We’re making a list, checking it twice
We know that Cyber Monday is not the most organically grown product of the holiday season. It’s not as if the masses have clamored to have a day so named.
As Amy Martinez, one of our retail reporters, noted in Friday’s Retail Report, it’s instead a term coined by the National Retail Federation’s Shopping.org division for the day people return to work after Thanksgiving and spend some time using their company’s Internet access to engage in serious work, namely shopping online.
Be that as it may, we here at Download Central find ourselves infected by the spirit of the day, if not the season. We’ve sharpened our surfing skills and are spending Cyber Monday 2007 finishing off our gift list:
• For Jeff Bezos, a consulting session with Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design guru.
• For Eric Schmidt, an autographed copy of “How to Win (European) Friends and Influence (European) People,” by EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, with foreword by Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras.
• For Howard Schultz, an ownership stake in the beleaguered New York Knicks. A guy’s gotta own a ball team, right? And the Knicks would go well with that sweet new NYC pad.
• BlueNile gift cards for Larry Page, who may be shopping for the proper wedding ring.
• For Craig McCaw, a big telecom for Clearwire to call home for Christmas.
• For Steve Ballmer, a return to those heady days in late October when the big bets were paying off. The fall air was crisp but not biting. The orange and yellow leaves rustled on the trees. And for a few fleeting days, there was the adulation of Wall Street. Hey, it was a solid run, up almost 20 percent in a brief stretch after first-quarter earnings. And just wait for results from the holiday quarter, baby.
• For Steve Jobs, grateful shareholders who recognize that an 87 percent return over the past 12 months isn’t bad, so lay off the backdating lawsuits already, OK? Namaste.
Price of a lock
So you want to be able to use that iPhone with any carrier, not just AT&T? Would that be worth $1,477?
That’s an option for German customers - at least for now.
It’s also how T-Mobile, the Deutsche Telekom wireless subsidiary that has rights to sell the Apple iPhone in Germany, is complying with a court injunction issued after Vodafone challenged T-Mobile’s exclusivity on the handset.
So if consumers want to have an “unlocked” iPhone - one that can be used on a network run by a carrier not named T-Mobile - they’ll have to shell out 999 euros. If they do use T-Mobile, it’s 399 euros ($590) with a two-year contract.
According to a report from The Associated Press, that’s not an unusual practice. T-Mobile sells the Nokia N95 for 199.95 euros ($296) with a two-year contract, for instance, or 619.95 ($916.60) without one.
Those options aren’t available in the U.S., of course, but it does raise some interesting possibilities. Would you pay, say, to view a hot YouTube video if you could skip the advertising? Didn’t think so.
From bread to dough
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, speaking recently to the National Society of Black Engineers, compared the software-development process to a much more mundane pursuit: bread baking.
“The pace is really something because whenever you come out with software, customers love to tell you what’s right, they love to tell you what’s wrong, and you know you can go out and do something new,” he said.
“It’s not like working at a bread company where they … go back and tell you they don’t like bread anymore, and great, well, we’re a bread company, what do they expect? We’re not going to change our product.”
We beg to differ slightly. Considering all the money software has made over the past three decades, there’s been a bit of bread-making going on.
Download, a column of news bits, observations and miscellany, is gathered by The Seattle Times technology staff. We can be reached at 206-464-2265 or biztech@seattletimes.com.