Photo by acaben

Steve Jobs could be on the verge of a self-destructive move that would ruin Apple. Again.

The idolized CEO’s leadership led to his dismissal many years ago, from the company he founded. The buildup to this was aggravated by  his arrogant and unfriendly manner, and unwillingness to unclench his fist from the steering wheel. His triumphant return to Apple in 1996 marked the comeback of Apple, and for years it seemed that he could do no wrong. But lately, he’s started wars or distanced himself from former allies like Adobe and now Google.

The Wikipedia entry on Jobs and and his dismissal from Apple are very laudatory and barely mention anything about the topic, have you been editing them Steve? (Joking aside, I suspect a PR executive or an overzealous fanboy is the culprit of it).

A few months ago, HTC released the first Google-branded phone, the Nexus One. It uses a touchscreen, and but doesn’t look more like an iPhone than dozens of handsets by Nokia, LG and others. But HTC has been singled out by Apple for a lawsuit. Apple claims HTC has violated 20 of its patents. But it deems like an indirect attack at Google, and all handset manufacturers that use Google’s open-source Android operating system.

This can only be interpreted as the first move of a major legal battle with Apple suing all other handset makers for imitating the iPhone. This is a terribly misguided thing. I hope the lawsuit fails, because otherwise, Apple is shooting itself in the foot, by generating waves of anger, and a likely backlash.

Hubris is your Achilles’ heel Mr. Jobs.

As the trend for smaller, cheaper, more portable computers drives on, Google is preparing to replace Microsoft as the software company for the world. The concept of the browser as an operating system has been a dream since the early nineties.

I remember a conversation with a Costa Rican friend, Juan Manuel Brenes, where he made the prediction, 15 years ago, that someday, the operating system would disappear, to be replaced by the browser. Since then, many in the computer industry have dreamed of a “cloud computer”.

Google is very near achieving that goal. Most surprising of all is the news that they are borrowing the Apple business model of selling the computer hardware with the software pre-installed. Microsoft does largely the same thing but still provides copies of Windows to install on old machines.

But, users would not be able to download Google’s operating system, called Chrome OS, and install it on their computers. The reasoning behind it? The operating system would not be stored in each computer, but in the internet itself. Any upgrades will happen in a server farm somewhere in the arctic tundra. Applications would be hosted on the internet and accessed as services. All data would be stored in servers, not your own computer.

This has several implications for privacy, and also for graphics performance. Most graphically intense applications have long since moved to game consoles, or the Mac OS. Apple would not lose much of it’s market share; the big loser in this would be Microsoft, because Windows is what powers cheap netbooks and most business machines, which only need scheduling and office software.

With Chrome OS, Google could easily become a larger giant by far than Microsoft ever dreamed of being.

Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement speech. Now, as we all wonder if Steve will recover, this speech becomes more significant. Get well Steve!

The iPod and the iPhone might have never succeeded, if it weren’t for Palm. Palm could have easily launched similar products years earlier and made an Apple version unprofitable.

As a Palm junkie, I watched in despair and disappointment as Palm failed to innovate in almost ten years, surrendering their market dominance over to a more daring Apple. But today, Palm is climbing out of its grave, trying to win back the hearts of gadget lovers, with their new smartphone, the Pre.

Apple’s strange attitudes have alienated many of its iPhone users by loftily ignoring their calls for multimedia messaging, which Pre boasts, a better camera, also on Pre (3 Megapix), a clipboard (think copy-paste, getting the picture? Pre has it), a physical keyboard (cleverly hidden by Pre’s sliding screen). Palm listened. There are other things which come in handy, like the ability to multitask, and a speedy, custom-written OS based off GNU Linux.

And while it’s no iPhone, it does look very sexy. Moreover, it outperforms the iPhone 3G in almost everything except look-and-feel. It’s smaller and more ergonomic than the iPhone. It has -gasp- better software, written specifically for a small device. Pre has the hardware iPhone lovers have been clamoring for for years. It even has the ubiquitous accelerometer.

Steve Jobs must be fuming. In the same week his absence deflated the Macworld conference, Sony releases the smallest netbook yet, and Palm rises from the dead to upstage his star product, the iPhone.

Even worse, the person behind this leapfrog product is an ex-Apple employee, the same person who designed the original ovular iMac and the first iPod: Jon Rubinstein. He is now Palm’s executive chairman. What a Judas kiss! And while Rubinstein says he’s not trying to compete directly with Apple, he sure is succeding.

Although it looks like a Google bomb, currently, if you type “Microsoft is…” into the Google search box, the top result is a gleeful April 2007 article by Paul Graham: “Microsoft is Dead”

My reason for discovering this amusing fluke is a recent warped decision by the Seattle software company to hire a former Yahoo! executive to manage their search and online ads. How desperate can you be when you hire someone from a struggling company to save yours? So I googled it and…khazam: there it was! (see image above)

Major software companies like IBM, SAP and Microsoft slowly stifled developers like me in the past decade. Fresh out of college I saw writing software in much the same way as I saw writing literature: creative, exciting and limitless. The business world smacked that idea out of my throbbing head. Businesses are not interested in creative writing of anything; does it sell?

