Weekly Links #2011.39
In the tradition of great weekly outlets, here is a bit follow up on last week: the epic battle between Yahoo! and HP for having the worst board ever is going into another round, this time All Things D reports Explanation Spam from board and CEO to employees. Oh my! Well this could all have a happy(?) ending if reports by WSJ and others are true and chinese Alibaba is interested in buying Yahoo! — we will see.
The dominating story this week of course was Amazon with their new Kindle line up. I’ve written dedicated articles about interesting parts of the discussion. If you don’t know what source to go to for information, use one of the previously mentioned or John Gruber’s post about the Kindle line up. The best stuff however, happened in the wake of the announcement:
- Predictably the press went nuts about whether the Kindle Fire would kill the iPad, the Andoid tablet market, both, neither or just anger some birds (It already does). Only few realized that here can be and now are two markets that overlap only partially: low-cost, smaller media consumption devices and higher priced, bigger, more serious tablets like the iPad.
- I can agree with the notion that the Kindle Fire and the iPad together can hurt other tablet makers, if they are stupid and try to chase both at the same time.
- Well it already began, Tablet that once should kill the iPad now commit suicide by trying to compete with the Kindle Fire by slashing their prices. That will surely work…
- To my surprise, I have come along only one article from Mobile Opportunity which looks a bit more closely at the fact that we have seen an Android tablet being released and neither the Android community nor Google seem to be happy about it. Crickets…
- Here is the reason: Android is just a means to an end. The Kindle customers don’t care about, whether it’s Android underneath. Which made the tech community start another double rainbow rumor: Amazon has set its eyes on Palm. Honestly that gets even me excited. I just wonder what would happen to Amazon’s Android Store?
Another punch in Android’s face are the patent-licensing deals between device makers and Microsoft. MSFT reportedly has made $444 million in revenue from this business alone. Which begs two questions: who makes more money with Android, Microsoft or Google? And which makes Microsoft more money, Android or their own Smartphone-OSes? (HT to John Gruber)
Even if it seems that I sum up Daring Fireball this week (hey, it’s not my fault that he is so much better than the rest), I can’t skip on the Oracle-Autonomy drama. Yes that’s three different links. As Gruber puts it: grab some popcorn and especially read the press releases from Oracle. Hilarious. HBO could make this a TV show.
Finally two short links for your lazy Sunday pleasure: Flowing Data gives us an infographic about the most popular infographics around the web. My favorite: a crapload of irrelevant data put together in a big vertical image. Love those!
If you ever wondered how Ferrari got its horse, Logo Design Love points you to the video from Ferrari. Fascinating.
