Sometimes I think people get so involved in trying to make a grand point that they miss the obvious one.  Such is the case with the International Herald Tribune's article entitled "CD sales falling faster than digital music sales rise".  In it they say...

Global music sales dropped 8 percent to $19.4 billion in 2007, according to a report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Revenue came in at its slowest pace since at least 1997, the first year for which the body issued figures. Physical sales of CDs and DVDs fell 13 percent to $15.9 billion. Sales of downloaded songs and mobile-phone ringtones rose 34 percent to $2.9 billion.

Digital sales "are growing healthily but, crucially, not fast enough to arrest the overall decline of the market," said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the industry group.

Tackling online piracy is essential to the industry's fortunes, according to the report. "Even the most innovative business models are totally undermined by free music," Kennedy said. There were 30 billion illegal downloads in 2007, with 39 percent of teenagers in the U.S. using file-sharing networks to access pirated music, he said.

Now I have been a staunch critique of music piracy but I doubt this is about that.  This is about everyone missing a very important detail. 

By design, digital sales are going to bring music sales in general down.

A long, long time ago someone in the music industry made an ingenious sales decision.  That person created the concept of "an album" and used it to package an artist's lack luster songs with their great ones and charge the same amount for both.  This scheme has been around for so long that we forget just how brilliant a sales move it was.

But it was such a brilliant move that I suspect it at least doubled the sales of the music industry.  Now that people can get around it you can expect sales to fall in a big way.  That, in my opinion, is a much more likely cause for this fall than piracy is. 

Look, Music Piracy in kids has always existed so I don't think that is going to cause a drop.  Adult music piracy is a new problem but by every measure I've seen its a relatively small one so while I oppose it on principle I don't think its making much of a dent in the industries' sales either. 

So if sales are dropping I doubt it has anything to do with Piracy especially when a much more likely candidate exists in the sales of individual song sales.

Pardon my double posting today but a series of posts really got to me and I felt the need to speak  up.  This really is the very definition of a "petty annoyance post" on my part so I apologize in advance (especially since my last post fell into vaguely the same category)

Anyway, the first quote came from Mark Evans who discusses Yahoo's current predicament...

Maybe the beginning of the end was the appointment of Terry Semel as CEO, who may go down as Yahoo’s John Sculley. Semel was intent on leveraging Yahoo’s traffic to maximize revenue. From a business perspective, it was probably the right decision but this laser-like focus on cash took away from the fact Yahoo made its mark by delivering solid services that people used and enjoyed.

There are so many things wrong with this paragraph that I barely know where to begin.  Here's a quick list though...

1. How did Yahoo! "make its mark by delivering solid services" exactly?  Yahoo! was semi successful as a portal and free e-mail provider but those services were always lackluster.  Yahoo! was never a good search engine and in fact was losing market share to Altavista before Google ever came along.  Their messaging system always sucked, their IM has always been an also ran, and so on, and so on.  Yahoo! hasn't been a successful company since the dotcom boom and is still alive largely based on a colorful brand and an early entry into the portal market
2. How did Semel get the blame for this?  I didn't personally agree with the direction he took the company but the man was brought on after the ship was already sinking.  He was fired because he couldn't get it back above water but his failure was purely one of not being able to solve the problems.  He didn't create them. 
3. This is off topic but people who throw John Sculley's name around either need to study Apple history or shut up.  Sculley had a run at Apple that was very successful overall and its Sculley that was responsible for the Mac's initial success (Jobs refused to put a hard disk in the Mac so it was largely a failure until he was ousted).  Sculley had faults to be sure but he wasn't a failure by a long shot and he's responsible for more of the current Apple mythos than he gets credit for.

The rest of the post is just about as bad.  I've been a reader of Mark Evans blog for a while and I don't mean to attack...well no, I do in fact mean to attack him here.  This post was just stupid and in this case he deserves to be attacked. If you want to discuss the history of the technology industry than you should have some idea what you are talking about. 

Anyway, Mr. Evans points to a post that amazingly annoyed me even more.  In it blogger Steve Hodson gives this advice that he believes will "save" Yahoo!

1. Kick Yang the hell out of there ASAP – like yesterday

2. Take the penalty and ditch the upper management as quickly as possible.

3. Tell Carl Icahn to go sit in the corner and STFU

4. Pay whatever it cost to buy FriendFeed ASAP

5. Put the FriendFeed boys in charge of Yahoo ASAP

You've got to be bloody kidding me.  I swear, I had to read the comments just to make sure he he wasn't kidding.  FriendFeed?  Do you have any idea how small and insignificant FriendFeed is in comparison to the whole of Yahoo?

