Mike Elgan

If your image of Microsoft is a sweaty Steve Ballmer screaming “developers, developers, developers” at an auditorium — or the boring company that makes boring products like Excel, or Exchange Server — prepare to change that image. Microsoft just might be evolving into a killer consumer electronics company. In the wake of two serial Apple […]

And just like that, the old Apple is dead, and a new Apple is born. I believe you’ll see massive changes to Apple products by next summer. Apple had to re-create its products to correct a recent string of failures, which I’ll tell you about below. The reason transformation was necessary is that Apple makes […]

Microsoft’s shiny new Surface tablet does not copy the Apple iPad. It doesn’t steal Apple’s intellectual property in either hardware or software. It’s a truly original product. There will be no lawsuits. Having said that, Microsoft does copy Apple in some ways. For example, had Tablet PC and/or the Ultra Mobile PC initiatives succeeded, or […]

The gadgetsphere is gabbing excitedly about two unknown touch tablet products: one from Microsoft and the other from Apple. At first glance, these two products appear to be categorically similar. In fact, they’re different from each other in just about every important way. Some Microsoft fans say that finally Microsoft is getting into the game, […]

The camera phone is turning out to be the most disruptive technology of our age. Camera phones are changing not only digital camera and phone handset industries, but also social networking, security, journalism, art, science, politics and more. Why Camera Phones Disrupt The cameras built into phones are nothing special. They take digital pictures, just […]

The wrist is a great place to lash information — especially real-time, ever changing information you care about. Unfortunately, the wristwatch has fallen out of favor along with the rise of the smartphone. “Smart watches” exist, but are designed for market failure. The problem is that these watches focus on the desires of a tiny […]

Today’s Silicon Valley is dominated by seemingly unstoppable Internet giants like Google and Facebook. But it wasn’t always so. In the late 1990s, Yahoo ruled Silicon Valley. StumbleUpon was tech pundits’ industry darling in the early 2000s. And MySpace was the social networking superpower until the late 2000s. These iconic companies rose and they fell, […]

The United States Constitution requires the federal government to “establish Post Offices and post Roads” — in other words, to own and run the US Postal Service. I think we should consider a Constitutional amendment that privatizes the Postal Service and nationalizes the wireless carriers. No, I’m not a Chavez-hugging, Maoist commie. Quite the opposite: […]

Amazing advancements in the speed of Internet searches have brought the gap between search and result down to fractions of a second. How could Google and other search companies possibly make them even faster? The answer is for search engines to harvest so much information about you that they know what you’re going to search […]

Information recently revealed from a variety of sources suggests that a huge percentage of users on social sites like Facebook and Twitter aren’t actually human. Millions upon millions of social accounts are either created by “bots” or have been created for some other purpose than social networking. And I believe the problem is much worse […]