Daniel Eran Dilger in San Francisco

Daniel Eran Dilger

While eager to demonstrate next year’s Windows 8, Microsoft has been reticent to make any promises about a tablet friendly new version of Office sporting the new Metro look, a clear departure from Apple’s strategy of presenting the original iPad with a suite of new iWork apps, but only after both were finished and ready to sell.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

New Metro-style apps designed to run on Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 for tablets will copy Apple’s App Store business model of charging a 30 percent fee from developers, allowing the potential for Microsoft to regain control over software in segments it has lost to Apple’s iTunes and Google search.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Microsoft is still a year (and ahem) away from bringing Windows 8 and its new Metro UI to market, but Apple has already beaten the company in releasing a hardware accelerated, animated web browser. It’s called Safari 5.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Gadget blogs are in a lather to photograph every piece of new prototype hardware seen running “early beta” builds of Windows 8, thinking that the completely new Metro-fied release might dramatically shake up the tablet market. They’re wrong, here’s why.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Handing out free tablets was the least Microsoft could do after years of leading its mobile developers down dead ends with Tablet PC, Windows Mobile, Windows Vista, Slate PC and Windows Phone 7. Still, will $500 worth of hardware in the hands of mobile developers forestal the death of Windows any better than it preserved webOS or Android 3.0 Honeycomb?
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Daniel Eran Dilger

If Google’s overall Android strategy seems to be derived from the collective fantasies of blog commenters (Google should buy Motorola!!), then Samsung’s legal defense in Apple’s infringement cases appears to be similarly sourced from anonymous online comments (I can’t see it!! If anything, Apple is copying Samsung!!).
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Here’s some choice examples of why you can’t believe everything companies or pundits proclaim about the prospects of their products.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

What do Google and Motorola get from being under the same management? Google gets access to Motorola’s home networking gear, GPS devices, cable boxes, and cord/cordless phones, all of which work directly against what Google has been trying to deliver in its Android push. In return, Motorola will destroy third party interest in Android and Chrome OS, while doing nothing to provide Google with the retail stores, PC platform, and local software experience it lacks.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Years after the tech industry unanimously agreed that Microsoft’s licensing model was far superior to Apple’s integrated hardware model, Microsoft began desperate measures to adopt Apple’s. Now Google is trying to do the same. Will buying Motorola help?
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Daniel Eran Dilger

While Android fans like to point out how well the free software is performing by looking at its plurality of market share among smartphone makers, the reality is that Android isn’t doing so well. Google’s acquisition of Motorola is proof of that.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Ask anyone covering the patent wars currently being waged between Oracle and Google, or between Apple and HTC and Motorola and Kodak, or Lodsys and iOS developers, and regardless of their opinion about legal liability they’ll tell you that the patent system is broken, and more often than not, that patents on software are sort of evil and should probably just go away. But are patents really that bad?
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Gene Steinberg of the Tech Night Owl invited me to talk about iCloud, Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5 and Android in a podcast with Paul Wagenseil, Jim Galbraith, and Ted Landau.

You can tune into the live broadcast stream Saturday night from 7:00 to 10:00 PM Pacific, 10:00 PM to 1:00 AM Eastern, at http://www.technightowl.com/radio/. An archive of the show is available for downloading and listening at your convenience within four hours after the original broadcast.

They episode is available here: August 6, 2011 — Daniel Eran Dilger, Paul Wagenseil, Jim Galbraith, and Ted Landau

The Tech Night Owl LIVE is also broadcast on many local radio stations via the GCN network.

You can also access our show’s Podcast feed, now available at: http://www.technightowl.com/nightowl.xml.

Daniel Eran Dilger

Seems hard to believe it was only one year ago that Google was rattling swords at its Google IO conference, comparing Apple and its iOS to North Korea while advancing Android 2.2 Froyo. What a difference a year makes. Now, rather than arrogantly bragging about how Android would crush and humiliate Apple’s axis of evil, Google has shifted into weeping about how other players in the mobile industry are threatening it with intellectual property claims
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Must be a slow news week. Analysts covering Apple seem to be competing with the world’s major religions in their efforts to concoct the most absurdly ridiculous stories to be told with a straight face.
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The first 5GB of documents users store within iCloud will be free, while Apple appears set to make 10, 20 and 50GB options available annually for $20, $40, or $100, respectively.

Missing in the transition from MobileMe to iCloud is the Gallery and iDisk web apps, which are largely replaced by similar functionality offered by iCloud’s Photo Stream and Documents features.