February 2005 Archives
Michael Wolff's speech
Professional media gadfly Michael Wolff delivered the opening keynote address at the 2005 SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York at the beginning of February. Hundreds of digital content professionals heard his speech; it caused a bit of a stir at the time, largely because he said that the Wall Street Journal "kind of disappeared" in the mid-90s:
I think the fact that the Journal felt that it was powerful enough to charge, and for a long time everyone regarded the Journal's activities online as the ultimate. They had unlocked the puzzle. In fact, I don't think they did. I think they locked themselves into a puzzle.
The speech was recorded by the SIIA, and then given by the SIIA's flack, David Williams, to IWantMedia.com. IWM then sent it off to be transcribed, and published the full transcript on their website.
Michael Wolff was not happy about this.
I don't know why Michael Wolff wasn't happy. I suspect that he wasn't happy because the speech was a little bit informal, and a little bit embarrassing. When people get paid money to give speeches, as I'm sure Wolff was, they often drop in little juicy bits of gossip to make their audience feel that much more insidery. In print, however, those bits of gossip can look more like self-aggrandising name-dropping:
I have a good story. I mean, this is a really good story never before told. At least never before told in public.
A little less than a year ago I was out at a conference on the West Coast. And there was a guy at this conference who in New York we refer to as the mysterious billionaire. We have no idea what he does, but he lives in the largest private residence in Manhattan. That's what everybody always says, that specific phrase: "He lives in the largest private residence in Manhattan." He also travels in a private plane, which I had once been on. I went out to Kennedy and there were all these G5s parked there. And I started to kind of move over to them, and the guy taking it out said no and shifted my attention to a 767.
I got on this plane first with some other people. And then the mysterious billionaire came on, followed by three teenage girls (not his daughters). At any rate, we're at this conference and it finishes and he's going to L.A. and offers me a ride on the plane. As a matter of fact, he says, you can sit up front if you want. So we go out. I follow him out to his car and then we're quickly followed by two other guys. It's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whom I've met before...
In any case, it turns out that Michael Wolff had either failed or refused to sign the SIIA's standard release form, which allows them to disseminate and/or republish the speeches of their speakers. Williams didn't know this when he sent the speech to IWM, but he certainly knew it when a furious Wolff phoned him up demanding that the speech be taken down. "No one realised Michael Wolff didn't sign the release," Williams told me when he called me earlier today. "And nobody reckoned that IWantMedia would get it up so quickly. And nobody realised what Michael Wolff's reaction would be."
Willliams also told me, per Wolff's statement to FishbowlNY, that IWM had sent the recording out to be transcribed, and that the quality of transcription was, indeed, pretty poor.
When Williams asked IWM to take down the transcription, explaining that he shouldn't ever have sent them the recording in the first place, they complied. But I happened to have a copy of the IWM page open in my own web browser, and I couldn't help but notice the irony in the situation. In the speech, Wolff congratulates himself on being right that "information wants to be free"; then, after his speech becomes public, he tries to unpublish that information. But in the age of the internet, as Wolff himself should know better than anyone, that's simply impossible. I proved that myself, by putting a copy of the IWM page up on felixsalmon.com.
That was a week and a half ago. Today, I got that phone call from David Williams at the SIIA, asking me to take down the page, and telling me that if I didn't, I would probably get something called a "takedown notice". Williams made it clear that if he had his druthers, he would have left me alone: after all, virtually no one was reading that particular page any more, and asking me to take it down, a la Puma, could simply rekindle interest in a story which everybody had already moved on from. When I asked Williams whether he was explicitly or implicitly threatening any kind of legal action against me, he said that "I've felt and argued from the very beginning that that would do more harm than good."
Williams, in other words, gets it. Wolff, on the other hand, doesn't. I left Williams with a choice: we could either let sleeping dogs lie, or he could ask me to take down the page – which I would, on the understanding that in doing so, I would certainly explain why I was doing what I was doing.
Today, I am taking down the page – something I always refused to do when Puma was after me. I'm doing so because, in this case, I think I'm actually breaking copyright law. The speech is Michael Wolff's intellectual property, and me reprinting the transcript in toto does not, I think, count as fair use. Williams phoned me back shortly after our first conversation, this time conferencing me in with Keith Kupferschmid, the SIIA's Vice-President for Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement. "Michael Wolff clearly has intellectual property rights," Kupferschmid said: "he owns the copyright rights in the transcript". My reprinting that transcript, I was told, plausibly enough, was a violation of copyright law.
