For Wall Street, it's a juicy notion: Could Microsoft buy Research In Motion? It's the kind of high-concept idea that gets traders afroth and keeps analysts busy churning out reports. It's also — how to put this delicately — completely stupid. Yes, Microsoft could buy RIM — and yes, you could go out and buy a gun and shoot yourself in the face. Both are in the realm of possibility, and both are suicidal ideas.
Next week's special Apple press event will be disappointing to Beatles fans — a group that included CEO Steve Jobs. Silicon Alley Insider reports that, despite an homage to the Beatles on the invitation, which reads "The beat goes on," a long-awaited announcement that the Beatles library will be available on iTunes won't be part of the September 5 event. Instead, it will feature, yes, yet more iPods. Are they still making those tired old things?
Sony's recent announcement that its PlayStation 3 console will soon act as a digital video recorder in Europe is little surprise to anyone following the industry. It's long been believed that the PS3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 could act as DVRs. The real question is how this move will affect a soon-to-be crowded DVR marketplace. TiVo, the best-known DVR brand, has struggled financially as cable and satellite distributors released their own recorders. Although its future may be a bit brighter thanks to a recent licensing deal with Comcast and the potential of a renewed DirecTV contract, there's more competition for TiVo than ever — and from the unlikeliest of places.
You'd expect to see all kinds of corporate blowjobs in a tech trade like Linux Journal. But an ad about blowjobs? Unlikely, I know, but this one, showing an attractive woman and promising that QSol's servers, like her, "won't go down on you," appeared in the magazine's August 2007 issue. It has, of course, attracted the attention of several blogs, including our sibling sites Gawker and Jezebel. But there's one overlooked fact in most of the coverage.
DVD rental site Netflix is in the news for hiring human customer-service reps in a move away from automated support. But that's surely the least significant of Netflix's recruiting plans. A tipster whispers that Netflix is trying to hire away Apple engineers to work on a set-top box for movie downloads. Not surprising, after Netflix's alliance with TiVo fell apart, and the DVR maker turned to Amazon.com instead as a partner for movie downloads. And Netflix's hiring of ReplayTV founder Anthony Wood, who's thought by many to be the original creator of the digital video recorder, kept Netflix set-top box rumors alive this spring. But if Wood is now staffing up his team by poaching Apple engineers, that tells us Netflix is getting serious. Heard more? Drop us a line.
This parody video pokes fun at Microsoft Paint, the aging art software included with Windows. YouTube commenters already point out that Vista Paint, the latest version, isn't much of an improvement. But that's not what makes it so funny to me.The real humor in the clip is its reminder that no one gets this excited about desktop software anymore. Take Apple's announcement earlier this week of iLife '08: The only real selling point of Apple's newest iLife software, used to manage photo collections, edit movies, and so forth, is that it's integrated with Apple's .Mac Web service. Yes, Microsoft Paint seems hilariously out of date. But to today's Web generation, it's not Paint that's outdated — it's the entire field of programs written to run on a PC instead of on a website. If you're in your 30s, this video will make you laugh out loud. If you're in your early 20s, I'm betting it will just bore you.
Mel Karmazin, now CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio, started in the radio business at age 17 and rose to the top by being the glibbest and most persistent ad salesman. But his able patter hasn't served him as well in recent years. After leaving Viacom because he couldn't coexist with equally alpha Sumner Redstone, Karmazin had hoped to restore his reputation in the nascent but promising satellite-radio market. That market hasn't quite developed as he'd hope. His future, and the future of satellite radio, will be determined by consumer and government acceptance of the merger of the two satellite-radio companies — XM and his own Sirius. And Karmazin has turned to a Washington Times' op ed to use his legendary gladhanding skills to sell everyone on the merger's merits. Don't be fooled. Excerpts and translations, after the jump.
Alas, poor Blogger. Fake Steve Jobs, one of the highest-profile users of the Google-owned blog service is departing for ... Forbes.com? Yes. The online arm of the stuffy business magazine isn't known for hosting blogs, but it's making room for Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor recently outed as Fake Steve jobs, the faux Apple CEO. The only question: Will Lyons get a raise for his troubles? I sure hope so. When last Fake Steve and I made plans to dine out, he proposed a burrito at Pancho Villa, the beloved and cheap taqueria in San Francisco's Mission District.
Chastened by the $4 billion loss it inflicted on Apple shares in May, Engadget has started more rigorous factchecking. Of other blogs. Our sister site Gizmodo was taken in by a fraudulent tipster — a 16-year-old Australian with the same name as a Google product manager, which lent his email just enough credibility for a Gizmodo writer to run it. Editor Brian Lam, embarrassed, issued a complete retraction. Boy, do I know how that feels. Of course, Gizmodo's item ran on a Sunday, when it couldn't affect the public markets — and the minor Apple hardware updates promised in the faux tip were unlikely to move the stock, in any event. Memo to my Gizmodo colleagues: Next time you screw up, try to make it matter a bit more, will you?
The jig is up, the secret is out, the game is over: Forbes editor Dan Lyons is Fake Steve Jobs, the now-unmasked author of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Brad Stone of the New York Times, to my dismay, was the one to out Lyons as the faux Apple CEO. It was crushing. I've known for some time now that several Forbes employees were in on the secret. Lyons, as Fake Steve, even hinted at the outing in a post today: "My world, anyway, is about to change." My apologies to readers. But it makes perfect sense. Here are the not-so-coincidental similarities between Lyons's chosen enemies and Fake Steve's.
