July 2010 Short Takes

Editors seem to be an endangered species.  I know I'd love to have one but given my budget for this BLOG (zero) it isn't going to happen.  The longer the entry, the better the odds that I'm going to make a mistake that will have me wincing at some future date if I ever go back and take a look at what I've written.  I do try to put out a polished product but I'm human and I see plenty of editing mistakes in Associated Press articles.

With that in mind here are some quick comments/thoughts/experiences on various business and technology related things.

NVidia
No, they aren't dead.  They aren't even in serious trouble yet but the signs are far from positive.  AMD/ATI just passed them as the leading discrete GPU vendor and their financial performance hasn't been making anyone happy. Their key differentiator right now is that they have error correcting memory in their latest generation GPU's. This makes for a very attractive product if you want to build inexpensive super computers.  They currently hold the number two spot on the top 500 super computing list and provide a very tempting value proposition for people,companies and organizations willing to do a little bit of work optimizing their codes to run in a GP-GPU environment. NVidia also provides ports of many popular libraries that make that task much simpler in many cases.

RIM/Blackberry
I loved my 8703E phone.  I replaced it with the Tour a year or so back.  I hated the Tour.  I am very much off the Blackberry bandwagon.  They are still the team to beat but between Apple and Android they have some serious competition and need to execute well in the next year or risk becoming a very small niche player. Their value to businesses that care about security is still high, but shiny (IPhone) and/or functionality (Android) often trump mundane considerations such as the security of ones corporate secrets.

Droid X
I've had this phone for a couple of weeks now.  I love it.  The phone is not perfect.  The virtual keyboard isn't all that easy to use for somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience with touchscreen keyboarding and it has had a few minor glitches but overall the experience has been great. Having a Camera/Video Recorder/GPS/Compass/Calculator/Flash Light/Games Machine/Web Browser in my pocket that also makes and receives phone calls is really liberating/fun.

Apple
The free case/apology press conference should have ended the majority of the coverage of the IPhone 4 woes.  Apple helped keep the story in the press by continuing to point fingers at their competitors. No surprisingly those competitors were delighted to respond. As I've noted before, at this point the facts are very much secondary to perceptions.  Apple just needs to let this go.