Marco Arment:

The problem isn’t that they botched it although they did, in some ways. The problem is that Microsoft isn’t Apple, and Microsoft’s customers aren’t Apple’s customers. They tried selling a more Apple-like attitude to their customers, most of whom don’t want and won’t tolerate an Apple-like attitude. That’s why they’re not Apple customers.

I’d generally agree that Microsoft’s customers are more conservative than Apple’s. If you asked their enterprise customers in 2005 what they wanted they probably would have said “Exactly the same interface as XP, just add more features as menu options.”

But I think the real problem was their all-in-one mentality messed with their existing platform, something Apple avoided. If Metro had been introduced as a tablet interface separate from desktop Windows… well, I don’t know if it would have taken off but it would have allowed them to offer a desktop upgrade path that was more palatable to their customers. They didn’t make upgrading exciting, they made it scary and daunting without any real benefit other than touch which most people don’t care about on the desktop.

The Verge’s Tom Warren:

Microsoft is once again planning to alter the way its Start Screen works in Windows 8.1 Update 1. While the software giant originally released Windows 8.1 last year with an option to bypass the “Metro” interface at boot, sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans have revealed to The Verge that the upcoming update for Windows 8.1 will enable this by default.

I joke but I’m sure I’m partly to blame. I did call it my favorite version of Windows ever. How’s it supposed to flourish after that?

I watched the original as a teenager and I am going to watch the hell out of this reboot with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Interesting move by Facebook — a dedicated news app from Mike Matas’s team so, naturally, it looks great. I assume this is a typo, though:

Paper will be available exclusively on iPhones initially, debuting in Apple’s App Store on February 3rd.

That’s supposed to read “Facebook Home phones” instead of iPhones, right?

Writing for Technovia, Ian Betteridge speaks my mind.

Unclear whether the price is $2 billion (per China Daily) or $3 billion (per TechCrunch).

Reminder: Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion. It’s cool, though, because pundits applaud these big acquisitions.

ADDED: $2.91 billion, straight from the horse’s mouth. As Nilay Patel notes, Google sold the Motorola cable box division for $2 billion so the loss is only about $7 billion. No biggie.

Episode 4 of Turning This Car Around is about food and how to get kids to eat it.

davenoon at Lawyers, Guns and Money keys an amazing ode to Blackboard, a software package used throughout higher education.

When I die, I want my whiskey-pickled body larded into a cryonic chamber, then buried deep in the earth. A thousand years from now, I want these loping, crookspined human gargoyles to dig me up and reanimate me. I will learn their language; I will amble to the profane horizon of their blood-gorged vernacular; I will force them at spear-point to build me a time machine; then I will murder them all with my bare hands. I will return to all of you then to bear witness, in a rapturous tornado of filth, to my contempt for that unholy system of course mismanagement software.

I used Blackboard years ago when I took some computer science class at the University of Washington, but I don’t remember much about it other than actively trying to avoid it. Still, if you’ve in any kind of large organization with centralized technology planning you know of a package like this, a package only an IT department would wish upon someone. I don’t know why it has to be that way, but that’s a the way it is.

Mac unit sales via Benedict Evans who says:

The Mac is doing just fine in a horrible market.

Which is funny because Apple helped make the PC market horrible by creating the tablet market. Microsoft, of course, helped make the PC market horrible by creating Windows 8.

According to Peter Oppenheimer on today’s conference call, Macs have now gained global market share for 30 of the past 31 quarters.

A-gain.

All lines except the iPod but including the Mac are up nicely on record revenue. Profit, however, is flat.