Eric Jackson writes for Forbes about what he thinks Apple should do.

Apple needs to start picking off strategic assets as if their life depends on it, rather than continuing on with a plodding attitude that doesn’t match the speed of their competitive environment.

This just sounds like advice from someone who knows nothing about how Apple works. As John Gruber pointed out, Apple’s product strategy is a thousand no’s for every yes.

Apple acquires a company to integrate it into Apple, not acquire something for the sake of it. Just because Facebook is going around buying companies doesn’t mean that Apple should do the same.

The writer strongly believes that Apple needs to take action:

No longer. Apple needs to start playing offense.

It’s time for Apple to get aggressive.

But he fails to explain why. Because Facebook is doing so is a weak argument.

Again, he thinks that spending will make the company better but he doesn’t give an explanation:

The bottom line is I think Zuckerberg or Musk (or pick another young entrepreneur like a David Sacks) would have no hesitation to use Apple’s cash and stock to make it a much better company.

He suggests that Apple buy Tesla:

Well, they could pay $400/share to take out Tesla (TSLA) and make an audacious huge play for the Internet-connected car, as well as snagging Musk into the fold in one fell swoop.

Yes, but it seems that Apple has found a way to do that without having to spend $50 billion.

It is a little coincidental that Jackson suggested that Apple should be aggressive in acquiring services since “it would nice for iMessage not to go down” and a couple of days later WhatsApp was down.

Macworld reports on the real impact of CarPlay—software.

Most people probably don’t ever think about the software in their car. And with good reason, too, since most automakers aren’t exactly consumed with a passion for developing software. Even in the cases where car companies do want to pimp the software features, the spotlight’s always going to be on the newest model—they don’t have too much interest in continuing to update the software on older models, especially when it comes to adding new features.

Sound familiar? Because to me it’s reminiscent of the state of the cell phone market prior to about, oh, 2007.

There is a difference between cars and mobile phones. Most people hardly change their cars so the adoption rate would be a lot slower.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen responds to T-Mobile’s campaign.

Is T-Mobile wrong to offer a better alternative for its customers? Definitely not. T-Mobile should be applauded for putting their customers first and not be afraid of ruffling the feathers of phone makers. Perhaps if BlackBerry put out new products, T-Mobile might actually have something to offer existing BlackBerry users to upgrade to.

Here’s another perspective of how BlackBerry has fallen. WhatsApp started as an app that provided a cross-platform alternative to BlackBerry Messenger. It just sold for more than what BlackBerry is worth.

John Legere’s tweet speaks volumes of difference in how the two CEOs engage their customers:

Was going to engage John Chen on Twitter, but turns out he’s not here. I’ll check MySpace. Don’t worry @BlackBerry Something in the works!

— John Legere (@JohnLegere) February 19, 2014

Sequoia Capital gives an insight on why Facebook bought WhatsApp.

Two numbers stand out for me.

One.

WhatsApp has one focus: messaging.

This discipline is reflected in WhatsApp’s unconventional approach to business. After one year of free use, the service costs $1 per year — with no SMS charges. This can save users trapped in expensive data plans up to$150 per year.

And charges only $1 per year.

It’s easy to take this novel model for granted. When we first partnered with WhatsApp in January 2011, it had more than a dozen direct competitors, and all were supported by advertising. (In Botswana alone there were 16 social messaging apps). Jan and Brian ignored conventional wisdom. Rather than target users with ads — an approach they had grown to dislike during their time at Yahoo — they chose the opposite tack and charged a dollar for a product that is based on knowing as little about you as possible. WhatsApp does not collect personal information like your name, gender, address, or age. Registration is authenticated using a phone number, a significant innovation that eliminates the frustration of remembering a username and password. Once delivered, messages are deleted from WhatsApp’s servers.

Zero.

Rather than invest in marketing, they let the service sell itself.

There may be no greater testament to the viral nature of WhatsApp than the fact that the company has accomplished all this without investing a penny in marketing. Unlike their smaller competitors, it hasn’t spent anything on user acquisition. The company doesn’t even employ a marketer or PR person. Yet like the world’s greatest brands, it’s created a strong emotional connection with consumers. All of WhatsApp’s growth has come from happy customers encouraging their friends to try the service.

I find their success through such a minimalist approach an inspiration.

For some reason, Google is compelled to post a guideline for Glass users.

It is interesting to note that Google has embraced the use of the term Glasshole:

Be creepy or rude (aka, a “Glasshole”). Respect others and if they have questions about Glass don’t get snappy. Be polite and explain what Glass does and remember, a quick demo can go a long way. In places where cell phone cameras aren’t allowed, the same rules will apply to Glass. If you’re asked to turn your phone off, turn Glass off as well. Breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about Glass and will ruin it for other Explorers.

As Gruber pointed out, it is a concern if Google has to tell users not to be a creep. Does it mean that there is something fundamentally wrong with the concept of Google Glass? Such as how it will infringe on privacy.

This feels like gun makers putting up a guideline for gun owners not to shoot innocent people. Except that gun makers don’t do that.

It’s 2014, so security issues are the norm rather than the exception, but the latest news that Asus left the door wide open on many of its routers is extremely disturbing.

The fact that anybody with your IP address will be able to login anonymously to your attached storage device is bad enough, it’s much worse that a list of almost 13,000 IP addresses of people who are using these vulnerable routers was published online. In simpler terms, that means your home address has been published online, and your front door isn’t locked.

Going through the file listings of other IP addresses I see insanely personal items like whole backups of laptops, family photos, porn collections, and tax documents. Anyone that has the list of IP addresses can potentially download any of those files. I wrote some python to walk through the list of IP addresses and check to see if logging in anonymously is still possible. I’m not bothering to look at anything just see if ftp.login() works and recording the statistics. The numbers are not reassuring. The code is also on pastebin for those who want to run it and help report the numbers.

So far the incidents that have surfaced due to this security issue haven’t been too serious, but it could be a lot worse if someone decided that it’d be a good idea to create a script to access the files of the affected users and delete all the files, or insert some sort of malware.

To make things worse, it took Asus a long time to finally release a patch. Patching the vulnerability is the first step, but the question is how many folks out there who own the affected routers are aware of the issue and know how to patch their routers?

Asus really botched this one badly.