Cool Stuff That Happened This Week

I was out of the office this week and for the most part hanging out with partners and vendors around the clock – so here are a few things that happened this week that I thought were cool from the geek standpoint.

Amazon released their own Apple TV. One of the things I love about Amazon is that they act like a total badass – no matter how big the leader happens to be they take them on – books, retailers, Google, Netflix, Apple, colocation/data centers – they are just a beast. And this week they came out with their “me too” device to compete with Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast…. With one little difference – you can buy a game controller. While everyone is fighting over taking over your living room with crappy radio that is virtually indistinguishable from everyone else, Amazon tries to take on Xbox and Playstation. Balls.

Microsoft Office for iPad downloaded 12 million times. I did it too! And man, it’s pretty. It’s really pretty. Templates are awesome too. But on my flight back from San Diego I wrote a document in Pages, updated my notes with Evernote and haven’t touched the Office suite ever since I installed it. It would be a tragic irony if the very thing that kept Microsoft Office as the standard people were used to is the same thing that keeps it from becoming as widely used on the go.

Microsoft taked about Windows Phone 8.1. It will have Siri. And they’ll give it away to OEMs for free on screens under 9”. And they’ll give you your desktop back if you’re unfortunate enough to be on Windows 8. I’m not sure how I feel about this – either the impossible has happened: Microsoft actually started listening to it’s clients. Or worse, they are recognizing just how hard their ass is being kicked by everyone they tried to “compete” with using halfassed products.

Galaxy S5 comes this month. Even though I am never more than inches away from my iPhone 5S, the Galary S4 is by far the coolest gadget I’ve ever used. The new features coming in G5 are insane. But it had two giant downsides: It’s giant and it’s keyboard just sucks. It’s kind of like when Windows Phone fanboys can’t stop talking about how it’s a great smartphone because it has a great camera– Great, I’ll keep that in mind when I need a digital camera. I really hope that Samsung got a better keyboard with G5 and I can’t wait to see if the G5 mini has the same geek candy drool factor.

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The IT these days is pretty much about the gadgets and services – and PC/server model has to a large extent been removed from the public discussion. It was an interesting week to be out with IT Solution Providers and IT vendors who were all tied to their gadgets and computers but not really very consumed in a business model around it. There is a reason for that (not because they are morons) in a sense that business computing is turning into a utility instead of a tactical investment. But more on that later.

Have a great weekend!