Ballmer to Apple: Don't Act Like Microsoft!

Yes, this is dripping with irony. Ballmer is actually asking Apple to delink it's software from hardware. I guess when a company is successful and you have no answer for their innovations, you should just accuse them of wrongdoing while ignoring your own transgressions.

Ballmer Pleads For Openness To Compete With Apple

"At the Mobile World Congress, Steve Ballmer took aim at Apple's closed iPhone ecosystem with an ironic plea for openness: 'Openness is central because it's the foundation of choice.' Ballmer has apparently forgotten his company's own efforts to vertically integrate hardware and software (Zune, XBox), its history of vertically integrating software (tying SharePoint into Office, IE, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc.), as well as years of illegally tying Windows to Internet Explorer that only the US Justice Department could undo.

iMovie 08 bites

Come on Apple! This is the kind of idiotic thing Microsoft does: Take software that's working well and, inexplicably, redesign key interface elements so that it becomes almost unusable (just look at the new MS Office 2007 for an example). Whoever convinced the iLife supervisors at Apple that the timeline in iMovie had to go should be sacked, posthaste, and those Apple supervisors should probably be booted as well. God, we're in trouble once Steve Jobs either retires or dies!

There's no end to the ranting out there regarding this issue, but just so you're aware...Apple apparently understands it's a dumbass, because they allow downloads of iMovie 06 to augment the 08 version. What they meant to say was "replace."

And just so you know, I made an effort and gave iMovie 08 a try; I just edited a movie with it. I got used to some things after a while (and a few new features are actually desirable), but it's still cumbersome and confusing. A timeline is too important, especially for audio edits.

BRING BACK THE TIMELINE APPLE! Leave the bumbling to Microsoft.