Jaysus! Howja make a fookin phone call with this fookin thing?

Good news for Apple worshippers in Ireland. You're getting the iPhone. And though the newspapers are whingeing about iPhone costing 1,200 Euros over 18 months, according to Danuta Gray, the CEO of our Irish carrier, "I'd say your Apple freaks will be queuing out the door when we launch."

That's Danuta Gray in the photo above, explaining to Paddy O'Rugbytard that he's typing on the wrong side of the device. Eejit.

Unlocked iPhones: A good problem to have

That's what Tim Cook says. Our COO was asked at a conference about all the so-called "missing iPhones" and explains to the investards that, um, this is actually a good thing since it means people around the world are dying to get one. Money quote: "Of all the problems we face, this is the one I face looking at with a little bit of a smile. Because it means there's great demand for the phone. And to have people stepping over each other to have the phone isn't a bad thing."

Amen, my brother. Extra backdated options in your pay envelope this week.

Waterboarding employees

A company in Utah allegedly used waterboarding on an employee. Frankly I think it's an exceptional idea. We've got legal looking into California statutes on this. Um, developer tools engineers? Are you paying attention? Anyone want to find out how long you can hold your breath?

Has anyone seen Eric Raymond?

He's the guy who wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Remember that? Back in 1997 it was this big hit and then for a few years he seemed to be everywhere and then suddenly -- nothing. Has anyone seen him? Do you know where he is? Is he alive? Are there any photographs of him out in public anywhere? I'm asking on behalf of Katie who apparently wants to hire him for some work. And some of the freaks in our OS development group want to talk to him too. Moshe has been on the job and says Raymond's old blog shut down on Nov. 11, 2003 and moved to a new location on iBiblio which seems to have gone dead in June 2006. Anyone have info? Any help appreciated.

Entire developer tools team placed on super-duper lockdown

Look, I've gotta admit, I'm pretty disappointed with the developer tools engineers. These guys have really let me down. We were supposed to have the iPhone SDK out by February and let's be honest -- it ain't gonna happen. They're all whining now saying that they told me from the start that February was unrealistic. Well, you know what I think is unrealistic? Not meeting deadlines and expecting to keep your jobs.

I came in this morning determined to fire the entire team but then Bertrand told me that if we fired everyone we'd never get the SDK finished. Which, okay, he's got a point. So we're keeping them on but I'm happy to say that I've had to take some extreme measures and put the whole team on super-duper lock-down, which is the second from the top most extreme version of lockdown that we have. (Photo of the engineering sleep pod above.) Nobody leaves the building, and there are only two meals a day, and bathroom breaks are limited to meal time.

Watch how fast that SDK ships now.

While I'm at it let me just say to those of you who have been writing in about Leopard -- yes, we know it's kind of slow. We know it's got some issues. We realize this. Yes, officially we're saying that it's super amazing and perfect and that we haven't seen any performance issues. But yeah. It's slow. We know about the problems. We're working on them. Or, at least, we would be working on them if the frigtards in developer tools and OS engineering could get their heads out of their asses and finish this goddamn SDK.

What really put me over the edge was I just found out that these guys haven't been abiding by the Level 4 lock-down rules I put in place a month or so ago. You know what these guys have been doing instead? They've been out getting hammered on tequila and having crab parties. No guff. Crab parties. Whooping it up while the SDK slips. Damn you, engineers! If I could run this company without you, I would do it in a heartbeat! We'd have nothing but PR and marketing and advertising people. Jony and I will design the machines ourselves, and we'll outsource the engineering. Someday this will happen. You mark my words. Every single one of these lazy OS engineers will be replaced by someone in China.

One more thing: To those of you engineers who are currently enjoying a liquid lunch over at IL7, please be aware that we've installed spy cams over there at BJ's and Moshe has a team on the way. So little buddies, my advice to you is to get your asses out of that bar and back to your work environment, pronto. That is unless you like the idea of being abducted, hooded, and renditioned to an Apple facility in a country where torture is legal.

I'm totally serious about this. Developer tools engineers, you have failed me for the last time.

Barry is rocking the world down in Texas

Here he is in El Paso meeting with some schoolkids. This was right after he fed an entire auditorium with just a single stick of French bread and a pack of hot dogs. Just look at those kids and how they love him! Yeah, they know greatness when they see it. Viva Obama! Much love to Art Director Jason for the beautiful suitable-for-framing art work. Friends, please share this lovingly crafted portrait with everyone you know. Someone should be painting it on velvet. Or on those glass panes where the eyes move when you walk across the room. Nitrozac and Snaggy are no doubt on the job already.

Obama just faith-healed some woman

Just heard this from one of our guys who's traveling with Barry for the week providing tech support for his staff. Apparently they were in Ohio, or maybe Texas -- I get them mixed up -- and some woman came up to Obama saying she was blind from a factory accident and out of work and she'd heard about Obama and had listened to him speaking on TV and just wanted to meet Obama and shake his hand. Obama shook the woman's hand and then took both of her hands in his hands and began talking to her in this very quiet voice, almost a whisper. Nobody knows what he was saying but suddenly the woman began shaking and crying and then Obama let go and the woman stumbled backward and started looking around and shouting, Oh my God! Oh my God!

According to our guy on the ground, this woman is not some kind of ringer or plant. Her husband and kids and some friends had brought her to the rally and they all vouched for her. Our guys says Obama seemed kind of geeked out and just took off fast, like maybe he didn't mean for this to happen or something. His handlers were freaking too and wouldn't answer questions about it and said only that the senator was moving on to his next stop of the day.

I know people are going to be skeptical but frankly I totally believe this because I've done it myself a few times. It's not magic. It's just a kind of energy that some people are able to channel. Goes with the charisma and the ability to persuade people with your speeches. It's just a more extreme version of that same energy. I've never asked Barry about this but I kind of knew when I met him that he had it. Bono has it too.

Anyway, I'm sure Barry is actually embarrassed about this and didn't do it to show off. If I know him I'll be he'll pretend it didn't happen and he won't want to talk about it. More as this develops.

Foucault's Pendulum: An update

Well I got about thirty pages into FP last night and so far the story seems pretty interesting but to be honest I've been much more fascinated (and not in a good way) by the typeface that they used. There's a little info at the end and they say it's a typeface called Bhenchod but there's no further info. So I've got Ja'Red doing some research for me. As you know I consider myself a leading expert on typefaces since I took a single calligraphy class as an undergraduate more than thirty years ago. And frankly I've got a few bones to pick with the way this edition of FP has been set and laid out. For one thing the leading is way out of balance with the size of the font. That alone is a huge problem and it makes it really difficult to read the book without getting distracted. At least if you're an aesthete like me who pays a huge amount of attention to tiny details like that. Just makes it very hard to focus. Probably not a problem if you're just some academic type who thinks he's a big intellectual yet doesn't even know a thing about calligraphy or typefaces. Anyway. Not sure how much of this book I will be able to read, frankly.

Attention ladies: Chinese robots want to rub your breasts

See here. Much love to Faddah for the tip.

UPDATE: Previously this had the wrong link. It's fixed now. I think.

Thief in Brooklyn steals Mac, leaves Dell behind

No kidding. See here.

New MacBook priced better than Dell. No kidding.

Some Wall Street dudes ran the numbers and even made a chart. We're at $1,099. The comparable machine from Dell costs $1,119. And it comes with Vista Home Premium.

Can someone please tell me why we don't have 90% market share? Or at least, like, 50%? Anyone? Bueller?

Dude I ran up some massive travel expenses last quarter

Says here I spent $550,000 traveling last quarter. Who knew? I mean I knew I was on the road a bit last fall. But jeez, a half million bucks? And that's just for the plane? Wow. I don't even want to look at what I spent on food. Or weed. Great news is that while other CEOs might get hammered for running up an outrageous travel bill, when I do it the Apple faithful see it as a positive. Apparently some stock market analyst found this number in our SEC filings and says it's way higher than usual which must mean I've been on the road a bit which in turn must mean we're working on cool new products or negotiating new iPhone deals which in turn means people should be buying our stock. Whatever. I'm cool with that.

We're about to pass Wal-Mart in music sales

Says here we're going to surpass Wal-Mart and become the #1 music retailer in the U.S. before the end of this year. Money quote from an analyst: "Digital sales were up close to 50 percent and CD sales were down 20 percent last year. Even at half that growth rate in digital sales, Apple will in all likelihood catch Wal-Mart this year."

Um, record labels? You know how you think I've been a dick in the past? Just wait till you see what I'm like when we're on top.

What up with all the hand-wringing?

My goodness. Katie just sent me this piece by Charles Cooper from CNET which rounds up all the bitching and moaning about the recession and how if the economy goes bad that's going to kill Apple and everybody should sell their shares and move to the mountains and live in a cabin and start stockpiling food and ammo ... or something. Headline is "Apple agonistes." Man oh man. At least it ends well -- Coop says the iPhone "remains head-and=shoulders above any smartphone in the industry," and that the Apple faithful are going to stand by us no matter what. Right on Coop. And right on, Apple faithful. Keep on buying the products, and your precious Apple stock will go back up too. Geddit? It's a loop. And there's nothing to worry about.

Cornered Clintstones attack: This Obama guy is black! Who knew?

So over the weekend the desperate Clinton campaign began circulating this photo of Barry Obama in an attempt, I guess, to make him seem scary. Drudge has the story here. Turns out Barry was on a tour of Africa when the photo was taken. But I guess we're supposed to believe that maybe he's some secret Al Qaeda operative and the photo was taken at his graduation from terrorist training school. Hoo boy.

Apparently the coded Clintstone message goes something like this:

Gosh, folks, guess what? This Barack Hussein Obama fellow comes from Africa! He may even be related to some Muslims! Does that outfit look familiar? Maybe remind you a little bit of this guy? Folks, he's not one of us! Does he really share our values? Can we trust him? Do you really want to elect a big scary dark-skinned foreigner who wants to destroy our nation and give away all our jobs to the special interests and leave all our children behind and not give health care to everyone?


Mother of God. This from Democrats? This is the kind of stuff you'd expect from Karl Rove. First the bogus plagiarism charge. Now this. What's next? Pictures of Willie Horton? (He's the dude in the photo at right and for those of you who are too young to remember the very ugly 1988 presidential race, check out the link to the Wikipedia page. In that case it was Bush Sr. and the nasty Repubes smearing Mike Dukakis, a somewhat swarthy son of Greek immigrants, and the coded message was that the Duke wasn't truly American and didn't share our values and gosh he let this big scary black man out of prison.)

Now the Clintons are dragging out the old tried-and-true "find a scary black man and attach him to your opponent" trick. Goddamn this makes my blood boil. Good news, I think, is that this time I believe the tactic will backfire on the Clintons and make them look like the craven, ugly, power-hungry creeps they truly are. Turning whites against blacks, turning one religion against another -- that's the crap we're all sick of and that's exactly why people are going crazy for Obama. So go for it, Clintstones. Show your true colors. You know what? I'm betting American people are better and smarter and a lot less bigoted than the Clintons give them credit for. I'm betting a lot of Americans feel really good about a dude who can travel to Africa and the rest of the world and reach out to them and respect them and earn their respect in return. Just a hunch.

The new book reading initiative

Well, okay. I got a few pages into Foucault's Pendulum yesterday but then I kind of dozed off. And then Jony came over to show me this new Aston Martin that he just picked up and then he stayed for a beer and dinner and then the Oscars were on and somehow the day just slipped away from me.

Key thing is that Jony says he totally empathizes with my situation on the book reading thing. Same thing happens to him, apparently, in his old art school circles. He says unless you're like starving in an apartment someplace making weird art that nobody buys, then you're totally shunned by the artsy crowd. God forbid you should go work in industry and actually make money -- do that and you're instantly branded a philistine. Which is weird, Jony says, because honestly San Francisco and the Bay Area are like the most intellectually alive and cosmopolitan places in the whole world. London, Paris, New York -- they get all the attention but honestly the Bay Area is so much more intellectually alive but people don't take it seriously because of the good weather.

