Dan Gillmor: Blog

SF Chronicle: $65 million will buy you an unfinished mansion on S.F.’s Gold Coast.

It would be one of the most expensive houses ever sold in San Francisco - a neoclassical villa with a four-story floating staircase and glass atrium, a facade of French limestone and a roof of 19th century Florentine tile is on the market for $65 million. Despite the price tag, the home is a mere shell - it doesn’t have interior walls, floors or ceilings - and will require more than $10 million to complete.

As more and more people sink below the financial waves, the super-rich do better and better. This is by design — by national policies that have divided Americans by class more than ever, rewarding the people at the very top, largely at the expense of our children and grandchildren, who either will pay to fix the mess we’re creating or will live in a world that makes this one look positively egalitarian.

Will Shipley: iPhone & iPod: contain or disengage?

But with the iPod Touch, what’s Apple’s excuse for locking up the platform? Why can’t I write programs for this device? Who might it hurt? Why is Steve announcing that he’s playing cat-and-mouse with developers who intend to do so? Is Apple so far removed from its customers that even when the latter overwhelming votes for extending a device (by downloading iPhone programs in the hundreds of thousands), Apple’s response is, “No, you can’t do that. We know what you want, you don’t. You want AJAX apps, you just don’t know it yet.”

That sure reminds me of the old, crappy Apple. The one that almost went bankrupt because of its hubris.

I don’t write programs for Apple because I worship Apple. I write programs for them because they have the best development environment. But I’ve always said that I will move from the platform the day Apple starts acting like a monopoly — trying to make money by using its marketing position to extort money from users, instead of innovating so quickly that users willing throw money at Apple.

Apple’s control-freakery is more than inconvenient for customers and potential partners. It’s insulting, and counterproductive.

I still use a Mac because it’s the best tool for the job — and because it’s infinitely extensible. But I won’t consider an iPhone or iPod Touch until the company lets go of its insistence that Apple, not the customers, are in charge. That may be never. Too bad for Apple, which is losing a customer.

Look near the bottom of the story about the conviction of a Silicon Valley executive for flagrant violations of law in issuing stock options, the SF Chronicle. In “Legal drama as backdating trial ends in ‘guilty’,” you’ll find this:

Many in Silicon Valley viewed the prosecution as a government witch hunt, arguing that backdating didn’t harm anyone. Companies routinely handed employees and executives better odds of big profits by granting them options at trading lows. They broke the law when they failed to properly account for the practice or disclose it to investors, inflating their companies’ profits

The mantra of the valley, and of corrupt people everywhere, is that breaking the law didn’t harm anyone because, well, it was for the good of the company. Bull. It was outright lying to shareholders. That is the bottom line.

NY Times: In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich. (M)any such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think of themselves as particularly fortunate, in part because they are surrounded by people with more wealth — often a lot more. When chief executives are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year and a hedge fund manager can collect $1 billion annually, those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny, a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age, when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes.

Envy and greed: what a great country.