AppleInsider rips Adobe AIR
Interesting take from AppleInsider on the Adobe AIR thing:
Adobe lists a variety of phone makers and chip manufacturers as its partners in the Open Screen Project, but notably excludes any mention of Microsoft, Apple, and Google. How will ARM, Intel, and Cisco have any relevant impact on pushing Flash on Microsoft’s desktop, Apple’s mobiles and the Mac, or Google’s web apps and Android platform?
And how are the existing licensees of Adobe’s Flash Lite on mobile phones (LG, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, and Verizon Wireless) going to do anything to promote Flash-based rich Internet apps when their devices can’t even run the full version of Flash?
Adobe seems to be hoping that nobody notices these problems and that its vigilant marketing efforts can entrance the public into thinking that a drawing app extended into an animation tool and then retrofitted into a monstrous hack of a development platform is a superior technology basis for building web apps compared to the use of modern open standards created expressly to promote true interoperability by design rather than retroactively.
Quote of the day
I love this one:
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.”
- Oscar Wilde
I just hope it’s not about me!
Smart comment spam is still spam
Now this is a smart comment spam:
I am not sure that I can completely understand your comments. Would you be so kind as to expand on your reasoning a little more before I comment.
I’m not going to link to the site where this originates (or, more accurately, where it points) because I don’t want to encourage or support spam in any way. But you can see who’s doing this here:
It’s smart, of course, because you have to think for a moment before being sure that it’s actually spam. But it’s still spam, as you can see when you go to the site being promoted, and realize it’s a shell site with nothing there but Google AdWords.
Annoying!
Microsoft Mesh and Architecture Astronauts
Joel Spolsky’s latest Joel on Software post is a must read, if only for the entertainment value.
An excerpt:
It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.
Twistori is absolute genius
Twistori is a very interesting way to waste time and yet feel like you’re doing something significant.
It follows the twitters of thousands of people whose messages start include the words
- I love
- I hate
- I think
- I believe
- I feel
- I wish
Pure genius … and hard to keep your eyes off.
What do you love, hate, think, believe, feel, or wish? Tell the world!
Amazon Marketplace: not for you or me
I just spent 20 minutes prepping a no-longer-needed-textbook for sale. One of the places I thought I might sell it was Amazon Marketplace, only to be presented with this:
Obviously, Amazon Marketplace is not looking for your average Craigslister, and probably not your media eBayer as well. Rather, they’re looking for bookstore owners, high-volume eBay retailers, and so on.
It’s an interesting strategy - definitely designed to capture the fat front end of the long tail and not the thin whippy extremity. It probably results in a lot less hassle for Amazon.
But it also does leave a significant portion of the resale market for eBay and, increasingly, Craigslist. And it leave a bit of a sour taste in the mouth of loyal Amazon clients, such as me, who have bought thousands of dollars of books and other products from Amazon, but can’t use the same service to recycle redundant items.
Get yer textbooks here
In the extremely unlikely event that you or anyone you know might be looking for an educational technology textbook, I’m selling one.
Educational Research: Competencies for Analysis and Applications is yours, all yours, for a steal: $10.
Of course, I have almost zero eBay history, so you’d kinda have to trust me …
Quote of the day
Saw this today and kind of like it:
In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
From Paul Graham’s You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss.
New Dilbert Mashup: cool but broken
Scott Adams has a new Dilbert mashup on his main site, Dilbert.com. Very cool.
The question posed is: are you funnier than Scott? You then get to change the punchline on the final pane of a Dilbert cartoon to something else … and people can vote on your version.
Only problem: it didn’t work as advertised. Not cool.
Here’s my cartoon, and the ostensible problem: “invalid panel count.” I’m not quite sure what it’s referring to …
Brands are results, not causes
Here’s a response I posted this morning on a Seeking Alpha story on Apple’s brand that seemed to imply it was all about marketing:
“All Day Breakfast” hit the nail on the head.
What people who don’t really understand branding don’t understand is that the best branding, the longest-lived branding, and the most financially remunerative branding is branding that is a result, not a cause.
The brand is authentic because it first arises from actual value and actual experience.
Brands that are invented via marketing alone are typically short-lived, expensive, and doomed to crash and burn. The product and the client experience need to be what the branding says in order to generate long-term value.
(The comment’s not showing up yet on Seeking Alpha … I had to sign up … they have an email authorization … I haven’t got the email yet … )
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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