Feedback on yesterday’s post, both here and on Twitter, seemed to generally be relatively uniform. Not so much divisive, but more along the lines of, “You think you’ve got it bad? Try bringing a Windows PC to a Mac environment.” You all bring up a fair point. Personally, I find it amusing that I know of not one, but two technology journalists who at one time or another covered the religion beat on a local newspaper. Why is that amusing? Because…
I recall hearing a story of a co-worker at Microsoft, who was a technical assistant to an executive, who had a Mac. It wouldn’t normally be a big deal, except he worked directly for an executive. As a result, this Mac was seen in many meetings across campus – it’s distinct aluminum body and fruity ghost shining through the lid a constant reminder that this was one less PC sold (even if it ran Windows through Boot Camp or virtualization software….
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…
It really didn’t hit me until recently. Something I’ve worked with for years, is being forced to retire. Well, not really retire, but at least asked to take a seat in the background. My daughters love it when I tell them stories about “When I was little…” – the stories always begin with that saying. They usually have a lot to do with technology, and now things have changed over the last 40 years. You know the drill – phones…
This week, for the second time in a year, I lost the hard drive in my main computer, a 2010 ThinkPad W510 running Windows 8. I swear I was good to the computer – I don’t know why this second Seagate 500GB drive (yes, the first one was too!) decided to hit the floor. I’ve had so many hardware problems with this system – BSODs, weird display problems, and more, over the last year, that rather than try to jam…
At lunch the other day, a friend and I were discussing the buzzword bingo of “development methodologies” (everybody’s got one). In particular, we honed in on Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as being an all-but-gibberish term, because it means something different to everyone. How can you possibly define what is an MVP, when each one of us approaches MVP with predisposed biases of what is viable or not? One man’s MVP is another’s nightmare. Let me explain. For Amazon, the original…
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….
It’s with a fair amount of disappointment (disbelief?) that I read Bruce Ramsey’s article about Initiative 522 (Washington’s GMO labeling proposition) in the Seattle Times. My belief, after reading this piece, is that Mr. Ramsey should generally refrain from writing when his familiarity with the topic at hand leads him to include the disclaimer “I am a novice”, as he did with the statement early in this article, “I am a novice on genetically modified organisms”. There are three modalities…