Wak Oentoenk

In school they teach you that one of the drivers of economic progress over the centuries has been society's increasingly accurate management of time. The seasons had to be tracked so that farming cultures would know when to plant. Once people started sailing across the oceans, they needed reasonably accurate chronometers to measure longitude. When railroads were built, the idea of uniform time zones became important so that the trains could keep predictable timetables. The term "railroad time"...

A year ago I wrote a frustrated critique of the CBS television network's online coverage of the US national college basketball tournament, which we fans affectionately call "March Madness" even though half of it happens in April (link).In the tournament, which includes 65 teams, there are often four games underway at the same time, and they start at around 9 am on the west coast. It's an orgy of basketball, but often a painful and frustrating orgy because inevitably your team ends up playing during...

I never thought I'd say that, but Apple's making me wonder. Apple says 100,000 developers have already downloaded the iPhone SDK (link). For comparison, it took Palm a couple of years of heavy evangelism to hit the same milestone. That's a deceptive comparison, though -- Palm was a small and relatively unknown company at the time, whereas Apple is a huge brand, with a large base of current Mac developers that it can bring over to the iPhone. So the process was quite a bit easier for Apple. ...

I have time tonight for only a quick note on Apple's iPhone software developer kit announcement. Overall, it is deeply impressive how many things Apple got right. We still need to see more details on terms and conditions, and a lot will depend on Apple's execution, but here are the problems they appear to have solved:--Mobile applications are hard for users to find and install, so Apple is building the applications store into every device. Apps are installed automatically when you buy them, and...

There's so much hype in the mobile industry that I'm always reluctant to use a word like "shocking," but nothing else fits Nokia's announcement today that it will support Microsoft Silverlight.If you missed the press release (link), Nokia said that it's going to make Microsoft Silverlight available for all of its mobile platforms -- Series 40 (the low-end phone OS), S60 (the high-end OS), and its Maemo Internet tablet. (It's not clear if Silverlight will be bundled or just offered as a download.)...

The other day when I was writing about the fate of mobile apps (link), I mentioned one of the laws of technology strategy. It made me realize that although we in the industry talk about those laws all the time, I've never seen them all written down in one place. There are probably more than three laws, but these are my favorites. Please post a comment if you want to add some more.Here we go, twenty years of industry experience boiled down to three lines: 1. An elegant business model paired with...

I was very surprised by the volume of responses to last week's post on the decline of the mobile applications business. Many of the comments were passionate and well reasoned, and if you haven't seen them I recommend that you check them out here.My biggest insight from the comments was that I had generalized too broadly about the mobile software world. Several mobile developers wrote in to say that they're doing just fine, thank you. Most of them seem to be either in enterprise mobile software,...