Dear Steve, it doesn’t ‘just work’ anymore!

Consider this the summer of my discontent with all things Apple. Sure, my favorite Mac, music player, and cell phone maker produces the coolest of cool stuff. There’s just one problem. It doesn’t ‘just work’ anymore. Apple is heading for a crash.

Apple’s Me.com vs. Google’s Knol

Wade Meredith on Google’s silly named new internet product. Yes, Knol is beta. Isn’t everything at Google? How do you pronounce it? Does it matter?

K-N-O-L is their brand name? I couldn’t think of a worse name if I tried.

How does the brand Knol compare to Apple’s recently launched MobileMe and Me.com?

Apple Inc. just bought Me.com. Now that’s a domain. That’s a brand name. Sure the launch sucked, but no one will care in 6 months.

Knol is so bad that Meredith is giving $50 to someone who comes up with a worse brand name.

Diary of an internet hit whore

Paul Rubens voices an update on an archaic, ill-informed, terroristic threatening perspective on Apple, the Mac, the iPhone, iTunes App Store:

Apple is not really a computer company. It makes toys. It used to be a computer company called Apple Computer, but it dropped the “Computer” bit from its name in January 2007 as a tacit admission that it was now a consumer gadget maker, not to mention an online music retailer.

According to Rubens, Apple “can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.” Microsoft, on the other hand, can:

Microsoft is huge, and it is quite capable of doing more than one thing at a time. During the past two years, it worked on Vista, Windows Server 2008, the Hyper-V virtualization system and the Zune — all at the very same time.

So, how is Vista working out in the enterprise, Paul? It’s being shunned almost as bad as the Zune, no?

10 Microsoft flops, 10 Apple flops

List of 21 Great Technologies That Failed from PC Magazine. Microsoft’s latest, not including Windows Vista, was 2004. Apple’s latest flop was 1999.

So we took a look back over the years at some of the greatest flops to come out of both Microsoft and Apple, technology that failed not because it was lacking in brilliance but often because it was simply ahead of its time.

HyperCard?

Free is good. Profit is evil

Free Software Foundation’s ‘5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G.’ A lengthy, uninformed, unbalanced, and self-righteous treatise on why a profit motivation is bad for consumers, and why open source software is better for the world than anything the obviously corrupt and evil Steve Jobs and Apple and Company will do for you.

Apple, through its marketing and visual design techniques, is manufacturing an illusion that merely buying an Apple makes you part of an alternative community. But the technology they use is explicitly chosen to divide people into separate digital cells, and to position Apple as sole warden. When your business depends on people paying for the privilege of being locked up, the prison better look and feel luxurious, and the bars better not be too visible.

John Gruber’s take: “They’re accusing Apple of concocting the whole thing as some sort of profit-making scheme.”

Shame on Apple. Not.

When open source comes up with software as cool as Apple’s, for free, I’ll pay more attention. For now, it’s not much of a contest.

3G, GPS are fine, but…

Mac users rejoice, that new mini Mac in your pocket is faster, cooler, and more expensive. 3G, GPS are fine, but Andy Ihnatko says the “App Store is feature that puts iPhone above all others.”

Well, overall the App Store is a win for the user. The entire universe of iPhone software is in one central location, accessible via either iTunes or the iPhone itself. Prices start at “free” and most apps cost less than an album. Buying and installing an app is dead simple and reliable...never more so than when you do it directly via your iPhone.

I’m up to my fourth page of applications on my iPhone. Some are very good, some are crappy. How many do you have on your iPhone?