Network World’s clueless “electronic delivery”

Normally, I like Network World magazine, but I really have to laugh at the cluelessness revealed in this editorial about their new “electronic delivery” system.   At first I thought this was some kind of late April fools style joke, but they appear to be serious.   I’ll let their own words explain their “revolutionary” plan:

With iDemand, we send to you in background mode an entire issue of Network World as a PDF that automatically sizes itself to fit your screen when opened.

…

The way we deliver the PDF in the background is by asking you to install a small iDemand client. Besides saving you the trouble of downloading the PDF every week, the client lets you receive Network World breaking-news notices.

Err.. hello?  Didn’t push clients die with the ill fated (and stupid) Pointcast?  I’d love to know what kind of golf course deal suckered Network World’s management into wasting money on this idea, but it’s gonna fail miserably. Push clients suck. Nobody like them in the 90’s, nobody likes them now.

The truly sad thing is that Network World already *has* an electronic delivery system.   It’s called a web site.  And rather than waste money on this ridiculous push client, they really should spend some time cleaning up the design of their web site so that it doesn’t suck as much and so that you can actually *find* the articles from the print edition.

OpenMoko – $300 Linux powered touch screen phone?

Wired has a short article that looks at the upcoming OpenMoko Linux powered cell phone.  Unfortunately their coverage, like most of the coverage I’ve seen of the OpenMoko, is focused on comparing it to the iPhone.  IMHO that’s unfortunate.  As has been pointed out endlessly by the many rabid iPhone fans on the net, it’s unlikely that anyone, particularly OpenMoko, will create as seamless and slick an end user experience as the iPhone.  Probably true.  Apple’s good at that.

But the big limitation of the iPhone is that, unlike the BlackBerry and all the various Windows Mobile based smartphones, you can’t load your own apps on the iPhone.  That’s one of the reasons that I think the OpenMoko is really more of a competitor for the BlackBerry and the various other smartphones, rather than an “iPhone killer”.

I hope the folks behind the OpenMoko are smart enough to realize that in addition to the “geek” market, they should also be targeting the enterprise market.  With the right developer tools, and particularly if the OpenMoko becomes available in both the current form factor and a “ruggedized’ version, this could be an awesome platform for developing and deploying mobile enterprise applications.

As for the geek market… If the next version has 3G and a decent camera I’ll definitely be getting one.