The answer is yes. Hulu has regularly blocked Flash-enabled devices through various (often circumventable, but still) means. It's just that you never hear about them.
Hulu reps have been quoted before saying it's because of licensing restrictions related to the content on other devices than PCs.
Having played around with it (I hacked together a gnash+ffmpeg port that's just sufficient to run Hulu on my own iPhone), they just have some logic in their flash scripts to prevent playing on unlicensed platforms. And in order to prevent direct linking to the FLVs, they use some obfuscating logic -- namely, they give you a string + a key and have you perform an AES-style operation using the two locally to get a time-expiring key to the file you want to play. They change the obfuscating pattern just often enough to make it annoying if you were, say, trying to keep up a Boxee script or update an AppStore application.
I feel like Google is constantly launching Facebook killers and waiting to see what will stick. They have so many different social networks and feed mechanisms that it's hard to discern a coherent strategy from them.
You can still browse without Javascript. This won't hide any content — you just won't have Javascript gussying up the presentation for you. Which is already the case on a lot of sites that don't use it as a CSS replacement. That is basically your choice if you choose to roll without Javascript.
HTC has been building giant-touchscreen-type phones for years. Windows Mobile is not some kind of cheap Blackberry ripoff; it's a Palm ripoff, a lot closer to the iPhone when it came out than anything else. Moreover, the first Android phones didn't even have multitouch or capacitive screens.
Did Apple influence some design decisions? Sure. However, the design of the G1 and the first Android phones were also a logical extension from what was available at the time.
I think that it could become a liability to do this at some point, though. When everybody is calling in and people have flaky quality, you are wasting at least some time. If a meeting is more effective in person, then have that meeting in person! You shouldn't be afraid to exclude one or two people if they're traveling; they're already excluded anyway. Why provide an illusion of close involvement?
When everybody is calling in and people have flaky quality, you are wasting at least some time.
I've never noticed flaky microphones or audio quality from remote participants. Ever. But I've often found that local participants are completely inaudible. If every local participant just used a bluetooth microphone (or really anything dedicated but the shared conference call microphones), things would be so much better.
The points you make are disturbing. As far as I can tell, the reason why people shy away from SEO is not that it doesn't work. Indeed, it seems like people shy away from SEO because it works too well. At least for me, there's a perception that SEO is evil and crowds out legitimate content. I would hope that these startups are not going over to SEO just because it works; I would hope that SEO is trying to show that it works legitimately.
Good sales teams crowd out great products with crappy sales teams (no no sales at all). Great marketing destroys great products that have no marketing.
The best developers take their head out of the code and realize that it's not a true product meritocracy-- in Google search results, in the App Store, or in any marketplace you care to name. AND they realize that really freakin' awesome things happen when you combine a great product with great marketing.
I sell software to big companies (Global 2000) in a new category and SEO has been absolutely vital to our marketing success. People from big companies are actively looking for new solutions w/ Google. (Not like, the CEO, but someone at the architect/pmgmt/tech lead level who may do something.) I've gotten both great OEM leads (from large tech co's even your parents have heard of), great direct sales leads at F500 companies and the (gasp!) federal government, and a lot of activity from consultants, analysts, and journalists.
SEO matters, even in the complex business to business sale, <em>but only if your company and your offering is remarkable</em>. (In the Seth Godin sense - worthy of remark.) Look at how much SEO a company like salesforce.com does.
It's a textbook. Flash doesn't matter. The content needs to be there. I've read textbooks on my iPad before; for the most part, it works OK. There doesn't appear to be any big advantage to the Kno that couldn't be matched in a specialized iPad app.
They lacked metallurgy, banking, agricultural technology... The Industrial Revolution was built on hundreds of years of slow progress and access to tons of natural resources. The Aeliopile was a toy that opened doors; it wasn't going to power any steamships.
There's a strange parallel to the evolution of life on Earth. Took about a billion years before the simplest single-celled organism developed all the basic mechanisms/components, and then a few hundred million years from complex multicelled organisms, and finally a huge explosion in diversity in the last hundred million years. I wonder if evolution and technological progress plotted on the same relative logarithmic scale would overlay each other?
