Looking at the two big headlines of the day, it’s all I can do not to look for a chorus of All-4-One and Shania Twain. Two of the biggest names of the 90s making their big bid to remain relevant on the very same historic day…one at a time, please:<\/p>\n
1) Newt Gingrich. Where to start? America really wants a guy who knows how to strike when the iron’s had sixteen years to cool? A guy who has experience dumping cancer patients AND MS patients to take up with younger wives? An old white guy with a Southern accent? Let’s be honest: if you split Bill Clinton down the middle into one part with everything people loved about Clinton and one with everything people hated, you’d basically wind up with Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich. But because Washington DC is a company town, and the Sabbath Gasbags are a branch of the company, there is an actual perception in some quarters that Newt Gingrich is a wise old seasoned veteran of Washington – or worse, that he can merely be sold as such. That the rest of the world won’t look at him and see “Sarah Palin without sex appeal” – which, let’s be honest, is what the mighty Newt brings to the table.<\/p>\n
If you want a resume topline for Gingrich, make it this: he was midwife to modern conservative politics. He actually staked a bet that he could make American government into a parliamentary system with him as Prime Minister, and he nearly pulled it off for a year and a half. Sure, he couldn’t get the Senate to go along with him, and he eventually got outflanked by the President, but if you need a name to answer “who brought us the House Republicans as a supine body that would blindly do whatever they’re told, no matter how asinine or illogical,” Gingrich is that name. Government shutdown, Presidential impeachment, six years of roll-over-play-dead for Bush, and scorched-earth resistance to anything and everything Obama says up to and including “Good morning” – all can be laid at the door of the big thinker from Georgia. Including Republican defeat in 2006, when his own playbook was used to bum-rush the incumbent House majority.<\/p>\n
It’s amusing and handy to have Newt in play. For one thing, it makes a mockery of every word spoken about “sanctity of marriage” by the GOP field. For another, it helps drive home the point that the GOP is still the party of the Confederacy. For a third, it helps drive home the point that the GOP hasn’t had a new idea for about two decades. And most of all, it gives us the very real possibility that the 2012 electoral map will look like the 1964 one.<\/p>\n
2) EIGHT AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS. For bloody SKYPE. Microsoft has the cash, somehow, but this is a hell of an outlay when they were essentially bidding against themselves. And for what? Video chat everywhere? The ability to talk from your Hotmail account to your Windows 7 phone? (uncontrolled snickering goes here)<\/p>\n
Microsoft hasn’t had a good idea in…well hell, ever. They have built an empire on Windows and Office and created nothing of interest since; even their Internet Explorer monopoly was a product of building it into the operating system. Which in turn led to a decade of malware and security nightmares, while superior browsers emerged from the Mozilla project and from KHTML’s evolution into Webkit. All the big things of the last ten years – search, digital music, web-based collaboration, consumer smartphones, social networking, blogging – in every case, the Beast of Redmond has been a day late and a dollar short, and everyone in Silicon Valley knows that if your next big thing depends on a Windows PC, it’s not the next big thing.<\/p>\n
So this is Microsoft making an all-in bid to buy themselves relevance in the field of video chat. Hopefully the carrier partners they need for their Windows phone platform won’t be too pissed at bundled VoIP video chat, because they definitely don’t have the stroke Apple does with AT&T (and presumably now Verizon). Hopefully the emerging data caps on home broadband won’t discourage people from trying to Skype up their own personal Telepresence room at home. Hopefully acquisition by Microsoft won’t do for Skype what it did for, say, Hotmail…<\/p>\n
NB: As an aside, the most interesting thing to come out of Google I\/O, for me, is the commitment on the part of carriers and manufacturers to support Android upgrades for 18 months. In a world where the Nexus One gets introduced in January and dumped in May, where phones are unable to update eight months later, where the only way to get a current version of Android is to root and hack your phone or buy the one unlocked Google model – this is the only thing that will keep pace with iOS in terms of knowing for sure that you can update your device for the life of your contract.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Looking at the two big headlines of the day, it’s all I can do not to look for a chorus of All-4-One and Shania Twain. Two of the biggest names of the 90s making their big bid to remain relevant on the very same historic day…one at a time, please: 1) Newt Gingrich. Where to … <\/p>\n