That said, I'm perfectly happy to link to anybody else who might want to host that particular webpage; if you want to read what it said, Google Cache still has it. Kupferschmid told me that "I'm hopeful nobody would take a complete copy of the transcript and put it up" on the internet. If anybody does, they can certainly expect me to link to them, but they can also expect a phone call from either Williams or Kupferschmid in short order.
Williams and Kupferschmid, I think, are likely to have something of a thankless task ahead of them. Every time somebody mirrors the page, they're going to have to get on the phone and try persuade that person to take that mirror down – something which won't be easy, especially if it's hosted abroad. They don't even particularly want to make all those phone calls, but they're thankful to Wolff for speaking at their conference, and they have promised him that since they caused the problem in the first place, they'll try to clear up the subsequent mess. On the other hand, maybe no one cares very much about Michael Wolff and information wanting to be free – maybe once I take my copy of the page down, it will disappear from the internet forever. That's certainly what Wolff is hoping will happen.
UPDATE: The page has magically appeared at cryptome.org.
Posted by Felix at 18:43 EST | Comments (6)
Has Gawker jumped the shark?
Gawker jumped the shark today. I don't think it's the fault of its two new editors, Matt Haber and Jessica Coen, both of whom are talented and funny writers. Nor do I blame Lockhart Steele, the new editorial director. No: this latest turn of events has Nick Denton written all over it.
Nick certainly never intended Gawker to be the kind of site which hosts hard-core pornographic videos. Here's what he had in mind before it launched:
Gawker is an online magazine for Manhattan launching in January 2003. It's target audience is the city's media and financial elite. Think of it as the New York Observer, crossed with Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.
Gawker actually succeeded very well at that, and pretty soon nearly all of Manhattan's media (if not financial) elite were reading it.
Gawker's success, in turn, helped generate buzz for more downmarket blogs in the Gawker Media stable, like Defamer (Hollywood gossip) and Fleshbot (outright porn).
By July of 2004, I was pointing out that Gawker's self-proclaimed readership of "600,000 media junkies each month" was, on the face of it, higher than the total number of media junkies in the known universe. That posting ended up with a wager between me and Nick Denton: if Gawker managed to get itself more than 600,000 unique visitors in any month of 2004, I would buy Nick lunch at Lever House.
The lesson of this story is don't go into a bet with Nick Denton. I lost that bet. The small reason was Tara Reid's left nipple; the large reason was that Gawker had given up on appealing only or even mainly to media junkies.
In early November, Ms Reid managed to let a breast out in public, Gawker covered it, and traffic went through the roof. On November 8, Gawker got 110,000 visits, compared to 49,000 a week previously. Most of those visits were evidently from people who hadn't visited Gawker before: the site's unique visitors jumped to 833,000 in November from just 425,000 in October.
Denton was mildly apologetic when he called in the bet: he knew a nipple-induced spike from genuine repeat readership. But in fact, although the number of unique visitors to Gawker did fall back in the holiday month of December, it then continued to rise, surpassing the 1 million mark for the first time in January.
But these weren't media junkies – they were people looking for dirty celebrity gossip, which had previously been the province of Defamer and Fleshbot. When the contents of Paris Hilton's mobile phone got posted on the web last week, all of the Gawker Media sites covered the story extensively, but Gawker itself took the lead. On February 22, at the height of the most recent Paris Hilton frenzy, Gawker got 220,000 visits in one day – a new record. Aggregating across all of Gawker Media, gloated Denton, the total number of pageviews reached 1.8 million. 434,000 of those were from his flagship site.
I don't think I'm betraying any confidences when I say that Nick Denton likes it when his sites get a lot of traffic. In Gawker's mix of high and low, it's the low which drives the traffic; the high gets Denton a certain amount of respect and lunch meetings. My guess is that Nick's now had lunch with pretty much anybody and everybody he wants to have had lunch with; his priority now is on goosing his traffic numbers.
Hence the full-court press when it came to Paris Hilton's Sidekick. Gawker linked to the full address book the minute it appeared on gorillamask.net: Denton's site was one click away from a whole slew of celebrities' phone numbers and email addresses. Similarly, when a video appeared today featuring Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst having very explicit sex with an unidentified girl, Gawker was more than happy to link to that. Private phone numbers, private sex videos – so long as you're a celebrity, there's nothing that Gawker won't link to.
