In general, the 60 Minutes interview of Jeff Bezos felt largely like a marketing piece. But what Bezos says at 13:30 is great. “Companies have short lifespans… And Amazon will be disrupted one day… I don’t worry about it because I know it is inevitable. Companies come and go. And the companies that are the shiniest and most important of any era, you wait a few decades and they’re gone.” – Jeff Bezos on 60 Minutes, Dec. 1, 2013 …
The vocal minority. You’ve heard of them, but who are they? Companies often seek to change their status quo by modifying how they do business. Generally, this is a nice way of saying just they want more. More what, you ask? Traditionally, it would have meant they simply want more money, as in raising the cost of the goods they are selling (or lowering the cost that they will pay to suppliers or partners). These of course are done to…
Have you recently updated an app your computer or your smartphone (or accessed your favorite Web app), and been faced with the arrival of: New features out of the blue Changed behavior for existing features A release that removes or breaks a feature you frequently use A user interface change that completely modifies the way the app works? If so, you might be a victim of mutually assured distraction (MAD). MAD can also alternatively be referred to as competitive cheese moving. Once…
A few times over the last year, I’ve had conversations with people about Windows XP holdouts. That is, that as Windows XP’s impending doom rapidly approaches next April, businesses and consumers holding out on Windows XP will readily flock to something new, such as – ideally for Microsoft, Windows 8.1 – or Windows 7. I’m not so sure. To start, let’s consider why a business or consumer would still be running Windows XP today. Most likely, it’s a combination of…
“Let me tell you why my TV series in the ’90’s was so good. Besides an inordinate amount of just pure good fortune. In most TV series, 50% of the time is spent working on the show. 50% of the time is spent dealing with personality, political, and hierarchical issues of making something. We spent 99% of our time writing. Me and Larry. The door was closed. Somebody calls? We’re not taking the call. We’re gonna make this scene funny….
It’s hard to believe that almost three years have passed since I wrote my first blog entry discussing Windows running on the ARM processor. Over that time, we’ve seen an increasing onslaught of client devices (tablets and phones) running on ARM, and we’ve watched Windows expand to several Windows RT-based devices, and retract back to the Surface RT and Surface 2 being the only ARM-based Windows tablets, and now with the impending Nokia 2520 being the only non-Microsoft (and the…
I’ve been tidying up my media subscriptions of late. Although I’ve subscribed to many paper and online publications over the years, I’ve found that there are only a few which give me an adequate mix of content to the price they’re willing to charge and the time I have available to give to consuming them. I know it costs a lot to create a publication, but it’s astonishing to see how much some media companies value their product – more…
“You’re always fighting things that are opposed to each other…So as an example, let’s take the PlayStation Portable, alright? Great game machine, but it’s not such a great music player, and there’s many reasons for that, but the main reason is that it doesn’t fit in your pocket, right? So your games want nice big screens, music players want to fit in your pocket. You have to pick one, and optimize for it, and the second thing you do will…
“…Part of the hardest thing about coming up with new products is to figure out a really cool set of technologies you can implement it with, and make it easy, but also figuring out something that people… want to do. We’ve all seen products that’ve come out that have been interesting, but have fallen on their face because not enough people want to do them.” – Steve Jobs at D2, 2004
I’ve been testing iOS 7 from the beginning, and though the UI took a bit of getting used to (and the new icon on the Photos app still makes me do a mental reset sometimes). Overall, I love the changes in it. I’d like to take a minute to tell you about a few of my favorite enhancements in the OS. Control Center – Control Center is easily one of my favorite changes – and it’s immensely useful. A flick…