May 222012
 

It’s official: Google has finally acquired Motorola for a reported $12.5 billion. Former CEO Sanjay Jha has been replaced by Google’s Dennis Woodside and is now free to “make it rain” in any strip club of his choosing after successfully baiting Larry and Sergey to buy the underperforming hardware-maker in a deal that made sense to nobody. In acquiring Motorola, Google has also inherited a boatload of litigation, as the company is embroiled in patent disputes with Apple and Microsoft all over the world.

I’d just like to remind readers of the fact that all of these cases involve Motorola using patents subject to Fair, Reasonable and Non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, something that you’d think would be incompatible with Google’s worldview as champions of open source. But as we all now know, Google invokes ideology like “free and open” only when it suits them, and I’m sure will have no problem letting these suits continue on their path despite adding another layer of hypocrisy onto an already-fetid pile of doubletalk.

 Posted by at 3:19 pm
May 222012
 

At the 16th Webby Awards, there was a nice video bit honoring Steve Jobs. The piece was kicked off by John Hodgman and Justin Long and introduced by Richard Dreyfuss, voice of the “Think Different” campaign. Dreyfuss’s intro featured some colorful rambling, such as the calling out of Mark Zuckerberg and “Eric Brin” (one of those is a [sic]) for stealing our privacy, saying “if you’re going to change our world, why don’t you pay for it? Because it’s theft.” Dreyfuss’s meandering intro alone is worth watching the clip, but the heart of the presentation came in the form of a video featuring notable figures from the entertainment and political worlds such as President Obama, Former President Bill Clinton and Bono, who were each given Webby’s traditional “5 words” to describe Jobs’s significance. The clip is 7:00 long and, because it’s resistant to embedding, can be seen here. Skip to 5:50 if you don’t believe watching Richard Dreyfuss go off the rails constitutes entertainment.

 Posted by at 8:04 am
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