The real shark-jumping, however, came later in the day, when Gawker decided to host the video themselves. Anybody going to Gawker's Fred Durst Sex Tape page was immediately confronted with the full two-minute video, and quite possibly put off their dinner for the rest of the day. The irony is that the title of the page was "The Fred Durst Sex Tape You Never Wanted" – well, if you went to that page, you got it whether you wanted it or not.
Gawker Media has hosted pornographic material on its webservers for a long time, of course, as part of its Fleshbot service. But this was video, not stills, and Gawker, not Fleshbot. Now note that Gawker's advertising page still comes with glowing notices from the likes of the Guardian, the New York Times and Time magazine. "Followers of Gawker include Michael Gross of the New York Daily News, Howard Stern, Kurt Andersen of NPR, Jodi Kantor of the New York Times, Deborah Schoeneman of New York Magazine, Ed Needham of Rolling Stone, and Maer Roshan of Radar," it says; it's my guess that most of those people read Gawker much less than they used to, and that none of them (with the possible exception of Howard Stern) think very much of the fact that Gawker was hosting the Fred Durst sex tape.
Denton has always valued traffic over advertisers: he's happy to lose advertisers if they object to risqué content, because that content means more pageviews and ultimately more advertising revenue. But if I were Denton, I'd be very worried that CheapTickets, the launch sponsor of Denton's new Gridskipper site, decided to pull its sponsorship after just two days, because, in Nick's words, "our travel site was too naughty". Denton put a brave face on it, releasing a statement saying that "Gridskipper will continue its obsessive search for the planet's hottest bods, with the occasional hotel recommendation thrown in". But the loss of a launch sponsor after just two days looks, to borrow from Lady Bracknell, more like carelessness than a misfortune. To put it another way: Gawker Media's rush downmarket, in what seems to be an increasingly desperate attempt to maximise pageviews, is actually jeopardising the integrity of its sites and of its editors.
Gawker, as I say, was never meant to be the kind of site which hosts porn videos. And Choire Sicha, the flamoyantly gay former editorial director of Gawker Media, was never the kind of person who would make cheap shots about lesbians – you know, talk about how they wear Birkenstocks and "comfy" pants, that kind of thing. Yet as I pointed out on MemeFirst earlier today, that's exactly what he's been reduced to doing, in his role as guest-editor of Wonkette, another Gawker Media site. Less than 18 months ago, Choire was castigating those who perpetuated the rumour that Condoleezza Rice might be gay; today, he has joined their ranks. Nothing has changed, in the interim, in terms of public knowledge about Rice's sexuality. What has changed is Gawker Media's attitude to such tidbits.
When Gawker was riding high in the buzz rankings, Denton would talk evangelically about the way that his weblogs could target small and affluent audiences, and get premium advertising revenue by doing so. That idea seems to have gone straight out the window: by going downmarket, Denton might have lost a couple of high-end advertisers, but that's more than made up for by his increase in traffic. Gawker started with buzz, now it's swapped that buzz for profit. Maybe blog publishers have to make a choice: they can have one or the other, but not both. Denton is reputedly obsessed with collegehumor.com – the ultimate high-profit-low-buzz website. But I can assure him that the number of people who read both the New York Observer and collegehumor.com is minuscule. If he's selling a highbrow audience to his advertisers, he's going to have to stop the slide downmarket on his websites.
Maybe he realised that today: a couple of hours after the Fred Durst video went up on Gawker, it got taken down. (OK, full disclosure: after I told Lockhart Steele that I thought he'd jumped the shark, he took the video off the page.) But so long as Denton encourages his bloggers to above everything maximise the number of hits they get, this kind of thing is going to continue to appear. In the short term, it certainly helps Gawker Media's traffic. In the long term, however, it could end up disproving Denton's original idea, that a narrowly-targeted website can attract premium advertisers by dint of its upmarket content and readership. Jason Calacanis, take note!
UPDATE: This page has been getting a lot more attention since Gawker was both sued and served a C&D by Durst. The Smoking Gun, along with the New York Daily News and The Register, says that Durst is seeking $80 million, but I can't see that figure anywhere in the documentation, and have no idea where it comes from. In the suit itself and the letter sent to Gawker, Durst only seems to be asking that they stop hosting the video. But as Gawker's Jessica Coen points out, "we complied before you even got around to wasting paper on us".
