Daniel Lyons's Blog, page 20

World awaits new Arrington blog, prays TechCrunch will survive without him

Michael Arrington has made it official — with a tweet — that he will soon launch his new personal blog. And now an anxious world awaits the new Arrington mega-blog and prays that TechCrunch can survive without him. (Above: One of the makers of CLOO, a new iPhone app, and fellow startup creators, their heads marked with a T for TechCrunch, pray before a statue of Arrington during the blog's popular Disrupt conference in San Francisco earlier this week.)

Is Facebook over?

Business Insider seems to think Facebook is toast, making the case that ZuckLand has "lost its mojo" and that "something stinks." They mention a bunch of add-ons that haven't caught fire, and that key people have left. They don't talk about financials, but by some accounts Facebook's mid-2011 results, as impressive as they were, actually fell short of what Facebook was projecting when it raised $1.5 billion from Goldman Sachs late last year.

Good Lord my Google-Motorola "rope-a-dope" theory was wrong as hell

A while back, when Google announced it was buying Motorola Mobility, I posited a theory that Google had pulled a "rope a dope" on Apple and Microsoft by pretending to compete for a set of Nortel patents. Google, I asserted, must have known all along that it was going to buy Motorola and get its huge stash of patents, and was just bluffing in the auction for the Nortel patents, tricking Apple and Microsoft into vastly overpaying for those patents.

Many people, including most notably my good friends John Gruber and M.G. Siegler, pointed out at the time how absolutely head-up-the-ass stupid my theory was. And it turns out they were right.

Thanks to SEC filings, it's now coming out (in stories like this one at the New York Times) that Google reached out to Motorola after losing out on the Nortel patents. Money quote:

In early July — mere days after Google lost out to a consortium led by Apple and Microsoft — Andrew Rubin, the company's senior vice president of mobile, reached out to Sanjay Jha, the chief executive of Motorola Mobility, to discuss "the possible impact of and potential responses" to the Nortel purchase.

I think I've become such a big fan of Android, both as a product and a phenomenon, that I've started thinking Google people are more clever than they really are.

I am heading off to a Jesuit Dominican retreat for a few days of corporal punishment and meditation so that I can try to get clear again.

Many thanks to all who have pointed out the errors in my thinking.

Attention: Frommer is a friend of mine

I just giving him a little shit over his iPad piece where he explains all the ways in which he does and does not use his iPad, that's all. Ease up on the nasty comments, okay? Fromedome is a good pal and a good reporter. His new site, Splatf, is pretty cool, and I admire him for striking out on his own to seek his fortune in the big city. He and I worked together at Forbes a long time ago, and honestly I wish him only the best. For the record, I too have had my iPad now for roughly 500 days, maybe a little bit more — I bought one the first week they were out. And, like Frommer, I mostly use it as a Web browser. And I still think there's nothing in the market that can touch it.

Obscure freelancer pens 1200-word essay explaining exactly how and why he still uses his iPad; anxious world breathes sigh of relief, then goes back to whatever they were doing before; freelancer returns to watching TV and eating Doritos

Big news: Dan Frommer, formerly of Business Insider, has now owned his iPad for exactly 500 days, and he is still using it for various things and believes that it is a useful device that fits into his life in certain ways, and though it is not perfect for everything it is very good at some things, and if you have 10 or 15 minutes with nothing better to do you might enjoy reading about how, exactly, Dan Frommer still uses his iPad, which for a while he wasn't using very much at all, though at first he was using it like all the time, and now he's settled into more of a normal rhythm where he uses it for various things most of which involve reading Web sites on the Internet using Apple's own Safari browser, an application that comes built-in on the iPad, at no cost. Dan Frommer does not read e-books or play videogames on the iPad. Nor does Dan Frommer use Flipboard . Dan Frommer is curious about AirPlay. Dan Frommer still uses his Macbook Air more than his iPad, but Dan Frommer nevertheless believes the iPad represents the future of computing. Dan Frommer is spending way too much time by himself in his apartment in Brooklyn and has way too much free time on his hands and someone needs to do an intervention.

New Arrington ultimatum: If you fire me one more time I swear to God I will walk out of here and never come back

It's official. Michael Arrington is out at TechCrunch. Erick Schonfeld becomes editor of the site but AOL says in a statement that TC will be "expanding its editorial leadership in the coming months." Countdown for reporters to start following up on their threats and bailing out begins … now.

Bay Area on red alert after Arrington vows to blow up TechCrunch HQ with laser from outer space

As Disrupt looms, Arrington's new demand: Poland, Austria, Sudetenland to be annexed to TechCrunch. And no more red M&Ms.

Entire staff of TechCrunch now threatening to commit mass suicide unless Michael Arrington gets his way, on everything, forever

That is the headline I've been waiting to see. But I got tired of waiting so I figured I would just write it myself.

Memo to TC staffers: You sold your startup to a big, stupid corporation. You were very happy to take the money. But the way these things work is that when you take money from a big, stupid corporation, you have to do what the idiots inside the big, stupid corporation tell you. That's the downside. The upside, of course, is the money. You took the money. What part of this do you not understand?

But oh, I hear you say, in our case the big, stupid corporation promised us that we would remain independent. We'd get to keep our "swagger," and our "Fuck you" attitude. Two things:

1. Get over yourselves.

2. This will come as as a surprise to you, but big, stupid corporations lie. It's what they do. They say things they don't mean. They do this all the time. They also sometimes say things one day and really mean them, but down the road they don't feel the same way and so they say something else.

You guys write about business, right? You're maybe aware of this phenomenon?

Apple's new "Give us back our iPhone" ad

Courtesy of Conan O'Brien.