I’ve been filing a lot out of Macworld and will have more coming later in week from CES. (Groan.) Latest is “Macworld, MacBoring,” describing the sad-ass spectacle that was yesterday’s Macworld keynote by Phil Schiller and wondering, “Is Apple’s golden era over?” Left out of this article (because I filed fast) was the fact that despite the lameness of the keynote, and the lack of anything really exciting, there was no shortage of bootlicking fanboys in the audience, cheering over every little thing and sometimes moaning orgasmically. There’s only one word for this: scary. Even worse were the hardcore Mac hacks who were sitting in the press pool and cheering too. (While most of us were just bored out of our minds.) I’ve never seen hacks actually clap and cheer at a press event unless it was an Apple event. Also check out a post I did for Newsweek’s tech blog, “What would Apple be without Steve Jobs?” Twitter length version: Apple needs to do something about a succession plan.

My latest Newsweek column, about Tesla Motors, is here.

I’m not making this up. iJustine, aka Justine Ezarik, the crazy Mac fangirl blogger vlogger Steve Jobs stalker, has been signed up as a spokesmodel for Mozy, a company that sells an online backup service. I just saw the commercials that are already airing in Boise and Austin, and soon will go nationwide. I’ll put them up as soon as possible. They’re fantastic. I’ve heard Justine has also signed on to do some ads for AT&T. Amazing.

That’s what some guy on CNET advocates. I think he’s kidding. Let me make a small prediction. There will be a lot of bailing out taking place at Facebook but it will be the old-fashioned kind — kids bailing out when they realize there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and bigshot Google defectors bailing, preferably early and with good excuses, so they don’t end up with flop stink all over them. Por ejemplo: If, as some are predicting, Larry Summers joins the Obama administration, I’d bet his old pal and former chief of staff Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook will go with him. This way Sandberg could say that she wasn’t leaving Facebook because it’s all fucked up and there’s no IPO on the horizon and while she really, really, really meant all that stuff about changing the world by creating software that lets recent college graduates hook up more efficiently and force-feeds them targeted advertising — well, as noble as that cause might be, and it is indeed truly a noble cause, she’s heard the call to duty, to help her country, and so, with a heavy heart, she will have to take her leave and let Mark Zuckerberg carry on with his current three-year path to a business model.

Won’t you please help the children? For ways to get involved, see here.

Check out this essay in the New Yorker about undecided voters. Money quote:

To put them [undecided voters] in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

As we head into the maelstrom of another economic downturn, flacks and spinmeisters will be rushing out to tell the world why the bad times are actually good for their companies. I’m already hearing people deliver some version of this, including the one that while many companies are going to get crushed, this particular company won’t suffer, because they possess the magical Anti-Downturn Potion, or they’re living inside the protection of an Economic Distortion Field. Some go a step further and even say the downturn could be a wonderful opportunity. One example is the statement that MLP put out yesterday regarding Sun. Another was Max Levchin of Slide who told me (see my Newsweek column about it here) the hard times might help his company because some of his competitors will go out of business. (Funny thing about that same Newsweek column was that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, was quoted saying that his company was “prerevenue” but would do just fine during a downturn, although for others “it’s going to be painful. There’s going to be lots of fallout.” Days later Dorsey was ousted from Twitter. I don’t think that’s the kind of painful fallout he was talking about.

True, some companies gain share during downturns. But most don’t. Most just find that sucky times, um, suck. But times like these provide a rare opportunity for flacks to shine with outrageous lies and made-up stories. So I’ve decided it might be a fun game to keep an eye out for examples of people or companies claiming that the downturn is going to be a good for some company for some reason. The more tortured the logic, the better. Send them in and we can keep track of them here. Peace.

Other ticker symbols considered included WTF, OOPS and OUCH. In case you haven’t heard, My Little Pony announced yesterday that they’re going to lose buckets of money and take some huge charges related to some acquisitions. See their press release here. Of course the villain in all this is the economy. Not My Little Pony. Nope, he’s been doing a great job. Like paying $4.1 billion for StorageTek, an aging tape storage company. Or paying $1 billion for MySQL, a software company best known for giving its product away at no cost. Other smart moves by MLP include open-sourcing Sun’s software, so that it generates less revenue. Plus some keen window-dressing, like a one-for-four reverse stock split and a stock ticker name change to JAVA. Yep, the board is so happy with MLP that last year they paid him $11 million – up from $7.7 million the year before. MLP said in a statement that the company is “positioned to offer the kinds of products that can radically help customers reduce expenditures.” In other words, this downturn is actually gonna be good for us.

For what it’s worth, I happened to be visiting Sun just as the last downturn was beginning. This was for a big cover profile in Forbes which ran in January 2001. (You can see it here.) McNealy and Zander were running the place and they were as arrogant as any team I’d ever run into in tech. Here was Zander explaining why a downturn in the economy would be good for Sun: 

“I think there’s going to be a shift in capital spending, and it’s going to be lucky for us,” Zander says. “I don’t care who you are—if you’re General Motors or Deutsche Telekom, you’re going to keep investing in Internet infrastructure and dot-comming your company, because that’s going to let you gain global advantage and be more competitive.” 

McNealy has stepped aside and is now chairman. Zander went to Motorola, drove it into the weeds, and then left.

Visionary entrepreneur Marc Andreeeessssen did a Churchill Club interview on Sept. 4 with Kevin Maney of Portfolio magazine. The transcript is here (along with a very unkind PhotoShop picture of Andreeeeeessssssen where they made him look like Beldar.) Money quote comes on Page 3 of the interview:

Does that create the danger of a new tech bubble?
If there’s been a crisis in a market, you don’t tend to have a new crisis in that market until the people who went through the last crisis aren’t in the system anymore. It was only eight years ago. So here we are in 2008, and there’s still no sign of a bubble in technology, which I can encapsulate in two words: no I.P.O.’s.

I’m wondering if anything has happened between Sept. 4 and today that might suggest there is a bit of a tech bubble. Okay, fair enough. I get Marc’s point. There’s no bubble in the public market. That’s because this the time VCs weren’t able to flog their money-losing POS companies off onto a gullible public. Instead they’re going to have to mop up the mess themselves. So if you characterize a bubble as something that can only take place in public markets, fine, there is no bubble. If you characterize it more broadly as a phenomenon in which companies with no profits and unworkable business models are able to raise millions of dollars in venture money, and then when each unworkable company leads to six or eight copycat companies that also get funding, and when a company like Facebook is valued at $15 billion — um, in the broader sense of the term bubble, I’d say that would be one.