MacWorld Keynote… feh

The coolest recent Apple announcement is the upgrade to the MacPros, in my book. The Air is cute, but for a little extra heft, the MacBook is still a better computer in every way. And the MacBook is still underpowered for my taste.

Who really cares about thin? Once you are hitting that sub 14″ category, isn’t weight the most important thing? My 12″ PB is a better mini-machine than the MacBook Air.

The ModBook is a more exciting machine to me.

The new iPhoneOS? Cool, but I’m still going to wait for 3G.

The new AppleTV, nice, but not a major improvement.

Renting movies, over due. Available one month after DVD? Sucky.

Wireless NAS? Cute form factor, nice price, but not revolutionary.

Was anyone really blown away by today’s announcements?

An interesting point about the high-level departures from Microsoft

Both Mini-MSFT and Joe Wilcox pointed this out. Microsoft isn’t replacing their high-level executives with internals. Bill Gates leaves, Ray Ozzie is hired to replace him. Jeff Raikes leaves, Stephen Elop replaces him. I’m not sure about some of the other executive departures yet, their replacements haven’t been announced as far as I can tell.

Why would Microsoft do this? Are they looking for folks without a lot of MS baggage who can shake things up? Are they looking for specific skills and experience they can use to compete? Or do they just feel like there isn’t anyone internal up to the task?

No matter what the reasons, this has got to be a major morale killer inside the company. If I was a director or VP or wanna-be executive, the message would be that my best chance of advancement was to leave because it seems like experience inside of MS isn’t valued inside of MS.

Network Solutions is evil

I’ve been a network solutions customer for many many years now. Partially, because when I first registered my domains, they were the only registrar. Later, I would occasionally register a new domain with them if it was important. I never trusted GoDaddy or some of the other discount registrars, NetSol seemed to be more professional and trust-worthy.

No longer… they just jumped to the front of the evil queue.

Network Solutions Using Questionable Tactic to Sell More Domain Names

As of Tuesday, if a user does a search on the site for a domain name, Network Solution immediately registers the domain in their own name. If the user then goes to a discount registrar to register the domain, it shows as unavailable. The user must then either not buy the domain, or go back to Network Solutions and pay their $35/year fee.

What does the new Mac Pro announcement say about the MacWorld Keynote

For those of us who have been waiting for a MacPro upgrade, today is a great day. New Mac Pros with 8 cores of Penryn power, new high-end video cards, all quite exciting.

You would think that this is something that Steve Jobs might want to announce from the stage in his keynote next week. So why announce it today?

Maybe they were holding back this announcement in case another one fell through… Maybe compared to the other announcements they were worried that this one might have gotten lost in the shuffle? Maybe it is to suck some of the attention away from all the announcements at CES?

This certainly ups the anty for next week.

[update: Here is Gizmodo’s take, they agree with me]