Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

January 03

As my favorite character from the Addams Family would say - it's SHOWTIME! Time for all of the hype and fallout from the big Apple at the MacWorld expo. This is the kind of stuff weeks are made of. In fact, I've got enough for three already written. But enough of the showy introductory fluff - let's get the meat. PSX emulation comes out the backrooms of the rumor mills and into the limelight with Connectix actually showing off their latest entry from the illegal grounds of the grey market. Yet already the fur is flying on the show floor with press-room murmers that Sony is not amused - and all this by the second day of the show! MacMarines report that Connectix was mum on how Sony was recieving the "good news" - disturbingly and peturbingly so. So now the ADC has a new mission in life. Not just watching the slow boat to China Apple death saga - but how long before (a) Connectix get's the hint and withdrawls the product - still pending non-show release or (b) Connectix finds itself getting the living snot beat out of them by Sony's lawyers. This time the game will be called "the empire strikes back - and boy are they pissed"! Personally I don't know what's more amusing in this saga since even the Apple fanbase is already panning the product as a legal bombshell, although they're rife with pleas that it's just more good stuff for Sony to take advantage of marketwise. Well MacJihadders, if you didn't read last week's tirade on how the video game industry works, and why brand equity is something you earn - not suck off of like a leach - then I'm afraid you're living outside the real world. Yet again.

January 04
New colors for the iMac and the biggest most bizzare case of reality distortion that Steve Jobs has laid onstage for the peanut gallery in history. This one was so beyond oddball that every news source in town - from MacWeek.com, MSNBC.com, to even the pearly gates of SFGATE.com and Cringely on PBS. All of them collectively are pulling their jaws off the ground and dusting them off long enough to mention Steve Jobs latest ass grab in marketing hype - his quote not mine - "specs and speed aren't important? - COLOR IS?" - before contemplating calling the nearest booby hatch wagon for a new rich and famous pickup at the Moscone center. The funny thing is, only RC was ballsy enough to mention full-out that this was not merely the largest re-purposing of the words R&D, but a barefaced and outright lie, andthe first to put it in the file of "admiring the capabilities of a total huckster". The irony is - only now are the MacMarines members seeking out sites that make note of Steve's wacko observations on color beating out things that people actually want out of computers. What took them so long? Were they in shock as well? So far only SFGATE.com has gotten targeted by the lean green geeky machine, with not even a speck of hatemail ready to fly at Cringley. Guess this onstage exercise was too embarrasing to bring back into focus so soon after the dammage was done. I'd like to go beyond the obvious for a moment. I'd like to put aside obvious notations that Steve has mentally flown the coop thanks to some industrial designers that are out of touch with the public. I'd like to take a moment away from pointing out that Apple has gone so far out of the mainstream that they couldn't wade their way out of a babbling marketing brook. I'd rather take a pause from making obvious commentary that all of the MacJihad tech arguments are now obsolete because it's all about Crayola crayon colors rather than MIPS. No, I'd first like to ask about the (albiet spooky and very out of touch) on stage babble itself. Sorry no Beige. Look more colors, no beige. Even the Washington Post has been trying hard to find something nice to say about the iMac and "no beige" is pretty much it against the Wintel machines on the market. But WAIT! Hold everything for a second. I'm not saying the lord king-high Steve Jobs has dick for a wardrobe, but has anyone - ANYONE - gone to a computer store lately and taken a look? Just to make sure "I" wasn't getting out of touch, I went to CompUSA here in Denver at the I-25 and Colorado Blvd location to take a gander at all the "beinge" Wintel boxes I heard so much about. After all of the media reports and even Apple's own goddamn billboards making a point about this for so long, I expected to be covered in tan plastic by the time I got out of the store. You know what? There's no beige! This is a scoop folks! I mean in spite of Apple and MSNBC's talk about beige, not to mention the Washington Post, and even (gasp!) CNN - the ADC is the first news-site to tell it like it is. Dear readers, THERE'S NO BEIGE WINTELS AT COMPUSA! Oh my FUCKING GOD - where did they all go!??? There were black Wintels - oh look there was a Sony purple Wintel! And lots and lots of white Wintels - but not one goddamn motherfucking beige one! What the hell is going on here! Has Steve Jobs' infamous field scrambled everyone's brains? Holy mother of Shit, did the sun explode and fry everyone's ability to see color? Are people going blind? Is that why I'm seeing hairy palms from the Mac fanatics so much these days? Take a look around! I haven't seen a beige computer since 1996! Well for all of you out there wondering what the hell is going on, it's called a false premise being thrown from the wonderful world of advertising - and it's the most glaring admission that Chiat-Day has flown the logic coop, and perhaps, why it's time for me to make a return to the ad-game. I'll even go back to St. Louis if I have to - as painful as that sounds to further the cause for ADC fans everywhere. Wish me luck. BTW/FYI: If I do get back to the town of shitty beer and homerun busting baseball, you'll be the first to know - the site will move to geekforce.com. As a prep move, I'm going to mirror the site on both servers so your most stable bet very well might be www.geekcorce.com/~mgabrys/clock. Update your bookmarks now and avoid the rush. It's not ready yet - but by the end of the month the mirror will be reflecting.