"You know where else is cool," Jony says. "Barcelona. A lot like here, actually."

I was like, Yeah, um, that's in the south of Spain, right?

He says, "No, it's in the north."

I'm like, "Yeah, right. Barcelona, right. Very cool. Yeah. Very intellectual."

Then we started talking about that really famous restaurant near Barcelona, this place called El Bulli where the food is like a work of art and you have to wait like a year to get reservations and somehow Jony managed to get a table in April and he wants me to go and I was like yeah that sounds so amazing and I really don't get why people think we're a bunch of spoiled vapid non-reading people out here because see we do so many really cool artistic things like flying my Gulfstream halfway around the world to get dinner.

I tried to read a little more of FP before bed but I ended up checking email instead. Tonight, I swear, I'm going to get at it. I've cleared some free time on iCal and will devote it to reading the book. I mean it.

Crunchy takes iPhone to wilderness, praises self for not using it

See this story from Outdoor Photographer magazine. This guy took his iPhone on a camping trip but didn't use it to make any calls or check email for a whole day. Wow! Cool, right? Give the man a badge. This after much hand-wringing and the following quote: "Am I using technology or is it using me? Who’s in control here, anyway?"

Good news is that by nightfall he broke down and watched a movie in his tent on his iPhone. But that's cool too. Because he chose it. He was totally in control of the technology.

Whatever dude. You've got an iPhone. We're all happy for you. Now get over yourself.

My eyes! My eyes! Aaaaarggggh!!!

Sorry to do this to you on a Monday morning. But can someone please tell me what the hell this is all about? I mean I'm glad that people care about our brand. But Buddha be praised! There must be limits! The original is here.

Hillary is so psyched!!!!

Yeah, things are going great out there. You go, girl.

Bootleg iPhones around the world

We're driving more than 2% of Internet traffic in Equatorial Guinea, according to the chart that goes with this story in BusinessWeek. Money quote: "Apple could successfully take the iPhone international in an unlocked form, and bypass the difficulties of negotiating exclusive carrier relationships, and simply charge more for the phone. Clearly it will still sell. Clearly the gray market in iPhones is rather healthy."

Negroponte in 1993: "High-definition television is clearly irrelevant."

I'm not making this up. That's what he wrote. See here. I'm not sure about this because I don't ever visit actual retail locations other than our own, but I get the sense that many of the so-called "big box" stores now do indeed sell and promote a wide range of high-definition television sets.

If anyone knows of any other really hugely wrong Negroponte predictions, please send them in. I'm told there are dozens and dozens of them.

Bill Lerach is working out like a bastard

Just heard this rumor that's going around in the Valley. Apparently Bill Lerach is suddenly all freaked out about going to prison, and has realized that providing newspapers is not going to be enough to save his ass, as he seemed to think recently. So he's been working out like a madman at the gym and bulking up. Supposedly he's getting a big set of scary tats too. I'm trying to imagine what he would look like with those gang tats around his neck. Any ideas?

Total n00b just discovering that Apple stores rock

See here. This guy just walked into an Apple store for the first time and discovers that our furniture is great, our geniuses are smart and cool, and black clothing is cool. And then he bought a Mac. Nice to see we're still winning converts.

Caption contest

Frankly I think this one is begging for PhotoCrank treatment. And Photoshop treatment. Have fun, people.

Linux dudes love Macs. Who knew?

See here. Money quote: "Conventional wisdom — suggesting that open source advocates are cheap geeks who don’t want to pay for technology — is just plain wrong. On the contrary, it seems as if the open source movement is more about quality than price. And Apple’s commitment to quality, it seems, is enough for open source folks to overlook Steve Jobs’ penchant for building closed, proprietary systems."

I love you too, open source dudes. I just feel bad for poor old Dell. They totally fell for that petition thing and started making pre-loaded Linux machines. Then you guys all keep buying MacBooks. Hilarious!

My birthday resolution -- I'm going to read Foucault's Pendulum

Many thanks to the thousands of Apple faithful who have been sending me greetings on this, the holiest day in our Apple calendar, the Apple equivalent of Christmas -- yes, it's my birthday. Fifty-three years ago today a savior came into this world, born not in a manger but in a Bay Area hospital, which to be honest in 1955 was pretty much the same thing. San Francisco wasn't always the nicest place in the world. That happened later, when the gays started moving in.

Anyhoo, as you know, I live in Palo Alto. And one thing about living in a university town is there are lots of snobby intellectualoids running around looking for any excuse to pretend they're better than everyone around them. Recently I stepped right into this when I said that Amazon's Kindle thing was a dumb idea because nobody reads anymore. This really picked up steam a few days ago when some guy at the New York Times bashed me and painted me basically as some kind of anti-intellectual greedhead who doesn't read books and just wants to shove crappo movies down people's throats and force them to buy overpriced spiritually dead consumer electronics instead of worthwhile meaningful literature. Here in Palo Alto they're call this "Kindlegate" and putting up posters with my picture and the words, "WANTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST LITERATURE."

Well, see, in places like Palo Alto people actually believe what they read in the New York Times and on posters taped to cafe windows. And now everywhere I go I'm getting catcalls. "Hey, book-hater!" Or they recreate that that scene in Being John Malkovich where some guy throws a can at Malkovich and says, "Hey Malkovich -- think fast!" Only in my case it was some some drunk grad students and they threw a hardcover copy of the new Pevear and Volokhonsky "War and Peace" translation at me and said, "Hey Jobs -- it's a book. Have you heard of it?"

Of course I've heard of "War and Peace." I've even read substantial parts of it. The rest I had read for me by one of my assistants at Pixar who worked up a treatment for me and then recorded himself reading the treatment so I could listen to it on my iPod.

Anyway. The thing is, I really am an intellectual. Have you seen the way I dress? And I really resent this anti-intellectual treatment I'm getting. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start reading all the big brainiac books that I've never read, and then I'll be making sure I drop references to them into every conversation I have. And I'm starting with the one book that I'm convinced no one has ever actually read even though every big brain poser owns a copy -- "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco. It's super huge, like 600 and something pages, and really intense, and extremely hard to understand. I've picked out a rare signed first-edition hardcover because that's all I ever read. It just feels more authentic to me to read a book that costs a few thousand dollars rather than some random paperback that anyone could just buy in a store.

As soon as I'm done with the Eco book I'm going to start mentioning it all the time and then saying, "It's this really amazing book -- have you read it? You really should." After that I'm on to the complete works of Harry Mulisch, starting with "The Discovery of Heaven." And I'll mention that all the time too. After that, Lacan and Derrida. Trust me, I'm going to be friggin unbearable.

Happy birthday to me. Now I must go up to my Jobs Pod and get to work. I've got a big day of reading ahead of me. Peace out.

At last we find out how the Borg steals from us

Turns out they just tape pu Leopard screen shots in hallways, with Post-It notes so MicroTards can comment. Very high tech. See this blog post from a Borg developer named Brandon. Top part is about how much he loves his Mac. But the key bit comes at the end: "One day a friend of mine on the team printed off a couple dozen screenshots of Leopard, showing off various tasks the user can do in OS X, and hung them on one of our hallways. Across from it are pictures of the same tasks in that incredibly well-kept secret of a project that we’re working on. There are post-it notes and markers next to each wall where passersby leave comments/questions. I wonder if any hallways in Cupertino have something like that?"

In fact, Brandon, the answer is yes. We have people who do something like that. They're called lawyers. Watch your back, punk.

We thought we would have to kill RIM. Turns out they're doing it for us.

See here. Gist is these outages at RIM are starting to hurt the BlackBerry's "iconic status." No kidding. By the way, I swear on a stack of Bibles that these outages were not the work of Moshe and his team.

Little tip: Don't put the newspaper next to your MacBook. Duh.

So this guy in New York says he's got a MacBook that keeps trying to burn his house down. He's even written to me directly, because as everyone knows that's also part of my job, fielding tech support calls. Right. Like when I'm not driving the delivery truck and running out to pick up coffee and donuts for everybody back at the office.

But here's the kicker. The guy just outright admits that these fires keep happening because he puts the New York Times next to the MacBook and the sparks from the MacBook hit the newspaper.

Um, buddy? Simple solution here. See the headline above. Man oh man. I love these "user error" problems. It's like when Dave Winer huffed and puffed and marched into a retail store demanding service -- only to be told about the little button on the side of his iPhone.

BTW, firebug dude? Stop writing to me.

We're being sued and as usual I don't even understand why

Some couple in Utah claim they've got a patent that covers the iTunes gift cards that we're using with Starbucks. I have no idea how this can be and honestly I'm still recovering from my recent exfoliation mishap and don't have time to investigate.

Japanese bash MacBook Air

Good grief. They say the internals are a mess. And they could do better. Yeah. Right. I'll sit here and hold my breath.

Dude at the NY Times calls me a bonehead

See here. He's taking issue with my statement that the Amazon Kindle is a dumb product because nobody reads anymore. Mr. Book Lover says I got my stats wrong, and that "a good book still holds more power than anything with a screen."

Look. I know that. I only said that stuff about Kindle because Kindle is made by a company that isn't Apple, and therefore it is shit, and its entire premise for existing must be attacked at every turn. Do these people not know that? As soon as we put out some kind of book reader product, reading will be back in fashion. Okay? Now everyone take a deep breath and relax. Feel better? Good. Me too.

Another fantastic Hillary song

No idea who recorded this version of the "Laverne and Shirley" theme song. But this woman's voice will haunt me forever. And not in a good way.

One more election-related item

Hillary's campaign has come up with a new slogan and put it on a T-shirt.

More "change you can Xerox"

And here's the other part of that standing O speech, lifted from Mr. Bill. This on the same night that the HillBeast was all but accusing Obama of plagiarism. Woman, have you no shame? Is there nothing you won't do? No tactic that's too low or gross?

Speaking of "change you can Xerox"

I'm pretty sure this is the one that got her a standing ovation the other night. Check's in the mail, John Edwards.

Woz forgives me for ripping him off

See here. He did an interview with some magazine from Wharton and they asked him about the time I got him to do some work for Atari and I told him I'd received $700 for us to split when actually it was a few thousand. His answer:

"When you judge Steve as a person -- the great things he brings to the world versus, maybe, these encroachments on personal decency or personal honesty with other people or disrespect of people when they've worked very hard and do a great job and he'll say, "Oh, that's just shitty," that sort of thing -- those are probably outweighed by the good that he does for the world. ...

"What Steve does on the good side -- like the music scenario [in which] we didn't bring just a music device called the iPod, we brought a whole music system: a store that sells it, a computer that manages and organizes it. And an iPod is just a satellite to your computer. Plug it in and it works. You don't have to do anything.

"You've got to admire Steve for that kind of thinking.

"Nobody's perfect. [Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."

I'm in tears as I write this. Woz, I love you too, man. I truly do.

Folks please read the entire article. It's a gem. Except the parts where Woz says the company has changed and we put too much emphasis on making products look cool. That part you can just skip right over.

A different take on the Borg's new open source strategy

Apparently some suspect a trap.

That giant popping sound ...

It ain't champagne being opened. Sorry. Facebook user numbers in the UK went down last month. Probably no big deal. Neither is the fact that their chief revenue officer just quit, "amid scrutiny of Facebook's $15 billion valuation, which many analysts say isn't justified by the company's revenue of about $150 million last year," as the Wall Street Journal puts it. Scrutiny? Of valuations? Here? In the Valley? What the hell is the world coming to?

Borg makes nice with open source. Oh please.

