Free Republic

A good friend of mine pointed out the money phrase from Steve Jobs at this week’s iPad 2 introduction: “This is worth repeating. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive.” It’s an insightful even brilliant statement that’s 100 percent true. Then why...

MARCH 4, 2004 The Curse of the Hundred Bagger Why Venture Capitalists Are Paralyzed and Our Economy is Stagnant By Robert X. Cringely Almost 15 years ago, I got a call from an editor named Mike McCarthy asking me to write a book he wanted to call DOS for Dummies. I was mainly writing for Forbes back then and they were paying me more for a feature story than Mac was offering me to do a whole book, so I turned him down. History shows that Dan Gookin said "yes" where I said "no," and DOS for Dummies went on...

OCTOBER 23, 2003 How Microsoft's Misunderstanding of Open Source Hurts Us All By Robert X. Cringely This week, speaking at a Gartner conference in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said some fascinating things about Linux and about Open Source software in general. And thanks to those remarks and the blinding realization they caused for me, I finally understand exactly why Microsoft doesn't understand Open Source. Ballmer asked, "Should there be a reason to believe that code that comes from a variety of people around the world would be higher-quality than from people who do it professionally? Why is its...

Son of Napster One Possible Future for a Music Business That Must Inevitably Change When I mentioned in last week's column that I would this week be writing about a legal way to do a successful music downloading business -- a business that would threaten the Recording Industry Association of America and its hegemony -- dozens of readers wrote to me trying to predict what I would write. Some readers came at the problem from a purely technical perspective, ignoring the fact that the real issues here aren't technical but legal. Some readers took a legal approach, but they tended...