When Larry Page became CEO of Google (again) a year ago, he declared that the company was going to put more wood behind fewer arrows — which has translated into shutting down some of its myriad side projects to focus on the big, …
Lost Audio: Steve Jobs Compares Himself to Jeffrey Dahmer’s Mother
Of all the reporters who ever covered Steve Jobs, nobody is more closely associated with the man than Brent Schlender. The former Fortune editor spoke with Jobs frequently for stories, over many years. He kept lots of tapes of …
I Bought Something from a Best Buy Vending Machine, and It Didn’t Go So Well
Sometimes fate is just plain mean. On Wednesday, I wondered if Best Buy’s best strategy for reinventing itself might be to radically reduce the selection of products it stocks and institute a no-frills customer-support policy. …
Wonderopolis Gets Smartphone Apps
Last year, we named a site called Wonderopolis to our list of the year’s fifty best sites. Created by the National Center for Family Literacy, it publishes a wonder each day for parents and kids to share — answers to burning …
Another Way to Save Best Buy: Make It More like Costco
Just about everybody, it seems, is full of helpful advice for Best Buy on how it can fix its business. I provided my suggestions back in March. (That was before the company’s CEO, Brian Dunn, resigned under mysterious …
Twitter’s Promise: Unexpected Sanity in the Patent Mess
Adam Messinger, Twitter’s top engineer, has blogged about a new concept that the company plans to implement and advocate for. It calls it the Innovator’s Patent Agreement:
The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps
…
Windows 8 Versions: The News Is Mostly Good
For years, it’s been fashionable to complain that Windows comes in too many versions, resulting in unneccesary complexity and confusion. Here’s a 2003 Cnet story by Joe Wilcox which reports on controversy over Windows XP’s …
Apple II Forever: a 35th-Anniversary Tribute to Apple’s First Iconic Product
Thirty-five years ago, on April 16 and 17, 1977, more than twelve thousand proto-geeks flooded into San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. They were there to attend a new event called the West Coast Computer Faire, and the room …
Fourteen Ways to Celebrate the Apple II’s 35th Birthday
You probably weren’t paying attention when a tiny company called Apple Computer introduced its second product, the Apple II microcomputer, at the West Coast Computer Faire on April 16 and 17, 1977. (I wasn’t.) You may never have …
Photos: The Apple II Turns 35
Hands On with Barnes & Noble’s New Nook Simple Touch E-Reader with GlowLight
More than most technologies I can think of, the E Ink screens used in monochrome e-readers such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch and Amazon.com’s Kindle Touch present a stark set of tradeoffs. If you don’t mind the lack of …
CloudOn: A Better Way to Do Microsoft Office on Your iPad, for Free
From Quickoffice to Documents to Go to Apple’s own iWork programs, there’s no shortage of iPad apps that let you view and edit Microsoft Office documents. But as anyone who relies on Office to do real work can tell you, there are …