Thank you, Arik Hesseldahl

That other fellow that writes for BusinessWeak didn't give me anything to work with last night. Thank the maker, Arik was on the job today. I'm serious, boys and girls. Mr. Hesseldahl gave us a great big old, Microsoft-sponsored rant on why Master Jobst Fimil should take the company on the wild goose chase of a stock buy-back.

That's the problem with giving these guys bylines. They think that because their names appear below a recognized registered trademark, they must know something. Not true.

Arik, The Master has at his disposal (the last time the numbers were officially updated):
$18,400,000,000.

Do you have 1.84 E10 USD?

Let me guess: No. Am I right?

See, the way this works is if you're really smart about money you have a lot of it. If you're not, you don't. His Steveness has a lot of money. You don't. Therefore, he is really smart about money. You are not. If anyone needs to see that equation again, I'll be here for a while after class.

You may need financial advice from The Master.

The Master does not need financial advice from you.

Any questions?
...

Apple's stock went up a few bucks today. Tim COOk announced that Apple is going to sell 10 million iPhones before the end of 2008. No. Wait. I thought Steve Jobs said that before the first one was sold. Apple has never said anything different than that. Tim COOk didn't say much that was new, just, "Remember what we said last year? Yeah. Just cut and paste," and the stock is up to the tune of $6.xx.

Remember what I said about the Stock Market being stupid? It's also insecure and has a short attention span. Kinda like a teenager, except with zero stuff to do after school. Sometimes the market just needs a hug.
...

Over at Forbes, the magazine that still owes me a jug of hooch and a stogie, there's a whole page devoted to Apple being late delivering an SDK for the iPhone. Brian Caulfield, the author, compares the one week delay of the SDK to the delay of Vista. He likens a one-week delay in a Software Developer Kit to a years long wait for arguably the most rat-infested operating system in history.

The iPhone SDK is important, but as yet, it won't affect 90-something percent of the personal computer market. Nor will it crash or fail to run on a substantial number of "iPhone SDK" enable devices.

Every time somebody compares Apple to Microsoft it blows me away.

Over on Slashdot, there's a piece about how OS X secretly cripples non-Apple applications. Some undocumented API apparently slows down Firefox and other browsers. If Firefox is crippled, I haven't noticed. It's the browser I use, and that is probably more crippling than anything Apple might do. Anyway, Slashdot compares Apple to Microsoft by saying that the undocumented API is like something Microsoft always gets in trouble for.

No. It isn't. Microsoft doesn't "cripple software with undocumented APIs." Things don't run slower when the borg want them excluded. Microsoft breaks shit. When Microsoft breaks it, it doesn't frigging work.

Apple speeds up it's own stuff without telling everyone how they did it. Firefox works fine.

Microsoft breaks other people's stuff so it won't even fecking work, and then refuses to tell anyone how to fix it. Later, they offer a lame-ass insincere apology and say maybe someday they'll get around to fixing it.

Apple misses by a few days and delivers a quality product.

Microsoft misses by a few years and delivers Vista.

Compare that.

Dumbasses.

Wow. I need some dark chocolate. Right. Now.