Tech.pinions Recommended Reading

I hope our many American readers are enjoying a day off celebrating Labor Day. To our many readers in other parts of the world happy Monday! Since today is a holiday in the states we didn’t plan an official column for today but rather wanted to highlight some other articles we thought deserved to be read.

Apple Never Invented Anything by Jean-Louis Gassée

Gassée had an interesting post and comment thread on his post called The Apple Tax, Part II. He followed it up with this excellent article where he point out the many flaws in the Apple never invented anything argument many seem to be fond of making. Gassée uses a great analogy of a Chef to help us understand the difference between innovation and invention.

I believe the Chef analogy is one of the stronger ways to understand innovation. It demonstrates how something new can be created from things which already exist.

Who Inherits Your iTunes Library? by Quentin Fottrell

I found this article in MarketWatch and found it to bring up a question I had not yet thought through. Namely what happens with our digital assets after we die? This is an interesting question to wrestle with and it is one unique to the time period we find ourselves in. To some degree many of our digital assets are not locked to our person or an account service. But there are certain cases where they are locked to a service and may be even more tied to services in the future.

There is a great deal more to be explored and wrestled with related to digital assets but we will have to tackle that subject another time.

Why Apple Needs to Lose the Samsung Appeal by Vivek Wadhwa

I don’t agree with every point Vivek makes in this column. I for one am not worried about innovation in Apple or even Silicon Valley for that matter. Anyone living or working near Palo Alto and can feel the startup energy wouldn’t either. But the issue or fear of startups being sued out of business as well as issues with patent trolls are very real and of concern.

Vivek makes some interesting points and we must make sure that even in the midst of these patent battles that innovation stays safe.

How Many Kindle Fires Were Sold? By Horace Dediu

On the heels of a major product launch event this week, Amazon had some interesting press regarding the official sell out of the Kindle Fire. Obviously when you keep taking orders for a product but stop making it earlier in the year one would assume you would eventually clear inventory. That is exactly what happened with the Kindle Fire.

Horace makes some good points and I feel he is accurate about the 5 million Kindle Fire estimation. It sure would be nice if everyone was open with their shipment numbers as Apple.