I do think that what Gawker did was probably illegal: they republished Durst's intellectual property without his permission. Durst's lawyers list a number of different statutes that Gawker has allegedly violated, and I'm sure that they could win a court case were it to come to that. On the other hand, it might be very difficult for them to show damages, so I'm far from convinced that they could get a large sum of money out of Denton & Co.
Posted by Felix at 19:48 EST | Comments (3)
Departure
Watching eight sno-cats leave the base in convoy this morning was very impressive. Eight fully loaded sno-cats, each towing a sledge piled high and a few passengers inside, off to meet the ship 50 km away. The trip will probably take five or six hours, except for the dozer that left at 4 am this morning, needing the three hour head-start to even hope to arrive around the same time. That's it then, the boxes have gone, the bags have gone, all we have remaining now are people.
The vehicles are due to return today or tomorrow and then repeat the journey on Wednesday with the remainder of us. I wangled a few more days here in the name of keeping an eye on special stow cargo and ice cores that will hopefully be flown to the ship tomorrow, but everyone knows I'd do anything to stay an extra minute here. I'm not sure what it'll be like to leave, I have no choice, which is probably a good thing, but it still hasn't gone in. I am far too comfortable here!
Looking back over this summer's blogs (which I can now do!), I realise how much I must take for granted. The things I haven't mentioned stand out more than anything. The arrival of the Canadian operated, huge Russian plane (DC-3 for those in the know) investigating potential opportunities for tourism in the future, my jolly flight to Berkner Island, getting stranded there overnight due to bad weather at Halley (what a shame), and with it the opportunity to fly a twin otter over Antarctica. A trip to creek two caboose one last time, and a night at beloved Wonky. A flight along the coast to remove some monitoring equipment on the Lydden Ice Rise. Our Argentine neighbours visiting by chopper again, and two more visits from the Germans after their initial arrival in November. The light changing as the sun drops, and first sunset behind the CASLab. The CASLab itself, loud and noisy, hissing, spitting, pumping, crammed to brimming with machines that churn and fry, flow gases around the ceiling manifolds, flashing lights indicating a fault on the gas detection system, inlets, exhausts, people climbing over each other to reach their machines.
The CASLab empty and three full sledges of cargo – sixty-odd full size gas cylinders, one ISO container and a hundred large boxes. The making redundant of oneself. And still I want to stay.
The ship arrived last night. Every time there is a storm, the sea ice changes, the cliffs change and the chance for getting our cargo out of here changes. A few weeks ago it would have been totally unworkable. Last week it was almost ideal, or as ideal as an N9 relief can be, today, it's not good, but it's not terrible. There is a tongue of ice sticking out below the surface that prevents the ship mooring up. I guess they'll have to have one officer continually holding the ship steady, using the thrusters, while the crane reaches across the tongue to the cargo on the other side. I guess. One thing I have learnt here is that there is almost always a way. Even to do the impossible.
So, I'm on my last few days. I'm packed, I'm as ready as I'll ever be. I want to stay.
Posted by Rhian at 12:52 EST | Comments (4)
The Gates
Anyone who has moved from Europe to New York knows that one of the most dazzling things about this city, quite literally, is the winter sun. We Europeans are used to drab, gray winters, where the few hours of purported sunlight are invariably overcast and usually drizzly as well. In New York, you wear sunglasses in the freezing cold, something Europeans only normally do when they go skiing.
It's only natural, then, that Christo and Jeanne-Claude, both Europeans in New York, would want to create for New York an artwork which captures the sunlight. The way they did that was by taking their trademark fabric and making it free-flowing, rather than wrapped around or on top of something. If a Gate is in the sun and you look at it from a northerly angle, the sun sets it alight; if you look at a whole pathway of Gates from the north, it is transformed into a river of fire and light.
Jake Dobkin has taken some of my favourite photos of the Gates; here you can see in one photo just part of the range of colours and textures that the Gates form in concert with the New York winter sun.
The Gates isn't just about colours and textures, however. It's an aural piece, too: every time the wind blows through a Gate, the fabric rustles and snaps, and you're reminded afresh of how these totems, so magnificent to look at, are also a very impressive physical accomplishment. The numbers are so big as to be meaningless, so I shan't bother you with the familiar litany; I'll restrict myself just to mentioning that there are over 7,500 of these things, any one of which on its own would be a Central Park landmark in its own right.
