What I’ve been saying for a long time

Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons on Apple:

Apple is looking like what Microsoft was 10 years ago—a Bigfoot…

He’s the same Daniel Lyons who wrote the delightfully insightful Fake Steve series. Elsewhere:

Bully behavior also invites backlash, as it did for Microsoft when that company rose to power in the 1990s.

Amen. Apple as struggling underdog is a great story, a company with great products and loyal customers. Apple as bully is just Microsoft with a different logo.

Goodbye Mac, Hello Windows Vista

It took me a long time to make the decision to switch from Mac to Windows. The decision to switch was not easy for me. I’ve used Macs for about 15 years. I loathe Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates. I scoffed at Windows users feeble attempts to justify their platform of choice. I convinced many friends, family members, and co-workers to switch to the Mac. So, why am I switching?

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?