Always been a fan of MS but just can’t anymore, their only saving grace is that Apple is so overpriced and lets face it, incompatible. In fact Apple is for people who can’t use computers, like my mom. The iPad has enabled her to come to terms with GUI without having to explain to her that you don’t need to feed the mouse to make it work, it’s for kids who like their one hit wonders in a ‘white’ box and are under the illusion that it’s cool to have what every other moron has.

In saying that, if there was a viable alternative to MS (and there will be one day) folks will flock to it!

When your monkey is old enough to decide to pick some music and listen to her friends, your opinions will change. Would far rather Little Monkey listening to Pink and Katy than Brittney and Taylor. Positive beats skanky or depressing every time. LOL While she still listens to my awesome and spectacular music choices, she still occasionally picks her own. Welcome to parenthood. :) Even Bieber is a pretty positive take on things compared to his competition…as sad as that is, there you go.

What I disagree with is Topolsky’s assertion that Apple’s ‘Post-PC’ direction will become the de-facto direction for computing and electronics in the years to come. Apple still does a lot to innovate, but I’m betting that eventually their inflexibility and narrow-minded vision will come back to bite them in the ass.

As for the logistics of returning a movie wherever you like, Redbox seems to have that figured out, and while I don’t have actual numbers in front of me, I’m pretty sure they have about six million more locations than Blockbuster.

I, too, used to be a Blockbuster employee back in high school. This is why I have trouble returning movies on time — old habits forced out of taking home five free rentals a week and forgetting when they were checked out. And even back then, in the VHS days of yore, people returned videos to the wrong store ALL THE GODDAMN TIME.

You know how we got the videos back to the right store? Occasionally, we’d bundle them up and mail them to the other store, but generally, an employee who lived fairly near the other store would be tasked with driving the videos to their home store. Off the clock, naturally.

Now that we live IN THE FUTURE, it really wouldn’t be so hard to work out an inventory management system that gauged demand for certain movies by store in real-time, and tracked the inventory and returns at store level. Then movies could be shuffled around to stores that need them on a weekly basis as either part of an existing logistics network, via UPS or post office, or via a designated low-wage employee shuffling them around town in his Saturn. Whatever works. Of course, that would require two things: 1) Blockbuster to update their TWENTY YEAR OLD inventory and POS system, and 2) Blockbuster’s leadership to have some kind of imagination and foresight.