Author: Mike P. Lewis

Analysis of Chrome

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A few weeks ago Google release a product called Chrome which is their own web browser. Only it is really so much more. At first it doesn’t look like much – and it isn’t, just yet. However it’s the direction Chrome is going and the intent behind the release that matters. Google doesn’t want a competitor to IE or Firefox, they want a new OS – a web OS that competes and beats Microsoft Windows.

Chris Messina who worked both a Mozilla and Flock – both browser companies – has a great post about how Chrome came to be and what it means (post is here). Chrome is the future of browsers. It’s one that embraces web applications and has Gears, an engine that enhances the internal code of apps to make them more powerful and quick.

On interesting piece of the post is pointing out WHO is working on Chrome. He paints Google as cohesive team of folks in the pennisula who are laser focused on delivering a next generation browser:

Google is a well-oiled, well-heeled machine. The Webkit team, as a rhizomatic offshoot from Apple, has a similar development pedigree and has consistently produced a high quality — now cross-platform — open source project, nary engaging in polemics or politics. They let the results speak for themselves. They keep their eyes on the ball.

Ultimately this has everything to do with people; with leadership, execution and vision.

When Mozilla lost Ben Goodger I think the damage went deeper than was known or understood. Then Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt went over to Facebook, where they’re probably in the bowels of the organization, doing stuff with FBML and the like, bringing Parakeet into existence (they’ve recently been joined by Mike Schroepfer, previously VP of Engineering at Mozilla). Brad Neuberg joined Google to take Dojo Offline forward in the Gears project (along with efforts from Dylan Schiemann and Alex Russell). And the list goes on.

A few more points he expands in the original and subsequent post:

  • One unique feature of Chrome is that it auto-updates without any notifications (with obvious security issues). Chris writes: “if you’ve read the fine-print closely, you already know that this means that Chrome will be a self-updating, self-healing browser….. by using Chrome, you agree to allow Google to update the browser. That’s it: end of story. You want to turn it off? Disconnect from the web… in the process, rendering Chrome nothing more than, well, chrome (pun intended).”
  • Another interesting point of note is that Google evolved the UI of the browser and “went ahead and combined the search box and the location field in Chrome and is now pushing the location bar as the starting place, as well as where to do your searching” This is interesting as it was a logical trend that no browser has yet picked up on


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AOL mail crushes Gmail

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Not in terms of functionality or ease of use but check this out:

Yahoo dominates e-mail with 88.4 million users in the United States in August, according to comScore. That is far more than Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail at 45.2 million and AOL at 44.8 million, not to mention Gmail at 26.0 million.

When you look at how much time people spend reading their e-mail, Yahoo mail users spend the most time (286 minutes a month), Gmail users the least (82 minutes), with AOL and Microsoft in the middle (229 and 204 minutes, respectively).

Wow. As a Gmail-lover, i would have never thought that was the case. You read the whole article here.

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Mad Men and Literature

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I just finished the first season of Mad Men and thought it was great. One thing i wasn’t expecting is how culturally literate it is (NY Times article).

During the season premier this year (just watched it) the main character, Don Draper, is reading a book by Frank O’Hara (Meditations in an Emergency).  At the end of the episode there’ s voice over of one of O’Hara’s poems.  The episode is about the coming of Fall (mid-year), the need to hire younger writers at the office, being middle-aged in the middle of the century.  It’s a great episode but I think the poem at the end more than encapsulates it. It reads:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

"Reading at lunch. Makes you feel like you're getting something done." "Yeah, it's all about getting things done"

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Distinct Voices in Film

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My last post about Vicky Christina Barcelona created some conversation about writer/directors who have distinct voices in film. My friend Sari came up with the Sorkin analogy to Woody Allen and it got me thinking about who else there is. Here’s what i came up with:

Quentin, Robert Altman, and Kevin Smith
  • Robert Altman. Talk about a distinct tone. Overlapping conversation everywhere. Sometimes it’s awesome (Mash, The Player, Gosford Park), sometimes it just sucks (Dr. T and the Women) and sometimes it doesn’t one way or another and it just is (Nashville).
  • Kevin Smith. His movies all have the fast talking, pop culture, sexual references. Mallrats and Clerks could have been the same movie. It’s fitting that his last movie was just a continuation of his first (Clerks and Clerks 2) because they are all basically the same. That said, Chasing Amy wasn’t fairly normal.
  • Quentin Tarantino. He’s the most like Woody Allen to me because he likes to have people talk like him in his movies. He also likes to have people talk like a total badass (Samuel in Pulp Fiction and Uma in Kill Bill) which i completely appreciate. I do love how he uses dialogue instead of action in his movies. I mean Kill Bill’s final scene – a samarui movie – was not a long sword fight but rather a convesation between Uma and Bill. Only Quentin could pull that off. Very cool
  • Who am i missing?

Now whether it’s a good thing to be able to identify a writer by watching a film is another whole post. Sometimes i love it (Tarantino) but sometimes i wish they would just write a story without needing to feed their ego.

Vicky Christina Barcelona Thoughts

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Saw Vicky Christina Barcelona this week and thought it was great. There are certain things i love about Woody Allen movies (and certain things i hate). In general, the movie was a lot like one big dream sequence. The main character (Javier B.) walks and talks the way you only wish people would speak. What occurs is what you’d always want movies to happen and what you see is what you’d want to see. The movie was just pleasing on every level. It’s both surprising and satisfying. In short, a fun summer flick. Some more thoughts….

