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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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?

The award for best summary of Apple’s new MobileMe service comes from David Pogue of the New York Times, who admits that .Mac was a “motley, unfocused service.”

MobileMe, however, has a much clearer mission that solves a much clearer problem. It’s meant to keep the e-mail, calendars, address books and Web bookmarks on all of your computers — Macs, Windows PCs, iPhones and iPod Touches — synchronized in real time.

Almost. There’s that 15 minute lag on your Mac or PC. Alright, so .Mac is history, MobileMe’s hiccups are diminished. David asks, “How is MobileMe now?”

Once everything’s ready, the magic is impressive. Make a change on your Mac, watch it appear on your iPhone and your PC. Add a new friend to the address book in Outlook Express on your Windows XP machine, and watch it appear in Windows Contacts on your Vista PC. Change an appointment in iCal on the kitchen Mac, and know that it will wirelessly sprout onto your traveling spouse’s iPhone four states away. And your Web bookmarks are the same everywhere.

Mostly.

Somehow, someday there’ll be collaboration using PDF files—according to Adobe, which released Acrobat 9. The latest release features native support for Flash. Rob Tarkoff, Adobe’s senior VP of business productivity:

The ability to break through and communicate a message in a compelling way has never been at a greater premium.

Is it the message or the medium which is most important? Isn’t Acrobat the medium? Acrobat 9, according to Tarkoff, will:

fundamentally change how professionals communicate and collaborate using electronic documents.

Somehow Adobe Acrobat, Flash, and Buzzword have become a Google Docs killer. Pundit Robert Scoble:

Soon people just won’t put up with a word processor that costs hundreds of dollars and isn’t collaborative. They won’t put up with a presentation program that can’t deal with photos from Flickr. They won’t handle a sales database that doesn’t run in the Web browser.

Collaborative documents are good and all but I’d be happier without Scoble.