The week just passed melded Inauguration week and the first week of earnings reports into one giant package filled with exuberance and resignation. Conventional wisdom says to start with the bad news and end with the good news, but that’s not how it went down: It started high with the momentum and promise of change embodied by Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States and ended low with some heavy hitters feeling the pain of the downturn.
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There’s got to be a joke somewhere in the fact that Macworld, the Consumer Electronics Show and the AVN Awards (the “Pornies”) all happen during the same week. Maybe even one that hasn’t been played out 10 times over. All Things Digital was too busy covering two out of three this week to think of one.
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Despite its relatively tame product announcements and the absence of Steve Jobs, Apple’s final Macworld keynote wasn’t without a highpoint or two: changes in pricing and digital rights management for the iTunes store, a new 17-inch MacBook Pro with an eight-hour battery life, and a surprise appearance by crooner Tony Bennett, among them. After the jump, the event in pictures courtesy of ATD’s crack photojournalist, Adam Tow.
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Where are Tina Fey and Sarah Palin when we really need a laugh? In this week ramping up to the holidays, good cheer–unsurprisingly–was hard to find. 2008 may well be remembered as the year the econalypse stole Christmas.
Yahoo was bereft of cheer, for sure. BoomTown covered its long-dreaded layoffs and published Jerry Yang’s complete memo to Yahoo staff about the painful process, which began on Wednesday. Ex-Yahoos from all corners of the company spoke (and vented) to BoomTown about the as-yet fruitless search for a CEO to replace Yang, who laid himself off last month. But wait–Digital Daily pointed out a singular moment of misplaced cheer–akin to fiddling while the proverbial Yahoo burns–as the company, uh, celebrated the holidays with a bafflingly lavish year-end party on last Saturday–four days before layoffs began.
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It was an eventful week–a new President-elect, Yahoo still playing the field with no takers, and the hovering recession beginning to hit a little harder, a little closer to home. It was hard to keep the storylines straight, so let’s approach it thematically.
Election 2008
Whether or not those voting machines malfunctioned or miscounted votes, Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States, much to the chagrin of comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who–since the beginning of the McCain/Palin partnership–were handed once-in-a-lifetime material. Between the brilliant Saturday Night Live parody sketches of (and by) both Palin and McCain, and Obama’s victory speech, the other big winner (by a mile) was YouTube.
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Since John Paczkowski’s still out of range, Beth Callaghan will be posting Digital Daily today.
In a stunning turn of events over the weekend, both Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes passed away–Mac of complications from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease, and Hayes from as-yet unknown causes.
The immediate impact and response, of course, is displayed on the Web, with the now-customary ritual proliferation of tribute videos on YouTube–at last count, there were 188,000 for Isaac Hayes and 137,000 for Bernie Mac.
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The week just passed melded Inauguration week and the first week of earnings reports into one giant package filled with exuberance and resignation. Conventional wisdom says to start with the bad news and end with the good news, but that’s not how it went down: It started high with the momentum and promise of change embodied by Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States and ended low with some heavy hitters feeling the pain of the downturn.