  • I love the way the characters talk. Many of the conversations are real conversations. Each character has tendencies that are real and recognizable. Scarlett J’s character has nervous little responses that sometime don’t make any sense and Vicky’s responses are always extremly honest.
  • I love the scenery. The background of the city makes the foreground even better. The characters are ridiculously attractive (especially Penelope Cruz – smoking!) and the Barca lifestyle of walking around in a gorgeous city, drinking wine and listening to Spanish music makes it even better.
  • Penelope Cruz is f’ing amazing. She was a godess in Vanilla Sky and she’s even better here. Sultry, destructive, passionate. Her precense brought the film to another level
  • (Spoiler Alert) There’s not a happy ending. I’ve said before that my favorite genre is film Noir and that’s because i like it when things don’t work out. I like it when all plans are ruined and the hero doesn’t get what he wants. Maybe because i think that’s just life. Maybe it’s becuase there are too many movies tha that have happy endings and i like the surprise. Or maybe i’m a machocist. Who knows. But there was not happiness at the end here. At the end of the movie the characters are older, wiser and have had a great summer but this is not a rom-com and i was very appreciative.
  • One thing i don’t like is when characters in the film starts complaining they sound like Woody Allen. i’m happy he’s not in the movie but when character neurosis come out, the language is his. They talk like him. It’s the same with Sorkin shows but still, i notice and i don’t like it.

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Am I the only one…

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who thinks that if McCain is elected that he’ll pass away and Palin will become President?  I know everyone knows that it’s a possibility but i’m SURE it will happen. It’s almost destiny.  Here’s someone who was in city council until 1996 and then mayor from 1996 – 2002 of Wasilla, a town of 5500 people.  This is the size of my high school.

Only in America can someone go from being a mayor of a town of 5000 to leader of the free world in 4 years.  Very interesting times….

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Google's Shot Across the Bow

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It’s been a while since there’s been a major power play by someone in Silicon Valley.  A big “take over the world” type of action.  I think Google’s latest Chrome is that – reminiscent of the old days of Netscape, Sun and others who were all trying to take over the world.  

Fred Wilson does a good job of describing how their 3 latest projects: Chrome, Android, and Cloud/Gears are positioning them to be the OS of the future.  Saying: 

 

 

  1. They are building a modern browser, Chrome, that resembles an operating system as much as a browser.  It’s not that Google wants to build a better version of Internet Explorer or Firefox. They want to build a better environment for running web apps.
  2. They are building a mobile operating system, Android, that is also designed for running web apps in a mobile environment. I think in time, Google’s Android will be to the iPhone what Windows was to the Mac. The iPhone laid out many of the killer mobile device innovations, but its a closed device, a closed carrier relationship, and even a closed application store. Android will take all of those good ideas and put them on every device, with every carrier, and in partnership with every app developer. 
  3. Google is all about the cloud. They have developed all of their apps in what goes for the cloud these days. They’ve build a great cloud computing platform in App Engine. 
These three things ensure that Google will be a major player.  With other launches of OpenSocial and such don’t display the raw power of Google but here it is.  I love it and believe they will be the biggest and most powerful company standing – over facebook, Microsoft and others – when the dust settles. 

Welcome to the Jungle….

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As Axl Rose purportedly makes final preparations to put out Chinese Democracy any minute now (we hope!), Stephen Davis, the rock biographer behind 1985’s classic Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, is releasing his long-awaited Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses. In it, Davis traces GN’R’s illustrious history all the way back to Rose’s origins as a disaffected Indiana kid named Bill Bailey. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction:

Some think the legend of Guns N’ Roses began in the nighttime Los Angeles of 1985, a distant echo of West Hollywood’s neon-lit Sunset Strip. Others think it should begin ten years earlier, at the confluence of two Indiana rivers, the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, in the 1970s. But in this telling, the GN’R saga begins in gritty New York, in upper Manhattan, on a sweltering, run-down street in the late afternoon of a summer day in 1980

Continue reading “Welcome to the Jungle….” →

World Peace? We're Closer than we think

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During my trip to Maui, i brought along the book “The Post-American World” by Fareed Zakaria. It’s a good read (not done yet). One part i really liked at the begging was when he was talking about how war and organized violence have declined substantially over the past 60 years – and dramatically over the last two decades. This was news to me. He writes:
The general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over 60% [since the mid-1980’s], falling by the end of 2004 to its lowest level since the late 1950’s. Violence increased steadily throughout the Cold War – increasing sixfold between the 1950’s and early 1990’s – but the trend peaked just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the extent of warfare among and within states lessened by nearly half in the first decade after the Cold War.
To that Harvard’s professor Steven Pinker argues, “That today we are probably living int he most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”
This seems so contrary to what i feel everyday due to the constant news of terrorism, bombings, airline accidents, etc. Zakaria addresses this saying:
One reason for the mismatch between reality and our sense of it might be that, over these same decades, we have experienced a revolution in information technology that now brings us news from around the world instantly, vividly, and continuiously…. Every weather disturbance is “the story of the century”. Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS. It is difficult to put this all in context because the information revolution is so new. We didn’t get daily footage on the ~2 million who died in the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970’s or the million who perished in teh sands of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1908’s
But now the deaths of ten, because they are seen up close, make the world seem more and more dangerous. When, in fact, the opposite is true.

Swimming Destiny

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The relay was incredible and it happened again – another nail-biting, miraculous finish.  This time by Phelps.  This race i just watched of the 100 was incredible (here).  It almost seems as if it’s just Phelps’ destiny to win every gold.  Everything is bouncing his way right now.

I do wonder how he would a view a silver medal – he’d probably be so upset.

Check out this finish:

With zero room to spare Phelps manages to touch first
With zero room to spare Phelps manages to touch first
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