News and comment on what's happening in the technology industry, and the direction it's heading.
Jack Schofield spent the 1970s editing photography magazines before becoming editor of an early UK computer magazine, Practical Computing. In 1983, he started writing a weekly computer column for the Guardian, and joined the staff to launch the newspaper's weekly computer supplement in 1985. This section launched the Guardian’s first website and, in 2001, its first real blog. When the printed section was dropped after 25 years and a couple of reincarnations, he felt it was a time for a change....
Google isn’t the first company to work hard at making its products worse: recently, Bitly, Digg, and Twitter have all managed to make themselves slower and less usable. The difference is that Google is no longer a small start-up trying to do its best: it’s a very rich corporation with plenty of time and money to comparison-test 41 shades of blue.
Amazon has just released a 30 second advert for its Kindle ebook reader that is based on making fun of Apple’s iPad. The scene shows a man with an iPad sunbathing next to an attractive woman with a Kindle 3.
Google has provided people who use its home page in the UK and Germany with a new toy: a blobby doodle where the balls that make up the letters flee from your mouse pointer. And like the Buckyballs doodle I wrote about recently, it’s a resource hog.
As you have probably noticed from the associated geekgasm, Apple has announced a sort of social network that is tied to its own online shop and elephantine iTunes software.Although some people found it to be “a big pile of steaming dung”, a haven for spammers and, as Mashable claimed, “slower than molasses in January at the North Pole during a legitimate Ice Age,” there’s nothing as weird about it as the name.
Within a couple of seconds of sitting down at my PC on Saturday I realised something was badly wrong, and since Google has been my browser home page for the past decade, it was dead easy to spot the guilty party: Google. To be specific, Google’s Buckyballs celebration doodle was consuming 100% of my CPU.
It was nice to see Samsung get lots of publicity after showing its Android-based Galaxy Tab tablet at the IFA 2010 trade show in Berlin. But the Tab was just the first of a string of new products as companies pile in to what they hope will become a viable new market, rather than a passing fad.
While PC shipments have staged a comeback this year, Gartner’s researchers have reduced their sales forecast for the second half of the year by 2%. Previous warnings by analysts were confirmed by an Intel statement on Friday that it was lowering sales forecasts.
The broadcast media landscape is changing rapidly, with people spending less time watching live television. Since young people are quicker to adopt new technologies than older people, the result is that the audience for live TV is getting older.
Companies planning to migrate from XP to Microsoft Windows 7 in 2011-12 may have to pay over the odds for expertise, according to Gartner Inc. The research company says: “During that period, demand for highly qualified Windows 7 migration IT personnel will exceed supply, leading to higher service rates.
Gartner says the PC market in Western Europe grew by 19.6% in the second quarter of 2010, with shipments of 15.