SFist Tech Roundup: Just Like You
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if the same goes for intellectual property theft and encroaching on other people's business, then a lot of people should be feeling very flattered this week.
Pixar should be flattered by the attention they're getting from former owner George Lucas, who opened a computer animation studio in Singapore on Thursday. Rob Coleman, the new studio's animation and development director, name-dropped Pixar while describing the studio, saying that Lucasfilms' efforts will be different because they focus on combining CGI with live-action characters. The studio is intended to allow Lucas to avoid union labor regulations in the United States bring an Asian aesthetic and sensibility to the Star Wars franchise with two new television series.
While we in the Tech Labs are disappointed that the shows aren't being directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, who did such a great job with the "Clone Wars" series that it actually fooled us into believing we still liked Star Wars, we remain cautiously optimistic. That series at least showed that Lucasfilm was willing to try new things with the characters and the franchise. (Such as teaching the kids about science in Boston).
While Lucas wants to be Pixar, Microsoft wants to be Apple. At a tech conference in San Francisco this week, Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie mentioned the iPod as an example of a consumer electronics device that took over a market and made a metric assload of money for its company. Actually, he described it as a product that perfectly merges hardware, software, and services in a way that's transparent to the end-user, but the sentiment is still the same.
Bill Gates is having none of that, though; he says that Microsoft's success is "overwhelmingly greater" than Apple's. No, Gates wants to be like Google. All the tech news swirling around the two companies has been building up to a big battle between Microsoft and Google over web-distributed office and productivity applications, so Gates responded with... the claim that Microsoft is going to dominate search engines. Apparently this is all going to happen simultaneously with Microsoft's dominating Apple in the digital media market and dominating Sony in videogames. We're less optimistic about that, as we'd prefer to see a word processor that's not big, bloated, and expensive, that's better integrated with online content and content creation.
Meanwhile, Google is tired of being Google and instead wants to be like Craigslist. Lots of blogs are talking about Google Base, a test/alpha/secret project designed to let users create listings in a database. (Some blogs were so exicted that they resorted to tired Web catch phrases to talk about the story — come on, why don't you throw the dancing baby in there while you're at it?)
The service wasn't intended to be so widely seen, as it's still in testing and the company is still trying to decide how they're going to use it. Considering that at the moment, it's not much more than a multi-user database, it's best to wait and see what they do with it. Speculation has been all over the place, from the idea that it's a global Craigslist, to an ebay competitor, to something that will take over every SQL database on the planet.
And lurking around the fringes, obstinately refusing to fit in with the theme, are the curmudgeons unimpressed with "Web 2.0", who want the Internet to be just like, well, Web 1.0. Apparently, AJAX isn't all that ground-breaking or innovative, and it causes issues with browser navigation. And "participatory media" like Wikipedia is doomed to irrelevance, because it's brought down by the lowest common denominator. And the phenomenon of blogging taking precedence over traditional news media is creating "the cult of the amateur," as real journalists are pushed out in favor of cheaper opinion-makers who don't actually gather news, but instead simply aggregate stories from other sources and publish it with their own bias and lack of fact-checking.
To which we respond, "Oh yeah? Well, you're dumb!"