, 2010 by CC

I have been using the iPad for two days, savoring its nuances and details. I will spare you the review (good reviews have been already written). Rather, I am going to share with my belief that Apple has been finally castrated by suits. Innovation is dead, long live good business. So much care has been put into making sure that the (increasingly stale) advantage Apple holds in packaging and integration is preserved and protected from cannibalization, that the iPad (and the company, and Jobs) have lost their balls.

Jobs’ life-long envy of “what it could have been” has just been put to sleep: Apple has become Microsoft. Continue reading →

Apple becoming Big Brother, censoring you and I as well

Posted on March 1, 2010 by CC

The article in Baseline looking at how Apple is stifling innovation shyly touches in one slide what I think is the biggest problem with Apple: too much power derived from total, arbitrary control over device, software and even purchasing choices. Not surprisingly, that power falls in the hands of a monumental egocentric like Jobs, and it becomes worrying.

I am an Apple fan, and as a consumer probably in the 97 percentil when measured by reliance and expenditure on Apple for personal AND business computing devices. But I have started to be alarmed too, and despite all previous proclamations, have decided NOT to buy the iPad, and to seriously look at switching away from the iPhone.

When Apple decides to keep OUT of the iPad technology that has become ubiquitous, just to REDUCE and without arbitration curtail what I can do with the device, it goes too far.

It goes even further, waaaaaay too far, when it decides in a non-transparent way which apps I can buy or not. No, not apps that could drain batteries (miserable excuse to keep Adobe out of their devices). The decision is taken on CONTENT; in other words, a megalomaniac decides what I can see.

Not that I would use the iPhone to buy porn: the device screen is too small to enjoy it. But who the hell is Jobs to decide what I can do with a device I paid good money for, and which has as competitors wonderfully open devices? Fuck, I left my country of birth to leave authoritarian despots behind, I am not going to take it from Apple. It’s not a matter of motivation: whether the decision is taken to make more money on me or to control my thinking or whatever: it still SUCKS.

onshi

like tears in the rain…