getwired.com

When the Nest Learning Thermostat first came out, I went through a couple of different modes of thought. Let me walk you through them. Bewilderment – I read the initial news about the thermostat and thought, “Tony left Apple and made… a thermostat?” Excitement – I realized that the design team had followed what appeared to be an Apple-like philosophy of simplicity and task-based design. Disappointment – I realized that it was $249, which was a little more than I wanted…

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The other day, I was on a panel of 4 pundits where an audience member asked whether we felt Microsoft would approve a Metro app that was data heavy. The visual I got was a data grid application, something perhaps written in Access, VB, FoxPro, or some other visual designer at a time when raw data access was thought to be a good thing. I spoke pretty candidly about the fact that if you’re making the effort to port to Windows…

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Natural. A harmless word. As someone who grew up in Montana, if you used “natural” in a word-association test, the response I’d give you is probably Glacier National Park. But natural isn’t a harmless word anymore. Unlike the word organic, which (though overloaded in meaning) has a very explicit definition when it comes to food, the word natural means everything, yet means nothing at the same time. At a simplistic level, the word natural means “from nature”. However, unless it’s something…

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Privacy. It’s a good idea, right? But what the heck is it? For quite some time, I was a paranoid nutjob about Google. It irritated the bejeezus out of me that I knew how diligently they tracked everything, aggregated everything, and could really identify me in a digital crowd. Eventually, I rationalized that it wasn’t really a big deal to me that Google knew when I was sick, when I needed repair for my VW (or that it knew what kind…

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Growing up in Montana, “the backpacker’s credo” was gospel. This saying, “pack it in, pack it out”, applies to how important it is to take anything you bring with you to a campsite back out with you. Nobody wants to take a 15 mile hike to a gorgeous lake hidden in the mountains only to see someone’s beer six-pack ring or Snickers wrapper on the ground. Not only does it spoil the scene, but litter is far from ideal for…

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Aron Ralston. You may not know the name, but you probably heard of his amazing story. Mountaineering by himself in Utah in 2003, his forearm and right hand became trapped for four days by a boulder that had slipped down on them. Finally out of water, he amputated his own hand with a multitool, to save his own life. For months – long before last October’s SharePoint Conference where gossip and dreams of Office for the iPad were a common…

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  As a child, my parents took my brother and I on several vacations. My dad’s a history buff, though – specifically the Civil War timeframe – so many of our vacations had a historical angle to them. One I remember best was a trip to the Washington, D.C. area when I was almost 10. In particular, we went to Colonial Williamsburg. I never would have imagined it then, but one thing that I saw there has stuck with me…

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Yes, I said it. Windows 8 should completely, blatantly steal a feature from OS X “Mountain Lion”. Issue certs for ISVs outside (not just inside) the store, lock Windows down to them by default, and revoke them when they go rogue. The reality is that Windows 8 on x86/x64 needs Gatekeeper (signature-based whitelisting) far more than the Mac does. I’ve seen huge cry from the open-source crowd about Windows 8 boot security, Mac App Store apps having to live within…

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I spent three days this week with a rather intense migraine. Hovering between pain and vertigo, I had an idea for a blog post I wanted to write. I blathered into Dragon Dictation on my iPad, only to realize I was rambling on about a subject that needed simplicity.  So I waited to write when I was cogent. I believe that Ken Segall’s upcoming book likely covers some of the same area I’m about to – albeit in more depth,…

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Recently a peer and I were talking about the phrase in the title of this post. We both heard it at Microsoft, and I know I heard it at startups after I left too. If you haven’t heard it before, the idea is as follows. There are three properties of a product: Delivery date Key features Product quality Generally when building a product, one of them gets cut, so you wind up usually only delivering two: Features and quality, but…

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