Modern Classics?

I occurs to me that computers, once an obscure, nerdy and introverted branch of the office automation genus, will ultimately be revalued and bestowed with the same credit that other profound human inventions and creations earned.

And the people most prominently associated with the emergence modern computing will be retrospectively grouped alongside creators of other historical classical creations; people like Beethoven, Shakespeare, Galileo, Da Vinci. 

At first sight that reads like a crass overstatement. But actually, when you take a couple of steps back...

Fishing

Just back from two weeks vacation in northern Italy where I deliberately took only a few photos and never even took an SLR. Previously I would have packed an SLR with multiple lenses and a compact camera.

But I find I'm in some kind of correction phase where I'm not inclined to snap at every piece of minutae just because I have a camera with me. I suppose the iPhone has something to do with that, it's always a handy stand-by whether you decided to bring a camera out or not. Regardless, I'm definitely in a living in the moment mood rather than fixing most of my attention on getting my camera out, setting it up and faffing around taking shots. After all, what's a memory for?

But I did take my Panasonic LX3 which for a compact camera is pretty functional. This is about only photo I took that I spent any time setting up for. Turned out OK.

Impersonal Computer Manufacturers

A final thought on HP's pulling out of being a personal devices vendor. Big vendors never did a great job of handling their end customers particularly well. After all, that kind of intimacy is what VARs and retail distribution were there for.But scroll forwards to 2011 and the web has all but disintermediated and eroded away those chaannels leaving big vendors nothing but a raw, cumbersome and mostly distance selling relationship with their end customers. And unlike twenty to thirty years ago, a large chunk of HP's customers today are increasingly consumers who like to be made to feel more special than a no-name suit with a company budget to spend. Enter stage left Apple and its flotilla of stores. Whether it was foresight or not, ten years ago Apple embarked on its then largely derided retail store strategy and in doing so, it seems to have sailed around the very problem that HP and, no doubt, other old tin shifters now find themselves in, now bereft of a smiling face on the front line. And what remains on high street PC retail is far from optimal - sheds full of racks of over-priced and a revison or two out of date kit accompanied by distantly reverberating muzak and soulless branded polo-shirts who look like they're counting the minutes until the time they clock-off. It wasn't called the personal computer for nothing.

HP Thoughts

HP's management are likely not to be idiots. Purchasing Palm (to get hold of WebOS and Palm's considerable mobile device patent portfolio) probably had a couple of speculative justifications.

One of them being the very long shot that they could actually become a mobile platform / device vendor.

The fact that the latter was brought to such an abrupt halt barely weeks after launch shows how much of a deliberate Hail-Mary punt their launch of the WebOS based TouchPad was. With most of the dev work already sunk, they probably reckoned it was worth at least a shot but only as long as they could hit EJECT at the first signs it was going to fail. Initial reviews were not great and sales reportedly followed suit.

The fact they moved so quickly to ice the WebOS business suggests clinical execution of a pre-planned contingency plan rather than abject panic.

The other reasons for purchasing Palm would be to take it off the table from competitors while Palm was on fire (although they still paid a pretty penny for the privilege shows how interested other vendors actually were).

But the real fall-back, money earning reason for buying Palm was for its patent portfolio. Look how much Google just paid for Motorola for the same reason.

Why now? Partly because Touchpad sucked so badly so soon and because Google just bought Motorola. They needed to put the WebOs patents on the market before someone followed Google and did a big patents purchase, and the reputation of WebOS took more beatings in the press, both factors diluting the future WebOS asset value and undermining the point of buying Palm in the first place.

Amid all this speculative strategising they also reckoned that their future in the Post-PC world was only going to get more painful. So they picked up Autonomy in a bid to diversify, again before someone else did.

All of the above points to a board in very stormy seas, floundering certainly, but not idiots. Whether they'll make it to shelter is another question altogether.

The devil finds work for idle hands

It certainly started off well intentioned; a tidy up and clearout of old stuff from my home office, making use of home alone time while my wife and daughter were away in Scotland for the week. But mid-way through this virtuous endeavour I found an old Windows XP installation disk and I instantly succumbed.

I feel dirty. Ashamed.