Pods Unite

This has been out for awhile, but there's a great television commercial out that I wanted to mention here. Volkswagen and Apple have announced a joint product pairing with the VW Beetle and the Apple iPod. I love our Passat, but this would be a fun combo.

I just finished reading a series of BusinessWeek articles that discusses Apple and their changng business strategy towards becoming more of a consumer electronics and services company. The articles talk about the success of the iPod, iTunes and the iTunes on-line music store, Apple's ability to innovate, the XServe server, and so on. All in all, fairly positive, with few really glaring mistakes. The one semi-whopper that stands out was the statement (in "Picking Apple as a Server Solution") that the XServe would suffer in competition with Linux because it uses proprietary software. Gee, it seems pretty open to me--the XServe/Mac OS X Server 10.2.x I run at work (Apache/MySql/PHP, file sharing services, etc) is certainly based on the open source model with GUI OS X interfaces slapped on top.