According to a Reddit with Microsoft’s Office for iPad team, Ballmer made the call to pull the trigger on Office for iPad, not Satya Nadella.

Here’s Ben Thompson’s take on that:

You can’t credit Ballmer for Office:iPad shipping without talking about it *not* shipping for 4 years. Better to hype Nadella. Incompetent.

Which… yeah.

Wired:

Forty years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, NASA open sourced the software code that ran the guidance systems on the lunar module.

By that time, the code was little more than a novelty. But in recent years, the space agency has built all sorts of other software that is still on the cutting edge. And as it turns out, like the Apollo 11 code, much of this NASA software is available for public use, meaning anyone can download it and run it and adapt it for free.

Now you can be a steely-eyed Arduino-based missile man in the privacy of your own home.

(Via Shah Selbe)

As someone who’s dismissed Office’s continued relevance, I would be remiss in not noting that 12 million is a large number. It’s way bigger than 500,000, for example. Even bigger than 4 million, by some factor that has yet to be determined by mathemeticians.

On the other hand, as a noted Internet jerk, I would also be remiss in not noting that the apps are free, that the number counts each app individually and that while I downloaded Word and Excel, I’m not going to buy them.

So, really, it’s more like 11,999,998.

Dave Smith reviews the Kindle Fire TV for ReadWrite:

If you try using Voice Search within any Fire TV apps like Netflix, Amazon will immediately take you out of the app and provide you with options to purchase the content through Amazon—Amazon’s Voice Search won’t work within any apps.

That’s a pretty hobbled advantage then.

The Apple TV suffers from lack of a global search method as well, but literally taking you out of an app and into another app where you’re more likely to have to pay for the content you could get for free in the first app suits Amazon pretty well but not the user.

Smith also laments the lack of ability to stream content to the device and says the gaming really isn’t anywhere close to there yet.

After my post yesterday about my very serious first-world problems, some readers noted you can AirPlay Amazon Prime Video from the iPad to the Apple TV. I have done that, but it requires me to find my iPad and activate AirPlay. So, I find that to be half a solution.

(Via The Loop)

(An earlier version of this post said I couldn’t do anything else with the iPad if I was AirPlaying from it. Thanks to @kiggle for correcting me.)

Via Buzz Anderson, the story of how the credit card was thought up:

In 1949, Frank McNamara, head of the Hamilton Credit Corp., went out to eat with some of his buddies. At the dinner were Alfred Bloomingdale (grandson of the founder of Bloomingdale’s department store) and Ralph Schneider, McNamara’s attorney. The three men ate at Major’s Cabin Grill- a famous New York City restaurant located next to the Empire State Building. At the end of the meal, McNamara reached for his wallet and was shocked to discover he’d forgotten it. He called his wife to bring him some cash and rescue him from embarrassment. McNamara vowed never to let this happen again. So he came up with the innovative concept of a card that could be used at multiple locations – with a middleman (Diners Club) between restaurants and their customers. In early 1950, McNamara issued 200 Diners Club cards to his associates who often went out to eat with clients. At that time, the cards were accepted at 14 New York City eateries. A customer could eat without cash at any restaurant accepting the cards. Diners Club would pay the restaurant and the cardholder would repay Diners Club.

The best business formulas come from identifying a need based on a personal experience and being able — through a combination of luck and skill — to satisfy that need. There, I just saved you four years of business school.

On last week’s episode of The Talk Show I wondered why so many financial analysts say stupid things about Apple. Rene Ritchie provides a timely answer to the question:

Financial analysts don’t work for us. They work for their clients. They work for people who make money off of movement in Apple stock, either up or down. Financial analysts say things to move the stock so that their clients can buy or sell and make that money.

I still don’t get why Trip Chowdhry has an $800 target on the stock and he keeps bad-mouthing it but that’s why I don’t play the ponies.

A video featuring John Gruber and Brent Simmons of Q Branch which I understand ran during Microsoft’s Build conference keynote. I have been told by sources in the know (by which I mean Gruber) that they couldn’t use iCloud because they needed to execute code on the server.

The Verge has a first look. At $99 with voice search and the potential for games (even if they’ll mostly be crappy at first) it’s a pretty compelling device. Search on the Apple TV without a Bluetooth keyboard or the iOS Remote app is a pain.

We talked about the potential for games on the Apple TV on the panel I was on at Macworld. Amazon is offering their own game controller for $40 which is a little pricey for such things but still about half what it costs for an iOS controller and it’s not apparently required for all games.

It’s nice to have options, but now I have content on a Mac and in Apple’s cloud that I can only stream to my Apple TV. I have Netflix that I can get from the Apple TV, the Wii or the Xbox and Amazon Prime video I can get of the Xbox or Wii. There is no single intersect in this Venn diagram.

June 2-6 and tickets move to a lottery. Much like The Lottery, expect the winners to be stoned by their peers (whoops, spoiler alert).

I join John Gruber on this week’s episode of The Talk Show to discuss this year’s Macworld/iWorld conference, Minecraft, YouTube and that time I slammed Paul Kafasis’s hand in a car door (still feel bad about that).