I mean, its a nice little service but the sheer idea that FriendFeed would make any difference at all is ludicrous. 

Forget the down right insane idea of "putting the FriendFeed boys in charge" for now (he claims he was "being facetious" in that one claim but serious in all his other ones).  FriendFeed is an 8 person company with $5 Million in VC money while Yahoo! is a 14,000 person company with $7 Billion in Revenue per year.  Saying FriendFeed would make a bit of difference is like proposing a guy with a water bucket can purify the Pacific Ocean. 

I mean honestly, FriendFeed was launched less than 5 months ago and this guy just seriously suggested they have the proven leadership to not only run Yahoo! but save it from years of downward spiraling.

Geez...

I'm sorry.  This post is harsh and I know its harsh but I have to admit I don't feel the least little bit bad about it.  Really folks, how can anyone take this type of thing seriously?  It blows my mind.  If the above is considered serious discussion than what exactly is considered idiotic discussion?

Addendum: On the Semel point I offer this...

Again, hardly a great run but I wouldn't call him a failure either.

When did academia completely lose their integrity?  I wonder this while reading Kara Swisher's account of the ceremony in which Harvard Business School awarded Facebook its "30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award".  Here's a quote...

While it is not yet clear exactly what kind of business case study Facebook will turn out to be in the end–a raging success or a raging something else entirely–that has not stopped Harvard from feting the hot and hyped social-networking site.

That would be the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California, which will bestow upon Facebook its 30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award on June 17 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport.

This, to me, is an embarrassment to the Harvard Business School.  From a business perspective what exactly does Facebook have to brag about?  What business school skills does Facebook epitomize precisely?

Thus far they are a company that burns through investor money while failing to come up with any way to sustain themselves.  How exactly does a company that still has no idea how to make a profit after over 4 years of existence get an award for being a well run business?

This isn't to take away from certain impressive technical innovations Facebook has made but even those are few and far between (other than the Facebook platform what technically have they really accomplished?)

This might seem like a mindless rant of annoyance and, to a certain extent, it is.  But the bigger issue here is that business organization does matter.  At some point consultants spouting words like "empowerment" and "employee self motivation" made us forget that business management is a requirement of a truly successful company (you know, the ones that actually turn profits) 

Apple engineers created technical wonders years ahead of their time between the years of 1985 and 1998 (The Jobs-less years) including not one, not two, but three different Operating Systems that were better than Windows in every conceivable way.  But the place was a chaotic mess where no one could get a project out the door.  So a company with the finest engineers in the industry stagnated despite the fact that they were creating world class products. 

That is the importance of business management.  Good process insures a business against that type of thing and you need people who have studied creating good process to make that happen. 

The same is true with making a profit.  Someone with some business sense might have said "Hey, maybe we should do some market research on this Beacon thing to see if people will consider it a horrible invasion of their privacy."  Again, the reason market research exists is to avoid just such disasters and not knowing that gets you into trouble. 

But when even the Harvard Business School seems to have abandoned the principles of good business management one has to wonder how the next generation is going to get anything done. 

Wanna know a secret?  I actually kind of like Fred Wilson.  I disagree with him on just about every subject under the sun but I can't help but like the guy.  I'm not proud of it but its true  (I try to dislike VCs in general, its a trick I picked up in the Valley and its served me well thus far).   

Because for any fault he might have he at least focuses on issues.  Plus when ever I type "Mr Wilson" I think of Dennis the Menace and for some reason that makes me laugh. 

Anyway, back on the "disagreeing with everything he says" point, today he said this...

Widgets have made a great contribution to the web in the past four years. They have allowed us to mashup our web pages and create experiences that express dozens of web services on a single page. This blog's front page expresses at least fourteen web services at this point in time. It was a lot more before I went on my recent housecleaning spree.

And yet, at least in my experience, widgets suck. That was the top search term on this blog for most of last year. And everytime I clean up my act, I get a huge number of readers thanking me. The widgets (and the javascript I put on this blog) slow down the page load times considerably. And they are distracting to many of the readers. I imagine if I took a poll, about 2/3 of my readers would vote for  widgetless sidebars.

OK, lets start with the most obvious point: Widgets don't suck. 

