Sony Plans for Fewer, But Better Products - Yahoo! News

Sony is banking on rear-projection TVs, digital music players, and next-generation DVD systems to revitalize its core electronics business, Howard Stringer, the company’s newly appointed chief executive officer, said at a news conference in Tokyo Thursday.

He will also narrow the company’s overall range of products to include only those he thinks Sony can make a profit on, he said in his second day on the job. He did not indicate which of Sony’s many products might be cut.

“A company as big as this one… has to organize its priorities. In the U.K. we call it the law of raspberry jam: the wider the culture is spread, the thinner it is spread,” he said.

Finally! What a smart move! Don’t they have like 32 different iPod competitors right now?

I remember back in the bad old days when Apple had the Performas, the PowerMacs, the this and that. Printers, monitors, scanners - and even clones!

And then Steve Jobs came and cleaned it all up into machines:

Consumer Laptop- iBook
Consumer Desktop- iMac
Professional Laptop- PowerBook
Professional Desktop- PowerMac

oh, and iPod.

The key is to focus on your strengths, instead of constantly trying to fix your weaknesses.

Thiw was a pretty fun article about some famous NBA Finals Game 7’s.

Unfortunately, it brought back some really bad memories - especially this photo:

Wacky Tales From NBA Finals Game 7s - Yahoo! News

A dejected John Starks of the New York Knicks heads for a timeout in the closing seconds of Game 7 with the Houston Rockets in the NBA Finals in this June 22,1994 photo, in Houston. The Rockets beat the Knicks 90-84 to win the NBA championship. One of the most vivid memories Robert Horry has from the last Game 7 in NBA Finals history was New York Knicks guard John Starks firing up shot after shot after shot after shot _ almost none of which went in.(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

There were some other absolutely awful Knicks games I recall watching back when Patrick Ewing was still on the team.

There was the infamous Reggie Miller from half court one.

There was the one where the shot clocks broke and they had to put them on the floor.

There was the one where everyone in NY started putting up blue and orange “I BELIEVE” signs - and then the Knicks choked at the end. Oh wait, that was -every- critical game!

Ah… the bad old days.

Oh wow! Things have been so busy I almost forgot!

I have now been at Microsoft for 5 years!

Let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane, shall we?

1999
October: I interviewed at Hopkins on-campus for a job with Microsoft.
The most interesting question? "You just shipped a product. Your team is
incredibly exhausted. A magazine reviewer calls to tell your that an advanced
copy of your product randomly crashes. What do you do?" A few weeks later I get an invitation to interview in California for Mac products

November 24-28th: I was home in NY from college for Thanksgiving Break.

November 28-29th: I was back in college to submit a project that I had completed.

November 30th: I went back to NY and interviewed with
Lehman Brothers. That night I would stay at the
Marriott World Trade Center.

I still have the card key from that hotel…

December 1st: I flew out to San Jose and arrive at SJC. Being that I took Continental, I arrived at Terminal C. You can imagine my bemusement at having deplane using a staircase to the tarmac in Silicon Valley. I stayed at
The Fairmont San Jose and had
dinner by myself at Gordon Biersch.
Later that night I would study the notes I had taken on Outlook Express for Mac
- the product that I thought I would be interviewing for.

December 2nd: I went out to the non descript building where Microsoft’s Mac
Internet Products Unit was then located on
Tasman in San
Jose. That day I interviewed with the recruiter,
Omar, Brad,
Dave
(who took me to lunch at Marie Calendars),
Dan, and Jud. I then was schlepped over
to Cupertino to interview with Brendan at the PowerPoint building. And then I
met Jimmy who took me out to the
interview dinner at Fontana’s
(pretty good place) and to show me the under-construction

Microsoft campus in Mountain View. These were some truly awesome people that
I met, and I really really really wanted to work there! (Oh yeah, I was wearing
a suit the whole time and these same awesome people made fun of that after I got
hired.)

December 3rd: I get back to Baltimore but my luggage doesn’t because it gets
lost in Denver’s baggage system.

December 6th: The recruiter calls me to let me know that I am offered a job!
Hurray! Of course, I accept!

2000
January 1st: The world came to an end. Oh wait. It didn’t. Stupid millennium
bug fears! (Remember Y2K?)

January 3-9th: I went to MacWorld SF for the first time,
courtesy of Microsoft. When I got to Moscone to get a badge, the show operators
said I wasn’t on the list. So I told them that I was with Microsoft - with no
proof. They simply gave me a badge - sweet! This was also the MacWorld where
Steve showed off OS X and Aqua.

May 25th: I graduate from Hopkins. Hurray!

June 14th: I flew out to San Jose - leaving NY for good. On that
day, it was 60 degrees when I left JFK so I was wearing a sweater.
Unfortunately, when I got to San Jose, it was a

record breaking 109 degrees that day. And I had 3 giant suitcases to lug
around the scorching hot car rental lot. I think I almost passed out!

