Day: February 4, 2010

the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future

Dick Brass, a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, who seems to think that Microsoft at one time did “bring us the future” as opposed to bring us lightly re-warmed ideas stolen from somebody else and grafted onto a vertical monopoly made possible through ruthless, anti-competitive techniques found to be illegal time and time again. Honestly, where would Microsoft be without an Apple or VisiCalc out there to crib ideas from and a IBM-derived business equipment monopoly to inhabit, corrode, and ultimately seize from the software flank (IBM’s maginot line being hardware, natch)? Not where it is today, I can tell you that much.

There’s a scene early on in [Avatar] where one of the scientists walks across the lab carrying the “mobile computer slab of the future.” We’ve seen one of these in almost every sci-fi movie of the last 50 years. It comes free with a jetpack, I suppose. Except this time, one month later, my 12 year old son turns to me and whispers “Look Dad, it’s an iPad.”

Mike Monteiro definitely gets it.

Code Brown

Boston NPR was predictably atwitter this morning on the news that Scott Brown accelerated his swearing in. What they got through without ever saying, even once, is that he most likely was doing so such that he can be there to vote in lockstep with the GOP to block such critical world-changing policy points as who is going to head the NLRB. Goddamned Liberal Media bias working against us once again.
Brown is genuinely staving off the utter collapse of The Republic by keeping somebody notionally pro-union out of the chairman’s seat over to the labor board. So this “independent” will undoubtedly go 0-4 on the independent thinking front in week one, likely also helping to stop a jobs initiative. And, as Lord Jesus well knows, politically independent Americans have no taste for job creation, no matter how anemic or government sourced those jobs may be. We just don’t want new jobs. Why can’t the fat-cats in Washington understand that? Probably because many of them don’t drive trucks.

Will he be asked about this 0-4 first week, even once? Of course he won’t. Will the Globe add a front-page feature counting days, months, years without a non-GOP lockstep vote on Brown’s part? Of course they won’t. Will enterprising reporters get into his face this week and ask for the deep policy explanations that underlie his supposedly independent stance that just happens to perfectly align with GOP political plays this week, and thus be ready to call him out as either a fool or a fraud? Of course they won’t.

Here’s your Scott Brown “independent” vote counter, brazenly predicted two years in advance and carved into the electronic firmament for all to see: 0.