In case you haven't seen it, the Borg announced today it would do all sorts of things to play nice with open source. This is nothing new -- Microsoft has been doing this Eddie Haskell "interoperability" shtick for a while now -- but today's announcement is significant for one reason, and it's simply this: The Borg are no longer scared of the freetards, and no longer view them as a threat. Marketwatch has a story here. Money quote in that story comes from noted freetard Matt Asay: "It's a good indication of Microsoft's self-confidence that it feels it can open up what effectively are its crown jewels and not lobotomize the company at the same time."

Self-confidence? I'll say. Like, for the past nine months Microsoft has been boasting in private about IDC numbers showing Linux growth stalling and even declining; those IDC numbers show Windows actually growing at a faster rate than Linux in the server space, despite being on a bigger base.

Red Hat, the single company freetards always point to when they want to prove that open source can make money, has turned into an inept clusterfuck, with nothing but bluster and bravado and a deluded belief that they're actually a thorn in Microsoft's paw. Bottom line: they're the new Borland. They're 15 years old and have been publicly traded since 1999 and last year they did all of $400 million a year in sales. Microsoft does more than $1 billion a week. That's right. Red Hat's entire fiscal year is a good three days for Microsoft. Last quarter the Borg added $2.6 billion in revenues -- that's six entire Red Hats. In a quarter.

Now Red Hat is being run by a former Delta Airlines exec. And its SG&A is growing significantly faster than its top line. I'm no good with numbers but my friends who are explain it this way: Now that the Unix market has been decimated and the low-hanging fruit has all been plucked, the boys in North Carolina are having to work a heck of a lot harder to take down deals. Hence the boost in SG&A spending. That's also why all the smart sales guys bailed out of the Hat two years ago, having made all the easy money.

Who else is out there to create a threat to the Borg? Novell is outright pwned. MySQL has vanished into the bowels of Sun, never to be seen or heard from again. Ubuntu? Look, it's nice that amateurs can play at making operating systems. From what I'm told Gutsy Gibbon fixed some of the problems in Feisty Fawn. Hardy Heron and Indignant Iguana will fix a few more. Wake me up when they get to Zesty Zebra. By then maybe they'll have pried 3% market share out of the Beastmaster's hide.

Am I missing someone? Oh, SugarCRM. Okay, fair enough, a huge threat to Microsoft's booming CRM software business. Ahem. PHP and some other scripting languages may be a nuisance but there's no big single monolithic threat out there. SpikeSource? I seem to recall lots of hype about them when they were launched a few years ago but jeez lately things have been a little, um, quiet over there.

Face it, kids. I know it sucks to hear this, but .NET is winning. It is. I'm sorry. You know how you can tell? Ask all the open-source application makers which stack they run on most. Er ... it's not LAMP. And it's not J2EE. It's .NET.

So of course the Borg is more than happy to play nice with the freetards who are making apps that run on top of .NET. Why not? If it pulls more sales of Microsoft's stack, and if it saves money for customers which they can in turn spend on yet more Borgware, where's the hurt?

It's not like the Borg got religion and no longer thinks open source is a cancer. They still think it's a cancer. They've just figured out a way to make money on cancer.

Plus, they want to look like sweethearts to the Euros.

Open source has ridden the classic Gartner hype cycle. Three years ago was the "peak of inflated expectations," and VCs would fund anything with "open source" in its name or business plan. Now the cycle has moved on to the "trough of disillusionment." Reality has set in. Nobody is making money. They're in the Slough of Despond.

Don't believe me? Try going out and raising VC for an open-source startup that will compete directly with Microsoft. My guess is you won't even get a stack of pancakes at Buck's.

Also worth noting: While open-source is great in many ways, remember that the single biggest tech phenomenon of the past decade has been an entirely closed and proprietary system which was launched in 2001 (two years after Red Hat had already gone public) and which last quarter produced $4.8 billion in sales. It's called iTunes and iPod. Have you heard of it?

Hillary rocks

I'm starting to think that maybe I've been too quick to write off Hillary. After seeing this video I think maybe she really can connect with young people. Check out the lyrics. Apparently we've misplaced our democracy somewhere, and Hillary is going to bring it back. Meanwhile, "we're leaving our children all behind," and "the world is getting hot." Great stuff. Much love to the dozens of people who sent in the link.

I almost forgot: Andrea Jung kneed Phil Schiller in the nuts today

We were having this meeting to discuss the friggin Chinese who are totally shaking us down on the iPhone and saying why should they pay us a slice of service fees and kiss our butts when people can just buy iPhones and unlock them and put them on China Mobile already? I'm sure you've heard about this but just in case see here and here. There's like 400,000 unlocked iPhones running on China Mobile's network and they're keeping every dime of the service revenue. How is this fair?

Anyhoo, we're in this meeting trying to figure out how to bring China Mobile back to the table and then how to put the screws to them, and it's really an executive team meeting but Andrea Jung has decided she's going to sit in, which is fine, I guess, though not really, and anyway in the middle of the meeting she decides that this would be a wonderful time to interrogate Phil Schiller about sales of the new Apple TV product and the MacBook Air. She wants numbers, breakdowns, unit sales by region, all sorts of data.

Phil gives her our standard answer which Katie wrote for him and he's got it totally memorized: "We're not here today to talk about those products. Today we're talking about iPhone in China. No, it's not that I won't answer your question. But it's just that we're really, really excited about iPhone and we're really excited about its potential to become a really exciting product in China which as you know is a very exciting market and we're very excited about it."

She's like, "You don't even fucking know, do you? You don't have the numbers." He's like, "No, that's not what I said." She says in that case then he should tell her the numbers, right now. He says he doesn't have that material with him. She says he should have it memorized but at the very least he should be able to provide ballpark figures and trend data off the top of his head and frankly if this meeting were taking place at Avon and if someone couldn't answer this kind of totally simple question that person's head would roll.

Phil says that if this meeting were taking place at Avon why would she be asking about sales of Apple TV and MacBook Air? She tells him to stop being a dick and tell her the numbers. Phil says, Seriously, wouldn't we be talking about eye liner or mascara or something? And why would I be in that meeting? I don't know anything about that stuff.

Everybody kind of laughs at that one, which I have to admit was pretty good. Andrea sits there with smoke coming out of her ears. She says, again, that she wants the numbers.

So Phil goes back to his rehearsed answer about being really excited about iPhone in China, and he starts giving me his classic deer-in-the-headlights look, as if to say, Dude, please, get me out of this.

But what could I do? I'm scared to death of this woman.

She goes over to Phil and tells him to stand up. He does. That's when she knees him. I mean she dropped the friggin guy. I mean he's down, curled up on the floor, moaning. We had to stop the meeting and take him to Stanford Medical Center.

Andrea refuses to apologize. Phil is threatening to quit. It's ugly.

Hillary attacks and kills Obama supporter at rally in Youngstown, Ohio

Look at her going in for the kill with her fangs bared and her shiv already buried up to the handle. Nasty! Seriously, the Clintstones are getting desperate. And with good reason. Much love to Neil from Aberdeen, Ireland, for the tip.

MacBook Air sneaks up on XO laptop, mates with it, then kills it

Not really. But the guys at TUAW happened to have both on their desk at the same time, so they decided to take a picture. See here. Best part is the comment string.

Someone has way too much free time

And that person is the one who made this song using random sounds from OS X. Only cool part to me is that one note that sounds like the beginning of "Trampled Under Foot" by Led Zeppelin. Rock on, dude with way too much free time on your hands.

Some dope engineer put hidden messages in our software. Moshe is on the case.

See here. Someone put some crazy lyrics and a quote from 1984 in the code for a keyboard firmware update. Note to Apple engineers: This kind of horseplace is strictly forbidden. And you know it. Punishment? Nobody goes home until someone steps forward and admits they did it.

Amish giant loves his XO laptop

"At long last, someone has made a PC that fits my freakishly small fingers. God bless you, Nicholas Negroponte," he says.

Um, not really. But they are going to start selling these things in Australia, for reasons that remain unclear at this time.

Vista SP1 helper program blowing up PCs, has to be pulled from market. I'm not making this up.

Hoo boy. I almost feel bad for these guys. Almost. Not really. See here. Can someone please explain to me while we still have only single-digit market share? Hello? Anyone?

I tried out a new exfoliation scrub, and boy was that a mistake

Sorry for the prolonged absence. Over the weekend I tried out a new body exfoliation product and suffered a serious allergic reaction. This was stuff Jony picked up at a spa in Marin and he was swearing by it. No brand name, just a blue jar. Supposedly it comes from South America and contains some kind of tree extracts. I know, I know. Who in their right mind just slaps on a full-body chemical mask made of God knows what ingredients? Then again Jony had been using it and swore by it. And there's no arguing with results. The dude has the softest, smoothest skin I've ever seen. He picked me up a jar when he was at his spa on Saturday, and dropped it off on Saturday night. I tried it out after my meditation and yoga workout on Sunday. Within an hour I'd swollen up like a balloon and my skin was bright red. Doctors were called and I needed a shot of something to bring me back to normal. Then spent two days recovering and talking to lawyers. We've also sent the stuff out to a lab for testing. More info as this develops.

Sacrilege! Zunes pollute iPod display at Wal-Mart

Much love to dear reader Sandy for alerting us to this. I knew we shouldn't be doing business with Wal-Mart. Moshe and a team have been dispatched.

Caption contest

Not sure what exactly is going on here. Any ideas? If you think it will help you can check out the original article here.

Andrea Jung is making my life a living hell

So you may recall that in early January we appointed Andrea Jung, the CEO of Avon, to our board of directors. To be honest I didn't think much about it at the time other than maybe I was a little bit worried that having a chick in meetings might be kind of a buzz kill. Well, it turns out we've made a horrible mistake.

For one thing, she smacks people. I mean full-strength slaps right across the face, for anyone who disagrees with her. Last week she was here in Cupertino and Bertrand Serlet said something in a meeting about why he needed a budget increase and wham -- just like that, she smacked him across the face. Hard. Almost knocked his eye out. She does this all the time. To everyone around her. Her driver. Her assistant. The barista at Caffe Mac. Step out of line, and bam. Face slap. And you never know when it's coming.

So far she hasn't tried it on me but I've already started flinching when she gets close. Meanwhile it's been six weeks now and all she's done is complain. She wants meetings. She wants numbers. She wants explanations and factory tours and sit-downs with design teams and finance people.

She's sending memos to Peter Oppenheimer and driving him nuts with phone calls and voice mail and email. She says we're totally not managing our money correctly and we've got way too much money in the bank because we're sitting on $18 billion in cash and we've got no debt and we owe it to shareholders to put that money to work and we should be acquiring companies or buying back shares and she's got all these ratios about cash flow and return on equity and our velocity of capital, whatever the frig that is -- I'm not even sure if it's a real thing, to be honest. Even Peter says he's never heard of it.

So I'm like, Um, excuse me, lady, now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not an MBA and I was never very good at math since I'm totally right-brain and artsy, hence the black turtlenecks, but I have been around business most of my life and I've always understood that it was a good thing to have loads of money and no debt. But what do I know? Maybe things are different in the makeup industry. But see, this is tech. And maybe you haven't figured this out but you and I aren't colleagues. You don't actually work here, okay? You're just on the board, and that's a great thing, I'm all for diversity, but just so you understand your duties, all you're supposed to do is show up for the meeting every quarter and vote the way I tell you.

She gives me this look and says -- get this -- she says that she works for the shareholders and that I work for her. That's she's my boss. I'm like, Lady, I've never had a boss in my life and I'm not about to start now and honestly I am going to friggin kill Al Gore for convincing me that we needed a woman on our board even though I told him there's a reason why you don't see many women running tech companies and it ain't for lack of trying. I mean they're fantastic at stuff like PR and maybe marketing as long as when you say marketing you really just mean a fancy word for PR. Advance work, making sure the hotel has the right water in my room at exactly the right temperature -- stuff like that, stuff where I don't actually have to really deal with them except to give them orders, and then when I tell them to leave, they do.