June 19th: Less than a month after I graduated, I started my
career at Microsoft.

Since then…
Wow, a lot has happened since then. Here are some of the products that I
helped ship:

• Office 2001

• Office X, and its various service packs.

• Handheld Sync for Entourage X

• MSN Explorer for Mac

• Office 2004, and its service packs.

• PST Import Tool for Entourage 2004

• Some Entourage-related stuff the MacBU will release later
  this year

And today, I work on MSN Search
Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search. (Or, MSNSTBwWDS for short.)

In the 5 years at Microsoft, I’ve learned so much - there are so
many smart (scary smart) people here that it truly is like drinking out of a
firehose. I’ve met so many great people - some of them in real life too (instead
of only on email)! The ability that I have been provided to date to make a
difference has been astounding. And, courtesy of the MacBU, I accrued so many
miles on American Airlines visiting customers - great times.

So much has happened in the last 5 years - I can’t wait to see
what’s coming up next.

Who says Microsoft can’t ship great things? You just need to
know where to look!

Thinking of working at MSN? Leave me a comment and I’ll get back
to you on it! MSN is hiring!

Do you have a Toshiba Portege M200 TabletPC?

If so, let me recommend to you this wireless driver.

Before I installed it, my M200 would regularly crash my Microsoft MN-700 Wireless Router’s DHCP server - causing all of my machines to not get IP addresses on wake.

That was a nasty problem!

Top cities for risky, interest-only mortgages - BusinessWeek Online - MSNBC.com

1. San Diego 47.6%
2. Atlanta 45.5%
3. San Francisco 45.3%
4. Denver 43.4%
5. Oakland, Calif. 43.1%
6. San Jose, Calif. 41.1%
7. Phoenix-Mesa 38.3%
8. Seattle-Bellevue-Everett 37.2%
9. Orange County, Calif. 37.0%
10. Ventura, Calif. 35.3%

The national average is 22.9%. New York came in at #40. (Click the link for all the data.)

Wow those are some significant numbers. I wonder what impact this will have in the near future.

Time to Toss The Textbook - Newsweek Business - MSNBC.com

We once thought we understood consumer spending, the economy’s mainstay. For decades, disposable income and consumption spending advanced in lock step. Americans spent a bit more than 90 percent of their after-tax income and saved about 8 percent to 10 percent. In 1959, consumer outlays were 92 of disposable income. The figures for 1969, 1979 and 1989 were 92 percent, 91 percent and 93 percent. Being so steady, consumer spending provided stability during recessions?in contrast to more sensitive investment spending on business plant and equipment and housing. Since 1960, consumer spending has dropped in only two years; investment spending has dropped in 13.

But since 1990, consumer spending has changed. It’s consistently outpaced income growth. In 2004, Americans spent 99 percent of their disposable income and saved only 1 percent. The main cause is the “wealth effect.” In the 1990s, higher stock prices caused Americans to spend more; now higher home values (up 55 percent since 2000 to $17.7 trillion) are doing the same. So consumer spending increasingly depends on “asset markets”?stocks and homes?and not just income. Query: suppose the next recession depresses both stock and real-estate prices. Would consumer spending fall and deepen the slump?

What an interesting piece. Check it out.

It’s a small small world indeed.

Example #1- On Wednesday morning, I left my apartment and ran into my next door neighbor who just moved in. See, people in my apartment complex change really often because a lot of the units are corporate rentals. Often times they’re high profile execs. A lot of times they don’t even ever actually move in!

So I said hi to her, and then followed her down the stairs, when I hear “Hey Dennis.”

Ok, well that’s alarming.

It turns out it was a friend from Hopkins: Steve! The woman I met and Steve are roommates right next door to me! Steve was one of my good friend’s roommates Freshman year - and that was the friend who had the TV so we were there all the time.

What a coincidence!

Example #2- Today I get a chat from a high school friend, Dan. See, Dan is a grad student at UC Berkeley. The only time I’ve actually met him since High School graduation was last thanksgiving - in NEW YORK. And right now he’s in Japan.

So in this chat, he tells me that he’s met Saiwing. My ex-coworker, ex-roommate.

What? Huh? Saiwing is also in Japan… but….

Turns out that they’re in the same intro program in Japan. And they’re even staying at the same house for a bit.

And that Dan recognized Saiwing from my blog.

Whoa.

Small small world indeed.

I’m looking for a Text Editor for Windows that can come close to BBEdit.

One feature I would like is the ability to use FTP from the text editor - that is, I can open and save files using FTP. Preferably SFTP!

I found one that could sort of do that recently (FTP, not SFTP), but the app constrains all its windows to the master window. (Like PowerPoint, unlike Word.) Argh! I hate when apps do that. That’s so Windows 3.1!

Do you have any favorite text editors to recommend?