Survey Says More Folks Have Homegrown Computers Than Mass Manufactured Boxes. survey says more folks have homegrown computers than mass manufactured boxes. Don't pin me to a year, but at a certain point thereafter, with the advent of commercially available upgrade parts, folks started to lose their fear of tinkering with hardware....

The only other tech product I can recall getting this much excitement was Windows 95, and it was huge, until folks got it home and had bad experiences. The iPhone appears to have worked just fine, but when a million folks try to use something, even a fraction of a percent of breakage is a huge number. Wait until these folks find out they will have to ship their phones in for new batteries and be without them for a week at just about the time the generation 3 phones show up. Particularly in the latter case you’ll be able to point at all of the folks with the first generation and make fun of them. Folks now have a "learn how to use this phone or else" problem and, once folks learn these features, they are likely going to want more and better just like them....

Most folks will likely opt for a less expensive plan and they range from $60 to $100 ; likely, most will pick the $80 plan with 900 minutes (those extra minutes can be expensive). That’s 30 minutes per day in a 30 day month, so I’ll bet a lot of those folks get really surprised by the bill they actually get if they use their cellphone during business hours. I’m dying to see what happens to the large number of folks who are likely camping out so they can sell the iPhone they bought on Ebay. While an unlocked iPhone would likely cost $200 more, I think folks should have the option of being able to switch out their phones whenever they want without having to pay a penalty. Folks, seriously, do you really need music and video on a phone this badly...

Some folks like to read, some folks like to listen to books, and some folks figure that if the book were any good they would have made a movie out of it. Some folks like to read, some folks like to listen to books, and some folks figure that if the book were any good they would have made a movie out of it....

Analyst Opinion - Microsoft just released videos of the "Mojave Experiment", which basically was a survey session aiming to convince a bunch of folks that Windows Vista is not as bad as they may have heard. A combination of a lack of benefits-oriented marketing by Microsoft, one of the most disparaging campaigns I’ve ever seen in my life from Apple, and what had been a nasty first year had folks who had never actually seen or touched the product believe that it was, well, crap. So the folks at Microsoft had a theory they decided to test, similar to the Coke/Pepsi challenge I mentioned above. At the start they asked folks what they thought of Vista and most seemed to agreed with one woman who gave it a "zero". Whether it is marketing folks who want to get us to buy what we don’t need (or get us to dislike a product we might otherwise like), or politicians who want us to vote in ways that aren’t in our best interest, we are constantly being manipulated....

Intel, but meanwhile, the majority of folks are just plain undereducated when it comes to computer technology. On Friday, the fine folks at Radio Shack (here in the U.S.) put out a press release on Friday to help folks sort out all of the confusing issues related to buying a personal computer. They should probably tell folks that if they want to store their own files, they'll need a CD burner. Last month, the friendly folks at Dell got my sister-in-law to drop around $3,000 on a desktop system she'll use exclusively to send email (despite my screams of despair)....

These people may be serial successes, in other words, folks that simply understand how to do things successfully and can do it repeatedly. If even a small number of the folks they acquired with YouTube are, in fact, the kind of person that can be a Donald Trump, or a Steve Jobs and they can both hold on and provision them to their potentia,l they not only jump to the of the on-line video heap they have the true potential of becoming the next truly big player in technology. Part of this serial success thing is luck but it certainly looks like both the Google and the YouTube folks have that in spades and the recent deals both have signed with the record labels would indicate that this luck is holding up very well for both firms. Any major drop - or for that matter increase - could result in distractions that the YouTube folks simply can not overcome to get the job done. But if these folks could be hugely distracted by wealth, the money they got from the PayPal acquisition would have already shown some of this bad behavior and we wouldn’t have a YouTube to begin with....

For Microsoft, they contract it out and you often wonder if the folks that designed the event either understood or cared about what it was they were launching. If you realize that something like a billion PCs run some version of Windows, then, say even a 10% initial migration would be 100 million folks or 2.5 times Apple’s estimated entire installed base of Macs. If only 1% of those folks had problems, and typically it will be much more than this, you would have 1 million people in dire need of help and there is no support organization or combination on the planet that could handle that kind of load over a short period of time. At the Vista launch, there were folks chatting about Apple’s supposed planned response to Vista and it could actually work. Of course, if Apple does this after saying nothing about PCs during Steve’s MacWorld address its going to cause folks to once again wonder if Apple is exiting the PC business....

Intel isn't limiting its recent foray into the consumer electronics device space to wireless home networking products (which still seem a little pricey for folks who just want to get two or three computers hooked up to their DSL line). Intel isn't limiting its recent foray into the consumer electronics device space to wireless home networking products (which still seem a little pricey for folks who just want to get two or three computers hooked up to their DSL line). Last week, the company put forth three new gadgets that may intice folks to get more involved in digital photography, audio, and video. You know, the scary thing is that while you and I know that having an "Intel Pentium" processor is not likely to be an issue as long as the machine runs Windows, folks who are thinking about buying these gadgets may not have our insight....