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You are currently browsing the raoli.com weblog archives for the year 2007.
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Aug 08, 2007 in Sports
Congratulations to Barry Bonds for hitting home run 756 last night, passing Hank Aaron and becoming the all-time home run king.
A lot of folks are less than thrilled about this turn of events. Between Bonds’ surly disposition and the rumors concerning steroid usage, many people feel that Bonds’ record is tainted. Personally, I don’t care.
Jul 30, 2007 in Mac
When iTunes Plus first debuted, I noticed a few tracks I’d purchased hadn’t shown up as eligible for an upgrade, even though I could find the same tracks in the iTunes Plus section of the store. At the time, I chalked the discrepancies up to the newness of iTunes Plus — I figured it was taking time for all the upgrades to be cataloged and that I’d eventually see the upgrades become available. After a while, I simply forgot about the songs.
I was poking around the iTunes Store the other day and I stumbled across one of the tracks that should’ve been upgradable. Figuring that this wasn’t simply a processing issue, I decided to write iTunes Store Support and find out what was happening.
Jul 23, 2007 in Business, Gadgets
Verizon Wireless and Broadcom in Deal
Verizon Wireless will pay the Broadcom Corporation as much as $200 million to bypass a possible ban on some handsets that use Qualcomm chips.
Something tells me that Broadcom gained a little bit of leverage in these negotiations on June 29th.
One of my first thoughts when I read about this deal was that it sounded similar to last summer’s agreement between Microsoft and Universal Music Group. You know, the one where Universal gets $1 for every Zune sold. The need to get the iPod and iPhone competitors to market caused both Microsoft and Verizon Wireless to make the sort of agreements that previously weren’t seen in their respective industries.
You have to assume that $1/player issue came up in the recent Apple-Universal negotiations. It remains to be seen how the Verizon-Broadcom deal will effect the future of the wireless phone market.
Before the International Trade Commission ban went into effect, there were rumors that Verizon was going to market the LG Prada as their competition to the iPhone. Theoretically, the ban could have provided Verizon executives with some degree of coverage in the face the iPhone’s success — “We had a plan in place to counter the iPhone, but we could not bring our new phone to market due to the ITC ban.” If the iPhone continues to rewrite sales records even in the face of Verizon’s new handsets, executives at Verizon may have nowhere to hide when shareholders question the wisdom of passing on the iPhone.
Jun 27, 2007 in Links
Jun 22, 2007 in Sports
The Soxaholix is usually pretty good, but I particularly enjoyed today’s strip
Look, for evidence of the complete shrink of the shank consider this: he’s now bettah known as the butt of a Carl Everett joke, i.E., the CHB, than he is for anything else including his now uber passe tome The Curse of the Bambino. Res ipsa loquitur, you know.
This is, of course, in reference to my favorite Boston Globe sports columnist.
Jun 22, 2007 in Links
Jun 14, 2007 in Links
Jun 13, 2007 in Business, My World
If you wonder why Microsoft can’t seem to get out of its own way these
days, read this terrifying first-person essay by an MBA who
now works at Microsoft, in which he admits he’s a “non-techie” and
describes his goal as “unlocking value” from software, which he
compares to chocolate chip cookies and running shoes. Now look. I love
MBAs as much as the next guy. Actually I don’t. But whatever. The fact
is, Microsoft was better off when its staff looked like this.
…and thus, Fake Steve Jobs points out the new Exhibit A as to why MBAs are often loathed in the tech industry.
Not that I’m saying he’s wrong, mind you. The MBA folks I’ve met who are interested in the tech sector tend to fit into two groups — those that think feature checklists are the be-all and end-all and those that think you need to truly understand what the customers want. Furthermore, party membership doesn’t seem particularly driven by level of technical skill. Some tech-savvy MBAs want solutions with every bell and whistle while others believe that their level of tech-savviness takes them outside of the main market segment.
I had a really good illustration of this fact during the last course in my MBA program, Technology Commercialization. It was a 4 day class where we crammed a lot of topics into a very short period of time. By the end of the course, you had a pretty good idea of where people would fall on various issues. Two of the most telling topics were a discussion of Apple’s success with the iPod and a proposal of an innovative new product. During the iPod discussion, there were a few people who were hung up on the fact that the iPod didn’t do everything that competing players offered and that the lack of feature X was a deal-breaker for them. I stopped just short of pulling out one of my favorite rebuttals from when I was at RPI: “But you’re not normal!” While we never reached any consensus in the Apple debate, a handful of folks in the class continued to push the fact that the market for the iPod is not the same as the traditional market for computers.
During the new product proposal phase, though, there was no such hope. The feature checklist mavens got rolling and there was no hope of pushing the discussion towards anything that seemed remotely possible of achieving mass market success. If this thing ever came to market, I think it might be outsold by the Palm Folio.
So, this is the environment I’m facing now that I’m trying to get back into the work force. Furthermore, I’m trying to get into the specific market segments where MBAs often have a bad name. And now, I’ve got Scott from Kellogg making MBAs in the tech world look like idiots, which I’m sure will help matters. Thanks, Scott!
Jun 07, 2007 in Mac, Programming, TiVo
A little over two years ago, TiVo quietly enabled the ability to stream unprotected AAC to TiVos for use via the Home Media Option. I say quietly, because this feature required you to install lame and didn’t appear to be documented anywhere. At the time, I viewed this as a promising sign that TiVo was starting to make good on it’s then 2-year-old statement that they were looking to add AAC support to the HMO. However, it’s been another 2+ years since that time and not much has changed.
What has changed is that Apple unveiled iTunes+, complete with unprotected AAC files. In theory, these files should “just work” with TiVo’s existing AAC support. Of course, as is true of many things, the transition from theory to reality did not go as planned. As reported by The Apple Blog, iTunes+ still are not playable through HMO.
We come here not to bury TiVo, but to fix it.