If you launched a brand new product just before Christmas and then sold around 700 000 units, you’d be pretty pleased. But if your company was Microsoft, and the product was the Surface tablet, those numbers would look a bit pitiful. But wait a minute
Browsing: Alistair Fairweather
When was the last time you heard people, young or old, arguing the merits of different rock bands? I’m guessing it’s been a while. But what about a tiff about their choice of mobile phone? In the last five years, I’ve heard too many to count. Does that make personal technology the rock ‘n roll of this century? The
What if I told you that modern life as we know it relies on a vast army of thinking machines? There are at least 50m of them on the planet, yet relatively few people would recognise one in a picture. I’m talking about servers – the powerful computers that underpin the Internet, accelerate scientific research
While titans like Apple, Microsoft and Google are grappling for global dominance, ordinary people around the world have begun tinkering with gadgets again. Just look at the Raspberry Pi. It’s barely bigger than a credit card and costs less than R250, but the Pi is a fully fledged computer. Hook it up to your TV and a
I threw away a pair of Sony headphones a few weeks ago, not out of disgust or carelessness, but because after nearly 15 years of hard service they had finally stopped working. That, in a nutshell, is the Sony story. Since it was founded in 1946 – emerging literally out of the
If I told you online shopping is the next big thing to hit South Africa, you might think I was living in 1995. So-called experts will tell you big brands like Amazon and Kalahari have the market sewn up. They have the scale, the supply chains and the deep pockets to dominate the market completely
Rumours are circulating that Apple may abandon Intel chips in favour of those designed by ARM Holdings. Bloomberg reported on 6 November that “people familiar with the company’s research” had said Apple was “exploring” the idea. Of course these sources
The year 1975 was a bumper one for the personal computer. Nearly 50 000 of them were sold, hatching an entirely new market. Just a year or two earlier, only giant corporations could afford computers. Jump forward to 2012: between July and September 87m new PCs were shipped and more than
When Stephen Elop took over at Nokia, he likened the company’s predicament to a man standing on a burning oil rig, debating whether to brave the cold sea or the flames. Nokia has since dived headlong into change – and is yet to surface. Microsoft, the company Elop left to join Nokia, is now toying with a similar plunge into
The iPhone 5 is a huge disappointment, without any of the delightful innovations that characterised the launches of its older siblings. The Phone 5 is a huge success, selling faster than any of the models that came before it. These are the messages competing for dominance in the tech and business press. But which