in other news, this is a cool retrospective of Sony’s historical PC designs . . .

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/6/5385716/sony-vaio-iconic-pcs-photo-essay

I always thought Sony was doing interesting stuff in the PC space, though they were hobbled by sticking with Windows 9x ~ XP.

Same thing with their interesting PalmOS efforts . . .

http://www.amazon.com/Sony-CLIE-PEG-T665C-U-Handheld/dp/B000068MQU

I bought that in 2002 . . .

Amazing how much Microsoft’s corporate incompetence has hobbled the entire tech sector.

They fought the good fight against iOS, Android, and HTML5, but I think Google is going to eat their lunch.

Goog might take out Apple this decade if they’re not careful, too.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/04/asus-chromebox/

~$200! That’s what Windows 8.1 can cost alone!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832416711

Living in Tokyo in the early 1990s allowed me to see the tail-end of Japan’s domestic PC industry, before Windows 95 and especially 98 rolled through Akihabara, leaving nobody standing against the Microsoft tide . . . even Apple was on its last legs ca. 2000, though the iMac did give them a small shot in the arm.

Fujitsu and Sharp were doing kinda interesting things with FM Towns and X68000 respectively. The 68K deserved better than what Apple, Amiga, and Atari were able to cobble together; Amiga got closest to the ideal in some areas, but nobody was able to put together the full package (H/W, OS, API).

Apple’s strength in the 80s and 90s was API.

But with HTML5, I think H/W, OS, and API are going to become irrelevant this decade.

This is why Microsoft needed to kill Netscape in the 1990s, prevent Win32 from becoming hidden (and thus irrelevant) under the HTML.

If & when $200 H/W becomes performant enough to run HTML5 apps without what Goog calls “jank”,

http://jankfree.org

Android/iOS/WinRT/OSX just become irrelevant for most people.