Widgets can't suck because Widgets are just self contained features that allow people to configure a program such as a blog to their liking.  So by definition they can't suck because by definition all software features can't suck.  There are certainly software features that do suck but features as a concept can't suck.

People say Widgets suck but what they really mean is "people over doing Widgets suck".  In the same way that you'll get a lot of people saying "Flash Sucks" when in fact what they mean is "people who use Flash badly suck".  But the reality there is that anything is going to suck if you over use it so there's really nothing that doesn't suck under the criteria set above.

So already we've proven that the problem Mr. Wilson (heh) is trying to address doesn't really exist. 

But there's a bigger point here and that point is why I posted on this.  Again from the post...

So if widgets suck, then how do we continue to express all of the web services on the pages we create? I think we need to move to a model where the content is all in the same flow. My tumblog is a good example of this. Here's a screenshot of fredwilson.vc for those of you who have never visited.

This idea honestly scares me to the point of sending a chill down my spine. 

Look, there are a lot of you out there that enjoy subscribing to 800 different services and spending huge amounts of time populating those various accounts.  I have no problem with that.  I'm happy for you.  Really I am.

But I have a busy life and while I value what you have to say when you are willing to sit down and put some thought into writing a blog post I really don't care about all your other junk.  Sorry. 

So this whole "lets just mix it all together in one big lump" thing really doesn't work for me.

Maybe if it was something configurable like Friendfeed but I've noticed even those tend to get out of hand because people keep adding the next new thing which means I constantly have to weed out the next new thing to get to what I want. 

Beyond that, this idea doesn't really solve the problem Mr. Wilson (heh) outlined in the first place.  The issue was that Widgets slow down a page and make it look crowded.  So tell me, what's slower?  Having one blog post with a bunch of widgets on the side that slow things down or having to click through 6 tumblr pages of junk to actually find the blog post in the first place?

Wouldn't it make more sense if you just didn't use so many widgets?

This kind of says it all...

From CNet...

A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.

Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.

The numbers don't get much better for Vista in 2009: 24 percent (compared with 29 percent for XP). That's a big step up from 8 percent, but is it a sign of momentum to come or just a temporary stopgap while developers wait until Windows 7?

Now to a certain extent this is disingenuous because people targeting XP are also targeting Vista.  One of Vista's biggest problems is that they made almost all of the significant improvements in Vista available to XP users making Vista a moot point.   Any Windows Forms or WPF application written for XP will run on Vista without modification.

(For those who don't know WPF stands for Windows Presentation Foundation and is the preferred way to develop Windows Applications now)

Yes WPF applications might look a little nicer on Vista because of the Aero Glass effect and the Anti-Aliasing but most users don't care about jagged edges or nifty see-through effects on their applications so its irrelevant. 

But it does illustrate a bigger problem which is that the Windows Desktop Application market is drying up in many ways.  Lets look at the different types of Apps out there and what has happened in the last few years...

Business/School Applications: To the extent that home users do use this kind of thing Microsoft dominates the market.  So there's really no point to developers even trying for a piece of it.

Education: This market more than any has been decimated by the Web.  A few cheap encyclopedias still remain but for the most part this market is dead.  You do still have educational games but those developers have to sell to schools with broken down PCs meaning they are probably targeting Windows 98 still.

Games: There are still die hard gamers out there but for the most part the era of PC Gaming is dead.  They might not be as powerful but consoles allow developers to have a set feature list to target which means console games almost always look better.  Now that the major consoles support HD there's just not much reason to stick with the PC anymore.

Financial: There are still a few Quicken/Money users out there but my impression after an informal poll of the people around me is that most just use their bank's web site at this point.  Plus with applications like Mint popping up the Desktop market for this type of thing will degrade even further.

Custom: There used to be a very robust market for custom applications used by small businesses and all of those were written for Windows.  But as someone who knows a lot of small business owners I can tell you more and more of those applications are becoming hosted web apps.  Small businesses usually don't have full time IT staff which means they've always relied heavily on the software manufacturer for support.   Hosted apps make supporting these applications much cheaper for that manufacturer so this is just a natural evolution of the market.

To me that's a pretty grim picture for Microsoft.  Add things like Adobe AIR into the mix (which allows developers to write applications that run on multiple platforms) and you have a dark road ahead for Windows desktop development. 