Most of all, the Gates are not something to be gazed at, or listened to: they're something to be walked through. This is ambulatory art: anybody buying one of the special Gates packages at the various hotels overlooking Central Park is likely to be disappointed. Staring at the things through binoculars is no substitution from reaching up and touching them yourself; what's more, as one look at any of the aerial photographs will show, this particular work of art is no more suited to being seen from above than is a Picasso.
Christo has been saying that the Gates aren't something to be talked about, and that if you want your questions answered, you should just walk the 23 miles of Gated pathways. In fact, although that would be an interesting exercise, it would also be unnecessarily constraining. The Gates are great to walk under, to be sure. But they're also great to view from a distance, to walk away from, to see out of the corner of your eye from a part of the park which has relatively few of them – the Ramble, perhaps.
In fact, one of the most surprising parts of my visit to Central Park today was when I wound up walking through the zoo, and briefly found myself in one of the few parts of the park where no Gates were visible at all. Suddenly I felt very sad: the Gates had really brightened me up, and their unexpected disappearance, even if it was temporary, hit me quite hard. I have a feeling that when the Gates come down forever in a couple of weeks' time, New Yorkers will mourn their departure.
Christo, of course, knows all about temporary art projects – he specialises in them. Ane he also specialises in their politics. I have a feeling that one of the reasons why he is encouraging the public to walk along the Gated pathways is not because that's the "best" way to view the art, but because he knows that one of the ex ante criticisms of the Gates – that the crowds would damage the park – might turn out to be justified. Even after only 24 hours, the grass to the side of many of the pathways has been turned into large patches of mud, as people walk off the paths to get the perfect camera angle, or just to walk around the slow-moving crowds. The park is heaving with people, which is great for Christo, and makes for a very festive atmosphere, but which might not be so good for the turf.
In fact, the general mood in Central Park these days is like nothing so much as that of Ueno Park, Tokyo, during the Cherry Blossom festival. Everywhere you look are the wondrous splashes of colour which visitors come to see from miles around; the commercial side to it is large-scale but tastefully done, and the crowds are heavy but not oppressive.
Interestingly, the crowds are also very monochromatic. New York City is a wonderfully multicultural city, but the Gates crowds are nearly all white. Art tourists will come from all around the world to see this piece, but I do worry that New York's black population, much of which lives very close to Central Park, has yet to get as enthused by this piece as the rest of us have. I can't think of a single friend of mine in New York who won't go to see the Gates; yet the total number of visitors, I have a feeling, is going to end up a mere fraction of the total population of New York City. (My guess? Somewhere in the 2 million range, and that includes double-counting of people who go more than once. New York's population is 8 million.)
Still, there is no doubt that this is public art on an enormous scale, and which has proved incredibly popular. Jason Kottke says that "it will probably be the most photographed event ever;" I don't know if that's true, but there were certainly thousands of photographic devices in Central Park today, including one fellow drawing a crowd with his enormous 11x14 large-format bellows camera. No Chicago-style small-mindedness here: these Gates are for everybody, and most people who go to see them are likely to want their own memento of having been there in person. This is art to live in the memory for decades to come. As Michael Kimmelman concluded his review this morning, "Once upon a time there were The Gates. The time is now."
So, are the Gates good art? Are they even, maybe, great? That's a hard question, and I'm reserving judgment; I'll go back again, for sure, and make up my mind slowly. Here's another photo from Jake, which gives an idea of some of their formal qualities: looked at from the middle distance, as they march and flutter in unison, they seem monumental in a slightly dated, 1970s sense, a work of art which wouldn't be out of place at Storm King.
On the other hand, 1970s monumentalism rarely came up with anything as subtle and beautiful as this. And, more to the point, it never made hundreds of thousands of people incredibly happy. Maybe art is too limiting a box to put this kind of public event into: it's already been compared, in terms of its audience, to things like the St Patrick's Day parade. There's no doubt that the Gates are great for New York, and great for New Yorkers. Whether they're great Art, too, is almost beside the point.
