Leaving comments across the blogosphere…
For Plasma TVs, Being Better Isn’t Enough
You talk as if plasma is a company or brand. Most manufacturers of plasmas also offer LCDs as you mentioned, including Panasonic. And it’s pretty easy for any of these guys to slap their brand on someone else’s hardware until they ramped up more themselves. Heck, Sony was late to the LCD game not willing to give up their tube and microprojection display stuff and had no problem turning it around in a year. So while the plasma market shrinks and the cheaper (and dropping) LCD tech improves, like other tech that doesn’t reach and sustain quantities of scale, it will be squeezed out. I love my Panasonic plasma, but I’m resigned to making my next purchase a large screen LCD.
Why TiVo Is Struggling While Netflix Is Thriving
Depends how you define struggle. TiVo’s subscriber numbers are clearly down (for various reasons), but if they manage to make most DVR providers into partners or licensees (and if they continue to prevail in court) they’ll profit handsomely for their investors. (And currently hoard over $200 million in cash, which could help them weather the lean times or acquire compelling new tech.) Also while Netflix and TiVo appear to operate in the same space, they are very different sorts of businesses. As a customer I’d like to see that new interface and a renewed focus on content discovery – one of their original and unique selling points. (I’ve given up on TiVo as a tool to completely bypass advertising.)
Apple and AT&T’s Colluding, Anti-Competitive Ways
I agree completely this issue is much larger than AT&T and Apple. However, that’s who I’m currently a customer of and who the FCC has sent inquiries. Not sure I’d go as far as saying CDMA is a problem, but Verizon is notorious for locking down their handsets (such as the storied past of blocking third party nav apps on Blackberry devices) and it’s true they haven’t embraced WiFi handsets. But back to AT&T, they’ve also blocked Sling’s Finder ID service in the past (before updating their terms of service to prohibit tv streaming) and my work aircard was blocked from using my company VPN. I know my limit is 5GB, leave it to me to manage that number instead of forcing me into a higher tier of service designed to gouge business customers. Of course, I also speak with my checkbook. I dropped my AT&T card for Sprint. And if the HTC Hero hits before Apple and AT&T rethink their policies, I’m jumping to Sprint for that too.
What we really want out of new operating systems
Snow Leopard one ups the screenshot with screen recording video QuickTime. And why is anyone uploading photos to Tumblr when you can email just about anything to Posterous. ;) Oh, and I have no use for a webcam. Having said all that, I like the saving/compression and removable storage improvement suggestions. Automatic saves should be more widespread – you think they’d learn something from Google’s cloud computing. But maybe they’ll just be lapped instead.