The company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, has continued to deliver huge profits. They totaled well over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole. Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure.

—

Dick Brass, writing in the New York Times about why Microsoft is no longer an innovator. Follow that clever bit of logic? Because Bill Gates is a good guy, we should all really hope Microsoft finally gets their shit together. Not sure how to explain Paul Allen and his string of failures while basically cavorting about like an overgrown child since leaving Microsoft 25 years ago, but whatever. And did you catch the part about how Microsoft has three CTO’s? Sounds like the definition of “chief” may have gotten lost.

His analysis is probably spot on, that Microsoft is too big and too unfocused and too internally competitive, but it’s nothing we haven’t heard plenty of times over the past decade. The whole piece reads like one big justification for the life and times of Dick Brass, bylined only as “a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004” – you know, right around the time Microsoft started its long, slow slide into obsolescence. Listen, Dick implores, I wanted to make cool shit but all those pesky VPs wouldn’t let me. A little digging reveals that Dick led Microsoft’s earliest tablet and e-book efforts – gee, I wonder why he’s suddenly showing up on the Times op-ed page? A page Dick boldly predicted would no longer be on printed paper in 2018.

I’m sure Dick Brass is a great guy but this seems like a time tested, perfected by political flunkies, cover-you-ass routine.

Dan Wineman, who is smart, wrote this in the middle of some tumblings from other smart folks about why it’s ok if Mozilla takes an ideological stance in this whole HTML 5 video thing. Go Dan!

Zealots they may be, but Mozilla is one of the very small number of well-funded groups actually fighting to keep the web open and free. Apple’s anti-Flash position also works in the service of that goal, but only by coincidence: Apple’s and Mozilla’s interests happen to align there, because Apple doesn’t control Flash. In this area, they don’t, because Appledoescontrol QuickTime. The Mozilla Foundation are the good guys. They led us out of the Dark Times when nothing worked on any browser but Internet Explorer. Let’s not forget that.

As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.

—Mike Monteiro sets the nerds straight on why the iPad is gonna be great.

Murray Hill Inc, a liberal public relations firms, is running for congress [via comrade Gruber]

indefensible:

hurtling:

This is from a newspaper editors’ listserv to which I unfortunately subscribe. No wonder our industry is circling the drain.

——-Original Message——-

From: [REDACTED] LISTSERV On Behalf Of [REDACTED]
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 4:36 PM
To: [REDACTED] LISTSERV
Subject: Newspaper of the Future

I’m trying to quickly gather whatever research already exists about what our audience (readers of print, online, and niche products) want, both in terms of content and platform.  Please point me to whatever you know of; if you can send me summary attachments, that would be even better.

Thank you.

I think a real problem with communications and knowledge workers these days is that they have forgotten that not all information is extant and that some will need to be actually teased out through hard work and the asking of questions.

We have become so used someone else having the answers that it seems we’ve forgotten that answering some of those questions is our job.

8 Chrome extensions for web developers

Firebug is really the last must-have

slaughterhouse90210:

“By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.”
— Gustave Flaubert, A Dictionary of Idiocy

Nice piece of dataviz from couch and crew over at USA Today. Enter your salary and it will show you your tax bill (inflation adjusted even!) for the past 70 years. Even shows how national spending priorities have shifted over that time and what your share pays for. Really nice work.

The L5 remote is an IR dongle for your iPhone that turns it into a fully functioning remote

I use my old 1st gen iPhone as a media center remote and now I can finally get rid of the remote for my TV.

Immediately. I’m going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription.

—Bill Watterson, responding to the question of how soon he’ll send a letter with the new postal service issued Calvin and Hobbes stamps. That’s why the man was the best in the biz.