I wondered, if when I was their age, would I have had the same review?…Has there been some kind of testosterone shift in me now that makes me a wimpy lover of girlie fantasies.  Hmmm. I do remember thinking along with many others that Lewis Carroll was on drugs back then, my tastes used to tend towards the less surreal side of fantasy, more towards sci-fi from the likes of Isaac Asimov.

But taste changes..which is a good thing because as you get older you realize “history does repeat itself – only in different ways” as someone once said to me.  I now understand what that means.

Almost twenty years ago today, the iPad came out – not the iPad, they called it something else back then Alice. Not “Tablet”.  What was it?  ”Pen Computer“, no can’t use the acronym…”PC” already taken.  Nomadic device?, yuck.  Handheld?  Boring.  Palmtop? Ugh.  PDA that’s it! no…that’s what “they” called it.  Aha! It was called the “Personal Communicator”!   Yep, PC for short…(ooops, hey I wasn’t asked to make these marketing decisions).

Anyway, we did have “Smart Phones” on the drawing board, but that was supposed to come after out iPad, er uh, I mean Personal Communicator.   We had it all bassackwards…

But we have been here before, its just twenty years later.

I just digged up this Ad for the EO Personal Communicator (the first one) and I remembered HATING IT when I first saw it.  I like it A LOT now…I think it captured everything we were trying to do at the Hobbit group in AT&T (yes, it was called informally the Hobbit group)…I guess I have changed.

How To Appease a Fat Cat in Gondola

Microsoft’s Marketing Stunt Goes Viral

Hmmm, and then there is this:

Microsoft says Office for Mac will have Outlook

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it will include Outlook, a popular e-mail and calendar program that’s ubiquitous on its Windows computers, in the next version of its Office suite for Apple Inc.’s Mac computers.
The current Mac version of Office includes Entourage, a program for sending e-mail and organizing appointments and contacts. The new version, which will be available in time for the holidays in 2010, will replace Entourage with Outlook.
Microsoft’s Mac unit is building the software from scratch, so Outlook will work with the Mac’s backup and hard-drive search features.
Apple recently said the next version of its Mac operating system, called Snow Leopard, will include support for Microsoft Exchange Server, the behind-the-scenes software that makes Outlook work.

Outlook for the Mac by the holidays in 2010???

Next month Apple Mail/iCal/Address Book will support MS Exchange out of the box. With iWorks features leapfrogging, the compelling need for Mac Office is dwindling. A rewritten Mac Office in Cocoa with Outlook would be welcomedby the switchers who are biz oriented and have been raised on Outlook. But for the Holidays 2010?Vaporware is an art.