Fortune’s Geoff Colvin:

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts applies the Apple model to his business empire: Keep it simple, and reinvent constantly.

Uh-huh. Comcast. Sure. Which is why Comcast has the same kind of customer satisfaction numbers as… uh… well… a prostate infection? Just guessing. Don’t have the numbers in front of me right now but I’ve had both, so I know of which I speak.

As Lessien remarks:

Sprinkle a little “Apple” on your corporate detritus: management consultants’ new answer for fixing terrible business.

I worked at a place where they brought in a former management consultant as the CEO. He said he wanted to make the company the Apple of our industry.

He was out in two and a half years.

If they mention Apple’s name, there is almost a 100 percent chance they’re doing it wrong.

iMore’s Derek Kessler:

In the early days of iOS, those questions of how well the platform could succeed without Office support were loud and ongoing. Had Microsoft launched Office on the iPhone and iPad early on, they could have furthered the impression that Office was a must-have for anybody serious about anything, even on iOS. But they let years pass, and now Microsoft’s flagship applications aren’t so must-have anymore and Apple isn’t overly eager to accommodate them.

Maybe the corporate world will eat up Office for the iPad, but I wonder what average user really needs a bloated office suite anymore, even before the iPad. Office suites were huge in the 1990s. They and gaming were what you bought computers for. But we passed that long ago.

A podcast I sometimes ruin, John Gruber’s The Talk Show, was picked by Apple for the Best New Technology Podcast category (along with Amplified and Before You Buy). Congrats to my pal John and all the other guests who are demonstrably better than I am.

Marco Arment:

What this timing really shows is how much Google needs to be on iOS. They’re primarily in the business of reaching as many people as possible so they can build up as much data and advertise to as many bodies as possible. Android is an insurance policy against their profitable businesses being locked out of other platforms, not an important profit center itself.

Wasn’t one (1) of the reasons Apple switched from Google’s data because they wouldn’t give them turn-by-turn and vector-based maps? The new version of Google Maps for the iPhone has turn-by-turn and vector-based maps.

I’ll be honest with you, I really don’t get a lot of Google’s decision-making. Don’t even get me started on the Motorola deal. Seriously.

Our long international nightmare is over.

(Is was like two and a half months, right?)

Marco Arment on the early success of The Magazine:

I don’t know how to save journalism, but I’m also not qualified to. I’m not a journalist and I don’t know much about that industry.

But he knows enough to make something great by starting small. Rupert Murdoch isn’t going to do that.

I don’t know if this counts for anything, but I’ve gotten more retweets of my piece for The Magazine than probably for anything I’ve ever written (fortunately, almost all of them positive). And I have a check. There’s no Marge in accounting Marco and Glenn Fleishman have to go through.

Not that Marge isn’t a pleasure to work with (smoking hot).

Ben Bajarin thinks that the touch screens on PCs are the wave of the future and the “gorilla arm” problem is overblown. I don’t necessarily disagree, but features come with a cost and I’m not sure slapping touch screens on every monitor in the land is warranted yet.

Also, are we set on “gorilla arm” as a name for this? Because I thought “zombie arm” was still in play.

Bajarin also thinks:

It is way too early to call Windows 8 a failure, no matter what any of the pundits say.

Completely true. It’s just not off to a great start and “even Ed Bott” notes it’s got a tough road ahead of it.

I join John Gruber again on The Talk Show to talk about The Magazine, The Daily, Tim Cook’s interviews this week and why John and I can’t love more than a couple of people at a time.

Jim Dalrymple:

What occurred to me is that Microsoft’s critical flaw is that they don’t solve a problem with the Surface. In fact, you could argue that the Surface actually causes more problems for users. That’s not a good start for a new product.

Jim’s conclusion is also good.

Microsoft thought they were solving a problem with the iPad, that it couldn’t run desktop-level applications. That may have actually been a feature.