Google may not be making a phone, but it sure is spending a lot of money to act like it — and a lot of that cash is splashing down in the Charles River. In Boston, the search giant is making unsolicited bids for the services of every mobile software whiz it can find. And its real-estate agents are on the hunt for an additional 200,000 square feet of office space in the area, on top of its existing facilities in Cambridge, Mass. Current candidates are 301 Binney Street, shown here, and a yet-to-be developed building at East Kendall Street. That should be plenty of space for engineers to spin their wheels sketching out never-to-be-released versions of the GooglePhone.
Attention, credulous gadget-seekers: There is no such thing as a GooglePhone. There never will be. Google executives are, shareholders should hope, way too smart to get into the hardware business, with its razor-thin margins. Sure, the search giant of Mountain View may be developing prototypes to help persuade carriers to feature its search engine and carry its mobile ads, as the Wall Street Journal has reported. But just as Google decided not to start making PCs, it's not going to start making cell phones, either. As Valleywag contributor Paul Boutin pointed out in Slate last year, when Google-PC hype was running as rampant as GooglePhone hype is today, "We might not realize it, but we all already have Google PCs." Any PC can access Google on the Web. And so it will be with cell phones, too. Check in your pocket or your purse. Your GooglePhone's right there.
The stock market seems inexplicable. In June, when Engadget posted a memo, later proved fake, about delays in the iPhone launch that later proved false, Apple shares sank but instantly recovered. Yesterday, when TheStreet.com ran a story based on a supposed Wall Street report on iPhone production cutbacks, shares dropped 7 percent — and dropped further today, despite a thorough debunking by CNBC's Jim Goldman and Business 2.0's Phil Elmer-DeWitt. Why the difference?
With a secretive company like Apple, sometimes you have to read between the lines. And what I'm reading is that Steve Jobs & Co. think that sales of iTunes movies and TV shows are nothing to brag about. Apple's latest press release touts how the company has sold 3 billion songs to date. But unlike its last milestone press release from January, no mention is made of how many videos Apple's online store has sold. No wonder Jobs refers to the company's Apple TV set-top box — a potential market for the iTunes videos Apple is selling — as "a hobby."
I'm a dunce. I was wrong. There, I said it. In running a tip on Tuesday that a drunk employee brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter which hosts servers running some of the Web's most important sites, I trusted a source I shouldn't have. Here's the story behind my 365 Main post. A warning to readers of sensitive dispositions — I'm about to take you inside the sausage factory, and it's a bloody mess.
Apple's stock was up more than two bucks to close at $137.26 today, as the company gets set to report June-quarter earnings. Investors have recovered somewhat from the revelation that AT&T activated fewer iPhones in the last couple days of June than some on Wall Street hoped for. With only two days of sales, no one expects the iPhone to contribute much to sales. MarketWatch states the obvious: Mac and iPod sales will make up for most of Apple's sales for the quarter, which analysts think will come in at around $5.2 billion. Nonetheless, the cell phone, as Apple's big growth opportunity, will be the focus of everyone's attention. I covered the call live, blogging the highlights here. On the call: CFO Peter Oppenheimer and COO Tim Cook. CEO Steve Jobs usually doesn't show for these things, and he didn't tune in for this one, either, even with all the iPhone buzz.
We've now learned more about the outage at 365 Main's San Francisco datacenter that knocked some of the Web's most popular sites offline. The latest theory: An employee, reportedly drunk, hit the emergency-power-off switch in 365 Main's Colo 4 room. (Update: I no longer know whether to trust the source who sent in the tip about a drunk employee.) Other sites located in other rooms were unaffected. This isn't the first time 365 Main has suffered an EPO-induced outage; a major one still remembered by customers occurred back in April 2005, and another took place last year. After the jump, a gallery of the carnage caused, and a roundup of reactions.
TheStreet.com is reporting that AT&T is paying unusually large fees to Apple in exchange for the right to sell the iPhone. The totals? $150 to $200 per phone, plus a $9 per user per month cut of the service fees. The upfront commission, which you can also think of as a discount on the true cost of the phone, is common in the industry and widely predicted; sharing service-fee revenue is something new. For Apple, which already plans to account for its iPhone hardware revenues evenly over the 24 months after a sale, this means that iPhone sales will juice revenues even more than expected. And for AT&T? It's getting a lot of high-tech, early adopter customers who wouldn't have gone to the carrier otherwise, but at the cost of setting a revenue-sharing precedent that will ruffle feathers in the wireless industry. Steve Jobs strikes a hard bargain.
Call off the virtual dogs: Andy Ihnatko has gracefully taken himself out of the running for secret writer of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. I'd like to say it was the cunning interview I conducted with Ihnatko, but Ihnatko proved more cunning than me, throwing me off the scent by hiding a piece of Fake Steve trivia he actually knew. In the pages of Macworld, however, Ihnatko is unequivocal in his denials, and I believe him. So with Ihnatko revealed as a fake Fake Steve, it's back to hunting for the real Fake Steve. I have one hot but hard-to-believe tip that I'm pursuing, but I always welcome more.
