“Apple CEO Tim Cook has long seen as the humorless and unemotional guy running the show from behind the scenes,” Peter Svensson reports for The Associated Press. “But he is beginning to reveal a more assertive and eloquent side, hinting that he’s learning to shoulder more of Steve Jobs’ role as a front man and leader.”
“On a conference call with journalists and financial analysts late Tuesday, Cook showed some fire when talking about competitors, echoing the combative Jobs,” Svensson reports. “He also spouted a vivid metaphor that spread like wildfire over Twitter before the call was over.”
Svensson reports, “on Tuesday, when asked if PCs and tablets might someday blend into one device, like rival PC manufacturers hope, Cook extemporized this response: ‘I think anything can be forced to converge. The problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.'”
“The ‘toaster fridge combo'” phrase zoomed around Twitter, and within minutes, someone created a ‘FridgeToaster’ account that started talking back at Cook,” Svensson reports. “Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw tweeted that Windows 8, the new software that’s supposed to bridge tablets and PCs, is ‘not a toaster/fridge. It’s a toaster/oven. Those seem pretty popular. Just saying.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw is delusional. It’s a prerequisite for working in an insane asylum run by a…
Microsoft, in trying to cram everything into Windows 8 in an attempt to be all things to all devices, will end up with an OS that’s a jack of all trades and a master of none (which, after all, ought to be Microsoft’s company motto).
By the time this hybrid spawn of Windows Phone ’07 + Windows 7ista actually ships, one can only dream where Apple’s iOS and Mac OS X will be! For Microsoft, it’ll be more like a nightmare. Perhaps Microsoft will someday put some scare into Google’s Android/Chrome OS, but only time – and a lot of it when measured in tech time – will tell. We simply do not see the world clamoring for the UI of an iPod also-ran now ported to an iPhone wannabe that nobody’s buying to be blown up onto a PC display.
From what we’ve seen so far, Windows 8 strikes us as an unsavory combination of Windows Weight plus Windows Wait.
Not to mention that probably no one on earth knows how much or what kinds of residual legacy spaghetti code roils underneath it all (shudder). Is Microsoft giving up on backwards compatibility? If so, people might as well get the Mac they always wanted. If not, then Microsoft’s unwilling to do what it takes to really attempt to keep up with the likes of Apple or even Apple’s followers. No matter what, if Microsoft’s going to ask Windows sufferers to “learn a whole new computer” (and that’s exactly how they’ll look at it, regardless of how Microsoft pitches it), millions will simply say, “Time to get a Mac to match my iPod, iPhone, and iPad!”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
MacDailyNews presents live notes from Apple’s Q212 Conference Call – April 24, 2012
My years at Microsoft: Frustration, disappointment and apathy – April 23, 2012
