Last Friday we went on a zeppelin ride from Moffett Field with Airship Ventures. My favorite part was to fly above the evaporation ponds:

And a green one:

You’ve cost the economy untold billions of hours spent on analyzing every minute detail with the coworkers. You’ve posed questions and gave answers that led to even more questions. You’ve made a bunch of unknown (but good looking) actors famous for the rest of their lives. And now you are gone. At least one question was answered – who was Kate’s true love. Good bye, “Lost”.

Certainly an interesting week, with Palm acquired by HP and Apple’s detailed response on why Flash is no go on their platforms. Along with the recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle, it is shaping to be a battle of giants in the consumer market. Now we have (in alphabetical order) Adobe, Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft and Oracle – each with its own platforms, tools and plans to get a piece of desktop, web and mobile consumer markets.

• Apple, Microsoft and (presumably soon) Google have their own desktop operating systems. They do not need to ask anybody a favor to be able to shape where they are going, and what they can run on it.
• Apple, Google and Microsoft have their own browsers. They do not need to ask anybody a favor to shape what can run in it.
• Apple, Google, HP and Microsoft have their own mobile operating systems. They do not need to ask anybody a favor to be able to shape where they are going, and what they can run on it.

Where does that leave Adobe and Oracle? Each is certainly a behemoth in the area of cross-platform consumer-oriented platforms. Adobe has Flash, Flex and Air. Oracle has Java and JavaFX. But do they control their own long-term destiny?

Give a man a fish, and he will expect to get a free fish every day and bitch about you on twitter when you stop. Teach a man how to fish and you will sell him fishing equipment for the rest of his life.