So Andrea gets this big tude and she's like, Excuse me? I'm like, You heard me. But in case it slipped past you, let me be more explicit. I don't like working with women. Maybe you've seen my management team. That lineup didn't happen by accident, okay?

We were alone when this happened. In my office. Standing up, facing each other. She stepped up to me until she was almost touching me. I figured she was going to go for the slap and I was ready to block and counter with a blow to the solar plexus but instead she just leaned in and said to me, in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper: "Listen. Let's get something straight. Like it or not, I'm on your board of directors. And like it or not, that means you answer to me. If I say I want some numbers, you get them. If I want a meeting, you set it up. And let me make you a promise right here and right now. If you get in my way, or if you try to fuck me up, I will bite off your fucking nuts and shove them up your skinny little white boy ass. Do you understand me? Are we clear? Good."

Then she left. I stood there shaking. In my entire life I don't think anyone has ever spoken to me like this. I called Peter Oppenheimer and Katie and told them to get here, ASAP. We conference called Al Gore and Jerry York and told them. Al said I shouldn't get too upset, that Andrea sometimes comes across as abrasive and he's heard about the slapping and he'll talk to her about that but down deep she's really a sweeetheart when you get to know her and she's just very direct and honest and that's a good thing. Jerry York just sat there laughing and then he said, "Kid, am I to understand that I just got pulled out of a meeting so that you could tell me that you got beat up by a girl? And you want me to do something about this? Seriously?"

Oh man. I really do not like where this is headed.

iPhone: It ain't rocket science, people

Ever look at something that's just deceptively simple and gorgeous and easy to use -- like, I don't know, your iPhone -- and ask yourself, Why the hell can't all phones be like this? For that matter, why can't all products of all kinds be like this? Check out these bozos trying to explain the magic of iPhone at a panel in Barcelona and you'll get a good idea why. They're all overthinking it. There's all this talk of "need states" and "neural networks" -- sheesh. If anyone here ever talked like these people they'd be tossed out in a heartbeat.

Cramer talking us down too

Well he picked us up like a dirty whore, took us for a ride, had his fun, then shoved us out of his car and left us in the gutter. Bastard! See here.

BusinessWeek says we're screwed

See here. Gist is, in a recession we'll get hit hard because we depend so much on consumer spending. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- I think if the economy gets really really bad it's going to help us because people will need to obtain gorgeous electronics in order to distract themselves from the misery of their lives. Hang in there, people.

Hillary Castro

Look, to all of you who are sick of the politics, I apologize, but this one was too good to pass up. Okay? And yes, Brian, I'm talking directly to you. You friggin whiner. For those who care, the original version of his terrifying photo can be found here. Much love to Mike for the tip.

An angry Microsoftie vents his spleen

This guy works at Microsoft but doesn't mind bashing the hell out of them. He's so fed up with Borgware that he's switched to a Mac. Money quote:

"I know I'm becoming a snotty Mac user, but after months of having made the transition, I understand why we go snotty. Apple doesn't churn out perfection, but they're hyperaware of the user experience. Things occasionally crash, and Safari has a memory leak that, although a rare event, can shut down the app. But overall, these are small things. They stand out because they're the exceptions. Most of the time things simply work. As I've said before, even Windows runs far better as an app under OS X than it does on its own. I don't know why that is, but there you go.

"It's things like this that drained me of the motivation to continue promoting Microsoft products. The further in I got, the worse my opinion of the company was. The clutter you experience on the user end is the product of clutter internally. If it weren't cruel and a danger to the economy, I'd suggest that Microsoft fire about 40,000 people."

Another reason to only buy iPods

Any other music player might be mistaken for a handgun.

This is sickening

Folks, check out this appalling Web site where they are selling an iPhone app in which a bikini-clad girl struts into your iPhone and washes the glass from the inside. How many times do I have to say this? People, this has to stop. Please write to Big Brain Studios, whoever they are, and express your outrage. Thank you.

iPhone app lets you avoid contact with other humans. I'm all for it.

See all about it here. Some guy has an app that will let you order Starbucks via your iPhone and pay via iTunes, so all you do is walk in and pick up your coffee and zip out. No inane chatter, no listening to their awful music, no waiting in line. Get in and get out.

As many of you know, I really can't stand other people. And I'm a freak about germs. I never shake hands if I can avoid it. And I carry Purell with me at all times. Remember when that sex fiend woman touched me on the show floor at Macworld? I was so freaked out that I had to go in for tests afterward. And I couldn't sleep until I got the results.

In fact a great deal of what I've developed over the course of my career has been aimed at enabling people to avoid other human beings. The ultimate goal is total isolation. Sadly, most people can't afford it, but thanks to Moore's Law the cost is coming down every year. Ideally we'd each have our own germ-free environment with a robot sex partner or a hologram or something. No more catching colds or getting the flu. No more messy interpersonal relationships. Perfect.

More Stallman risk-taking

Really, it's getting out of hand. He flew into Greece today and went straight to the Vikos Gorge. Folks from FSF Europe are trying to stop him but he won't listen. Damn you, RMS! Get a grip, man!

Next up: "The primaries are flawed."

Want to catch a glimpse of how the Clintstones will try to weasel their way to victory? Check out today's Gail Collins column in the New York Times where she goes on about how crappy the Maine caucus was. See, it's not that people don't want Hillary. It's that the primaries are no good. The process is flawed. The caucuses and primaries don't really reflect the will of the people. Supposedly Collins is just writing about the Maine caucus and the whole piece comes across as kind of a puckish, gee-whiz, slice-of-life humor piece. But there's a subtext at work here.

Money quote: "There is an impression abroad that these caucuses are grass-roots democracy ... Even if that were true, which it’s not, consider whether you would really want a presidential nominee selected by about 20 colorful characters in a barn."

She goes on then about some old geezer on a cane who had to climb a few steps and sit on a less-than-comfy bench.

Right. See, Hillary is getting creamed, but these primaries and caucuses just aren't truly representative. Why those poor old folks are totally discriminated against! And there's not enough parking! And it was snowing out! And the people running the caucus didn't even know the rules!

I'm telling you, this column did not just happen by accident. This is how the Clintstones operate. They shift the argument. Remember the Lewinsky mess? Pretty soon it had nothing to do with whether Bill lied. Oh no. They turned it into referendum on Monica herself, then on Ken Starr, then on the Republicans. Same in Las Vegas recently for the primary -- Hillary wanted the casino caucuses canceled, so the teacher's union went to bat for her.

So now this "primaries are flawed" theme will be something the Clintstones will latch onto if Hillary loses Texas and Ohio. Their little hatchet men and women will scream that the votes from Michigan and Florida should be counted. They'll scream about irregularities in some of the primaries. Today's column, describing the wackiness and unreliability of a single polling station in Maine, is an attempt to build a foundation for the "flawed primaries" argument. It's a single brick, to be followed by many more. Wait and see.

Stallman friends freaking out about his 'erratic behavior'

Friends of free software guru Richard M. Stallman are starting to get worried about his increasingly erratic behavior. He's been taking off on trips and not telling anyone where he is; he'll be gone for weeks at a time. Then there was his Craigslist ad seeking a girlfriend, and then the hip-hop dancing on the lawn at MIT. Now this photo has just surfaced on Stallman's personal web site showing him in Lima, Peru doing bike tricks at one of those concrete rollerblading ramp places. (Our art director, Jason, spotted it.) Stallman was in Lima to give a talk about free software at some socialist university. Afterward he hit the skate park. Apparently he's going through some huge mid-life crisis, getting all into extreme sports like bungee-jumping and skydiving.

All I can say is, do what you need to do, Stallman. But you really should be wearing a helmet. I'm just saying. Peace out.

Sun's new focus? Storage. No, Java. No, MySQL. No, Linux. No, supercomputers.

Yup, they're all over the damn map at Sun these days. Big supercomputer coming tomorrow. Will rank near top of the Top 500 list. When I called My Little Pony to ask him why they're building this incredibly expensive one-off machine at a time when the company is fighting for its survival, he launched into a rambling lecture about the future of cloud computing and the open-source stack and the endless possibilities to leverage synergies and deliver a complete solution to meet customer demand in response to real customer needs while also providing a greener solution that uses less power and requires less cooling thereby delivering a lower total cost of ownership and also there's the incredible power of software to free customers from vendor lock-in and deliver new solutions that harness the creativity of the really great engineers at Sun like Andy Bechtolsheim who basically has freedom to explore whatever he wants and just come up with great ideas ...

At that point I put down the phone and went to the bathroom. When I came back Jonathan was still talking. Amazing.

Valentine's Day massacre at the Borg

Big shakeup coming tomorrow, with some big names being tossed overboard. CNET has the story here.

Yahoo: Out of frying pan ...

... and into the clutches of Rupert Murdoch. That's the latest rumor," anyway. News Corp. is supposedly making a bid to save Yahoo from the Borg. Poor Jerry Yang. Has he actually met Rupert Murdoch? Well I'm sure they'll get along just fine.

Am I angling to be Obama's VP? I can't answer that question at this time.

So I'm doing this big speech at the Eclipse Foundation conference next month and apparently it's not enough that they've got the top-rated Fake CEO slated to appear -- they're also trying to play me up as a possible VP candidate in an Obama campaign. Folks, all I can say is that as far as I know there has been no evidence presented that would support any such claims about my intentions and at this point Katie has advised me not to comment on speculation. I'm a huge fan of Obama, that's true. I'm also a huge fan of the Eclipse Foundation and look forward to doing a keynote at their event if only because it will rile up a bunch of freetards, and with any luck the Free Software Foundation will appear outside in yellow hazmat suits to protest my appearance or even -- dare I hope? -- burn me in effigy.

Early registration ends in the next few days, from what I'm told. And yes, most of the panels are really gorpy techie stuff but there will be entertainment too -- I'm talking about FSJ, and Cory Doctorow will talk about his weird-ass glasses, and Sam Ramji from Microsoft is going to show up let freetards throw tomatoes at him. Or maybe he'll try to explain why the Yahoo deal makes perfectly good sense. Now that I'd pay to hear. See you all in Santa Clara.

Rush Limbaugh pleads for help with his Macs. My response?

See here. He's got some problem with his Macs and he blathered on about whether he should put out a personal plea to me. One of guys said: "If you put out this appeal to Steve Jobs and ask him to help, his reply is going to be, 'Mr. Limbaugh. Do us a favor and endorse Windows.'"

Actually that's not true. That's not my response at all. What I said, in fact, when Rush called me, was this: Siooma, you fat reactionary asshole.

We did NOT pay for this product placement

In fact, the producers of "House, M.D." paid us. I'm not kidding. We're that cool.

How the Google-Apple cloud partnership will work

Nick Carr has the full explanation. See here. Right now the only companies that can power a cloud are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon. Figure Yahoo and Microsoft merge. That means four big back-end players and the two best will be Google and Amazon. Fact is we'll play with any of them but we're tight with Google and if I had to bet on a single horse it would be Google. So what would each of us do? It's pretty simple. Money quote: "Apple would sell the hardware, and Google would subsidize the cost of supplying the servers with advertising, just as it does in other businesses in which it works."

Facebook: You can never leave

So says the New York Times which runs a nice article explaining how Facebook keeps you from deleting your account. Money quote: "Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data." Neither can you move your contacts to a different social networking site, as Scoble pointed out recently.

So here's the racket. All these Web 2.0 guys built their businesses on open-source software like the LAMP stack and all went around raving about the wonders of open source and how great it is that there's no vendor lock-in -- and then they set about locking their own users in. Sure, it's not the kind of hooks that old-school gangstas like IBM and EMC used to use. It's less overt and more subtle. At Google they call this the "Velcro business model," meaning you can, in theory, get yourself unstuck, but it takes some effort. Squirrel Boy loves to talk about it and he says that all you have to do is spout some pious bullshit about empowering users and putting their needs first and then you can get away with anything you want.