January 05

Another report from the MacWorld floor, MacWeek.com reports that Jobs is - once again - pre-announcing 1300 or so applications much like he did last year before anything actually hits the shelves (like software or anything). This isn't really a one year nostalgic move though, since it harkens back to the great 1991 let's tell the people what they want to hear - not what the hell is going on in reality, NeXT/Quark deal. You remember that one from the ADC don't you folks? That's when NeXT and Steve Jobs leased the same space at the Moscone center to announce that DTP had arrived on the NeXT, shortly before Quark took a look at the NeXT marketplace - panicked - and told NeXT to go to hell. Of course NeXTworld Magazine made an impassioned plea to NeXT users to write in and protest this decision, netting a whole 11 letters at Quark's Denver headquarters, thus sealing the fate of DTP on NeXTstep forever. That's not exactly news either from Jobs since NeXT in 1988 announced that IBM was licensing NeXTstep and it would have a healthy run on RS6000 workstations. Well, that didn't happen either. So it's with a great aplomb that the ADC reaches down into the old-world catch phrase bag and pulls out the time honored classic - "don't count your software before it's published". Otherwise you're just as certain to be let down as 11 NeXT users were at the beginning of the decade.

January 06

Well there was at least SOMETHING new at the great expo, the new G3 machines cloaked in tacky colors. In this case everything seems very nice from the faster processors to the more realistic prices. Although those pesky serial and SCSI ports seem to be gone thus making 3 card slots a mere 2 for high-end people. Wave bye-bye to pro-video folks - it's REALLY dead now. The biggest news from this of course is that even the MacMarines are having what would be described as a full-blown panic attack at the idea of both loosing all of their peripherals in one go (hey fine for suckers at the iMac end but not for towers eh?), and having to fight drivers and adapters which still don't work very well on the current upgrade or die peripheral scene. Still if replacing thouands of dollars worth of scanners, printers, networking tools, SCSI drives etc, isn't appealing to make you want to buy one of these newly colored tower gems, perhaps the fact that not a single firewire device exists on the biosphere located on the third orbit from the Sun. Sorry about that one folks, Apple and the interm-CEO has spoken. Get used to the new obsolete harware pile. What's ironic - and when will this site not enjoy the embrace of classic irony - is that the last coffin nail goes out to the Apple-fan set that had for about a decade, told us Wintel people that sticking with Apple ment a larger return on your hardware's investment with the backwards compatability scene. Well, gee - the Win 95 crowd seems to be doing ok. All the gadgets seem to plug in ok, and of course the floppy drives are still servicing all those billions of floppy disks. I guess the OS update path, Mac OSX, and those missing ports are causing you to renew your investment just a little earlier than - say - MINE. My ThinkPad 365ED from 1996 still has room for an external monitor, plenty of IDE and card-based peripherals, and oh look - all of the new software for Win 98 runs fine on my laptop. Imagine that! I'm actually getting more out of my 3 year old laptop vs those that bought a power mac with all the trimmings less than a year ago. Pretty wierd huh?

