Google Chrome OS

If I was building an OS today I’d be building what Google just announced. Like most heavy technology users I’ve been moving heavily toward hosted web applications over the past few years. I don’t use Evolution or mutt anymore, I use GMail. I don’t organize my photos on my laptop and use my own hosted …

Social media in the Sahara desert

My wife and I just finished a week long camel trek in eastern Morocco with Berber nomads. While our hosts had no formal education, no running water, no grid electricity (just a little solar), no flush toilets and no floors in their homes, no land lines and no computers they did have mobile phones. Pretty much everyone seemed …

The Sidekick ID and the iPhone

There were two interesting announcements today. First the Sidekick ID which had been previously leaked was formally announced and reviews have started to show up. Secondly Apple announced that the OS X Leopard will ship three months late – more than two years after the previous release of OS X. This slip is being seen as evidence that Apple is having trouble building as many products at once as it wants to.

In the four years I was at Danger we were building exactly one product at a time. We failed to separate the development of the hardware, the OS and the applications. Separating the client and server schedules was a slow and painful process. In the two years since I’ve left things seem to have improved. The fact that they’re able to ship two products (even if they are quite similar) is really exciting. That Danger is succeeding where Apple, with their 30 years of experience, is beginning to stumble is cause for congratulations.