Someone has started a Fake Nick Denton blog

He's the evil fucker who runs Gawker Media, which owns Valleywag. The posts are vicious. Our latest fave:

I'd like to thank Owen Thomas
For introducing me to the sheer joy and blissful splendor that is a bleached asshole.

For more, see here. Apparently all of his underpaid underlings are in a tizzy trying to find out who's writing it. They're also all leading suspects -- as is Denton himself, as it turns out. Crazy!

Holy mother of God. They're trying to bring back OS/2.

Not all of it, just part of it. But still. Worse yet, the rumor is they want to combine it with Linux and create a new Frankenstein monster. It was bad enough to see IBM trying to resurrect Lotus Symphony as a freebie product. Now I guess they figure why not toss out some pieces of OS/2 while we're at it. For more on the looming OS/2 nightmare see this story by Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-And-Paste from eWeek, who naturally thinks this is a wonderful idea because OS/2, as we all remember, was far and away the second-best operating system of the 1980s, and IBM is this huge Linux booster so anything they do is obviously wonderful in the eyes of the freetard hackery, unless it's something like suing Amazon over patents, in which case the freetards simply pretend it didn't happen.

Also: I know we've now mentioned two stories in a row by this illustrious hack, Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-And-Paste. If you're wondering how this happened, here's the story: The FSJ Spotlight Team is still monitoring this guy to see how long it takes for him to start reprinting press releases verbatim again. We're pretty sure that sooner or later he'll be back to his old habits. So far, however, he hasn't slipped up. To be sure, he's still writing mostly from press releases, and lifting huge chunks of them, but now he carefully puts these huge chunks inside quote marks. Which I guess qualifies as journalism. Sort of.

FWIW, the OS/2 story isn't taken from a press release. It's sourced this way: "I'm told by developers who should know ..." In other words, IBM is feeding him stuff. So much easier than having to write it for him in the form of a press release.

Gaping security hole in Linux

Hackers have found a "major Linux security hole," but of course this is great news, according to famed freetard and renowned Red Hat press release copyist Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste of eWeek. Because now the problem can be fixed -- geddit? Money quote: "Security, the experts like to tell us, is a process, not a product. With open source that can be a very good thing since when security problems are found they can be fixed quickly." Yup. There's a gaping hole in Linux, and "no perfect patch for the problem at this time," but that's nothing to be upset about, and in fact it's something to be cheered.

Right. Now imagine the exact same exploit had been found in OS X. Imagine how the freetards would be screaming. Better yet, imagine it had been found in Vista. Would Steven J. Vaughan-Freetard be cheering that one too? Egads. Freetards, listen to me. This kind of bullshit coverage does nothing to advance your cause.

I feel so bad for Bill Lerach. Nah, just kidding.

Well after years of raping every company in the Valley with ridiculous shareholder lawsuits and then preening around like some kind of big superstar crusader for the common man, old Bill Lerach has finally gotten what he deserves -- two years in prison. Which means that with any luck, soon Mr. Chia Head will be having done to him the same thing he's been doing to us all these years. Money quote from yesterday's Journal story comes from T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor: "He’s getting what he deserves. I once likened Lerach to low life form, somewhat below pond scum. Thank goodness he’s met my highest expectations.”

Then in today's Journal, Lerach is mulling over how he's going to survive in the big house. He says he intends to "keep to myself, read, serve my time and come out." He also says his plan involves using newspapers to bribe fellow prisoners. "A sports section is supposed to win you a lot of favors," he says.

Sure it does. Keep dreaming, muffin ass. A bunch of us here in the Valley are taking up a collection to send you a wig and a skirt and some red lipstick. You're gonna need them.

Meanwhile, dear readers, if you need yet another reason to vote for Obama instead of Hillary, check out this photo. Its title: "Birds of a feather."

John McCain, set to music

It's a spoof of the Obama "Yes We Can" video. Scary stuff.

Hillary adds a bold, fresh new face for change

Well Hillary is on the ropes but she's making bold moves and big changes, bringing in some fresh blood to breathe new life into her campaign. Check out Hillary's new campaign manager, Maggie Williams. Just look at that happy, positive face. She's the cheery and upbeat gal who served as Hillary's chief of staff during the White House years and who is described here as "the ultimate Hillary loyalist, fierce and unwavering in her devotion for nearly 25 years." She also is said to be unafraid of cracking heads. Al Gore says everyone in the White House lived in fear of her, and that supposedly she once bit a Secret Service agent. Bit him. On the arm. And left teeth marks.

Well, at least we know what a Clinton White House would look like. Don't say you weren't warned.

Jerry York is tormenting Al Gore again

So as I've mentioned before Jerry York is like the world's biggest climate change skeptic and he loves to take the piss out of Al Gore. This drives Al nuts since as you might suspect he doesn't exactly have the greatest sense of humor about this urgent crisis that threatens to destroy all of civilization within the next ten to twenty years. Jerry's latest thing is sending Al taunting emails with links to stories about people freezing their nuts off in Alaska and record cold temps in Minnesota and bitter cold in the Northeast. He find this crap on the Drudge Report and sends it to Al with notes like, "More evidence! Keep up the good work!" Jerry's point apparently is that record cold snaps somehow mean that global warming isn't happening. Al tries to explain to Jerry that in fact these record cold snaps are the direct result of global warming. Jerry won't listen. He doesn't really care anyway. He just likes to get Al all wound up. And it works. Al just called me practically screaming. He's down at Kleiner Perkins meeting with greentech people all day, and then he checks his iPhone during a bathroom break and finds these taunts from Jerry and so he calls me, as if there's something I can do about it. I told Al, Look, just let it go, don't let him get to you.

Al says he wants Jerry tossed off the board. I'd love to do it, honestly, but we can't do that. He's too wired in. And honestly, we're all scared of him. Just look at the photo of him. The guy sharpens his teeth. And yes, he's little. But you would not want to fight him. Trust me.

People keep telling me to stay out of politics

So I'm getting loads of mail and comments from people saying I should stop commenting on the primaries and stop raving about Obama because they don't come here to get political news they come here to get stuff about Apple and technology blah blah blah.

Folks, look. If you're writing in saying this, then you clearly don't understand me and you don't understand Apple. Apple isn't a technology company. Apple isn't a consumer electronics company. Apple is a lifestyle. It's a way of looking at the world. It's a perspective. An experience. Politics and culture are woven in the very fabric of who we are. So are music and literature and film and religion. And yoga and meditation. These are the things we at Apple think and care about. Except for the engineers, who really do care about nothing other than their stupid little weenie projects. Especially the OS and developer tool freaks. But they're a tiny majority of the company. For the rest of us, the point of Apple is not just to sell more iPods and iMacs. We're trying to change the world.

People, I've got Al Gore on my friggin board of directors, okay? You think that's because he knows a lot about business? Or technology? Um, right. I mean he's like one of my best friends in the whole world. And trust me, we don't hang out and talk about how 3G networking and how much flash memory to put in the next iPhone. We talk about America's role in helping the developing world develop; we talk about poverty, and AIDs, and climate change, and economics. We talk about how this country can climb out of the hole we've dug for ourselves. We talk about how we can keep the assholes in Washington, D.C., off my back. And lately we talk a lot about Obama. It's what we're on the phone discussing. We're watching the primaries, watching the momentum build. We're amazed and happy and almost daring to believe and almost daring to feel excited despite that nagging voice inside us telling us that we shouldn't get our hopes up because good people always get crushed in the end and no doubt the Clintstones have loads of dirty tricks up their sleeves. (Al says he's had a whiff of what they're cooking up, and it's terrifying.)

Now look. I know that most of you are hardcore Apple believers who don't need to be told any of this. You know what Apple is all about. You know that when you carry iPhone it's not just because it's the best mobile device ever created but also because it defines you and tells the world what kind of person you are and what you stand for and what you believe in. You know this. You've been part of this movement for decades, some of you. But the new guys need to be instructed. And that's cool. We need to bring in the new blood. My feeling is this: Let's not harsh on the n00bs. Let's be gentle with them. But at the same time we must let them know how they're supposed to vote. Okay? We all straight? Namaste to everyone. Go Obama. Stop the war. Peace out.

Allchin admits: We blew it on those stickers

Now the Borg is in trouble for the way it handled its "Vista capable" sticker program, letting PC makers put "Vista capable" stickers on machines that could only run Vista Home Basic, the low-end version which lacks many of the most annoying and unreliable frigtarded features found only in the more expensive versions. Naturally there's a lawsuit, and the lawyers have dug up some email in which former Windows boss Jim Allchin says, "We really botched this." The Borg of course says this email does not represent the truth and that, um, I don't know, the sticker program was a huge success? Not sure. Sadly the lawsuit is not addressing larger issues like (a) the damage to the planet caused by the existence of any version of Vista, and (b) Microsoft's outsized contribution to the destruction of world culture over the past three decades. Guess those issues will have to be taken up separately.

In unrelated news, we keep spotting Allchin at our Apple retail stores, wearing a disguise and paying in cash. Dude, we totally know it's you.

G'day mate, let's put some Borg on the barbie

Meet the CFO of Microsoft, Chris Liddell. He comes from New Zealand, which I'm told is very close to Australia, where I'm told they say things like that phrase in the headline of this post. Whatever. If you're wondering who dreamed up this crazy merger with Yahoo, look no further. It's not Monkey Boy -- it's this nut. Check out the eyes in that photograph. And the evil little grin. Total madman, right? Story says he's brought a "philosophy of change" to Microsoft. Well, that's putting it mildly. Like, let's change into a big bloated dinosaur wallowing in a tarpit trying to wrestle with another big fat stupid dinosaur. Let's spend years doing this. Woo-hoo! And yes, as suspected, of course Mr. Liddell is a former investment banker. And at the highly reputable Credit Suisse First Boston no less. (You may remember them from their starring role in the dotcom bubble a few years back.)

Who else but an investment banker ever dreams up impossible mega-mergers like this and then spends months and months in meetings trying to gin up numbers to make the case for why this marriage can work when it's obvious to everyone that it can never work? Can you imagine the way the tools from Morgan Stanley and Blackstone were drooling when Liddell flew them all into Redmond and told them to run the numbers? Investment bankers love deals like this -- just think of the fees! And they never get blamed when the whole thing falls apart years later. Nope. By then they're long gone and it's always management's fault. Put a bunch of these banker sharks in a room and believe me they'll find a way to make the numbers work. They're like those two scientists in Utah who twenty years ago convinced themselves that the laws of physics don't always work the same way and if you just add a little of this and take away a little of that, voila! Cold fusion!

Same with mergers. If this division does this and you do some layoffs over here and you add a few people over there and you play Abbey Road backwards while reciting the Lord's Prayer in Latin, whattaya know! Synergy! It all works! Lead turns into gold! The monster is brought to life!

Mad props and a free fake MacBook Air to the first person who Photoshops this photo and gives this guy a pair of really crazy crazy Charlie Manson eyes. Bokay? Peace out.

My dear friend Guy Kawasaki has started two new sites

And naturally he's included a feed from my site in both of them, and naturally I'm going to promote his new sites here on my site and in turn he'll promote my site on his sites and I'll thank him for the promotions and link back to his sites and we'll be spinning up the page views like a pair of hamsters racing on two adjacent wheels. Or something. And yeah, I know what you're thinking. Isn't this just a case of shameless log-rolling? Back-scratching? Mutual admiration society? One hand washing the other? You betcha. I'm flogging this stuff hard. It's the least I can do after all the hard work Guy did flogging the Mac for us back in the 1980s when he was our Chief Evangelist. See his Mac Alltop which is a roundup of all the cool Mac sites, and then Egos Alltop which is a roundup of the leading egomaniac bloggers on the Interwebs. My site is listed right next to Scoble's. I'm happy like a little kid on Christmas morning. Now we just need to get Guy to come back to Apple and whip this place into shape again. I miss you, bro. I really do. It's not the same around here without you. Call me.