Addendum: The article quotes ITJungle.com as saying Vista's increased security is driving developers away.  They cite "Kernel-level access and User Access Control" as big issues.  To me, that doesn't hold much water.  Any Windows developer is going to be writing .Net applications by now and .Net applications are largely self contained.  I don't see a lot of people needing "kernel level access".  As for the new UAC restrictions I learned how to create a manifest after reading one article so I don't think that's such a biggie either (a Manifest is how you inform the system your application needs to run as elevated.  If the user approves your application to do so that's all there is to getting around UAC)

Louis Gray talks about meeting Disqus founder Daniel Ha over the weekend and how that meeting made him even more impressed with the company as a whole.  For those who don't know Disqus is a centralized commenting system.  Bloggers can replace their comment system with Disqus which then allows commenters to log in using an account and have a persistent identity across all Disqus enabled blogs.

Here's the one paragraph gist of Mr. Gray's feelings towards Disqus....

For a service that's already got what I believe to the best solution with threaded conversations, a strong GUI and centralized activity, Disqus is continuing to work hard to maintain their lead. Andrew's comments point to near-term release of importing, exporting and trackbacks, and Daniel seems to have an extremely level perspective on what could be a challenging environment for anyone, let alone a 22 year-old entrepreneur. I believe we need a lot more people like Daniel focused on delivering a great customer experience with real benefits, who are less focused on the day to day fights between competitors than they are on getting the service perfected.

Disqus is one of those companies that is on the rise in "blogger talk share".  Like Twitter and FriendFeed before it I firmly believe Disqus will obtain "A-List Darling" status in the coming months.   But bloggers are a false positive for these types of services and I really think Disqus needs to realize that if they want to succeed in the long term.

Most of the bloggers endorsing Disqus are the types that basically live on line.  It's a clique of about 1,000 people and they, for better or worse, don't have any issue with putting themselves completely out there. 

While that's great for them I don't think it's how most people live.  Which is why I think it is a mistake for Disqus to continue their current track of making all the comments fall into one global pot. 

I really don't think people want a centralized identity on the web.  The beauty of the web is that there is probably some site out there for just about anything.  That makes it very easy to connect with people who share whatever specialized interest you have.  But that doesn't necessarily mean you want all those interests coming together. 

People aren't centralized by nature.  We act in different ways depending on who we're around at the time and how we think those people perceive us.  So while the CEO of a fortune 500 company might be the biggest comic book fan in the world he probably isn't going to bring that up at a stock holders meeting. 

People want the ability to pursue their interests privately.

If Disqus really wants to take off I think they need to look at allowing people to have a global log-in that can have several identities attached to it.  Then allow blogs to form communities amongst themselves rather than being part of one big Disqus community.  That way users can determine for themselves how much of their life they want to share with the people who might read their comments.

Until Disqus finds a way to let them do that I don't see it going very far.

I have been critical of Steve Gilmor's writing style in the past.  Something about a person writing in a way that seems designed to confuse people seems downright immoral to me.  But today is a day of celebration because Mr. Gillmor has actually produced....wait for it...a completely coherent post.

Yes the logic's still a bit fuzzy and the focus is still a bit rambling but every sentence is profoundly understandable and that deserves a shout out.  In order to do my little part to prove that speaking clearly inspires dialogue and to hopefully encourage coherence in the future I felt the need to pass on some link-love. 

So without further ado, Steve says...

About noon Friday here in California, I happened to click on a Summize tab substituting for Twitter’s Track functionality and monitoring the use of my Twitter screen name. Someone named Scrabo had tweeted “Rumor here at NBC is that Tim Russert passed away”. A minute later another: “@stevegillmor Brokaw getting ready to go on air.”

Turning on NBC, then MSNBC, then CNN, I found nothing: reports on flooding in the Midwest, breaking news about a bomb attack in an Afghan prison, a strange obliviousness on the NBC outlets. Something about the first tweet resonated - “here at NBC” - and I went back to the computer and Summize, finding another tweet directed at me that said Wikipedia was already updated with the news. Jumping to the New York Times, a single line at the top of the home page. Finally, at 12:33 Tom Brokaw broke into programming with the news.

I've gone over the inaccuracy of Twitter more than once so I won't rehash that.  Instead, I wanted to say something about expediency.

Three kinds of News

The way I see it there are three types of news that we all consume.  Those are...

News requiring some reaction: Natural Disasters near those you love, disastrous turns in Financial Markets you participate in, and anything else that might require you to act quickly falls into this category.

