This is a page out of The Innovator's Dilemma, in some ways, if you look at a "rift" as a disruptive innovation. Of course, it's not quite the same thing, but the description of how companies react is quite similar.

Links:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dilemma-the-revolutionary-book-that-will-change-the-way-you-do-business-collins-business-essentials

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology

Man, these horrible new SEOified urls are a graphic disaster. I ought to make the sw automatically tinyurl them...

If you're considering obfuscating them anyways just truncate the text inside the <a> at some number of characters (you could even add an ellipsis if you want to get fancy).

Yes, that would be much better. I hate tinyurl -- it completely obfuscates things.

What about [reddit-style links?](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28990)

Yeah, I feel bad about posting big long links like that, and would gladly spend the time to use markdown. I added that as a feature request a while ago (ok, 5 days, but it feels like a 'while ago' in speedy life land):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783

The 'SEO links' links do, unfortunately, seem to be effective.

It seems that the comment is old enough that I can't edit it any more to replace, it, either...sorry.

What is the big deal about the iPhone? Isn't it just another product that may or may not prevail? Why do writers try to make it sound as if the fate of Apple and Steve Jobs would depend on it? Also was it such a huge investment for Apple? I don't think these days building a phone is that much of a problem, at least there are several companies who managed to do it before.

Well said. There's something very American about rifting.