“The Next Steve Jobs Will Totally Be A Chick”

Comedian Louis C.K.:

The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick, because girls are No. 2–and No. 2 always wins in America. Apple was a No. 2 company for years, and Apple embodies a lot of what have been defined as feminine traits: an emphasis on intuitive design, intellect, a strong sense of creativity, and that striving to always make the greatest version of something. Traditionally, men are more like Microsoft, where they’ll just make a fake version of what that chick made, then beat the shit out of her and try to intimidate everybody into using their product.

I agree, except she won’t be the next Steve Jobs. She’ll be the first and only whoever she is. via Daring Fireball.

The Windows Blog

Great news from Microsoft:

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

In the post the Author, Dean Hachamovitch, reiterates the company line regarding HTML5: “we’re all in,” but this is not a surprising development at all. H.264 is the de-facto standard for mobile web video. Microsoft doesn’t control H.264, and Apple is the pubic face of the codec. It is in Microsoft’s best interests if H.264 has some (serious) competition. It just so happens that it’s in all of our best interests, too.

Jeffrey Zeldman on Microsoft’s “Enforced Bragging”

I’m not challenging the quality of the hardware and software improvements; I’m pointing out the enforced bragging, which is mandated from on high, and which flies in the face of the humble stance other high-level divisions in Microsoft would like to enforce in the wake of the company’s European drubbing and the dents Apple and Google have made on its monopoly and invulnerability.

In short, the tone of these announcements has not changed, even though the times have.

This is a symptom of corporate culture as a whole. The megacorp is constitutionally incapable of relating to humans from anything but a position above us, be it imagined or not.

A Concise Summary of Charlie Booker’s Recent Anti(?)-Apple Rant

Cleversimon gets to the heart of Charlie Booker’s strange rambly piece from earlier this week:

Finishing the sentence “I’ll never buy a Mac because” with anything but “it doesn’t meet my needs” means you don’t get to accuse Apple users of making irrational purchasing decisions based on slavish adherence to an ideology.

It’s not surprising that Booker’s view is purposefully self-contradictory. He makes his living being a contrarian. For him It doesn’t have to make sense so long as it is rabble-rousing.

Yahoo Gives Up On Search, Bets on Bing

Earlier today Yahoo and Microsoft signed a 10 year deal which sees Yahoo not developing any new search technologies, and using Bing for it’s algorithms. Like most of you, I fail to see how reducing the main Search players from 3 to 2 creates “more innovation”, but does anyone even read these press releases anymore? The official site for the deal is begging for a PR-Speak-To-English translation.

Also important: What happens to BOSS, Delicious, Search Monkey and Yahoo’s other search products? (via Andy Baio)

Bing

Microsoft’s new, absurdly-named, search engine has launched. Two things: How is this better than their own live.com, and how is this better than Google.com? It seems to bring nothing new to the table aside from the little popups on the right side of the results (which I’m sure is where “bing” came from. Bing! Bing! We’re lucky they don’t have a sound effect with them. It plays in my head, regardless.) and that isn’t super useful. It’s cramped, and boring at the same time.

The text-search engine space desperately needs some serious competition. Something like TinEye is doing for image search. The question is: What else do you do to search? I have a feeling the answer is not going to look anything like Google or Bing or even Wolfram Alpha.