Summary of Vista Review by the Economist

More positive than Mossberg, but just barely. Usual review bloat excluded to get to meat of the matter:

Microsoft’s latest products mean that its users should no longer double as crash-test dummies.

.. Apple calls them “widgets” ..

In many ways, the changes make Microsoft’s new software more like Apple’s. Yet more flattery for Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, who has seen more than a decade of Microsoft upgrades that borrow his company’s interface innovations.

All marketers lie

SF Chron:

Dasani, like many bottled waters sold in the United States, doesn’t originate from pristine mountain springs; it starts in the same pipes that run into people’s kitchens.

Dasani undergoes a filtering process and, according to Coke, is “enhanced with minerals for a pure, fresh taste.” But, in the end, it’s still tap water.

…

In San Francisco, city officials collected nearly 34,000 samples from the water supply in 2005 and ran more than 100,000 water-quality tests. “All compliance monitoring results met or exceeded federal and state drinking water regulations,” the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission reported.

That same year, the commission held a blind taste test near the Ferry Building. The 300 participants were offered samples of two popular bottled-water brands (Crystal Geyser and Aquafina) and local tap water.

Half said they preferred the tap water. Twenty-five percent picked bottled water. And 25 percent said they couldn’t tell the difference.

David Lazarus notes that Americans spent an estimated $11 billion in 2006 drinking 8.3 billion gallons of bottled water.

iPhone patents brouhaha

Techdirt is presenting a convoluted rationale for the iPhone patents:

Last week, I asked whether or not the iPhone actually needed all those patents that Steve Jobs bragged about. It kicked off a fun discussion in the comments (and among other bloggers), but Tom Evslin’s response over at his own blog is one of the most enlightening in explaining not only why Apple needed those patents, but why Steve Jobs so prominently bragged about it: Apple made a really dumb business decision in locking themselves up with Cingular, and the only way t

Locking in customers with Cingular might indeed be dumb decision, but there may be a far better reason for Apple to patent everything they could and mentioning it publicly. Maybe it was a simple exercise to dissaude patent trolls such as Creative, Contois, and maybe LG (even though they started after Apple):

“LG undecided about lawsuit against iPhone over similarities to LG’s Prada phone“

IMHO, there’s no reason to read too much into this: I go with the simple answer.

Fully right

Bravo, Daniel Eran:

•In the early 1980s, Microsoft announced it would deliver a Mac equivalent on the PC.
- Windows 95 came ten years later on top of DOS, with a clumsier interface than the Mac.

•In the late 1980s, Microsoft announced it would deliver the next DOS with IBM: OS/2.
- NT came many years later, and could run for nearly a month before being rebooted.

•In the early 1990s, Microsoft announced it would deliver an answer to NeXTSTEP with Cairo.
- It never really did, but try Windows 95, okay? It can even run Bob.

•In the late 1990s, Microsoft announced it would deliver pen computing.
- After years of Windows for Pen failure and WinPad vaporware, WinCE didn’t impress.

•In the early 2000s, Microsoft announced it would deliver a brand new Windows.
- Vista came years late, missing features, and unimpressive.

More recently, there’s also been announcements about owning media playback with Windows Media Player, owning video games with the Xbox, owning media DRM with Janus DRM, owning media players with the Zune, and owning media downloads with PlaysForSure. None of those has happened.

Will somebody please tell the pundits? They still seem to think Microsoft’s announcements are worth repeating.