ParisLemon

lilly:

I’ve been thinking about the situation with Yahoo suing Facebook regarding some older patents, and observing the reactions online in blogs and on Twitter. I’ve been struck by how unanimous it’s been, and the emerging narrative that Yahoo has somehow crossed a line, that Internet companies don’t…

A smart take on the Yahoo/Facebook patent situation by John Lilly. I think he’s right, there’s more fueling the outpouring of hatred directed at Yahoo than just their patent maneuvers. BUT, I also think their maneuvers are particularly bullshit in this case. Look at what it is they’re suing Facebook over. It’s things that nearly all social services use. It’s obvious things. Things that existed before Yahoo patented them. 

Lilly is right that many other patent lawsuits are bullshit as well — particularly in software. But Yahoo is being unreasonably evil and stupid here. Why didn’t they sue, say, 5 years ago? Why aren’t they suing 200 other companies “infringing” their silly patents? 

It’s because, like Kodak, they’re dying. And these are the actions that a dying company resorts to. With Kodak, it’s obvious — they’re bankrupt. And people feel sort of sorry for them as a result. Yahoo is not bankrupt, so it’s not-so-obvious. But they are still very much dying. And they clearly know it, hence, the lawsuit.

Maybe we should feel bad for Yahoo here too. But we don’t yet. But we will someday in the not-too-distant future. The saddest thing now is that they probably really think this lawsuit will help save them. It won’t.

Is a Google-branded Nexus tablet coming? Yes.

Will it be any good in the sub-$200 price range? That’s the real question.

It may be good compared to the Kindle Fire. But is that good enough? Like it or not, even at 7-inches, it’s going to be compared to the gold standards of tablets: the iPad.

And I still just find it very hard to believe that a sub-$200 tablet is going to be able to hold a candle to the iPad. Unless Google/ASUS plans to sell it at a significant loss. Which they won’t.

The easiest way to sell something cheaply is to make it with cheap components. And that never seems to translate to a great device.

John Gruber is all over the fallout of the This American Life/Mike Daisey fiasco.

The New York Times ran an op-ed by Daisey about his fabricated tales (the day after Steve Jobs passed away, no less). CBS News had a report in January widely citing Daisey.

So far, this all appears to be unrelated to the separate NYT article that kicked off the “iEconomy” series. But is there any question that Daisey’s initial “reports” at least in part led to these subsequent reports?

Reports that seemed to focus solely on Apple for no real reason beyond the fact that they’re now the largest tech company in the world with a possible blindspot thanks to Daisey’s story. 

Reports filled with suggestions that Tim Cook called “patently false and offensive”.

Holy shit this is bad. That’s all you can really say. This episode was easily the most widely circulated in the tech community for obvious reasons. And it generated thousands of other related stories.

Host Ira Glass:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. 

It appears that Daisey pulled a Stephen Glass (no relation to Ira, pure coincidence):

Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

Reads like parody, but is sadly just click bait. Click bait spread over three pages, no less.

Some of the intro is pretty great though:

I tell you this because about 55 million of your fellow tech consumers have been lining up like lemmings, getting ready to jump off the iPad cliff, once again. Don’t get me wrong. I acknowledge that there is some value to an iPad. But just because all your friends are buying the latest and greatest “new” iPad (what we previously thought would be the iPad 3), that doesn’t mean you have to, as well.

Reads even better when you consider the ending:

Yes, I’ve ordered one.

So what are the 16 reasons? Well, one is “you already have an iPad”, stating that the odds are that you already have an iPad — because clearly most people in the world already do. Another is that Apple doesn’t allow porn in the App Store. Another is that it’s too big, which directly contradicts the earlier stated reason that the screen is too small. Related: another is that “it’s still not 16x9”. 

The rest range from poorly thought-out, to poorly argued, to garbage.

Truly great list.

“…Apple ranks highest among manufacturers of smartphones in customer satisfaction,” according to J.D. Power.

Not bad for a disappointing phone.

Man, it’s too bad Apple is unraveling.

And those people who sold their Apple stock in October sure look smart today. It’s only up $200-a-share since then. Why not $300? Total slackers.

Meanwhile, don’t look now, but Apple’s market cap is double Microsoft’s market cap. 

A wonderfully exhaustive review of the just-released Sparrow for iPhone by Federico Viticci. 

I’ve been testing out the app for a while now, and it’s pure gold. As you’re all well aware, I despise email, but Sparrow at least makes it look good and behave well. If you want a good laugh, look at Sparrow side-by-side with Google’s native Gmail app.

The only real downside of the app is the lack of Push Notifications. But they’re honest about why: it’s hard to do it in a secure way. Really hard. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t yet dished out APIs for the type of background sniffing that would be needed to get this to work without routing every email through Sparrow’s own servers. 

But the team is hopeful that this will change eventually. For now, you’ll just have to settle for a great-looking email app.

This is much more interesting than it may appear at first. Mozilla has previously been not just opposed, but vehemently opposed to using the H.264 codec. They view it as patent encumbered.

If you ask Google, one of the reasons they started work on the rival VP8 (the video portion of WebM, which may still also be patent encumbered, by the way) was because of this. They wanted a HTML5 video codec that would span the entire web.

It caused a bit of a shitstorm when Google announced they’d drop H.264 support in Chrome — even though they were keeping Flash built in. It sounded like a nightmare scenario that wouldn’t work. 

And it didn’t. In fact, over a year later, Chrome has yet to drop H.264 support.

Now Mozilla is talking about supporting H.264 because basically they have no choice. Their Boot2Gecko mobile OS project will be a complete non-starter without it. And if they do it there, they’re thinking about doing it elsewhere, it seems.

The most interesting quote from Mozilla director of research, Andreas Gal:

Google pledged many things they didn’t follow through with and our users and our project are paying the price. H.264 wont go away. Holding out just a little longer buys us exactly nothing. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Google over-promised and under-delivered. Badly. 

Pretty damning description of “New Google” by James Whittaker, a former Google employee who recently jumped ship.

Essentially, he spins a tale of a once idealist company getting drunk on ad dollars and selling their soul to push monetization above all else. And that has directly contributed to the Google+ situation, which Whittaker more or less says is already a failure. 

And it’s not like he’s just any old Google employee complaining — he worked on Google+ as an engineering director. On it specifically, he writes:

Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

By the way, Whittaker actually went to Google in 2009 after leaving his job at Microsoft — a common occurrence back then. Not so common: going back to Microsoft after the stint at Google, which is exactly what Whittaker has done.

Great, honest post by Marco Arment from last week (just catching up on reading now in my post-SXSW haze). He’s reacting to the recent launch of Readability’s new app which is competitive with Arment’s own Instapaper. 

Writes Arment:

Reacting well to competition requires critical analysis of your own product and its shortcomings, and a complete, open-minded understanding of why people might choose your competitors.

How often do you see someone admit that they screwed up in the face of competition? Not often. It’s usually lame excuses or flat-out denial.

No product is perfect. And if you really can’t believe and/or admit when your competition does something better than you, you’re already on the road to failure.

Makes total sense that you need a Google+ account to be able to go to Google I/O this year. 

Well, total sense if you’re trying to bolster your underwhelming social network, that is.