Posted by Felix at 20:20 EST | Comments (5)
Apples
If there's one overriding reason why Steve Jobs has been a huge success at Apple, it's that he has managed to demolish the old truism that Apple =Mac. Nowadays, in the eyes of the general public, Apple is much more associated with iPods and iTunes than it is with Macs; indeed, Apple's own iMac marketing campaign is essentially attempting to leverage the iPod brand to increase Mac sales.
The mass success of the iPod and iTunes owes everything to the fact that they are Windows-compatible. In the world of computers, on the other hand, Apple was until recently very much a control-freak company. Unless you got a super-high-end tower system, if you wanted an Apple computer then you got Apple everything: computer, keyboard, screen, mouse, software, the lot. Now, however, with the Mac mini, all that has changed. "Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, and Mouse", says Apple: we don't care if they're ancient, ugly things, what really matters is the operating system under the hood.
Which is why the report today that Steve Jobs has been approached by three PC manufacturers about letting them run OS X is so intriguing. Here's the juicy tidbit:
Most tantalizing of all is scuttlebutt that three of the biggest PC makers are wooing Jobs to let them license OS X and adapt it to computers built around standard Intel chips. Why? They want to offer customers, many of whom are sick of the security problems that go with Windows and tired of waiting for Longhorn, an alternative.
As Pete Rojas notes, we can assume that one of those PC makers is Sony; what we can't assume is that Jobs is going to say yes. But he should. Apple is still languishing in tenth place on the list of the biggest PC manufacturers, which is pretty weak since Apple sells 100% of all the computers running OS X, which is probably the best consumer operating system in the world.
While Apple has always been very good at designing computers, and it certainly seems to have mastered the art of designing operating systems, it's never been very good at selling computers. Apple's market share has been wallowing in the 3% range for as long as I can remember, and although a lot of people say that the success of the iPod means that many more Macs will be sold in future, so far those predictions have yet to come true.
Jobs is clearly happy with people running OS X while using ugly keyboards and monitors: that's the whole raison d'etre of the Mac mini. So why not let them run it while using an ugly computer as well? I have no doubt that Michael Dell, were he so inclined, could double the market share of OS X more or less overnight. In turn, that would mean more developers writing software for OS X, as well as the ability, for the first time ever, to make a like-for-like comparison when it comes to the perennial question of how much more expensive an OS X machine is when compared to a Windows box. You could have exactly the same monitor, keyboard, box, processor, and everything: only the operating system would be different. No longer could people say that they were buying a Windows machine only because they couldn't afford the Apple one.
Those of us who remember Apple from pre-iPod days also remember the clones: computers by companies you'd never heard of, running Mac OS on the same crappy old Motorola chips that Apple was putting in its own computers. It was an experiment by Apple which didn't really work, and it was born out of desperation on the part of Apple. This time around, however, things have changed. It's the big PC makers who are approaching Apple, and they, one assumes, are willing to pay whatever it costs to rebuild OS X for Intel chips. No longer would Apple be at the mercy of Motorola or IBM, waiting months for promised processors to be delivered. If OS X ran on Intel chips, you would have something of a dream combination: a super-reliable operating system running on chips from the most reliable PC chip manufacturer.
Apple would lose some of its own hardware sales to competitors, of course – but it could make up for that by pricing OS X accordingly. More mouthwateringly, Apple would finally have a choice of chip manufacturers, for the first time ever. Rather than simply having to accept whatever IBM gives it, Apple would be able to start putting Intel chips in its own computers if they were faster or cheaper than Big Blue's. Indeed, if OS X was rewritten to run on Intels, it would probably run on chips from other companies too, creating real competition in the market to supply Apple with chips. Whenever there's competition, the consumer benefits.
All this is much easier said than done, however, I'm sure. Huge questions remain unanswered: would all OS X applications have to be rewritten for the Intels, or would rewriting the operating system be enough? What would happen to Apple's reputation if the new machines turned out to have all manner of bugs and glitches, even if those bugs and glitches were the fault of the manufacturer and not the operating system? And if Apple's own hardware sales fell significantly from their present low levels, could the company still afford to spend all that money on hardware design? In other words, could this move mark the beginning of the end of Apple as a computer manufacturer?
It hasn't happened yet, of course, and frankly I'd be surprised if it ever did. But it's certainly an idea well worthy of consideration, and I, for one, would love to see a Sony computer running OS X.
Posted by Felix at 18:54 EST | Comments (8)
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