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Why 'Wired' Seems to Have It Wrong About Amazon and Apple

The December 2011 issue of Wired is out, with a photo of the left half of Jeff Bezos' face on the cover.  I was excited about this issue, because I wanted to read about the moves Amazon.com [and my Amazon WishList] is making to be a cloud content provider in addition to seller of books and anything else you can find in a supermarket or shopping mall.

Instead, I was disappointed.

The article by longtime tech writer Stephen Levy repeated some tiresome comparisons between Amazon and Apple. Amazon is content company, right? Because it makes most of its money selling more content things, both real (like books, shoes, and DVDs) and electronic (like ebooks and streaming movies). Yep, it's not a hardware company, though its big news right now is hardware in the form of the Kindle Fire.

And Apple isn't a content company, right?
Because it makes most of its money selling hardware things, like computers and mobile tablets and smartphones. Yes, it's not a content company, even though its current big news is user content management in the form of launching iCloud.

The article also disappointed because all too soon it descends into a Q&A dialog that doesn't grab me. It doesn't talk enough about the Amazon consumer experience and what might be coming down the pike. The most I learn about consumer experiences at Amazon is that Amazon really doesn't like to talk to me on the phone, really is not proud of being a profit-making enterprise, would offer single pricing for movie streaming if, gosh, only the movie content providers would agree, and seems more head-in-the-clouds than futuristic.

There's an ethereal quality to Bezos that bothers me, and I'm trying to put my finger on why.

Meet My Tech Sidekicks: R2-D2, Sancho Panza, Radar O'Reilly, Robin, Sam Stewart, Tonto, and Max Klinger

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Above: Images of the sidekicks after which I have named my computers and smartphones: R2-D2, Sancho Panza, Radar O'Reilly, Robin the Boy Wonder, Samantha Stewart, Tonto, and Max Klinger. (Click on the thumbnail photos in the row on top to switch images.)

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When I was a kid, it was common for families to name their automobiles. This was just as, I suppose, families named their horses up until the 19th and 20th centuries. Which made sense, since horses were animals and they were alive.

But now I feel that my computers are somehow alive, too. At least they're pretty smart, they do my bidding, they look out for me (if I teach them how), and they do seem possessed of certain personalities.

So I name my computers. Many years ago, when I obtained my first laptop, a used Dell Inspiron, I named it "R2-D2," after the character in Star Wars. I thought of R2-D2 as my wing, just as he flew in a round hole on the wing of Luke Skywalker's X-Fighter.

Thus began my personal tradition of naming computers after sidekicks from stage and screen.

Both of my Dell Inspirons were named "R2-D2." My first MacBook laptop was named "Sancho Panza," the sidekick to Don Quixote, the Man of LaMancha. My first iPhone was named "Radar O'Reilly," after the sidekick corporal and company clerk to the commander of the MASH 4077th mobile Army surgical hospital in the movie and TV series "M*A*S*H." (Radar's real name was "Walter.") The second iPhone was named "Robin," after the Boy Wonder sidekick to Batman.

My next MacBook received a name from a British detective series, "Foyle's War." In a first, my computer was named for a female sidekick, Samantha Stewart, who drives and breaks cases for the show's namesake character, Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of Hastings, England. So the laptop is graced with Ms. Stewart's more familiar name, "Sam Stewart."

My Mac Mini at the office is named "Tonto," after the sidekick to the Lone Ranger.

Remake Your Netflix Queue with NYT's Data Graphic

The New York Times did a cultural service for the rest of us with its guide to the most-rented Netflix movies of 2009, in various zip codes in a number of major metropolitan areas. The Flowing Data blog has its own take.