Friday, January 21, 2005

Frustrated with once again losing track of one my many technical books, I just purchased Delicious Library and a Bluetooth scanner. The scanner will come next week, but I've started entering some of my books using its automatic Amazon lookup of book details. In 20 minutes I had cataloged 21 books. With the scanner, it would have been even faster. Very cool. Small developers have been making my computing life much more productive and pleasant (with for example NetNewWire, MarsEdit, OmniGraffle, and LaunchBar), and Delicious makes it even better. 4:55:06 PM

Sony exec admits strategic music mistakes: The head of Sony's video game unit said this week that his company missed out on potential sales from its line of digital audio players because it was overly protective of Sony's music content. 'Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said he and other Sony employees have been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple's iPod, mainly because the Tokyo company had music and movie units that were worried about content rights....(Via iPodlounge.) Better late than never, but this also shows the fatuity of theories of "digital convergence" popular during the bubble. Even if technical convergence were possible -- and managers constantly overrate the feasibility and benefits of unified top-down designs -- it ignores the conflicting interests of different players, in this case copyright owners and device makers. Telecoms suffered grievously from this fantasy. 4:39:46 PM