Exact Editions Blog

There is a fascinating confusion now reigning in the higher reaches of the Microsoft empire.

Steve Balmer and his team are convinced that tablets should be viewed as PCs, and that there is no need to put a mobile operating system on Windows tablets (“iPads and tablets are just a different form factor of PC”). They appear to have completely misread the reasons for the success of Apple’s iOS and its iPhone and iPad devices. As Horace Dediu notes:

Summed

At its World Wide Developer Conference at the beginning of the month, Apple introduced iOS5, a close integration with Twitter and its plans for a Newsstand within iTunes. There was a brief overview of the Newsstand service in the presentation and this mention in the Press Release:

Newsstand is a beautiful, easy-to-organize bookshelf displaying the covers of all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in one place. A new section of the App Store™ features just subscription titles, and allows users

When the iPad was launched, there was a widespread view (and I shared it) that soon, and not more than a year or two later, there would be some highly competitive and lower-priced tablet alternatives for customers to choose from. The iPad had opened a new hardware category, but competitors would quickly crowd into this new opening… there would be lots of choice and most of it would not be for Apple hardware.

Whilst dissecting a review of one of … Keep Reading

Intentionality is a philosophical term of art, and it refers to or ‘points to’ the directedness or aboutness of much of our mental and linguistic activity. Of much of our action. But ‘intentionality’ has also been used by web commentators, John Battelle, for one, when he considers the extent to which Google is striving to build a method of search which captures the user’s intent and which is at the same time harvesting and modeling intentions and desires:

The Database

There were a couple of tell-tale signs last week that Google may be having some pain and problems with its vastly ambitious Google Books project. First, was the news that Google was pulling the plug on its corresponding, open-ended, plan to scan and database masses of historic newspaper archives. Second a report that Google was diverting all its programmers from its eBookstore and perhaps not vigorously pursuing plans selling eBooks.

The problem that Google has, is that there was huge … Keep Reading