January 07

Apple at the expo also pre-announced it's profit way in advance of it actually existing. Aside from blowing SEC regulations on whispering performance or sleezing investors with speculation, it's interesting to make note of things that weren't included in the MacWorld Expo this year as promised by the big Steve J. How'd everyone like that gander at the Quicktime 4.0 update? You know? the one that would include the internet video steaming that was supposed to be included in Quicktime over a year ago? Did you miss it? That's ok, because you certainly must have seen the new consumer portable that everyone's been talking about - including Steve Jobs to the educational people last month. No? What the hell - did you blink? Well this isn't really a surprise because something always slips in the big valley, but usually not in the aftermath of the interm-CEO-whateverthatmeans shoots his mouth off to the press and the user circut. Still, whatcha-gonna-do? Before the Mac was unveilled Steve used to host sneak peeks at the darn thing against secrecy and Non-disclosure rules for over a year before it went up for sale. Even the NeXT which was so hush-hush the employees at NeXT were often kept in the dark on what was going on before they were even hired. That didn't stop Steve from bringing dates he was trying to impress into the sacred vault. So I don't really think it's too wierd for MacWeek.com and others to rail on something that we know "could" be available even though it's not anywhere near ready because after all, Steve's still got an ego to maintain, and people to impress. Even if he's married and should have better things to do.

January 08

This one has come both by e-mail and by bbbs(hey 61 members, 1300 hits a day, and over 2000 messages in 4 months - even with massive gongs and bans - we're blowing away Mac and Windows fansites! Check it out!). The big question? What would "I" do if I were the interm CEO? Well here's the skinny. Create a G3 tower with 10 (countem) 10 slots plus a propriatary SCSI array slot for the video people that are screaming for them. Charge over 10 grand and make a mint on the margins. Keep the iMac around and introduce an iWindows box. See which one sells better, and phase out the loosing box eventually. (going back in time) sell off the Newton group rather than mulching it. Create the ultimate Wintel Laptop that's cheap and stylish and sell it next to the same MacOS version. Phase out the lesser seller. In short, I'd maintain the MacOS for cash-rich video people, and the cheapest to produce consumer machines, in low volume, to use the Apple fans as a Japanese test market. This harkens back to the fact that most consumer electronics in Japan sell at higher prices intially to test the waters on a giant focus group - then the product is released to the USA at a lower price when the econmies of scale work themselves out. Do the same with Wintel hardware products making the MacOS version a way to jack up the price tag on the prototypes for the people who refuse to learn and are willing to pay. Yes I'm evil. But it would work. Mac fans would love the fact that they're still being supported (as an evil test niche plan), and flop configurations could be stopped before the larger product run began for the Wintel OS versions. Twice the money and double the fun! And my name's not just Montgomery for the hell of it - "excellent!".

January 09

Another memorable Steve Jobs move at the Expo - bullshit numbers. You know the drill - quote something quasi-legal and then run like hell. Something akin to Tiawan firework pacakge instructions really - "light fuse and get away". Well this is something that gives the MacJihad on the usenet and the MacMarines fuel - but I'm not buying it until someone credible other than Apple.com has something to say. Let's talk sales - let's talk NeXT's infamous history with sales numbers that didn't exist. Let's talk sell-through instead of channel-loading. Let's talk Mac defections of 10% instead of pithy Wintel defections that don't make a dent in the global market growth. Let's talk Data Quest. Let's talk Wall Street. Anyone got anything yet? No? Well you can count on them in the next few weeks, not only because the ADC is ahead of itself in the news file - but because Steve Jobs in infamous for making the SEC's hairs stand on end. Because when you're comparing silicon valley hype to the truth, you might as well be comparing Cuban cigars to cherry trees. Thank you, drive safe, and have a good tomorrow.