I had lunch recently with someone who was a recent transplant to NY from Silicon Valley. They commented on what a great thing it was to finally ditch their car for getting around as it’s a bit of a hindrance to own a car in Manhattan. I thought about this for a while afterward, mostly remembering the few years I lived in NY when I owned a car and kept it in NY. I never drove it anywhere for fear of losing the most sacred of things in NY, my parking space. As a result, it mostly sat unused except to move it from one side of the street to the other, twice a week. (I initially had dreamed of just garaging it until I discovered that for the same money, I could have gotten it three bedrooms and a 2 baths in a nice area in NJ). The key was, I had the potential of using it anytime I wanted to. Today, I live in the NJ suburbs, no more than 15 minutes from Manhattan without traffic. Ask me why, and I’ll tell you it’s to have the advantages of the suburbs but still be close to the great museums, theater and culture of NY. Of course you might want to ask me when the last time I went to one of the great museums or saw a show on Broadway. There’s an aspirational theme associated with all this. It’s not what I do. Rather what I could do.
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Leading computer manufacturers along with Intel and Microsoft have inadvertently created a monster. And like Frankenstein, it is a monster they’d like to destroy. Although the industry’s hot-selling brainchild is physically quite small –perhaps more analogous to a gremlin in scale— with its small 10-inch screen, underpowered Intel Atom processor, cheaper version of Windows and under $400 price, netbooks are devouring corporate profit margins.
Since it’s introduction, the AT&T logo has reminded many users of the Death Star. Sure, that’s not what it’s supposed to look like but no matter how many times they tweak it, I just see the Death Star. So it was amusing to me when over the weekend the first leaks (or release depending on your point of view) came about Verizon’s latest campaign about 
The surest way for someone to generate attention is by making an Apple prediction. Apple has a cult following, and its product development and launch strategy is famously secretive, so the fact that your source is the lunch counter guy across the block from the Hon Hai factory in Taiwan won’t be discovered (or may even be considered authoritative!). Financial analysts are often the worst offenders – we have been promised an Apple tablet more times than I can count, assured that an iPhone nano was on the way, and where’s that iPod touch with a camera?
When I first was briefed on the Media Center edition of XP by Microsoft, I thought MCE was a pretty bad idea. A lot of my skepticism had to do with the market they claimed they were going after, namely college students in dorm rooms and yuppies living in cramped apartments with no room for both TVs and PCs. Of course, college students mostly buy laptops, and no matter where you live most folks don’t watch TV on a small computer monitor from across the room. The short-term market were enthusiasts who understood the value of a DVR such as a TiVo.
One of the things I can’t help notice, playing the latest and greatest video games, is how this generation of consoles and PCs have the ability to provide the most realistic worlds I have ever seen with the most intense level of detail and real-world physics models. It makes sense: games are, at their heart, simulations and thanks to Moore’s Law the processing power of today’s devices mean that I can model the world in ever more detail and sophistication.
This is a follow up note to some folks who work in Redmond (it’s OK for the rest of you to read it if you want to).
