Pride: Argentina's telecommunications ranking

While the right-wing press who misses the "pro-market" State-free 1990s tries to smear the current administration day after day... we read some good news thanks to PRMinds's report on telecommunications in Latin America:

2007 Latin America Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband in Mercosur, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela:

"Argentina: Argentina has one of the most solid state-of-the-art telecom infrastructures in South America. Fixed-line teledensity is around 22%, similar to Brazil and Chile. Like elsewhere in Latin America, the shift is away from traditional telephony and towards mobility. While fixed lines stagnate, mobile telephony is booming, reaching a penetration of over 82% – a figure that is well above the Latin American average, trailing only Chile and a few Caribbean islands. All telephony services are open to competition, requiring a single licence for any type of service. The country’s incumbents Telefónica de Argentina and Telecom Argentina still dominate the country’s fixed network [it's time to end Telefonica's Local Loop monopoly, Cristina!], but long distance telephony is highly competitive [who calls long distance from a fixed line?]. Three mobile operators, Movistar, CTI Móvil, and Telecom Personal, run a close competition for mobile market share. All three are planning network upgrades in 2007 to prepare for the launch of UMTS 3G technology. Argentina’s Internet market is the third largest in Latin America, and penetration is among the highest in the region."

NYTimes´ Pogue is right: people do not "choose" IE

Tech columnist at the NY Times David Pogue writes in his review of the Internet Explorer 7 beta:

"ABOUT 85 percent of the Internet population uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to surf the Web, even though it's relatively ancient, crusty with neglect and about as secure as a screen door. In what other industry would 85 percent of consumers choose such a product — when better ones, also free, were also available? Trick question. Those consumers aren't actually choosing Internet Explorer; in fact, they're not choosing. They just use what came on their Windows computers."

It was about time someone told it like it is!!

However, some folks at the Evil Empire of Redmondia need a reality check.... specifically Microsoft India´s guru Rishi K Srivastava who only weeks ago claimed just the opposite, that the "bundling" had nothing to do with IE´s market share (yeah, right!).

“IE’s success cannot be attributed to its access through Windows. The reason why people are not opting for other browsers is because of IE’s superiority. If you have access to a better product why you would not choose it. IE is much secure and only a large corporation like Microsoft can invest so much into security,”
What a good joke.

See Srivastava... you can fool some people a long time, but you cannot fool all the people, all the time.