At the end of your life, you take nothing with you. You leave behind everything. If you’ve spent your life taking, you leave behind a legacy of taking. If you’ve spent your life giving, you leave behind a legacy of giving. You decide. Every day.
Yesterday I read Paul Miller’s piece on The Verge, I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. Having decided not nearly as long ago (4 days) to take a break from Twitter and Facebook, I found the piece timely. I recently decided to take a bit of a timeout from Twitter – and even more from Facebook – because I felt that the energy I put into them, and the negative energy I received from them was…
A friend recently posted a link to this blog. It’s an interesting read about where you should focus when building your app; should you have one app for each platform, or an API that goes as high up as possible into each platform? In particular, he quotes the expression, “the API is the asset, the UI is simply throwaway”. I get the point he’s trying to say. Platforms come and go – but an API should be designed to be durable….
App hoarding. The dark, unspoken secret. We’ve all done it. I logged on to a Windows 8 tablet I hadn’t used for quite some time, and I was so ashamed of myself. So much junk, so many free apps I downloaded, tried, and abandoned. Only recently have I begun steadfastly maintaining a “two screen” limit on iOS to try and keep the applications on my devices solely to those that I use regularly. This isn’t new, mind you. Enterprises have…
A few weeks ago on Twitter, I said something about Apple, and someone replied back something akin to, “Apple is only one release away from irrelevance.” Ah, but you see… we all are. In terms of sustainability, if you believe “we get this version released, and we win”, you lose. Whether you have competitors today, or you have a market that is principally yours, if there is enough opportunity for you, there’s enough appeal for someone else to enter it…
Working on another blog post, and ran across an interview of Bill Hill from 2009. Bill reinvented himself many times in his career, from a newspaperman to someone who fundamentally worked to change the way the world read text on a digital screen. It harkens back to yesterday’s post, as well as my post on the machines coming for your job. Specifically, at about 19 minutes in, this conversation comes up: Interviewer: “In this economy…What’s the relationship between fear…and taking chances…?”…
Earlier today, this tweet showed up in my Twitter timeline. It leads with the text: “Quality to blame for declining news audiences, study suggests” I retweeted it, and then commented, “The increased cost for news content, and the decreasing amount of truly unique content, show why people abandon news outlets.” At first, I thought this applied just to news content. But no, it applies to many things in our life today; however news exemplifies it in a very unique way….
“Smart”. Many device and appliance manufacturers toss that word around like they know what it means. An app platform on a TV? Voila! It’s a “Smart TV” An LCD screen and/or an app platform on a refrigerator, washer or dryer? Voila! It’s a “Smart Appliance”. You go ahead and keep using that word, manufacturers. Just understand that it doesn’t mean what you think it means. You’re turning it into a meaningless modifier, like “green”, “natural”, or one of my favorites,…
This blog post is in response to the TechCrunch piece entitled Get Ready To Lose Your Job. For my entire life, my father was a physician (until he retired). He had to subscribe to medical journals and take courses to keep his skills up to snuff, but medicine, and his specialty, did not evolve to such a form that his career has been replaced. That said, his specialty (gastroenterology) now has some amazing tools at their disposal that can obviate…
While talking with my wife the other day, I happened to mention Atos to her. If you don’t remember Atos, they’re the company that banned email at the tail end of 2011. I’m not sure how well that has gone, but I haven’t heard that they’ve reversed the decision – in fact they are still blogging about it as of last October. I thought the idea of banning email was illogical then, and I still believe it is. I was thinking…