Microsoft’s main competitors, Google, Apple and the Open Source movement answer: “Yes.” It is their spark of youthful creativity is gnawing away at the Microsoft/Intel cartel. That spark is my hope for a more spiritually satisfying career. Hopefully it will also pay the bills.

There are Microsoft daemons lurking in the background of a friend’s MacBook Pro. Could it be the reason his keyboard and trackpad suddenly stopped working?

Some twisted Unix system programmer decided to call background services daemons; the name stuck, and spread to Linux and Mac OS X, which are Unix-based . But nowhere is the name so well applied as with background Windows “services”: they chain any computer’s performance to the ground, and suck the life out of any poor foolish soul that merely wants to use their computer.

Jon Ive seems to have drunk too much of the Apple cool-aid, I almost welcome hearing other, saner voices in this video. That said, this is a great upgrade to the current line of MacBooks. Still, my first impression of them is that they look too much like HP laptops. As it is, I’m glad to have my current MacBook, I don’t appreciate a buttonless trackpad, or the conspicuous lack of a firewire port. The environmental innovations they’ve put in this product are very laudable though.

The price is much sweeter!

And of course, … I’ll never go back to Vistaland.

Microsoft usually drags its feet in the browser arena, and this time it could cost them. Internet Explorer is usually years behind its peers in performance and features. Opera and Firefox boasted tabbed browsing much before IE7, and IE8 is bringing and ad blocking feature that has been available in Firefox several versions ago.

Microsoft’s monopoly in the OS market gives it no motivation to excel in the browser wars, because it has an absolute advantage no competitor could even get close to. Even Apple used Internet Explorer for Mac as its default browser for five years. But the prevalence of the internet has proved baffling to the OS behemoth. Google’s tremendous success, and the departure of key Microsoft employees to it, has made CEO Steve Ballmer famously throw a chair and vow to “kill Google”.

How would Microsoft kill Google? By blocking its ads. Online text ads are Google’s major source of revenue. Ad blocking is one of the most touted of yet-to-be-released IE8’s features. Coincidence?

But Google was probably expecting that…and is preemptively releasing its own browser today, Google Chrome, with many innovative features, before IE8 is officially released. Google just might have a chance.

I can’t wait to try it out! Google has described Chrome’s inner workings in this web comic. Unfortunately, Chrome will not be available to download until after Google’s press conference at 11am, Pacific time.

One of its key features reveals Google’s open secret to replace Microsoft’s Windows with a “Google Operating System“. Each browser tab runs in a separate process, with its own memory space (called a heap) and objects (called a stack). No process can read or write from the other processes. If one process fails, it is deleted, and it’s memory is reallocated, but the system remains stable. This is exactly the way operating systems run programs. Chrome even has its own task manager, just like an operating system. Please get the chairs out of Mr. Ballmer’s way!

Its other impressive features are a Javascript virtual machine (called V8) which promises to make web apps run much faster, and blacklists to protect web users from phishing and malware.

The most promising thing about this browser, and probably the most irksome to Microsoft, is that the entire code is open source. This means any developer can see its inner workings, and tailor software to run efficiently on it, or improve on what Google has done. In fact Chrome is indebted to open source code from Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Web Kit.

Open source software has created an environment where creativity and innovation are thriving. This freedom has the tendency to promote standards and consensus among developers. Even if Chrome never becomes the dominant browser, the “browser-as-an-OS” approach will influence other browsers and weaken Microsoft’s stranglehold…not on the internet, but on operating systems.

I’ve said this before, Google how do I love thee! Let me count the ways.

Image by Eszter Hargittai, used with a Creative Commons license. P.S. This is a Google employee’s car, not hers.

After my laptop was stolen from me at gunpoint in February, I decided to hold off on it’s replacement for a while. I was originally going for an HP: cheap and Linux friendly. But, my friends lured me into the reality distortion field of Macdom, and I was irrevocably caught in its gravity.

I’ve been envying Macs since the dawn of the personal computer, when I was an 8-year-old. My cousin, a computer science major, and now a pastor and musician at Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, induced in me my three major passions: Christ, music and computers, in that order.

It started with the Commodore 64, which he had loaded up with a flight simulator, and a music composition program. But very soon afterward, he became a Mac fanatic, and my envy began. He would compose music with Finale, and whenever I visited, I’d spend hours on end exploring all you could do with it. He had the Adobe suite on it, and through it I was exposed to the desktop publishing world that catapulted Apple’s early success in the eighties.

Then my brother in law started a string of Mac purchases, the Macintosh II, then an iMac, and a string of laptops that culminated with the MacBook Pro. I am happy to join the cult: I got a black MacBook. Amazingly, I haven’t photographed it yet. One thing I know: I’ll never sleep again.

Image by Paolo Lunazzi, used with a Creative Commons license

Jobs, you genius you, you heard me…the iPhone is no longer overpriced. At $199, it won’t be appearing in boxes of cereal, but it just might be cheap enough for me to finally, a year after falling in love, for me traipse into consummation and happily-ever-after mode.

Image by Diego Sepulveda, used with a Creative Commons license