Category: Tech Trends

  • Mac Pro

    Search for “Mac Pro” and you’ll get this article, You probably won’t be buying a Mac Pro this year, this video, Do I Regret buying the Mac Pro? 3 Weeks later.., and this Quora question, Is the New Mac Pro worth the price? The conventional wisdom is that Mac Pro is expensive, for professionals only,…

  • The Cost of Doing Internet Business

    A couple decades ago the costs of putting up a website seemed really reasonable–especially as compared to pre-Internet media like books, newspapers, and encyclopedias. A lone webmaster toiling away in the wee hours of the night could get a site up and running with HTML and CGI by the break of dawn. Pages were static,…

  • Is It 1998 Again?

    Set the Dial to 1998 Let’s power up the time machine and take a quick trip back to the wide world of tech around 1998. Microsoft was the Khaleesi of software and controlled a vast empire through Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. Microsoft marched its conquering army of apps over the desktop and through the…

  • JavaScript, Swift, and Kotlin Oh My!

    This blog post now lives on http://blog.viacom.tech/2017/05/31/the-co-evolution-of-javascript-swift-and-kotlin/  (and it’s much shorter and better!)  

  • North Star

    Successful  companies usually have a secret sauce. It could be an algorithm or an insight. But whatever  that secret sauce is, it is used to create or disrupt a market. Apple created the PC market when Steve and Steve figured out that affordable pre-built personal computers would be really useful for consumers. IBM disrupted the…

  • Trolls Are USA

    It’s clear that Americans are more divided than ever. Our self-segregating tendencies have been reinforced by the adoption of Internet technologies and algorithms that personalize our newsfeeds to the point that we walk side-by-side down the same streets in different mental worlds. Before the web, before iPhone, Netflix, and Facebook, the physical limits of radio,…

  • Faceless Phone

    About twelve  years ago I attended a management leadership training offsite and received a heavy glass souvenir. When I got home after the event  I put that thingamabob, which officially is called a “tombstone”, up on a shelf above my desk. Little did I know that after more than a decade of inert inactivity that…

  • First Day of the Year

    Welcome to 2016 day one. Imagine if on  today we could accurately predict what will happen in 2016? We could write a blog post with predictions and then gloat when they all come true! Here are some of the outcomes I would like to be able to predict: Which movie will win best picture? Which…

  • Quick Thoughts Apple Watch Sport, AppleTV, Magic Trackpad 2, iPad Pro

    This year I had a lot of Apple product to buy. Other than buying a new iPhone every couple of years the rest of my Apple gear didn’t need updating. iMac, MacBooks, and iPads got a little faster, a little thinner, and a little more expensive but not so much that I really needed break…

  • The Desktop Strikes Back

    I was surprised and delighted by Microsoft’s introduction of the Surface Pro 4 and and Surface Book. I have a feeling that Microsoft is  doing something really interesting: Bringing back the general purpose personal computer. Wait, wait, I know what you are thinking! It’s all about the phones and pads and the Internet of things!…