Charlie Rose featured the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, and The New York Time’s David Carr for 23 minutes of iPad discussion. The money quote came from David Carr on how Amazon’s Kindle compares to Apple’s iPad:

It looked like something the Mennonites made 150 years ago.

Priceless.

Windows 7 is better than Windows Vista. David Goldman of CNNMoney.com points out an alarming statistic:

A whopping 31% of clients have reported problems with upgrading to Windows 7, according to a recent survey of more than 100,000 customers conducted by consumer helpdesk firm iYogi.

What happens when the bugs are worked out?

Once the bugs from upgrading have been worked out, users have had a relatively hassle-free experience. And those who bought a new computer with Windows 7 preloaded have seen the fewest issues.

Duh.

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.

I can’t be the only one who thinks that search engines suck subway scum. There’s Google’s search engine, and Yahoo!, and Microsoft’s new Bing (which will be Yahoo! very soon), and a few dozen others. 15 years into public internet search and it’s still the same. Enter keywords, wait for page, click for hours to find something useful.

The Motley Fool’s Tim Beyers on Bing:

Bing ought to be able to show you what others think of the content you’re searching for—whether they have saved it, how they rate it, and how they use tags to categorize it.

Now, that’s an idea with legs. Except, that to get ratings on search results requires search engine users to leave ratings. That’s more work. Yahoo! has this social bookmarking thing called Delicious. Could that get integrated into Yahoo!‘s version of Bing?

Say you use Yahoo! to search for “The Motley Fool.” You’d see what you see today—pages ordered by ranking, as well as related searches—plus information about how those pages were tagged, how many times, and by which Delicious users in your network. Beyond that, adding ratings or exposing comments wouldn’t be difficult.

Except for the fact that I don’t like Delicious, I do like the idea of some sort of regulated approach to ratings on search engine results. Why? Most results suck subway scum. There’s too much crapola to wade through to get what you want, despite the advanced search options. The term in use already is social search, which I don’t like as much as rated search.

Social search is a way of sharpening what has classically been a blunt instrument—the give-me-everything-you-can-find-as-fast-as-you-can search engine. Both Bing and Google are like this today, but won’t be forever.

That’s because both Facebook and Twitter already provide social search, which provides specific results often better than Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. What of Google’s Wave. I like this stream concept where everything rolls together because it’s all encompassing, but encompasses a little too much of Google’s world to give me comfort.

The real trick is to develop search results that are closer to expectations than to advertising hooks. Easier said than done because we don’t pay to search. Social search like Delicious is yet again another promise that search results will be better. In the future.

The best article so far on the iPad’s impact; by Dan Moren in Macworld:

Like hot rodders, techies wear their tweaks and optimizations as badges of honor. To me, that’s the chief distinction between power users and your average user: power users adapt computers to the way they work, instead of adapting the way they work to computers.

Money quote:

Much of the negative response to the iPad seems filled with anger—which, as Yoda adroitly pointed out, stems from fear—and it mostly comes from the kind of power users who like dealing with the underpinnings.

For a few decades personal computing has been mostly an evolution. Touch is the revolution.