g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
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As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
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.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est



Cars without compromise.



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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
17:23 - Of course he would say that
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100210/bill-gates-on-ipad/

(top)
Bill Gates is publicly unimpressed with the iPad? Stop the presses!

“You know, I’m a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard – in other words a netbook – will be the mainstream on that,” he said. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”

Not yet, you don’t. Keep in mind Gates said essentially the same thing about the iPod in 2004 only to launch the Zune two years later.

“There’s nothing that the iPod does that I say, ‘Oh, wow, I don’t think we can do that,’” he said. “There’s often, early in the new market, a few products that help get the category to critical mass. In the long run, people are going to buy what gives them the right price, performance, and capabilities. And does everybody want to have exactly the same thing? Probably not.”

Honestly, these kinds of sound bites from companies with competitive material interest in announced products like the iPad are generally as close to useless as you can get, aside from the entertainment value of deconstructing contentless marketing-ese. Such a company is all but required to say something dismissive and self-confident. You have to have some kind of response on the record, right? And you can't very well say, "We at Microsoft are genuinely very impressed with what we've seen, and consider the iPad [/iPhone/iPod] a milestone product against which we will define our goals going forward. It really demonstrates that our product offerings and strategy to date have been off the mark. Expect products from us that aim to do better." Not if you don't want your stockholders baying for your blood.

What it puts me in mind of are the ridiculously vapid and predictable post-game sports interviews where winning players all say something like, "Well, the whole team was all pulling just right, we went out there and did our best, and it all just came together," and the losers all say "We gave it our all, but it just wasn't there today." Just once I'd love to see a real sports interview show a guy saying, "Yeah, it was all me and my awesome home run. I kick ass, huh guys?" Or just follow the example of BASEketball: "Well, it was a team effort, and I guess it took every player working together to lose this one."

If there's any value at all to these competitive statements of confidence, it's that it occasionally gives us—accidentally, as a way of contrasting just how useless they want to make the present-day statement—a glimpse into how they really felt about past products. "Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough."

One can only wonder what they're really saying in the halls at Redmond today.

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© Brian Tiemann