Best Buy, dead store walking

Let me start by saying that I really want Best Buy to succeed. I want and need a local store where I can pick up a gadget or accessory on short notice.

That said, and related to my previous post, I was hoping to pick up a Bluetooth keyboard for my Nexus 7. Colleague Mitch Wagner suggested the Logitech 920-003390 Tablet Keyboard for Android.

Amazon offers the keyboard, available for 2^nd day delivery, at $49.00.

I checked Best Buy online:



This page doesn't show the price. It's $69.99  so that  I can have it shipped to one of the stores in 7-10 business days.

How I work - Google Docs

Most of the time when I leave my home office, I take only a tablet, either an iPad or Nexus 7.

My editors prefer plain HTML with separate image files. They can work with Word files, but strip out most of the formatting. I use Word mostly for the editing tools such as auto-correct, word count, and grammar checking.

There are a lot of make-do products that let you work with Microsoft Word documents. Office 365, the web version of Office, is one of them. You access it through a browser from any device. In addition, I could use WordPress or similar blogging product to create my docs.

Google Docs provides a good editing environment for documents, covering the basic features of headers, styled paragraphs, links, and images. A recently added features permits offline access to files. I can edit my my files when not connected to the Internet. Google Docs will synchronize the edited docs when I reconnect.

The trouble with Office 365 and Google Docs is that the HTML output that they generate gives spaghetti code a bad name. It's bloated and doesn't create a separate CSS file to segregate the formatting code.

I'm trying a cleanup tool called Tidy-HTML5. It's an experimental variant on the tidy/html-tidy family of tools. It has a -gdoc switch that cleans up the HTML. Tidy-HTML5 requires a *nix environment where you can compile the tool. It works well on Cygwin.

The Android version of Google Drive (the app that provides docs and spreadsheets) doesn't support direct editing of spreadsheets. You can open the spreadsheet in your browser  and make edits there. I've tested spreadsheet editing in Safari and Chrome on the iPad and Chrome on the Nexus 7.

More on education and marketing

Online course and textbook company Kno announced that it is offering a line of K-12 textbooks. The materials are available for the iPad and web browsers. Native Windows and Android apps are in the queue.

Kno has partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the major textbook publishers in the world. If you browse over to the HMH web site on your iPad (because you want to see how things look), you can find the catalog for each grade and subject area:

If you click Browse, you can see what they have to offer:

Flash doesn't run on an iPad. It also does not run on Android, so that you can't browse the catalog from your Android phone or tablet.

This is not an auspicious beginning for Kno.

Did Linux miss its moment again?

This morning's news includes a note that preorders are available for Spark, the open KDE tablet. To which the tech press, behaving like political reporters responding to the next not-Mitt,  proclaims that ebruary seems to be shaping up to be the month of Linux tablets.

Um, no.

Unless you think that two Linux tablet announcement is a big deal.

Linux users have been saying for years that this is the year that companies and civilians will adopt Linux for desktop systems.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Google Trends for Linux desktop"][/caption]

Even with new, slick renditions of Linux from Ubuntu, Mint, and others, it just never got the respect or traction that Linux advocates sought. It's too bad. Linux is a very good, solid, secure desktop operating system. It runs well on older, less powerful systems. It just never made it to your aunt's computer.

And, then came the iPad. The tablet runs a deeply proprietary operating system from Apple. It owns the mind share, even if its market share is slipping. Some forecasts suggest that tablet sales will pass desktop/laptop sales within three or so years.

Android, Google's tablet and phone operating system, is Linux-based and open source, but the interface is defined by Google and the hardware manufacturers. There are options to load various custom ROMs on tablets, of course. All the same, it's all still the province of hackers and hobbyists.

Linux still owns the server environment, including pretty much everything that makes the web the web. The story remains, however, is that not only did Linux miss the chance to claim the desktop, the desktop computer itself may be moving to the back of the pack.

Miss a minute, miss a lot.

3+1 things about the tablet wars

Apple doesn't have to worry too much about the Kindle Fire or Nook Color or their kin. The people who buy a tablet based on price will still wish that they'd bought an iPad.  The people who buy a Nook have a specific reason for doing so and most will be happy with their choice. Apple would not have reached them anyway.

The people who buy iPads (iPad buyers are exactly who you think they are, but with pets (infographic) | VentureBeat), may not know quite why they did. Or, they probably knew exactly why they bought one, but are embarrassed to give the real answer. (Sort of like saying you bought Playboy for the interviews.)

Apple has managed the near-impossible: they became the generic name for a type of product while retaining their distinct intellectual property rights. (See their series of brutal take-down suits in Europe and Australia  over the Samsung Galaxy. Nilay Patel explains it all in Apple sues Samsung: a complete lawsuit analysis on The Verge.) Apple won the music player (iPod), integrated monitor-system (iMac), and ultra-ultra notebook computer (MacBook).

1. The iPad still defines the terms of engagement. It's iPad vs. not-iPad, even when it isn't. When Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Fire, he didn't mention the iPad at all. He didn't have to and shouldn't have.


2. Retail strength trumps specs. Barnes and Noble makes better systems than Amazon, but Amazon can and will deliver anything to you effortlessly.
   Buying books and magazines on the Nook and iPad has been a confusing and unsatisfying experience. Amazon figured out how to do that a dozen years ago and no one else is close.


3. When the battle moves to the Cloud, Amazon may be able to get the upper hand. Apple's never done really well with Internet services. iTunes works because they control the start and end of the pipe and there's no chance to get lost.  Their servers rarely handle peak loads well.
   I think that Google should buy Barnes and Noble. Then it would be a fair fight between the Kindle and the Nook.

+1
None of these is a social product. Social media is glued onto each product like an afterthought. Apple doesn't know how to do social. (Remember Ping?)  The promised deep integration of Twitter is nowhere to be found in iOS5. Amazon doesn't even have the native Android Twitter client in its app store. The Nook leaves a bag of tools on the table and says, "Here, you do it."

By the way, there are plenty of tablet comparisons and reviews out there. You don't need one more from me.This one is pretty good: A human review of the Kindle Fire – Marco.org, as is the venerable CR: Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet: How the specs compare.

My own experience is that I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire, received it on Wednesday and boxed it up for return yesterday morning. I have a Nook that's now running CyanogenMod. Much of the time, I bring my iPad to meetings instead of my laptop.

For the next year and probably two, Apple will own and define the tablet market. One of these companies still has to figure  out a coherent social strategy for tablets. If Google doesn't buy B&N, Facebook should consider it make a serious social tablet.