When I moved to Cupertino in 1989, it had several general bookstores: A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in the Oaks, a B. Dalton in Cupertino Crossroads, a Waldenbooks in Vallco Mall, and a Crown Books in the Marketplace (across from Vallco). Stacey’s later opened a branch near Vallco. For the geeks, there was Computer …
Category Archives: Business and economy
More product naming goodness
Earlier I wrote about Microsoft and IBM making their nomenclature more sane. Looks like Sun is getting also into the act. The current version of Java is “Java 2 Platform Standard Edition, version 5.0” (or J2SE 5.0), which has an internal version number of 1.5. That’s three version numbers for one product. Thankfully, the next …
The Great Malls of China
The Great Mall of America is nothing compared to what’s getting built in China these days. We’re talking malls over 130 acres, or 1/5 of a square mile.
A sudden outbreak of naming sanity
Two of my biggest pet peeves were recently addressed. Microsoft announced that in Longhorn, it is dropping “My” from My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places, etc. Woohoo! I’ve always thought it sounded pretty lame. I used to rename these folders myself, starting in Windows 95, but eventually I gave up. The other one is …
Why I think there is a housing bubble in Silicon Valley
Consider this: between 2000 and 2005, housing prices have gone up 46%, or 7.9% per year. But at the same time… The population has gone up only 4%. Rental prices have gone down 16%, or 3.5% per year. Nonfarm payroll employment has dropped 14%, from almost 900,000 to less than 780,000. The ratio of buying …
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