Monday, June 07, 2004

PERMALINK

Some folks in the comments below and elsewhere are contesting my statement that Reagan's 1980 election was a close one. Reagan won 43.9 million votes to Carter's 35.5 million. Anderson won 5.7 million votes. (The electoral map looks much worse, as it usually does.) Certainly not a squeaker like 2000, and not as close as I remember it, but not at all the landslide it's often recalled as, or that Reagan's subsequent victory in 1984 really was. If you look back at the coverage from that year you see that in fact the polls remained much closer till near the very end. The debates were evidently decisive -- debates that we discovered a few years later had been seriously tampered with: William Casey had stolen the Carter campaign's briefing book to prep his candidate. (And then there is the murky matter of the October non-surprise -- we'll almost certainly never know the full story of what did or didn't happen between the Saudi-friendly Reagan-Bush operators and Iran, but speculation remains strong that they exerted great effort to make sure those hostages stayed hostages till after Election Day.) In the hazy glow of post-mortem memorials we can delude ourselves that today's bare-knuckles Republicans are a nastier species than their Reaganite predecessors, but the truth is that dirty tricks have long run in the party's genes. comment [] 11:33:04 PM | permalink

Steve Jobs spoke here this morning and introduced a nifty new product, Airport Express -- an all-white plug-in Wifi adapter that's little bigger than a cigarette pack and doubles as a music bridge between your computer and your stereo. For $129. Available in July. "This doesn't solve every problem in the world," Jobs said. "But it's very very simple, and it works." Here's some of what Jobs had to say: "Longhorn's basically a copy of Mac OSX a year ago. Microsoft is chasing our tail again, and that's kind of fun." "What Apple's great at is inventing cool technology and making it easy to use." "A lot of traditional consumer electronics companies haven't grokked software." Mossberg asked Jobs the same question he asked Gates -- whether the computer will be displaced at the center of consumers' digital worlds. Jobs had a similar answer: "Where are you going to put your 5000 digital photos? Or your 5000 songs? You're not going to put them on your cell phone." "The hardest part of making smart products is figuring out something that people want to do." Jobs said he'd called the Kerry campaign up to "offer them help on advertising" and a week later he read that he was serving as an "economic adviser." He wouldn't comment further on politics: "It's a personal thing, not an Apple thing." About the gulf between Hollywood and Silicon Valley: "Technology people don't understand the process these creative companies go through to build the things they produce. And the creative people don't appreciate how creative technology is." "The biggest threat to Hollywood is not the Internet but the DVD burners." comment [] 9:15:24 PM | permalink

[Internet access here at D is really flaky, so I'll see how much I can get posted here over the next day or so.] The dinner at the Four Seasons Aviara Sunday night was accompanied by wines selected by the Wall Street Journal's wine columnists, John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, so when Kara Swisher kicked off the Bill Gates interview with a serious question about security, Gates offered a crack about what a great question that was after three glasses of wine -- and then delivered an anecdote about Warren Buffett, at a dinner where the costly wines had been seriously fussed over, covering his glass as the waiter came by to pour and remarking, "I'll take the cash." Gates seemed far smoother and more relaxed than on previous occasions that I've heard him speak,and better able to parry challenges without getting that impatient, "why are you bothering my superior intelligence?" look of yore. Either age has mellowed him, or he's just grown into the role of Richest Geek in the World. Here are some of the things he said: "Longhorn [Microsoft's next revamp of Windows] is about structured information. The world's not just about text lookup. Longhorn brings the idea of an object-oriented database to the wayinformation is stored." "Already there's a class of users who basically stay in e-mail. So when they go out of e-mail to the shell, they get disoriented." The Journal's Walt Mossberg asked whether Longhorn was more radical a change than Windows XP or Windows 95: "Radical sounds negative. It's just way more of a switch in terms of the model of how you think about data." Eventually, "Search will be based on semantics, not just keyword matching." Users will benefit from the "galvanizing effect" of Microsoft's competition with Google in search. About digital music, the Ipod and ITunes: Mossberg asked, "Can you succeed in music without a hot device?" Gates: "We'll have dozens of hot devices... We just have a different model." Mossberg: "That's fine, but it's a failed model at the moment." Mossberg: As digital devices proliferate, will they remove the PC from the center of things? Gates: "Where else are you going to organize your memories?" Gates said he devotes 10 hours a week to his foundation work. "That's the time other people are mowing the lawn." Mossberg: "So you just let it grow?" Gates: "Somebody comes and does it, I don't know how. Maybe it's astroturf." John Battelle has a fuller report on Gates' comments on Google here. comment [] 7:47:24 PM | permalink

Last night's post about Reagan has elicited a good and spirited back-and-forth in the comments. I'll let that debate be, with one clarification: When I wrote, "America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president," some readers seem to take that to be synonymous with "America was a lot better off in 1980 than in 1988 (when Reagan left office)." Of course things changed in 8 years, some of them for the better. Was Reagan responsible for all those changes? Would a different president have seen inflation decline (Paul Volcker did more to accomplish that than Reagan, and guess who appointed him?)? Or seen the Soviet Union begin to decline and fall? Could the positives of the Reagan era have been realized without the hefty negatives? Could a real leader rather than a Potemkin-village leader have done a better job? This is the direction in which my comment was aimed. And no, I do not think that -- outside of popular music (even Elvis Costello managed to produce one bad album!) -- the '80s were a dark age. But the moment at which Reagan won office felt to me, as a young man who'd come of political age in the '70s, like a closing of horizons and a snuffing out of hope. (If I'd been writing in the morning instead of at midnight, the sentence would have read, "that moment felt like the start of a dark age.") In retrospect, that feeling was plainly unwarranted. But the world looks different to you at 21 than at 44. If it doesn't, something's probably wrong! comment [] 1:38:44 PM | permalink