big in Japan

wait for it...

iPhone | Design

Far be it from me to pimp a product line but it's worth noting that Walter Mossberg long considered Apple no more than an interesting technology footnote. He's changed his tune the last couple of years, even suggesting at one point that Apple had become a viable enterprise technology solution — which indeed it has. Among other good news for Apple this week, the iTunes store took the third spot in music retailing for the first time, moving ahead of Target — another company I like a lot — and Apple became the fourth leading seller of laptop computers, reaching something over 14 percent of total sales, behind Hewlett Packard, Dell and Gateway if memory serves me. In any event, after two weeks of daily use, here's Walter Mossberg's review of the iPhone:



[Updated 06.27 with a YouTube embed that fits the Blogger template (the video I embedded last night from the Wall Street Journal was too wide for this template — once again, the variety of video standards poses a challenge to presentation). Out of the box, iPhone reportedly plays only QuickTime movies (no Windows Media Video or Flash). YouTube — which is to say Google is delivering something on the order of 10,000 videos as the new device lands this Friday and, according to some reports, will make its entire inventory available by Fall 08.]

call the IT guy

my good friends at InsideWork dug up this nugget:

In this context, InsideWork President Dan Wooldridge recalls Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's warning:

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less

[You may recall that General Shinseki was moved along by the Bush administration because a month before the invasion of Iraq he had the temerity to tell the US Congress it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called Shinseki's judgement "wildly off the mark" and went on to administer a most profound irrrelavance.]