This is why people don’t trust journalists. Ryan Tate’s headline in Valleywag does not match the so-called article (two paragraphs does not an accurate accusation make):

Apple and Google are among a handful of tech companies who fought to hide the race and gender of their workforce from newspaper reporters. And no wonder: Their diversity probably went from bad to worse.

Probably? Not one fact to back up the headline. Not one.

The headline is based upon a San Jose Mercury News report that the largest Silicon Valley companies have just 7-percent black and Hispanic employees (about half the national percentages), and that Apple, among other companies, refused to divulge race and gender statistics, calling the information ‘trade secrets.’

I’m convinced that Apple’s employee race and gender stats are somewhat below the national average, particularly for black and Hispanics. Roughly half of all Apple employees are retail workers, which would skew those statistics. I wonder what percentage of Apple’s customer base is black or Hispanic.

How does a reader juxtaposition Tate’s misleading headline with his summary?

It’s entirely possible that Apple CEO Steve Jobs, for example, is hiding a very diverse workforce behind this management team.

John Nack on Adobe’s attempts to sabotage HTML 5:

Bullshit

Adobe representative Larry Masinter:

No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, “blocked” in the W3C HTML Working Group—not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video—not by me, not by Adobe. Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5. Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?

Uh, yes.

Let your actions speak louder than your words. Adobe products are proprietary, slow, bloated, buggy, and expensive (can you say Flash?). Adobe as a company is self serving to the detriment of official standards and customers. Adobe’s products attempt to circumvent both Windows and Mac user interface standards with a proprietary UI design, again, to the detriment of customers.

I will not believe what Adobe’s representatives say while the company’s actions are so obviously corrupt.

In the leapfrog war between Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture, a new winner. For now. Think of Apple’s new Aperture 3 as iPhoto with performance enhancing drugs. Jeffrey Mincey’s summary in Mac360:

Aperture 3 fits well between iPhoto and the Lightroom-Photoshop duo. Worth the upgrade price, for sure, but be prepared to spend some time learning where Apple put all the pieces.

I’ve been using Aperture 3 all weekend. It’s much busier than iPhoto, yes, but the speed and tools make it great. Mixing digital still images in a presentation with HD movies, including audio, is stunning.

Now I need a new camera.

My Valentine’s Day eCard from Wil:

What? No chocolate?

Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief announced that an iPad version of Wired would be available by summer. EiC Chris Anderson on the iPad:

I’m from the media world, and as you may have heard, we have lots of questions about our future. The good news is I think we found part of the answer. We think this is a game changer.

Indeed.

From Wil, an interesting little tidbit regarding Adobe’s once promised support of the HTML 5 standard. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in June:

To the extent that an improved HTML standard accelerates innovation and consistent reach for web content, we’re very supportive.

Uh oh. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch last week:

Adobe supports HTML and its evolution

This week? Adobe wants to block publication of the current specification. Why? One element in the specification would compete with Adobe’s Flash.

Microsoft may be ready to screw their Windows Mobile partners the same way they screwed their PlaysForSure media player partners. How? With a Microsoft Windows phone. From Gizmodo:

With MWC right around the corner, all eyes are on Microsoft for the launch of Windows Phone 7. And though we heard Project Pink was in trouble, this FCC filing suggests the Sharp-made Turtle may still be on its way.

Pink? Turtle?

Suddenly, iPhone iEverything doesn’t sound so bad.

Needham analyst Charlie Wolf doesn’t seem to know the dangers of using a spreadsheet for what-if analysis. Apple sold 25.5-million iPhones in 2009 and is projected to sell 37.2-million in 2010 (that’s over 100,000 a day). But get this one—Wolf projects 142.5-million iPhones for 2019 (yes, that 2019, 19 years from now):

The final year number assumes the global smart phone market grows from 170.2 million units in 2009 to 569.8 million in 2019, and that Apple’s market share grows from 15% to 25%

What about the iPad, iPod, and Mac? Eric Savitz in Barrons:

(Wolf) sees a steady ramp in iPad sales as well, forecasting unit sales of 2 million this year, 6 million in 2011, and 9 million in 2012, reaching 19.8 million in 2019. Wolf sees Mac ships (sic) growing from 9.5 million units this year to 24.9 million in 2019. On the other hand, he expects iPod sales to fall from 53.2 million this year to 35.5 million in 2019.

Maybe Apple is about to enter a global golden age, but those numbers sound crazy. Can Apple still be Apple with sales approaching $200-billion?

Maybe you missed the news. There was a Macworld in San Francisco this year.

The only thing about this week’s Apple-less Macworld Expo that hasn’t been downsized is nostalgia for the Steve Jobs-dominated, bigger-than-life geekfest it used to be.

Still alive. But for how long?

Survey from Flurry shows that iPhone and Android users get bored with apps quickly.

While people quickly tire of applications, they stay engaged with social networks more than anything else.

Flurry also noted a large spike in App Store developers following the iPad announcement in January.

From AllThingsD, Microsoft’s Bill Gates on Apple’s iPad:

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.’

Windows PC tablets have been around 10 years, mostly as dismal sales failures, relegated to a few tiny, niche markets. Gates seems to believe the tablet is still new.

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.

Maybe that’s why Windows continues to lose market share, and Microsoft’s Zune media player has been a sales disaster compared to Apple’s iPhone.

Can you name Apple’s cats? In order?

Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard.

Nick Bilton in The NYT:

Apple seems to have a fondness for cats — perhaps it’s because of their sleek form and penchant for quietly sneaking up on prey before pouncing. But the company might have a slight problem coming up with a name for the next release of its operating system: It’s running out of cat types. Although this might seem trivial to some, Apple is a big fan of consistency when it comes to naming its products. In addition to the cat operating systems, there is the famous “i” naming convention: iPhone, iPod, iMac, iWork, iLife, iBooks, iBook, iTunes and now the iPad.

How about Cougar?

Some women complained that the iPad’s name suggested feminine hygiene products, choosing “cougar” would fall flat on the sensitivity meter. (The term is popular slang used to describe middle-aged women who seek sexual liaisons with younger men, and Courtney Cox plays one on the ABC television series Cougar Town.)

Sigh.

Should Apple retire the cats? Yes.

Are we witnessing the death of the Mac? Yes. At least, in the sense of what we know computers to be vs. what they are becoming. The future of computing belongs to powerful, handheld, closed devices that anyone can use. From Mac360:

Let’s face it. Computers as we know them, and have known them, for the past 30 years, are overly complex beasts; electronic behemoths which require too much effort for increasingly little gain. A Mac is not a toaster. It has become a bewildering array of digital devices, all of which demand learning curve time and maintenance, and like a closet, the Mac becomes a collecting place of everything from music to movies to email. All that capability comes at a price. Macs are no longer easy to use. They need to be replaced. Who else but Apple could replace the Mac. The bad news is that many won’t like what is happening to computing. The good news is that it’s already happened (or, rather, happening now).

If only Nixon could go to China, then only Apple could replace the Mac.

From The New Yorker, George Packer’s Neither Luddite Nor Biltonite wonders if Twitter (and blogging and multi-tasking, emailing, browsing et al) could be murdering book reading.

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head.

I find myself doing the same thing—trying to limit what crosses my eyes, evaluate the worth, and respond accordingly.

The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution.

Excellent reading of an accurate observation. It’s less than 1,000 words yet seems like a book. He’s right.