ParisLemon

This is just all kinds of awesome.

The latest charts are a great reminder of this: While Rivals Jockey For Market Share, Apple Bathes In Profits.

Certainly having a huge market share means something. But not nearly what it used to mean in the mobile industry. It used to be that the dominant force (Nokia) also dominated in terms of profits. Not anymore.

Agree with much of this. The new MacBook Air is the MacBook Pro’s worst enemy. When I got the new 13” MBA, I stopped using my 15” MBP completely. And it was a top-of-the-line i7 decked out with RAM and an SSD. In fact, I just sold it. 

Apple will need to fundamentally alter the MBP line.

I would imagine the standard MacBook or the 13” MBP will be killed off. Maybe even both. 

The 17” MBP, like Marco points out, is for a certain type of buyer, so they may not change it much. But the 15” is the real sweet-spot. 

I’m all in favor of ditching the optical drive and making the entire thing thinner (though I’m really not sure they will with the Pro in this iteration). Meanwhile, the remaining extra space should be all about battery. Imagine if Apple sold a laptop promising something like 12-15 hours of battery life? Huge.

And yes, the glass screen should go too. It’s too heavy and too reflective. 

So maybe we’d have a 15” MBP weighing in around 4 pounds. With 12 hours of battery life. Intel’s latest processors and 4 GB of RAM standard (expandable to 8 GB). More ports than the MBA. All starting around $1,600.

That would tempt me to switch back to a Pro. Though I still don’t think I would. The Air is that good.

The simple answer is that the key to Quora is its centralized repository of knowledge (and the way that knowledge is surfaced through social signals). 

There are plenty of Q&A plugins. Formspring has a way to post to your website, and Tumblr has an “Ask” feature. But aside from very popular people with very popular blogs, this doesn’t do much to get knowledge from brains onto the web in a meaningful way. 

The fact of the matter is that the most popular people don’t always have the best answers to things. In fact, you’d have to believe that more often than not, they don’t. Which is not stated but is one of the big issues with Scoble’s rant.

If Quora is about surfacing the world’s information that exists in people’s heads, there needs to be a centralized place to hold that data. At least until web search and structured data improves in that specific area.

Dear Scoble, Quora is not your blog. It never was your blog. It will never be your blog. Act accordingly. 

Or, as Dan Kaplan puts it, “tame your ego, chill out with the fluffed-up rambles, the pointless photos and the naked self-aggrandizement.”

So Google basically will hire app developers and pay them a nice salary for them to do their thing. But they must do it on Android. 

Interesting tactic…

If he accepts the role, the new film could be very, very good.

[via /film]

My guess would be for Nokia partnering with Microsoft to build Windows Phones rather than with Google to build Android phones.

Obviously, a big part of that is Elop’s Microsoft ties (and the fact that he is said to have stayed on a bit longer after making his move known within Microsoft — something which probably wouldn’t have happened if it was considered at threatening move or bad-blood move).

But also, Microsoft appears to need Nokia just as much as Nokia needs a smartphone OS partner. While by most accounts, Windows Phones are impressive, they aren’t selling well. Microsoft is simply really late to a game already in progress. They also need a catalyst to shake things up.

A Nokia partnership would do that. And Microsoft would probably be open to making concessions so that Nokia Windows Phones are differentiated from others in a meaningful way.

While customization would be easier (and cheaper) to do with Android, Elop “Going Google” and taking Nokia with him would be the equivalent of him spitting in Steve Ballmer’s face.

It’s interesting that when Hulu launched, it was dubbed the “iTunes-killer” or the “YouTube-killer”. But now neither of those two are its biggest rival. Instead, Netflix is by far. At the time, Netflix was simply a DVD rental-by-mail service. Things change.

Also interesting how much in-fighting there is when the networks own so much of Hulu. Meanwhile, there’s no in-fighting at Netflix, which just continues to execute.

As a fan of The Tudors, this pleases me.

Interesting too that Brits have now been cast as Batman (Christian Bale), Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield), and now Superman — all American superheros. (Garfield was born in the U.S., but grew up in England and naturally speaks with a British accent.)

You’d have to believe the U.S. Government wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to pass this legislation right now, right? I mean, seriously. Anyone? No?

That said, you’d have to imagine that the core motives behind this isn’t to shut down things like social networks, but rather infrastructure stuff, as is stated. But there’s probably way too much gray area in such a bill. Gray area that someone will try to take advantage of. That’s why it’s troubling.

A fascinating move on a number of levels. Though it’s important to note (as Y Combinator’s Paul Graham does) that this deal has nothing to do with the Y Combinator organization itself. It’s simply between the investors and the startups coming out of each class.

This means that YC LP Sequoia (or anyone else) could do the same thing if they wanted to. 

Of course, most firms would not want to do a blind blanket investment. But this is bold statement by SV Angel and Milner about the quality of YC companies over the years. They’re absolutely betting on Graham’s vetting process.

And it really isn’t an expensive bet to make given the potential upside and the piggy banks involved. But it has to scare the shit out of other VCs/angels who either can’t afford to make such bets or think it would be insane to (insanity with the possibility of paying off big, of course).

Good or bad, it does change the game.

Cutts:

The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

Haven’t done enough article searches yet to confirm it’s better, but this was definitely a major, major problem. Glad Cutts and team to finally went after it.

As I suspected, Microsoft still had the slight edge over Apple in profit this past quarter. But it’s down to about a half billion dollars. Next quarter, it’s over. 

Meanwhile, they’ve fallen about $7 billion behind Apple in revenue.