Category: Technology

Chuqui 3.0: Instead of buying a zune…

“Thinking of buying a zune? Well, surprisingly enough, according to Amazon, 10% of the people who looked at a Zune instead went off and bought a 16×10 two person camping tent. That’s either a lot of tents, or a really small number of views and sales. I know which I’m betting on.”

After I got over my shock of seeing Chuq von Rospach post a blog entry at some other time than a-minute-before-midnight (an in-joke between us), I chuckled at his quote above.

I remember last year before the Zune launch and every media outlet was posing the question “Will this kill the iPod?”… I said, over and over (never here, but in other blog comments and various mailing lists) that the Zune would be a non-starter. A failure. The “Bob” of this decade.

While Tech Punditry isn’t my gig, I felt pretty confident on this prediction.

Looks like Amazon has sold about 100 of ’em. 😉

I’m going to be doing some long-overdue upgrades of the software behind the scenes here this evening, so don’t be surprised if I’m down for a while.

Entertain yourselves with old rally stories at my old website: www.goolsbee.org

–chuck

Windows expert to Redmond: Buh-bye
Microsoft’s marketing materials for a past version of Windows used the phrase, “It just works.” But the only computer that tagline honestly describes is the Macintosh. Don’t translate that in your mind as, “Yeah, so what, the Mac is easy to use.” Any new computing environment takes some getting used to. The easy-to-use aspect is nice, but not all that significant. When Mac users say, “It just works,” what they mean is that you spend more time on your work, and a lot less time working on your computer.

Bingo! Nice to see something I’ve been saying for… ever, validated once again. If you want to spent endless hours futzing around ON a computer, your best choice is honestly a Linux box. If you want to just get stuff done, go with a Macintosh.

If you want to spent your days swearing AT your computer, go with Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft tries real hard. They spend billion$ on thousands of programmers and flog them mercilessly to come up with every possible way to make Windows “cool”… make it “usable”… make it “work”. But in the end you realize that is exactly the problem. This is an Operating System created by commitee. Mind you, so is Linux, but it is made by a commitee that never sees or talks with each other.

MacOS X is really a INTERFACE, not an operating system. The OS underneath it is yet another UNIX variant, but the average computer user would have a hard time noticing that. It is an amalgam of NeXTStep and FreeBSD, both solid UNIX variants with a long history of excellent performance. What Apple has done is tweaked the user interface with all those years of knowledge and experience they gained with the Macintosh, from 1984 to 2001. OS X is hardly related to the “real” (or as Apple calls it in a sugar-water reference “Classic”) Macintosh that was shipped in 1984. Instead it is the tried and true, been in development since the late 1960s, UNIX, with an Apple created User Interface on top.

I’ve been managing UNIX systems of various flavors since 1989… SCO (long before they turned evil!), SunOS 4.X, A/UX, AIX, Solaris, NeXTstep, FreeBSD, Linux, Irix, etc. They have been great multi-user systems, perfect for their task, but what Apple has done is build a UNIX that is suited best as a PERSONAL COMPUTER. That is all about interface, and nobody builds better UI than Apple.

So… tired of fighting your computer? Tired of running the computing equivalent of bending over in the prison shower? Tired of running a spam spewing robot without your knowledge? Tired of cleaning up the mess of backdoors, trojans, viruses, worms, etc?

Get a Macintosh.