Valentine's Day Zunes delayed

More heartache from the Borg. Little hint: Buy her an iPod Touch instead.

Dvorak now recommending Macs

Semi-demented PC pundit John C. Dvorak, longtime tormentor of Apple fanboys, appears now to have had a change of heart. See this story from the New York Times. Some bozo bought a Vista machine which immediately fell over and died on him and he ran up $800 having a techie fix it for him. Meanwhile he calls Dvorak who tells him, "I advise everybody to buy a Macintosh because Apple products are the easiest to use.”

Our PR people have put out a few calls to find out if this really was Dvorak and if so whether he's pulling off another of his weird practical jokes. More as this develops.

Google is secretly praying for the Microhoo deal to go through

So I saw Squirrel Boy (photo above, shown demonstrating the correct procedure for eating a shit sandwich) this afternoon at a tai chi class and afterward we went out for a smoothie and he was pouring his heart out to me about this Microsoft Yahoo deal. He says Yahoo is stalling for time with this new line about how Microsoft's offer is too low but in the end he thinks they'll get rolled up. He says he doesn't see how anyone can bail them out of this. Google can't, for obvious reasons. Nobody else has the money or the stomach for it. The place is a friggin mess, way worse than anyone knows. Semel left it a shambles and Yang has just let it keep drifting because he doesn't have the chops to shape it up.

So then he startles me and says that some of his guys have been thinking about the deal some more and they actually think it could be a good thing and so even though Google will make a big show of opposing the merger, deep down they're kind of secretly hoping it goes through, because they think it will be a disaster. Then he starts going on again about the cloud. The cloud, the cloud, the cloud. It's all you ever hear when you hang out with this guy. I was like, Dude, I'm so sick of hearing about the damn cloud. Instead of talking about it why don't you idiots go build the friggin thing if it's so magical and all-powerful and important? He says they're well on their way, farther than anyone knows, and in ten or twenty years there will be only a handful of service providers and if you're bummed by the kind of vendor lock-in we used to see from IBM in the old days or that we see from Microsoft today, just wait till you see the lock-in that these global compute utilities will be able to get. Eric says this is going to be the golden age of cornholing. It will make the old Bell System crooks look like amateurs. The guys running the cloud will control everything: phone, data, video, television, movies, music.

Eric's like, Do you have any idea how terrible it will be if Microsoft manages to survive the transition into the cloud and become one of the big global service providers? Look how they've behaved in the PC era, and you'll get some idea. I pointed out that, with all due respect, I don't tend to believe that Google will behave any better and in fact they'll probably be worse. Eric said that's probably true but at least if Google is running the cloud there'll be a nice piece of action for Apple because we'll be making all the access devices like skinny notebooks and iPhones and iPods and computers that also act as TV sets, whereas if Microsoft becomes top dog they'll do everything they can to put Apple out of business.

Eric says his guys have already strategized the entire game plan for the next decade and figured out how the consolidation is going to go and who ends up where. They've got it all up on a big whiteboard at the Googleplex. Sun, he says, probably gets sucked into Google at some point. Or into another one of the utilities. Same for EMC and VMWare and NetApp. All the big point product makers. Eric says we'll see spheres emerging, giant ecosystems around each service provider. The vendors will all try to remain independent so they can sell into all of the ecosystems, but the utilities will try to pull vendors into their orbits and control them. And they'll have leverage over the hardware and software makers because the service providers will collude with each other to drive the prices of software and components as low as possible. So vendors will get weakened and finally will face a choice of being assimilated into a sphere or just slowly dying. Then there are the vendors who just won't be needed at all. Example: Red Hat. And possibly Oracle. IBM is simply too big to be ignored but is already being pulled into Google's ecosystem; they formed a cloud computing pact last fall.

Thing is that everyone was just hoping and praying that somehow they could kill off Microsoft and keep them out of this new era. Nobody likes them and nobody wants to work with them. Eric says they remind him of this kid he knew growing up who would show up every year for Little League try-outs and everyone totally hated him but he always did just well enough to make a team and so they had to put up with him, year after year. He says that everyone was hoping that after Gates left the place would fall apart and the world could move on without them.

Yet now here they are, in desperation, trying to buy their way into the next era. Eric says at first his guys were freaked out but after they thought it through they began to realize that it could be a good thing. For years, he says, Google has believed that the only way Microsoft would die would be if the company made some huge colossal mistake. In other words, nobody was going to kill them; they were going to have to kill themselves. Well, that big huge colossal mistake that everyone has been waiting for Microsoft to make? Maybe this is it.

The Google freaks have played out the scenarios using some monstrous machine they've got and they say they cannot envision a single scenario in which the merger actually ends up working. They believe the merger will screw up Microsoft for at least five years, maybe more. By then, Eric says, Google will already be taking down huge corporate accounts for cloud services.

Honestly, he says, the more he thinks about it the happier he gets. He says he almost wants to send Ballmer some flowers but he's afraid that might seem heavy-handed.

Clinton pal Susan Estrich now plays the race card too

See here. Gist of her argument is that people pretend to like Obama but won't vote for him when they get in the ballot box because they're secretly racist but ashamed to admit it. She says this is why Obama does better in polls than he does in the actual election. Estrich says this has happened to other black politicians too. See? It's a black thing. Riiight.

Money quote: "If this is happening even among us good Democrats, what does that say about Obama’s strength in a general election? Not pretty questions. Not a fair world. But for Democrats who want to win, these are questions that must be addressed."

Well here we go. It's like we're reliving the Lewinsky years. All of the slimy Clintonistas are crawling out of the woodwork now that Hillary is on the ropes. First we had that smarmy prick Begala all over the TV a few days ago after Super Tuesday. Now we've got Susan Estrich warning that we should all vote for Hillary because a black dude can't win the general election. Ugly stuff.

Meanwhile Obama swept four states this weekend.

Message for Friday: Yes We Can

Not just for Friday. But it's a good way to end the week, don't you think? It's a gorgeous video, and certainly owes a debt to our Apple marketing. And you just know that everyone in that video uses a Mac. I mean, for sure, right? That makes me feel really good. People, do something. Send some money to Obama. Have a coffee hour at your house. Talk to your friends. It's important.

BusinessWeek scolds Monkey Boy

Check out this open letter to Ballmer by my main man Arik Hesseldahl. He says Ballmer needs to stop trying to be everything and learn to focus. Money quote: "So who has focus? That other Steve. You know, the turtle-necked guy in California who keeps annoying you by selling iPods and computers that typically don't run on Windows. You could learn a lot from him."

More raves for OLPC machine

See here. Some poor bastard ordered an XO and it still hasn't arrived. Turns out the freetards simply can't handle any kind of logistics. "When I went looking for my laptop, I discovered that the OLPC foundation’s ability to track, update and ship my laptop to me is barely better than that of a home mail order business." By now he's read all the crappy reviews. So he called and asked them to refund half of his money -- they can still send the freebie machine to the kid in the Third World. Was told they can only refund the "fair market value" of the machine he didn't receive. Which I guess is zero. Right?

Peggy Noonan: Hillary is toast

Well, that's sort of what she says. But there's a big bit of wishful thinking involved. See here.
She can't raise money and has been forced to borrow from her savings. Apparently the Dems and journos are whispering that Hillary has lost the momentum and it has swung to Obama (yay) but they don't dare say this out loud because, "deep down journalists think she's a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched." Noonan also says the Repubes are terrified of Obama because they can't figure out how to attack him. Whereas Hillary would be like fish in a barrel. Money quote: "The Democrats continue not to recognize what they have in this guy. Believe me, Republican professionals know. They can tell."

Some of us do know what we have in this guy. Which is why we love him. Go Obama. Go.

Music has gone so far downhill in the past 30 years

Our music lab guys are getting baked and listening to classic rock again, and just now they sent up this clip of Dutch progressive rock group Focus performing their hit song, "Hocus Pocus," in 1973. I'd forgotten how amazing this band was. Jan Akkerman? The king of rock guitar. I'd also forgotten about the glory days of rock when yodeling and flute playing could stand shoulder to shoulder with heavy-duty balls-out guitar-based rock. Not to mention wild facial expressions. If you can stand to watch the entire thing you should check out the wild response from the crowd. I mean they were just loving it. See, the pot wasn't as strong in those days, but people smoked a lot more of it. I think. Best of all, Thijs van Leer, the yodeler, now looks like this.

NY Times: iPhone outselling Microsoft and Motorola

Check it out here.My goodness we totally rock. No matter what some Brit from the Guardian might say, Apple is now the leading maker of smart phones worldwide. Or that's the gist of it anyway. Er ...

Yet more raves for Vista

NEC officially announces a Vista downgrade program. I love it.

Ha! Suckers! We nailed you again!

Man I just knew people would bitch when we introduced new iPhone models and sure enough here come the whiners. You wonder why we didn't announce at Macworld that we had new models coming? Well, think about it. I mean that would sort of takes all the fun out of it for us, doesn't it? Yeah. Truth is, we like keeping you angry. It's what builds customer loyalty. Sounds paradoxical, I know. But it's true. You can look it up in psychology textbooks. Or you can just take my word for it. What's that? You'll take my word for it? Yeah. I thought so.

We're not pirating your music. We're promoting it.

Some freako unknown musician guy says he's outraged because he saw his albums for sale on iTunes but he's never seen a dime from us. See here. He describes us as "a huge multi-billion dollar corporation that has been selling thousands of dollars worth of my music and not even acknowledging it."

Folks, I can't address the specifics of this situation, and frankly I'm not up to speed on exactly what our arrangement is with this particular artist or his label. But I assure you that we are asbolutely fulfilling our end of whatever bargain we've made with this fellow. And I will guarantee you that even if this fellow is not getting any money from us, he is definitely getting attention for his music by being on our store and that in itself is a form of compensation.

We don't rip off artists. We love artists. We're all for the artists. The crazy ones. The rebels. It's who we are. It's how we do business. We're good. People who complain about us are bad. That's all I have to say on this matter at this time. Now will someone please get me a friggin chai latte at exactly one hundred and sixty five degrees? Thank you. (Much love to JoinAnonymous for the tip.)

Freetard attacks Torvalds, defends OS X

See here. Noted freetard Matt Asay says Linus was out of his mind when he said recently that OS X was "utter crap" compared to Linux. Money quote: "I guess when you're famous you can say inane things and get away with it. Yes, Linux does some things better than Mac OS X and Microsoft's Windows Vista on the desktop (security, maybe), but let's be honest: the Linux desktop is 'utter crap' compared to either OS X or Windows when it comes to the thing that matters most: usability. If normal people can't use it, it just doesn't matter how beautifully architected it is. Sorry, Linus. Everyone has to be wrong sometimes. This is your turn to shine."

Much love, Matt Asay. Prepare to be called a shill by your fellow freetards.

Me? A snake-oil salesman?

That's what some filthy hack from the Guardian in England says. See here. Nigel's got his panties in a twist because he says I used misleading charts at Macworld to make iPhone look more successful than it truly is. Money quote: "Everybody appreciates that the iPhone has been a spectacular success in a very short time. Why not present that success fairly and honestly? Why isn't that `the Apple way'?"

Moshe and team have been dispatched.

Microhoo conspiracy theory

The Economist presents a possible motive for Microsoft's offer -- they're trying to bait Google into an antitrust crisis. Money quote: "Indeed, even if Microsoft believed that it would be prevented from buying Yahoo! on antitrust grounds, it might make sense to push for the deal, if only to force the antitrust authorities to take a serious look at issues of market power in the online search and advertising market, which would inevitably lead them to Google. By responding on February 4th to Microsoft’s bid by offering whatever support Yahoo! might require, Google may have walked into Microsoft’s sucker punch. For whatever adverse effects on competition might result from Microsoft buying Yahoo!, the impact of a closer relationship between Google and Yahoo! would surely be worse."

