Links for Monday May 2^nd, 2011

• Carnival Barker Edition: Show me your iOS licensing certificate! | Monday Note: Another triumph from John-Louis Gassée. He digs into the Mac vs. PC war of the late 80's, to definitively show that what happened then isn't necessarily bound to repeat now with smartphones.

• The Emperor’s New Network Effects: This article is so ridiculously good. If you're worried about an iPhone-dominated future, this bit is key:

  "So the crucial question for the vertical industry tipping point is how fast can Apple scale their manufacturing and their distribution. And can they scale fast enough to dominate this massive market? As with the horizontal tipping point, this is impossible to accurately quantify, but I think the fact that Apple is losing ground against Android is a sign that they can’t scale fast enough to achieve an iPod-like dominance of the phone market."

  Apple isn't going to win or lose by repeating mistakes of the past (i.e. not licensing their OS), but rather by making new mistakes. And not attacking the low end aggressively, could be the new mistake. (via Daring Fireball)

• What Safari’s “Reading List” in Lion means for Instapaper: A reasonable analysis by Marco Arment (creator of Instapaper), on Apple's purported "Reading List" feature, coming in Mac OS X Lion. Apple's implementations of these sorts of features (Safari RSS is a great example) tend to be too limited for me to get any real use out of them. So, my guess is that Instapaper is safe, until Google shows up with a knockoff.