#cringely

Cringely was thrilled when Gates tried to disprove an anecdote from Accidental Empires. In the book, Gates goes to a convenience store in 1990 (net worth at the time: $3 billion) to get a tub of butter pecan ice cream. At the checkout counter, he can't find a 50-cents-off coupon he had brought, and as he searches and searches, a frustrated customer farther back in line finally tosses him two quarters, which Gates takes. The customer calls out, "Pay me back when you earn your first million." Gates told Cringely the story couldn't be true because coupons come in the daily newspaper, and he doesn't get a daily newspaper. "He wanted me to buy it!" Cringely marvels. "Why? Who am I to him?"

View On WordPress

By now I'm sure everyone knows that Apple is going to be making macs using Intel's x86 architecture chips. I'm not going to bang on about how surprising and impossible the whole thing is because its actually not that crazy. OS X is built on FreeBSD. Now as far as I know FreeBSD will run on anything that can understand zeroes and ones including Intel's x86. In fact I'd say 90%+ systems running BSD are on Intel or AMD chips. Why is it such a stretch then that Apple built this compatibility into OS X? You can't change the core and the core is compatible. In fact, you could say it would be foolish NOT to support it... cause you never know when you might need Intel. So Apple have obviously had the warm blanket of being able to switch to Intel and have done a decent job of keeping quiet about it for the last 5 years. Cringely weighed in with his usual wild predictions claiming that Intel and Apple are going to merge. In this case I think he's wrong. In fact, I'd say that this time he's absolutely batshit fucking loco. Why would big blue piss off 95% of their business? Just because they are unhappy with Microsoft's tactics? Why would Intel cut off their nose to spite their face? Also, if Intel are even thinking about Apple it would be an aquisition, not a merger. They'd also need to pry control from the icy grip of Steve Jobs' cold dead hands. He definitely wouldn't be on stage hugging the CEO of Intel if he was going to be Jobs' future boss. No, the real reason is just what Jobs declared at the WWDC. IBM aren't playing ball. This is hardly surprising given that they're moving further and further from the desktop business and deeper and deeper into hardcore servers and gaming consoles. All the signs point to this, from the sale of it's PC business to Lenovo to developing the Cell processor for the PlayStation 3, its obvious IBM's focus is no longer on the desktop chip market. The only reason it has a tenuous foothold in the market in the first place is, you guessed it, Apple. Sorry Bob. I think you got it wrong this time around.

As usual, Robert Cringely manages to blow away everyone by seeing something where others don't. The man is remarkably perceptive and, perhaps more importantly, is capable of delivering his message to enough people thanks to PBS and his geeky fame. Engines of Change is just another great piece of thinking. Everyone knows the technology exists, he just plugs enough of it together to make something completely different happen. What I want to see (and haven't seen yet) is a cheap IP phone that uses WiFi. It only needs 802.11b but needs to be in the approximate price range of the Nokia 3310. Now that would make me a rich man.

Things discovered while spending 7 years of intensely following IBM: "I do not think there is any way back.”

of course! ♥