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Last night, a follower on Twitter asked me the following: [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/robertmclaws/status/154446168846368768″] For those who don’t know, my day job is as a research analyst at Directions on Microsoft (DoM). Unlike most analysis firms that focus horizontally across various vendors in various markets, we focus exclusively on Microsoft (which DoM has done for 20 years this year). This single vendor approach has enabled us to dive deep and lets us answer questions about Microsoft’s software, services, hardware, and even complex licensing…

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Last Friday I posted this on Twitter: Netflix/Quickster, GoDaddy, Verizon… fascinating to watch an Internet beat-down cause a business decision to be reversed. 2011 should go down on record as the year that companies – some of them, anyway, experienced resonance to the point that they were forced to reverse a key business decision. I refer to resonance as the innate amplification of topics across the Internet as they reverberate from user to user that agrees with the sentiment. Amusing topics that…

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As a child, my favorite treat was a cheeseburger. Not just any, but a Burger King cheeseburger “minus mustard”. Years later, a cashier pointed out that BK cheeseburgers didn’t have mustard on them, but nobody had ever corrected me. Have it your way indeed. I’ve had innumerable meals out. I’ve eaten too much fast food, candy, sodas, and junk food. A few years ago, while we lived in Austin, my wife and I somehow began to contemplate eating healthier. I don’t…

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Who doesn’t love a free lunch? C’mon now – you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Yet why do countless people fall for “the inbox hustle“? I’ve been working on whitelisting technology for over a decade, and my sojourn has taken me far from where it started on Windows to the Internet at large, and to the base psychology at play when a typical person gets gamed by crap in their inbox, on Twitter, or on the…

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Almost a year ago I posted a two part set of posts discussing “The war for the family room”, where I discussed an impending battle between the Xbox, Apple TV, and Google TV. Things are evolving quite nicely. Though Google TV has effectively flopped in it’s first (overpriced and overly complex) implementation, I’m sure Google will be back. In the meantime, I wanted to take a bit of a look into where all three are now. Apple TV – more content providers, but largely…

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It’s been almost a year. I can’t believe it. For almost an entire year, pundits (including myself have been talking about ARM and Windows. We started the year with lots of questions. We end the year with almost all of those questions… unanswered. It’s Microsoft’s prerogative whether to answer the question of how well enterprise customers will be able to port any of their line-of-business (LOB) or ISVs can port any of their apps to Win32 on ARM. It was…

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Even if you’ve never heard the term, you’ve used a desire path. We all have. It’s the shortcut with the well worn path between the two houses on your way to elementary school. It’s the path between the science building and the engineering building at your college, where the ornate fountain in the middle and the circular/intersecting sidewalks looked pretty from above when they designed it, but meant many people wouldn’t take the long way all the way around, and…

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I remember the original iPhone well. I remember incredibly slow network connectivity but pretty darn good battery life. The iPhone 3G I replaced it with pretty evenly swapped those. I learned that it was worthwhile to turn 3G on when I really needed it and off when I didn’t. 3G giveth bandwidth and taketh away battery runtime. My iPhone 4 today runs close to an entire day on a charge, which usually includes use for email, Twitter, Facebook, and Pandora….

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I am noticing a frightening trend. On iOS, there is a growing collection of “security” apps. There is no such thing as a third-party security app on iOS (or on Windows Phone 7 for that matter). They don’t exist. There is no such thing. On iOS, there is (thankfully) no framework for the background task approach that “classic” antivirus has used for the last 25 years. More importantly, due to a vetted application store, the need for such an approach is not…

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I’ve long been critical of Google’s lack of “local” search focus. In particular, I think that they’ve missed a lot of opportunities to try and connect with local restaurants (no, not those with logos with you’d recognize – rather, those with food you’d remember), but it goes far deeper than just restaurants. Google licensed Yelp content for some time, and even tried to acquire Yelp back in 2009 to try and fix things like this, and when that failed, Google…

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