Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

The estimable Guy Kawasaki will be presenting a free webcast tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific focusing on how to evangelize your product or service. Although his work after Apple hasn’t been as high profile, I feel that he is a person that we all ought to pay attention to!

With just a few clicks, a contributor over at Wikipedia is about to delete our entire field of work! The article on enterprise storage is nominated for deletion because the readers didn’t believe it existed as an entity.

If you disagree, and think enterprise storage is more real than “enterprise chewing gum”, please head over there and edit the article! Add some sources! Expand it! At least add a comment supporting the existence of the field…

If you’re a Google user like I am (in my off-time), you’ll be happy to learn that Google finally made two long-awaited changes today. First up is the addition of presentations to the Google Docs suite. Although Docs still lags well behind the full-featured office suites (especially Microsoft’s unexpectedly great PowerPoint 2007), this addition does add much to Google’s ammunition in pushing their online office suite. One funny thing, though, is that none of Google’s office apps yet support the XML-based OOXML formats pushed by Apple (iWork), Microsoft (Office 2007), and Novell (OpenOffice). In fact, Google pushes that last - you’d think they’d use the format, too. In other news, a cryptic post shows that Google’s excellent Reader app is finally out of the Lab…

There was lots of speculation last month about what VMware would do with all that post-IPO cash. Well, today at VMworld, the company announced it had acquired Swiss virtualization management company, Dunes. This just hit the wires, and there’s no information as of now on either company’s web site.

It looks like this will add an extra dose of mature process management around provisioning, managing, and retiring virtual machines. Considering how these virtual servers can pile up unnoticed (you can’t trip over them like a real server after all), this is a much-welcome addition.

On Wednesday, Apple dropped the price of the iPhone from $599 to $399. Predictably, many people went wild, complaining that they got ripped off by this 33% price cut after just 10 weeks of sales, while others defended the move, comparing it to price cuts by Sony (PS3), Microsoft (XBox), and even Apple itself (Mac Mini).

For me, this brought up recent memories of TiVo’s (late) price cutting on the Series 3 high definition DVR. Introduced at $800 in September, it was available for around $650 in the Spring and dropped to $400 with a special rebate for Fathers’ Day. Then, in July, TiVo released the TiVo HD, priced at $300 and including most of the features of the Series 3. Again, recent buyers went nuts, complaining that their “investment” was wasted as prices effectively dropped by over 70% in just 9 months.

I was present for both of these storms. I bought a $600 TiVo Series 3 and my wife bought me a $600 iPhone. Of course I wish I hadn’t “had to” pay so much, but I’m not angry. That’s how things go in the fast-moving electronics space. This is doubly true of mobile phones - how many people who spent $500 or even $800 on a Motorola RAZR spite my mother in law for the one she just got for free?

Both the Series 3 and iPhone are “insanely great” products, and I am as happy with them today as when I first unboxed them. In fact, these price drops have made me seriously consider buying a TiVo HD and second TV. And I just ordered a $399 iPhone for my wife. What goes around comes around, truly!

And, by the way, if you bought a $599 iPhone on August 21 or later, Apple will give you a $200 credit, and if you bought one at any time, Apple will give you a $100 credit! Why didn’t Motorola do this for RAZR buyers!?!

Apple just announced a total refresh of their iPod line, bumping up storage capacity across the board. The little Shuffle is the only one without more storage (still at 1 GB), but the Nano now has a nice screen (with movies) and 4 or 8 GB of flash storage. The disk-based iPod (now the “Classic”) has 80 or 160 GB in a thinner package. And Apple repurposed most of the iPhone as the “iPod Touch” with 8 or 16 GB of flash (wish I had that in mine!), WiFi, and Safari.

And what better to do with WiFi than buy songs over the air, possibly while sitting in Starbucks? That’s right, not only can we burn up our credit cards wirelessly from our iPod Touches (that name sounds kinda creepy now that I think about it) or iPhones (yeah, they’re supported too) but we get Starbucks integration to boot! You’ll get a little green mermaid whenever you walk in and can download whatever song is on the air (as long as you’re in one of the few stores that will have added this feature before 2010).

Oh, yeah, one more thing… The 4 GB iPhone has been dropped and the 8-gigger is now $200 cheaper at $399. Now that I’ve had one for a month, I can tell you this. You know how people hype new products and you say “it can’t possibly be that great…” Well, the iPhone is that great. Seriously. Buy two. Uh oh, now I sound like Fake Fake Steve Jobs…

With all this glorious NAND flash rolling out of Cupertino, it’s safe to assume that supplies will be tight for a while…