Software as Silo

Software is a funny thing. How important is it? Apple has just announced it’s giving most of its away for free — effectively costing it some $900 million in the short term. Samsung has just convened its first developer conference in the hope of persuading more people to write software for its devices. Microsoft, known … Read more

The rebirth of RSS?

This is a column written for the BBC World Service (here’s the show.). Views are my own, and do not represent those of my employer, Thomson Reuters.  I’ve been wrong about a lot of things, but I’ve been particularly wrong about something called RSS. RSS is a simple standard, dreamed up during the halcyon days … Read more

iPhatigue

This is the text of a BBC piece I wrote, based on our Reuters story of a week or so ago.   The problem with smartphones is that they’re visible. We want them to be visible; we flaunt them. We put them on the table in restaurants, we fiddle with them if conversation lags; we not … Read more