Mobile Future, can Yahoo! really show the way?

Business Insider reports that Yahoo CEO Marisa Meyer is considering giving iphones to all Yahoo! Employees. It seems she agrees with those in the company who feel that their IT department’s commitment to Blackberry is holding them back and that their engineers would benefit from using devices that they aim to deliver services to; not Blackberrys. This was known at Sun Microsystems as “Eating our own dog food” The article finished with what I assume to be a Business Insider editorial comment,

“Yahoo should be innovating for the future, and BlackBerrys are not part of the future. They are part of the quickly fading past.”

The article also states that Meyer is not so wedded to Apple, and might consider Android. The unspoken question is whether Yahoo! is part of the quickly fading past.

On another note, I use all three devices, although the Apple device is an ipod touch and since like everyone I am unhappy with what I have, and am already looking forward to replacing both the phones. …

Labour’s Lost Mayor

sack boris projected

This article was started just after the election in May 2012, and only finished over the Xmas break of 2013, nearly 20 months later. Some of the tenses may thus be a bit odd. I have backdated this in the blog to the time I started it. However RSS feed consumers and Facebook will publish this as at today. The article talks about the candidates, Labour’s manifesto, the role of London Mayor, how Labour sought to hold Boris to account for his record and character and briefly questions whether London is a coherent political entity. I have tried to ensure the article is contemporaneous to the time of the election. (I didn’t quite manage it.)

As I’ve said, I have been busy over the last year campaigning for Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London and for a Labour group on the London Assembly. Now we have the perfect vision from hindsight others have been writing about the London election, Labour’s victory in the Assembly and failure to win the Mayor election. I thought I’d join in. Many blame the candidate, but I feel the issues are deeper than that and that lessons need to be learned. …