News requiring your attention: This includes things like the various positions of political candidates, news on stuff that will make you healthier, and other things you should probably know but which don't necessarily require you to do anything.

Idle Chit-Chat: This includes the various goings on of celebrities, heroic things done by Children and/or Puppies, and other entertainment based news events.

The point I'm making with the above distinctions is a simple one: There are different types of news and they require different types of delivery mechanisms.  Most people have lives that require them to pay attention to what is happening to them which means they only want their attention drawn away if they need it to be.  Like in the case of news needing them to react in some way.

Situations needing a reaction have systems already in place

Here's a funny Twitter fact: Its only been around for a couple years.

Here's a funny life fact: People have needed to react to natural disasters and stock crashes for far longer than a couple years

Here's my not so funny point: Any news that requires a reaction from you already has a system to deliver that information immediately.  Financial companies will send you a text message if your stocks are dropping, the USGS has an Earthquake Notification System (via SMS) and every other type of news requiring an immediate reaction from you is going to have a system that informs you immediately.

Oh, and those system's won't require you to comb through tons of people talking about what they had for lunch in order to find that news.

The benefit of ignoring other news

That brings us back to Mr Gillmor's point in regards to the other type of news.  The thing to remember here is that you don't need to know the other types of news in real time.  In fact, it can be detrimental to do so. 

In Mr. Gillmor's example he brags about finding out about the death of Tim Russert before anyone else.  In it he says...

But an event such as Russert’s death and the emotional shock wave it produced put the lie to the notion that this stuff is echo chamber or A-List or whatever. 30 minutes before the world knew about this tragedy, someone I don’t know reached out and established a connection based on mutual affinity.

Given that quote I ask you: don't you think it might be advantageous to hold off on learning news that will send an "emotional shock wave" through you until after your work day is over?  Rather than spend the rest of it distracted and completely unproductive? 

Expediency is not always a good thing which is probably why there aren't already systems in place to deliver that type of news in real time.

So what have we learned?

Twitter is a nice service for those who enjoy it.  Nothing more.  Trying to attach importance to it by saying it delivers news faster doesn't hold a lot of water. 

(oh, and let me finish by saying one more time that the news it delivers is completely inaccurate)

One last thing to regular readers of this blog.  I want to apologize for again tackling the whole "Twitter News" thing.  I know I promised not to.  But I felt the special circumstances warranted a quick revisit.  I'll definitely shy away from here on out.  I PROMISE!

Addendum: Michael Arrington posts a Qik Video follow up to the post here in which he tries to clarify what Mr. Gillmor was trying to get across.  Basically the point he was trying to make, if I'm getting this right (the video cuts off at a weird point), is that Twitter allows people to connect in a personal way over things that happen in real time.  I can understand that point on an intellectual level and I think that's a big reason why people who like Twitter use it.  For me personally though I don't see it.  It takes a lot more than a 140 character summation of events for me to connect with a person who I don't know.  I assume when someone famous dies there will be other people who are touched by it so for me to connect with someone over it I need to know that something specific about their sorrow jives with my own experience.

A novel idea occurred to me today.  I was browsing the Internet, seeing what was going on in the world, and I thought to myself "Tom, why not write a blog entry that doesn't involve the iPhone?"  Which is where this rather amusing promo video from Microsoft came in...

Even if you don't watch the whole thing you owe it to yourself to jump to the 1 minute 5 second mark to check out the horribly lame "Flirt" application.  As I watched this I couldn't help but remember this quote from the famous Surface Parody Video...

The future is here and its not an iPhone...Its a big ass table!  -   Microsoft Surface Parody Video 

For the record, though its terribly overpriced and probably too early to matter, I do think Microsoft Surface technology is the future.   Or if not it specifically a technology a lot like it.    The problem right now is that we've become too used to looking at cyberspace through screens and it clouds our view of how that interaction should ideally work. 

Its a tunnel mentality where we've become so used to looking at cyberspace through tiny windows that we've forgotten the world behind those tiny windows is of infinite size.  Like the submarine crew that has forgotten how vast the ocean is after months of looking at it through tiny port holes we've put the vastness of cyberspace into a small box and forgotten it can exist outside that box. 

I've never been a big fan of Bill Gates' predictions (remember "The Road Ahead") but I couldn't agree more when he says that every physical surface will probably use this technology eventually.  As cyberspace breaks out of those little screens I think we'll find ourselves more and more enveloped by it.   