Oh yeah. We introduced a new iPhone and iPod Touch today. No big deal.

See here. No big deal. More storage space. Higher price. We'd almost forgotten this was coming. But anyway, you'll love it. No need to say anything much about it or have a big event or get up on a huge stage with a giant image of iPhone behind me. Which is why we didn't. It's how we roll. Totally minimalist. Understated. No hype. We just put out a very simple press release. Okay? It's a cool phone. Now it's even cooler. Go buy one. Now let's just move on.

Times: Obama is a Mac, Hillary is a PC

Spot on, as they say in Croatia. See here. Money quote: "Mr. Obama’s site is more harmonious, with plenty of white space and a soft blue palette. Its task bar is reminiscent of the one used at Apple’s iTunes site. It signals in myriad ways that it was designed with a younger, more tech-savvy audience in mind."

No wonder I love this guy so much.

Microhoo merger images keep pouring in

Much love to Iulia and Natasha who are scouring the Interwebs for more and more ways to express our feelings about this Microsoft-Yahoo deal in visually metaphorical ways. This one shows Steve Ballmer on top of Jerry Yang. We think.

Go vote! Then do it again! And again!

Friends, today the future of our civilization hangs in the balance. The man in the photo above is our only hope. Please please go to your local polling station and vote for him. Then go back under a different name and vote for him again. Keep doing this until they stop you. It's that important. Even if your state is not voting today, go down there and stand outside and just chant his name. Okay? If you do live in a state that is voting, get out there and bug your neighbors. Drive them to the polls. Call the local Obama office and see what you can do to help. FWIW, I'll be busy most of the day today driving people to the polls one at a time in my Mercedes two-seater. Not the most efficient method but you would not believe how much people will pay for the chance to ride along with El Jobso and see the famous car with no license plate.

Go Obama! Go!

And while we're at it ...

Well when we went looking for ways to visually represent the biggest scariest dumbest nightmare merger of all time, this photo just leapt out at us. And it's screaming out for PhotoCrank attention, don't you think? Have fun, kids.

The Borg-Yahoo arranged marriage

Just got a call from Iulia and Natasha in Krasnodar and they say that after hearing about how miserable all of the people at both Microsoft and Yahoo are about the merger they wonder if anyone other than Ballmer actually wants this to happen. They say the Borg-Yahoo merger reminds them of one of those arranged marriages from old-fashioned novels (or from modern day Krasnodar) where neither the bride nor the groom wants it to happen but both are powerless to stop it. They suggest the photo above might be a good one to use in future stories about Microhoo instead of the one of Ballmerdog fucking Yangdog. Apparently the photo depicts the joyous first encounter between a mid-level Microsoft executive and his counterpart at Yahoo who are excitedly discussing synergies that could be achieved by combining operations and ways to leverage resources more effectively in order to deliver greater value-add and arranging a list of action items, blah blah.

Much love, Iulia and Natasha. We always appreciate your suggestions.

A reader asks

Dear Steve,
Back in August you said you were bored with the industry and you wished someone would announce a big stupid train-wreck of a merger. See here and here. You wrote at the time that you'd like to see "one of those deals where tens of billions of dollars change hands and everybody knows it's a train wreck but the two CEOs get up and talk about their wonderful synergies and blah blah and everyone just kind of snickers and waits for the disaster to happen." You said you wanted to see "something big and robust and incredibly stupid, with at least one but preferably two very high-profile companies doing something really, really dumb." My question to you, Dear Leader, is simply this: Does Microsoft's bid for Yahoo fulfill these conditions?
Signed, Steve Dowling

Dear Steve Dowling,
Thank you for your letter. The answer is a resounding Yes. Microsoft taking over Yahoo is beyond anything I could have imagined. It's a wet dream brought to life. Thanks for the question. And I love your horns and beard braid. The new look is really working for you.

Yahoo: Borg deal is "frosting on a double-layer suck cake."

Yup. They're really excited about the deal. I do feel for the poor bastards. I mean the last few years have been pretty shitty at Yahoo, first with Terry "I Have No Idea" Semel and more recently with the return of the Yang. I know when I spoke there a few months back the audience was so depressed I couldn't believe it. I told Jerry to start putting Prozac in the drinking water. Well, Yahoo people, if it's any consolation, your counterparts at the Borg are just as bummed out as you are. FWIW I love the term "suck cake" but I might have used a different word instead of suck. Peace out.

Torvalds says OS X is "utter crap." I'm speechless.

Honestly, the balls on this guy. See here. Money quote: "To Microsoft and Apple it's a way to control the whole environment ... to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware." He says that like it's a bad thing. Man oh man.

Mike Ditka wearing weird sunglasses, hanging out with Al Gore

What the hell is going on here? Last I knew, Ditka was a self-described "ultra-ultra-ultra conservative," and he once even considered running against Obama for a state senate seat in Illinois. Now he's hanging out with Al and they're considering endorsing Obama? Amazing. To me this just shows the kind of charisma that Obama has. He's truly a uniter, a guy who can reach across the aisle and bring people together in common cause. For the sake of our country, I pray Obama holds his own tomorrow.

More raves for Vista

This is some trade magazine in the UK. To answer their question: It's actually not pointless. Because once you've upgraded from XP and lived with this POS (Painful Operating System) for a while, you'll be begging for a Mac. Truth is, everyone at Apple loves Vista. It's the best marketing tool we've ever had. Much love, Monkey Boy. And good love with that Yahoo merger. Great move. Really. Couldn't be happier for you.

She's crying again

See here. Hillary is tearing up again, this time at Yale. Friends, if tomorrow is your day to vote, please get out there and do it. Obama is our only hope. The fate of our nation hangs in the balance.

Caption contest

What on earth could Ballmer be saying here? Did he just finish Jerry Yang's prostate exam? Or perhaps his own? Is he maybe reacting to this blog post by Google's chief legal officer? This is the one where Google says they're not upset about having a big competitor -- oh no. That's not the problem. The problem is that the proposed deal is a threat to freedom and apple pie and motherhood. This is Google's favorite song. They sing it whenever they want to get their way. Whether the issue is net neutrality, or the bid for wireless spectrum, or now this -- these guys do their best Eddie Haskell impersonation and look everyone straight in the eye and say it's not that they're concerned about their stock price or their revenue growth, it's that they're concerned about users, because gee whiz these evil guys who are opposing our efforts could really mess things up for everyone. The Google guys are the good guys, see? They're the ones who put the needs of Internet users first. The amazing thing to me is that so many people believe this bullshit. I'm sure Google will try to use it on us when we start kicking the shit out of Android. Wait and see.

Monkey Boy's three-legged race

The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.

Here's the weird thing: I first heard that line about the 100-yard dash from Ballmer himself, maybe a decade ago.

See, the biggest mistake people make about Monkey Boy is thinking he's dumb. Trust me, he's not dumb. I've known him for years and he's really, really smart. Like scary smart, freako IQ, way high on standardized tests all his life. He remembers everyone he's ever met. He remembers every detail of every meeting and loves to freak out little junior Borgsters by recalling everything that happened at some random one-off from months or even years before. Total photographic memory.

The problem is not that he lacks IQ. Sure he's Rain Man when it comes to remembering things. The problem is he has no vision, and no imagination. He's all left brain. Hence this Yahoo offer. All he can see is that Google keeps beating the snot out of Microsoft and after all these years his coders still can't create a search engine that works as well as Google's and no matter what Microsoft does they can't catch up. He's tired of banging his head against the wall, so finally he just says, To hell with it, let's buy someone and see what happens. His board is just as tired and bereft of ideas so they say, Sure, whatever, go for it.

But here's the really dark part of all this. He knows it won't work. He has to know this. He's not stupid. The cultures will never fit together. And the deal is too big. It's not manageable. And it's completely anathema to Microsoft. It's totally out of character for them. It goes against everything the company has ever stood for. Ballmer knows this, and he's doing it anyway. Because this is exactly what every old-guard CEO does when all else fails. I mean it's right there in the official playbook that you get in business school. And ultimately, smart as he is, Ballmer is an old-school kind of guy. He's not really a tech guy. He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He's a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It's Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can't think of anything else to do.

So if the deal happens -- and I'm not convinced it will -- Ballmer will have bought himself maybe two years before it becomes clear to the entire world that it has failed. By then maybe Ballmer will be gone and someone else will have to mop up the mess. Or maybe Ballmer will still be around, in which case maybe he'll do another deal and buy himself two more years or whatever. He'll figure that out when he gets there. All he knows is that right now he's got to do something. His stock has been underperforming the market for years. His shareholders are pissed. His board is grumbling.

But what, exactly, is the big vision here? I guess they'll talk about how phase one was the PC revolution and now we're entering phase two which is Internet computing and the cloud and they'll say that by joining together they'll become this giant powerful megacloud provider and the battle for utility computing is going to be all about scale. Oh, and synergy. Yeah. They'll talk a lot about synergy. You know, like when you hook together a bunch of data centers that run on completely different technology stacks.

Scariest to me is that in all the articles I've seen the one thing Ballmer keeps bringing up is how he'll be able to save $1 billion a year in costs. Are you kidding me? Is this Microsoft or Dunder Mifflin? I mean, I don't doubt he could save a billion a year. But it says a lot about the kind of company Microsoft has become that this is what they're thinking about.

According to our spies in Redmond the general consensus among the Borg rank-and-file is sheer and total dread. At best they see this as a giant pain in the ass, an enormous drain on resources, an unnecessary and pointless distraction with lots of nights and weekends spent slogging away on random useless bullshit and dealing will all sorts of annoying non-Microsoft people who don't understand how Microsoft does things but can't be blown off or pushed around like the "partners" the Borg is accustomed to dealing with.

Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don't really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards. Now imagine that it is your job, you lucky bastard, to be one of the little circus clowns standing alongside trying to make this extremely unnatural and unholy act take place. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people will have their lives completely ruined and flipped upside down for the next two years because of this deal. They'll see even less of their kids. And those ski weekends? Forget about it. Ain't gonna happen. Meanwhile Google will keep pulling away.

That's the good scenario. In the worst-case scenario the merger turns into a never-ending world of shit à la AOL and Time-Warner, and Microsoft ends up gutted and gasping and then they waste another few years debating whether they should break the two companies apart and if so how do they do that and then maybe some prick like Carl Icahn or Kirk Kerkorian jumps in and adds to the misery.

Yeah. It's that good. That giant buzzing sound you hear is the whirring of photocopiers in Redmond revving up and spitting out resumes. If this deal goes through people will be crawling over each other to get out of that place. You wonder why old-timers like Jeff Raikes and Charles Fitzgerald are bailing? Now we know. These guys are good soldiers who stuck it out through the DOJ nightmare and fought the good fight. But they're done. They're not hanging around for this mess.

Which brings me back to the three-legged racers in the 100-yard dash. Back when Microsoft was riding high I was talking to Ballmer at some conference -- I have no idea where or when, but I'm sure he remembers exactly which conference this was and what day of the week it was and the number of the hotel room he stayed in -- and on that day somebody had just announced some huge anti-Borg merger, and all the idiots in the press were saying this was going to kill Microsoft, and Ballmer was just laughing. Laughing. Laughing his ass off.

Ballmer said he loved when his rivals merged, because whenever the also-rans in any market start teaming up they might as well be waving a white flag. Because it's over. You've beaten them. You've driven them to despair. They haven't been able to beat you on their own; there's no way they'll do it together. Then he told me that line about the hundred-yard dash.

I'll never forget it. But I guess he has.

Hillary uses the N word

Good news, readers. The New York Times has decided to torpedo Hillary's campaign and help Obama. Hence we get this article on today's Page One which purports to explain "Clinton's Gradual Education on Issues of Race," but really is a vehicle for laying out the case for Hillary being a lot less enlightened than she might be. And to drive home that point, the Times dredges up an old letter in which Hillary wrote to a mentor about working with "underprivileged Negroes," and the editors make sure this word gets put right up top, like a big red flag, right in the second paragraph of the story, way before the jump.

