Another Year

If you subscribe to the dingbat theories espoused by the credulous with too much time on their hands and access to a Mayan calendar it’s game over at the end of this year.

A lot of guys I know in the IT industry are hoping these dribbling prognostications are right because there’s only so much stupidity you can take before you want to go postal.

Late last year I wound up on a big project and managed to relax over Christmas and now its back to the grind.

The good thing about the tech industry is that nothing has really changed.

RIM is still waiting for someone to come in and turn off life support. On the upside Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsille have given up as being co-CEO’s. On the downside they still don’t have anything new and/or interesting to provide in the way of products.

Nokia is beating the drum telling the world they’ve shipped a million WinMoPho’s - the big question is what’s the sell through rate? Just because you’ve shipped a million handsets to distributors it doesn’t mean that a million people are going to part with their hard earned to buy one.

Ballmer is still telling everyone that Microsoft is relevant, unfortunately sales numbers in the PC world are telling a different story.

The patent wars continue with the legal profession making out like bandits as multi-billion dollar corporations behave like a bunch of whining pre-schoolers arguing over the red truck in the sandpit.

Finally there’s been no change in the level of stupidity found in the rarified air that is senior management.

Welcome to 2012.

Earth to Woolworths. We don't want to be your unpaid staff.

Over the weekend I went to do the weekly shopping at Woolworths.

I was surprised to find a couple of checkouts had been converted to a new type of automated checkout, it had a conveyor and was obviously designed to allow people to do the checkout thing with large amounts of shopping.

Now when they implemented automated checkouts that were designed for smaller amounts of goods I tried it once…you could tell this was technology designed for the benefit of the store, not the customer.

These new checkouts are more of the same.

Note to Woolworths management: You want to make my shopping experience better, implement RFID so that a scanner will pick up the contents of my basket/trolley without me having to do the barcode swipe thing. That improves my life.

What you’re doing now is making me an unpaid employee of your company, I don’t like that, and I’ll bet that the next thing will be a ‘service charge’ that will be levied if I have the temerity to not use the new tech and actually want someone from the store to scan the goods for me.

If I wanted a career at Woolworths I would have pursued one; I didn’t. So don’t try to force one on me now.

Woolies may be the ‘fresh food people’ but they’re also the ‘rank technology people’ as well.

RIM proves the Deadbook is…well…dead

RIM announced that, for a limited time, they are taking $300 off the price of their tablet.

Now that type of deep discounting isn’t a sign of a healthy market for a product.

RIM thinks the market doesn’t recognise the brilliance of their products, the market knows that RIM’s products are about 5 years too late.

Sorry guys you missed the boat.

Shoot RIM and put them out of their misery.

RIM is finished.

Blackberry 7 devices are too little too late, except for those companies and users that are too slow on the uptake.

Recently I was talking to a guy who was waxing lyrical about his new Blackberry. It was great, it was wonderful, it was the best Blackberry he’s ever had. Unfortunately, the best Blackberry ever isn’t as good as a middle of the road Android or iOS device.

RIM is a living (?), breathing (?), example of a company that built itself on a successful business model that has been bypassed by everyone else.

When RIM made big impacts in the marketplace they had applied the pager model to email…brilliant…since then all they’ve done is more of the same while the rest of the industry has looked at ways to bypass being wedded to a proprietary infrastructure.

RIM were either too arrogant or too stupid or too busy following the adventures of Jim and his desire to buy an ice hockey team to notice that their opposition were changing the way people looked at smartphones.

New OS, cool looking handsets and everything else aside, RIM has another massive issue. The carriers that are their bread and butter don’t need them any more. They can get email to users across their own networks without having to pay RIM for using their proprietary backend systems that are no longer as reliable as they used to be.

Add to that and Blackberry’s have lost their cachet as a cool device so there’s no real incentive for carriers to promote a Blackberry.

Blackberry stood still and got passed by while they were too busy bathing in their own reflected past glories.

Nokia thinks WinMoPho's are great. Imagine my surprise...

During a break on a big project I’m working on I was catching up on some reading.

I ran across this piece on the Boy Genius Report - Nokia’s Jo Harlow: Windows Phone is ‘easier, faster and a hell of a lot more fun’

Imagine my surprise!

Nokia’s product boss says something like this about the product that Nokia has bet the farm on.

I’m sure if Jo worked for a company that sold bovine manure there would be some way to tell us that their bovine manure is a hell of a lot more fun that the oppositions bovine manure.

Given Nokia haven’t sold a single unit yet and Microsoft’s share of the mobile market is so small that it would represent a massive reduction of Nokia’s already shrinking market share you’d have to hope everything Jo Harlow is saying is true otherwise the bovine manure manufacturing sector may start looking good.

The Blackberry Zombiepocalypse Spreads

So RIM have had a ‘core switch failure’.

Blackberry devices all over the planet started imitating the sales numbers of the Deadbook and finally Jim Balsille and Mike Lazaridis stump up and say “whoops…our bad”.

Yeah…I’m sure sending out a video apology on the launch day for the iPhone 4S is going to help. Following it up with a few free apps isn’t really going help all that much guys.

Faced with plummeting market share, wrong headed thinking and launching an unfinished product to market with the vague promise of “we’ll fix it with software updates soon…promise…really…”, isn’t going to help.

Not only has RIM lost the ‘cool’ factor, they’re losing everyone’s confidence.

RIM should put Jim and Mike out to pasture so they can worry about ice hockey teams and telling each other that they’re the best.

Stick a fork in RIM, they’re done.

Another World Changer Passes

So in the last week Dennis Ritchie passed.

Nowhere near as well known as Steve Jobs, but at least as important.

Dennis Ritchie was a co-creator of UNIX and the C Programming Language. Without him we would be dealing with a very different computing landscape. Linux, Mac OS X and a whole lot of other technologies wouldn’t exist without the work that he did so many years ago.

Unlike Steve Jobs there won’t be the huge outpourings of grief at Apple Stores all over the world, but, there should be, because without the work of Dennis Ritchie its arguable that Apple wouldn’t be the company that it is, neither would a lot of others.

So farewell to another pioneer who changed the world.