Microsoft's Touchwall begins to show some of that potential.  Though the technology being used to produce it seems commercially unviable (as Microsoft pretty much admits by saying they won't market it as a product) the concept is there.  An Infinite canvas from which to work from.  A work surface that literally goes on forever.

That's the promise of Microsoft's Surface.  Instead of sitting down at a monitor you'll call up a window on your wall or coffee table and work from that.  Beyond that you'll be able to change the very appearance of your home at will as display technology reaches the point of photo realism. 

Don't get me wrong, this future is still a ways off.  The materials need to become sturdier while simultaneously becoming much, much cheaper.  That's going to take a while.  But the promise of the technology is too great for it not to eventually happen.

The problem Microsoft has now is that they're way ahead of the curve which makes Surface a technology lost in time.   Being years ahead of the competition only counts if you can turn that advanced technology into a viable product with an upgrade path.  Surface is advanced right now but the technology will easily be cloned by everyone by the time the future I described arrives. 

Microsoft's challenge right now is to turn it into something more impressive than a $10,000 arcade game while the future catches up to the technology.  If they can't I suspect they'll join Xerox PARC in learning how great research and lofty concepts mean nothing if you can't turn them into something that can be sold.

All that said, I have to admit that seeing this technology has had a profound effect on me.  I've recently started to adjust my thinking somewhat as a developer because of it.  Product lifetimes can easily be 8-to-10 years in the corporate world which means that new technology will often have to be grafted onto those old solutions.  So for me, as a developer, I feel obligated to start looking at ways the programs I write can be translated into increasingly bigger surfaces and how I can make UI designs that will scale up in size and interact with different forms of input(so users don't have to relearn a program if wall size screens become the norm some day).

Continuing on what seems to be "The Week of the iPhone" here on TomsTechBlog here's a story about Steve Jobs saying Apple will design its own mobile processors in the next generation of iPhone...

South Korea-based Samsung has long been central to Apple's handheld efforts (), supplying the primary SoCs -- or system-on-chips -- for everything from the iPod nano to the iPhone. Meanwhile, Intel has been in the running to assert its Atom processors at heart of a larger iPhone-like Multi-Touch internet tablet that's also under development at the Cupertino-based electronics maker, and was at one time believed to have sealed the deal.

Unfortunately for the two industry heavyweights, Apple appears to have other plans to further innovation around its Multi-Touch platform that will reduce its reliance on chip designs conceived largely by third parties. In an interview following his keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Jobs told the New York Times' John Markoff that his firm's recent $278 million acquisition of a small fabless semiconductor company called P.A. Semi was an investment in the future of its handheld products.

The reason I post on this, to be honest, is to make myself look good.  Because just a couple days ago I posted this...

Why this should give people pause: Jobs' crowing over how the 3G and GPS chips were fit into the iPhone without increasing the size was just the NeXT monitor all over again.  I have no doubt there was some amazing and very time consuming engineering behind that accomplishment.  The question is whether that was the best use of Apple's resources and if anyone would care that the phone was 1/4 of an inch thicker than the original.  Because I suspect that other things got the shaft because of that feat of engineering.

Designing your own processor is stupid because no one cares and it's a huge resource drain.

Lets say they do have a fantastic design team and they do manage to eek out a whole second or so of faster processing time.  Ask yourself, is it going to matter to the consumer?  Is it going to matter more than Video Chat, MMS Messaging, or a host of other features they could easily produce with an Intel chip?

Of course it isn't.  Consumers don't care about processors unless the performance increase is huge.  Want Proof?  One example springs to mind and that example is...Apple. 

Remember the days when Apple was using the PowerPC chip?  They'd trot out a Mac, put it next to a PC and amaze onlookers as the PowerPC Mac easily bested the equivalent Intel PC.  Then they sold millions and millions of Macs and eventually defeated the PC in the marke...oh wait, no they didn't. 

What they did was eventually move to Intel chips because no one cared that the PowerPC was faster and their refusal to switch was backing them into a corner on the hardware front. 

Now Apple has another revolutionary product and It's looking more and more like Old Apple is back with its "Not Invented Here" syndrome fully intact.  I can see the press conference now: Apple will trot out its new iPhones, put them next to the equivalent phone on Intel architecture and amaze onlookers as the iPhone easily bests the other phone.  Then they'll sell millions and millions of iPhones and eventually defeat...oh wait...

Yeah...that's my point.