Hillary used the word in a letter she wrote during her time at Wellesley -- and she graduated in 1969. Now, I'm not as old as Hillary, but I'm pretty sure the word "Negro" was not the greatest choice at that time. I know it would not have gone over well if someone had used it when I was at Reed in 1972. Certainly it rings pretty offensive now. Other than Quentin Tarantino, is there anyone who uses it? I mean, I'm no expert on this subject. I don't actually know any black people, and I certainly don't have any working close to me, but from what I've read the word has some bad connotations, and while not as offensive as the other N word it's definitely not the word you want hanging in the front of everyone's mind every time you walk into a big gathering of black people. Which it now will be.

The best you could say is that this reference makes Hillary look really, really old -- like old enough to have been alive during a time when the word "Negro" was considered acceptable. Yeah, she's the candidate for "change," all right. Christ. I bet even McCain never used the word "Negro," and he was born in the late 1800s.

Word from our sources inside the Times is that the top brass blew a gasket when Bill went around race-baiting Obama recently and they decided to go to the mattresses. If the Clintstones want to play with fire, then fine, let's play with fire, seems to be what they're thinking. They figure they can pry away all those black leaders like Andrew Young who keep jumping through hoops to pretend Bill is one of their own by pointing out that, um, Bill is married to a white girl from "the palest of Chicago suburbs" (line one of the story) who is less than 80 years old and yet still once used the word "Negro" when referring to African-Americans. Basically, they want to embarrass black leaders into siding with Obama.

See, the reporters love Obama. He's totally won them over. And they hate Hillary. This piece is a shot across her bow. In addition to that stuff up top, down below they've got people saying that Bill Clinton's record on civil rights is "more mixed than people generally acknowledge," as one expert puts it. They mention that Hillary worked for Barry Goldwater, which "is about as close to original sin as I can imagine," says an African-American law school dean. Then they wrap up with Lani Guinier taking a shot at Hillary and explaining why she's supporting Obama.

And for good measure they toss in that extremely flattering photo. We all knew that young woman when we were in college, right? She was the one sitting in the front row, impatient with her classmates, sighing and pulling faces and rolling her eyes whenever anyone asks a question, always arguing with the professor and disputing every point and launching into long mini-lectures of her own on the material, completely convinced that she, not the professor, should be teaching the class.

Folks, if this woman becomes president we are in for eight years of hell. I'm so glad to see the Times has decided to kneecap her.

Look, I hate these friggin Ken Fisher ads as much as you do

So I'm getting bombarded with mail from people telling me to take the Ken Fisher ads off the site. Folks, do you really think I'm in charge of what ads go on the site? Do you really think I sit here in my office with the whole ad team and preview every friggin ad and decide which ones I like and which ones I don't and look at storyboards and make suggestions for how they might be improved? Jesus. I don't have anything to do with the ads. It's called the separation of church and state. Have you heard of it?

For what it's worth, I hate the friggin Ken Fisher ads even more than you do. Every time I pull up the site and hear his voice barking at me about what a fucking investment genius he is a little piece of me dies. But there's nothing I can do unless I want to cancel the ad deal and go back to writing this blog out of the goodness of my heart and unfortunately the goodness of my heart is not a very large place. Think of Rhode Island, then think 99% smaller, and you've got an idea of the size of the geographical land mass we're metaphorically talking about here. Yup. Hate to tell you, kids, but I'm in this for the money. Shocking, I know. You thought I did it for love.

And since most of you fucks were too cheap to go buy my book, even though you've been reading this site for a year and a half and the book costs only fifteen bucks on Amazon and all you have to do is click a button on my sidebar and even if you don't even read the book you could just view the purchase as a way to say thanks for eighteen months of fun-tastic entertainment, and even though you should read it because the book got wet-dream type reviews from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly who all said it's basically the greatest work of satire since Jonathan Swift and at fiften bucks it's the bargain of the century -- well, since you won't go buy the book, you're stuck looking at ads. Boo fucking hoo. My heart breaks for you. One asshole even wrote in saying he's not going to read the site anymore because Ken Fisher annoys him so much. I guess it's too much work to hit the pause button. Or to set up an RSS reader. Whatever. Good riddance, you cheap lazy prick.

FWIW, people, if you think Ken Fisher is an annoying pain in the ass, you should see the evil douchebags in New York who do the ad brokering for this site. Spend a few minutes breathing the same air as those smarmy duplicitous grin-fuckers and trust me, you'd be begging for Ken Fisher. Begging. Every time I meet with them I have to throw out my clothes and bathe in bleach afterward. I'm not kidding.

Andrew Young says Bill Clinton is black because he's slept with lots of black women. Larry says in that case, he's Asian.

So apparently this is a true story. Andrew Young actually said that Bill Clinton is black and that this is the case because Bill has bedded a great number of African-American women. Bob Herbert column from the New York Times cited this comment in his column (see it here). The actual quote: “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.” Herbert was outraged, but Larry, who just called me, says this is amazing news for him. As you know, Larry has accomplished everything he set out do in life except for two things -- one is he wants to break Wilt Chamberlain's record (and he's closing in, believe me) and the other is he wants to be Asian. (Hence all the weird plastic surgery on his eyes. Someone should do a sequence of photos showing how he's changed over the years. It's not as dramatic as Michael Jackson, but almost.)

Anyway, Larry says he's looking into this race-change-by-intercourse theory, and if there's any truth to it, he's going to declare himself officially Japanese. Or maybe he'll have a transitional phase as a Caublasian, like Tiger Woods. Then he'll go fully Asian in a few years. More as this develops.

Get on your feet!

As you know I hate Fake Steve Ballmer but I believe he is the auteur who produced this short film using pix created by readers here FSJ and I must say, it's incredibly compelling. Reminds me of early Orson Welles.

El Reg: Facebook is over

Look, I hate The Reg as much as everyone else but they've nailed the Facebook situation here. Numbers don't lie and the numbers show interest waning in these time-suck Web sites. Much love and namaste to Ted at Uncov who figured out that the only way to make money on Facebook is to sell ads to other Facebook application developers, and what this amounts to is a repeat of the late-90s bubble:

Ted Dziuba of the recently-departed, much-missed blog Uncov put it best: "Fuck, this is a pyramid scheme. There is no money input into this system except venture capital. I remember a time, long long ago, when tech companies spent their own venture capital on each other, so revenues were all booked from the same small pool of money. Yeah, as I recall, it didn't end well."

The Reg is also correct in predicting that very very soon we'll have the usual cast of Web 2.0 cheerleaders claiming that Facebook is still a huge transformative game-changing media giant and the world has changed and those who disagree just don't get it:

This time around, expect spinners to work on massaging the comScore figures, and happy-clappy bloggers to leap to social networking's defence by claiming the falls are sign of the market maturing, and of fierce competition. They could be right, but it still means that the individual business are not the goldmine their greedy backers slavered over.

Scoble? Owen? Start typing.

I sense a disturbance in the force

About a half hour or so ago I woke up feeling nauseated and dizzy and just generally out of sorts, like maybe I was coming down with the flu. Couldn't understand why. Was sitting up in my office doing some Zen meditation and breathing exercises when I got pinged on my iMac by my buddy Brinke. Tells me he woke up having the same weird symptoms and then turned on the TV and found out what was causing it.

She's here. The beast. In the Valley. My God. She's like one of those squids that spews out black ink, only what she spews is bad karma. And she sucks up all the good karma. Honestly, people, if she's elected I may have to move Apple out of the country. We'll put the headquarters in Tibet or something. Brinke says there were strange problems with the power grid which started right after her plane touched down.

FWIW, check out the grimbo motherfuckers in that audience. Now picture those humorless assholes celebrating victory in November. Then picture the kind of world these charmless schoolmarms would try to impose on us if they ever obtained power. Friends, for the sake of all that is holy and good, these people must be stopped.

This is why we don't listen to customers

So some research group put together a group of slack-jawed frigtards and had them focus group our classic 1984 advertisement. It's amazing enough that these bozos didn't know this was an actual ad. I mean where are they living? On the dark side of the moon? But seriously check out the comments. I'm sitting here speechless. This is why I try not to go out in public too much. There are, sadly, way too many sub-100 IQ people like this roaming around out there. You know what else really scares the shit out of me? These cretins are allowed to vote.

Sergey hearts his iPhone

See this article from the New York Times where Sergey Brin raves about his iPhone and tells how helpful it was to him in Switzerland. Just between us? I've talked to Sergey about Android, and in private he admits it smells like ass. But it's Eric's project and Larry is pushing for it too so Sergey went along for the ride.

More raves for Vista

See this article from the Seattle P.I. about a computer store in New Hampshire that has been really helping the Vista cause along. I know what you're thinking, and yes, we are paying stores to do this. We call it market development. Interested parties should contact Phil Schiller's office.

Woof!

Well once again the greatest readers on the Interwebs have stepped up, and we've got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the Ballmer-Yang Photoshop contest. Just look at these lovely samples, each one suitable for framing. Picasso would be proud. Or jealous. Much love to all.

From Trev:


From SnowGypsy:


From Michael:


From Matt:


From Daniel T:


From Jason, our Art Director:


From James:


This one came in via PhotoCrank but I had to share because I so admire the way this person thought different about the situation:

Woz -- the Jan Brady of the Valley?

Dear reader Brian writes in to ask if anyone else has noticed the striking resemblance between Jan Brady -- the perennial runner-up little sister in the Brady Bunch who was always jealous of her older, better looking, more successful sister, Marcia -- and my former business partner, the one and only Woz. I'd never thought of this before but I think Brian has a point.

BTW, Woz picked up five MacBook Airs from our first batch and word is he's already been griping about what he would have done differently and what features he wishes it had and what's wrong with the design, blah blah. Look for him to be mouthing off somewhere in public soon.

Squirrel Boy swears he's not scared. We have evidence to the contrary.

Here's a shot of Eric getting into his car this morning so he can go home and work on the answers he's going to give to analysts this afternoon. The calls from Wall Street are pouring in, and Google's crack PR squad (cough, cough) is working overtime to hold them off. I know what you're wondering and yes, we do have one of our operatives planted in their flack team, and word is they are freaking the fuck out. Stock is down to $513 from $564 yesterday. They're shedding market cap faster than Britney Spears is shedding her grip on reality. It's not just the Yahoo deal and the Facebook deal. You may have noticed that the Borg also recently lined up a n exclusive deal with the Wall Street Journal to handle their online ads.

Oh well. Frankly, Eric and I haven't been too cool since they launched their stupid Android thing. On the other hand we are supposed to be brothers in arm against the Borg. And Eric says that this whole thing should scare me too, and I suspect he's correct, though I'm still waiting for somehow to explain why that is.

Bam! Borg makes Yahoo its bitch.

In case you're still waking up and getting coffee, the Borg just launched an assault on Yahoo, offering $45 billion. Now we know why Terry Semel left yesterday I guess. He's the guy who rebuffed the Borg a year ago. Question is whether he quit in disgust or if the Borg made his departure a condition of the deal. Anyway, this is classic Borg. They wait. And wait. And wait. They press on you. They look for weakness. They keep pushing and pushing. They step on your oxygen tube, just a little, so slightly that nobody can see it but just enough to make it a little harder for you to breathe. They watch you grow weaker and weaker. They let Jerry Yang do his stupid 100-day review. Then they pounce. Now they've rounded up Facebook and they'll soon have Yahoo, as long as government regulators don't block the deal, which they probably won't given the current administration. Oh, and gee whiz -- guess who just missed their earnings number and has lost about $40 billion in market value in the last few months? Hmmm. Seen this movie before?

Beastmaster, I hate you. But I tip my cap to you too. Deep down, we are more alike than we are different.

Much love to anyone who can Photoshop the heads of Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer onto the photo above.