Welcome to this week’s Who’s on Crack, Gadgetell’s lump sum of odd moves in tech for the past week. This week, the action was in Barcelona as the big guns showed off their stuff at the Mobile World Congress, possibly the biggest mobile phone event of the year. This week’s nominees are:
- Microsoft gets all classy
- Flash is the devil
- Verizon and Skype get cozy
- Google Buzz: the first punch line of 2010?
Microsoft pulls a Coke and a smile?
It turns out the announcement of the death of Microsoft Windows was premature. This week, Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 Series. Gone is the Windows Mobile name, as it became associated being old, out-moded and out of touch, a lot like my Dad. Microsoft says they’ll still offer Windows Mobile 6.5 lineage but will call it Windows Phone Classic.
Classic? Really? Years ago, Coke reformulated and launched New Coke. It was horrible, so they had to back pedal and quickly reissued Coke Classic to hold onto marketshare while assuring users this wasn’t the crappy new Coke they were trying to push on us. Flash forward to today and now Microsoft goes the Classic route. Am I the only one with a bad taste in my mouth?
I’d much rather watch a YouTube video of Microsoft Phone team going “Office Space” on the Windows Mobile source code with bats in an abandoned field. Now that would be a PR move.
Flash is el diablo
Flash is the opposite of motor oil, the opposite of Red Bull, and was likely coded by the devil. That is, according to Steve Jobs whose personal quest to kill off popular Adobe Flash reared its head again. Our Andrew Kameka reported, “Jobs made the comment to writers at the Wall Street Journal amid claims that Flash is “buggy” and old school technology that’s no longer relevant in today’s landscape. Uh, yeah, the software that powers more than 80 percent of the web’s video content, countless games, and major news websites is no longer relevant according to Jobs.”
Is Flash really that bad? Would it really take a 10 hour battery life down to a puny 1.5 hours? The best part is, how does Steve know this? He obviously had a prototype built with Flash so he could access most of the web. It’s not good enough for us, but for him, he probably has Apple had to test this theory as it’s designers surely wanted to play with most websites, 80% of which have Flash on their sites. $5 says he’s got 16 of these Flash-running iPads stashed around for a full 24 hours of Flash playback. Sweet.
Verizon and Skype get engaged.
This week, Verizon announced it will work with Skype and offer the service over it’s broadband network to smartphone users. Our Shawn Ingram says,”Verizon and Skype have announced that Verizon will now allow those who possess certain smartphones to call anyone over Skype on the 3G network. That could have easily been inferred from the announcement of the press conference, though it couldn’t be seen that Verizon would allow for unlimited Skype calling over the 3G network.”
This is great news right? Well yes, but users will still have to pay for a voice connection. Even if Skype is your main gig, you’ll still be signing up and paying for some minimum monthly voice minutes. The door is now open for a data only network. T-Mobile, Sprint? What do you guys say, how about a data only plan for Skype and data fanatics? The network of the geek!
Google Buzz – the first punch line of 2010?
It’s true, the folks you email are not necessarily your friends. Google learned the fact this week as they pushed out Google Buzz to users. Our Cheng Hung put it well, “We’ve got to admit that Google Buzz’s auto-following model is really crappy. I’ve had some random eBay sellers (I bought some stuff from them a long time ago) auto-following me on my Google Reader ever since I activated Buzz. Sure, in a way, it’s quite convenient because you don’t have to spend time setting up, but things gets bad when it starts to auto-follow people you don’t intend to follow.”
It is rare to see a “F. you, Google” post become popular enough to make it to Techmeme. The author had her abusive ex-husband get auto-followed on Buzz and too much info was handed over. Google’s made some big steps to quickly stomp this out, but whoa man! Buzz is now making it into the mainstream language as a verb describing things go very wrong. For example, “Robert is really going to Buzz up Gadgetell’s right sidebar by following one of my suggestions.” You’ll find yourself more and more ways to use Google’s whoops-a-daisy in daily conversation. Enjoy it.
Here's some insight:
Long story short, Adobe's dumb*ss Indian CEO got arrogant and uppity with Jobs and tried to bully his way onto the iPhone platform. Valley rumor has it that Adobe is outsourced to the gills and DOES NOT have the technical acumen to fix the sphagetti clusterf-ck that Flash has become over 10 versions. And doesn't want to.
Macs have been second class with Adobe for a LONG TIME now. Jobs isn't going to return the favor for a bunch of "Lazy" MBAs and their offshore minions, which is what Adobe has become. Hence all the talk about 'Old Adobe'.
Jobs HAD a relationship with the old Adobe founders, but they don't run that joint anymore. He is going to make an example of Adobe. And judging by Adobe's recent rhetoric they are running scared.