Archives: August 2011

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Ice creamAnyone who knows me knows that I have a serious sweet tooth. My biggest weakness – ice cream. So I recently bought an ice cream machine (Cuisinart ICE-30BC Pure Indulgence 2-Quart Automatic Frozen Yogurt, Sorbet, and Ice Cream Maker). I’ve been tinkering with various recipes, and came up with a variation on one that I’m pretty happy with. Without any further adieu I give you…

Ted’s Cherry Vanilla

Ingredients:

  • 5 cups heavy cream
  • 1 cup skim milk
  • 1 1/3 cup sugar
  • 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
  • 1 vanilla bean
  • 1 cup of maraschino cherries

Makes 2 quarts

Directions:

In a large saucepan, pour the heavy cream and milk. Add in your sugar.

Prepare your vanilla bean by slicing it open, and scraping out all of the vanilla seeds.

Turn on heat, and heat until sugar is totally dissolved in the milk/cream mixture (take a spoonful of the mixture, and when you can’t feel any of the sugar’s grittiness, it’s ready).

Right before you remove from heat, drop in your teaspoon of vanilla extract, and your seeds from your vanilla bean.

Once you remove from heat, store in the freezer for a couple of hours to lower the temperature of the mixture. This step is optional, but I’ve found that the colder your mixture is when you pour it in to the ice cream maker, the better the end product is.

Once chilled (but not frozen!), pour your cream mixture in to the ice cream maker and let it churn for about 25 minutes. Now, add in your maraschino cherries (just a few at a time), until they are all mixed in.

After about 30 minutes in the ice cream maker, your ice cream will have a soft serve like consistency. You can enjoy some at this stage, but I recommend storing in the freezer over night for a more solid consistency.

Enjoy!

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Steve jobsBy now I’m sure you’ve heard the news that Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple, and that Tim Cook has taken the helm.

Like many, I have reached out to Steve via email in the past to fix issues I couldn’t get traction on. My 2006 blog post ‘When bad customer service turns good‘ details the ordeal, and how a last ditch email to Steve got me the results I needed for WWDC 2006.

I can’t think of any other corporate shakeup that has on the outside generated so much press, yet on the inside, meant so little.

What I mean by the latter assertion is that Cook has been running Apple for the last 9 months since Steve went on medical leave. And this wasn’t Cook’s first time in the captains char, having run the company during Steve’s prior medical leaves as well.

Apple is tops in just about everything they do right now, so no one can (without being laughed at) second guess the leadership team that Jobs has assembled. Although the products that Steve Jobs has helped bring to market will be what most people remember from his tenure as Apple’s CEO, I tend to think it will be Apple itself that stands as his greatest achievement.

When Steve came back to Apple it was on death’s door. He took swift, bold action (which many including myself second guessed at the time) and over time, built Apple in to the largest (using market cap as the main metric), most successful company in the world. He changed the culture at Apple to reflect his values so much, that I believe Apple will continue on just fine so long as it adheres to the principles he instilled.

Best of luck Steve, and thanks for everything you’ve had a hand in bringing to market.

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HP TouchPadSo, after less than 2 months in the marketplace, HP has killed the TouchPad and the entire webOS hardware line, including current and future Pre smartphones. It was nearly just a year ago that HP bought Palm and was publicly stating that they were ‘doubling down on webOS’. So what the hell happened?

HP lost Mark Hurd as CEO, and brought in Leo Apotheker. Apotheker comes from SAP, where he worked for 20 years. Apotheker doesn’t have any experience making and selling hardware. SAP exist solely as a solutions provider, writing software and offering consultancy services for large corporations. When the webOS game plan was finally put in play, and the TouchPad didn’t perform, Apotheker had the ammo he needed to steer the ship in a different direction.

webOS was (and hopefully, still is) a compelling product. However, in its transition to a tablet OS, it was released in a half baked status. The first TouchPad reviews were nearly uniform in their assessment that the OS was released before it was ready. Many of the bugs and quirks seemed to get ironed out in an over the air update released just a few weeks ago. However, first impressions count, and the TouchPad as product definitely suffered from its unfinished status.

Another misstep on this road to TouchPad failure was the marketing plan. In TV land, HP ran ads with celebrities like Russell Brand and that annoying chick from Glee, doing some shtick or show tune that did nothing to highlight the TouchPad’s strengths.

Then there was the price drop of $100 that happened a few weeks ago. HP tends to do this sort of price adjustment in the PC world, so it wasn’t a shock that when the sales for the TouchPad started to tank, HP would drop the price. But that is a reactionary plan. If the plan for the TouchPad was to enter the iPad dominated tablet space and establish itself as a worthy competitor, HP should have launched with the $399/$499 pricing from day one. At $100 below the competition, they could have very well taken the #2 tablet spot.

Now, HP is liquidating their entire stock of TouchPad’s for $99/$149. It’s really a sad sight for someone who had hoped for a worthy competitor to the iPad.

HP says they are still committed to webOS, but that logic defies belief, and certainly doesn’t reflect their current actions. HP says they are looking to license webOS to other tablet/phone manufacturers, but I doubt anyone will want to do that when Android is free, and HP hasn’t shown any success in managing the hardware portion of the stack, which is the portion they had the most experience with. if HP can’t succeed at mobile hardware, why would anyone expect them to succeed in mobile software?

With HP looking to divest itself of it’s PC hardware business and follow in IBM’s footsteps as a SaaS/Consulting outfit, the logical move is to sell off the Palm assets. With the recent patent war that has erupted, the Palm patent portfolio might fetch more than the $1 billion HP paid for Palm last year.