We (the Blogosphere) Stand on Guard for Thee (Apple, Google, et al)
When the bandwagon starts rolling when do you decide to jump on? To be specific, when news such as Apple’s new iPhone or Cisco suing Apple for the use of iPhone name emerges does it make sense to blog on it when a post frenzy has already happened. In other words, how much additional value can anyone offer that hasn’t already been written? Some people such as Rick Segal and Dave Taylor have decided to wait a day or so to give themselves some time to think before offering their insights/thoughts as opposed to piling on the news.
Taylor, for example, made some excellent points about Microsoft’s controversial decision to give bloggers free laptops with the new Vista operating system several days after the news broke. After the hue and cry had settled down about whether giving away laptops was ethical, Taylor took a different approach by calculating the amount of money that Microsoft spent giving away the laptops (approx. $150,000) and why Microsoft decided to go that route rather than give away 7,500 copies of Vista for the same price.
The answer, according to Taylor, is “Microsoft Vista is in fact a bear to install and has prohibitive hardware requirements. That’s the only conclusion I can draw, because if it were a breeze to upgrade from WinXP to Windows Vista, with all your apps backwards compatible, all your data intact, and all your files untouched, you’d be happy to install Vista on your existing PC and enjoy the new OS.”
Maybe Taylor’s wait and write approach is the way to go. Of course, this means you risk missing out on being part of the news/conversation as it happens, but it also gives bloggers the opportunity to perhaps offer some much-needed insight rather than a quick reaction.
Note: I’m trying a different format for my posts by separating the paragraphs after a friend suggested the the wide text column was difficult to read. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone
Written by Mark Evans on January 12th, 2007 with
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