I announced here on Scripting News that the final RSS 2.0 spec was out. But! – no one had a problem with it. I guess we were ready to go to the next stage, with a clear way forward. And RSS would go on to eat the world, to steal a phrase from a well-known tech pioneer.

I started using RSS via Safari when macOS Tiger was released in April 2005. I then moved to NetNewsWire in March 2006 when the number of feeds was slowing my browser. My news, blog, and web reading have changed for the better. I now use Reeder on all my devices via Feedbin sync.

Cheers to Dave for creating RSS and another 20 years of a decentralized web.

The problem with “best tool for the job” thinking is that it takes a myopic view of the words “best” and “job.” Your job is keeping the company in business, god damn it. And the “best” tool is the one that occupies the “least worst” position for as many of your problems as possible.

Shiny new tools are irresistible and can sometimes solve problems in a better and more elegant way, but most times a proven and limited stack is what you need.

• You see it as a right.
• You think people should be grateful.
• You think of it as a burden.
• You think you are owed.
• You expect to be recognized.

Leading is not for everyone, and that’s fine. Not everyone should be leading, especially if they only want to advance their careers. I believe that leading is a vocation parallel to being an individual contributor. It doesn’t make one role “better” or “worse.” They are just different and equally important. Hence I believe that just because you choose a leadership role shouldn’t mean you are to be paid more than an individual contributor.

Leadership and individual contributors’ roles need to be financially comparable. They should be based on the impact on the overall team and company and not because of the role.

When leading, I am grateful for those that grant me the privilege to lead them. I know that that privilege can be withdrawn at any time. I’ve made more mistakes while leading than those listed above, but I strive to do my best to continue growing so that I can enable others to do the same.

It would be great if Apple added a way for users to have more options for deleting the following data, either manually(selectively) or automatically from their browsers:

1. Web browsing history: After a certain amount of time has passed. [Yes, insert joke here].
2. Cookies and other data that websites store.

One workaround available today for deleting selective browser history more easily is to delete said data via Safari on macOS if you have the same iCloud account on both devices.

Web browser history is easy to select by date and delete all at once. On iOS, you can only do all via the Settings app or one by one. The Safari history on iOS could add an option to the context menu that deletes “all newer” or “older than” links from the selected one. Here where that could be added here.

Cookies could have two additional options with different potential benefits:

1. Deleting based on the date websites were browsed; or
2. Deleting based on the time since the user’s last visit to said website.
3. Deleting all cookies upon closing a tab.

On macOS, the website cookies and data are not organized by date but in alphabetical order. Which makes selectively deleting items a cumbersome job. Every few months, I periodically delete; all-knowing, I’ll need to log in to a bunch of websites I use regularly. It’s not great, but it works.

Just having better options to do this manually would be a huge win, even if not automatic, since auto-deleting stuff for the user can probably bring tons of unforeseen issues.

Something else I wouldn’t mind managing more easily is past Wi-Fi networks.

[…] few eBooks offer any advantage in use over their physical equivalents. eBook readers are still incredibly primitive, and won’t even let you refer to two or more sections of the book at the same time. You can’t photocopy them, copy quotations, or do anything remotely advantageous. What should have been a liberation from the printed page turns out to be the imposition of more restrictive rules.

Jason Snell:

I prefer to read on it than to read on an iPad or iPhone, which is why I keep buying Kindles even though I could definitely read on an iOS device without any trouble. The reflective E-Ink screen is more pleasant for long reading sessions, and the fact that my Kindle isn’t full of push notifications and Twitter apps helps it be a distraction-free reading environment.

[…]

Amazon’s approach to Kindle software updates has been erratic at best and absent at worst, and he’s right that using a Kindle “feels like trudging through soft sand.” The interface is inelegant and in so many ways unchanged from its original release in 2007, just months after the iPhone arrived on the scene. Typography on the Kindle is still mediocre, despite minor advances like support for custom fonts and (in limited cases) the elimination of force-justified text. Even support for library borrowing is hidden, because Amazon really wants you to buy books.
It’s the lack of a proper app story that stings the most, I think. I’d love a version of the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Athletic for my Kindle—the real apps, with the ability to read the latest stories. I know that my E-Ink Kindle screen isn’t going to give me vibrant color or animation, but it could certainly show me the text, which is what the Kindle excels at.

Andrew Albanese writing for Publisher’s Weekly(via DaringFireball):

Under Macmillan’s new policy, which is scheduled to go into effect on November 1, public libraries are allowed to license a usinge discounted, perpetual access e-book for the first eight weeks after a book’s publication. After eight weeks, libraries can purchase multiple two-year licenses at the regular price (roughly $60 for new works). Librarians, however, say that not being allowed to license multiple copies upon publication unfairly punishes digital readers, and will only serve to frustrate users and will hurt the ability of the library to serve their community, especially if other publishers follow suit.

“Libraries are prepared to pay a fair price for fair services; in fact, over the past ten years, libraries have spent over $40 billion acquiring content,” the ALA report reads. “But abuse of their market position by dominant actors in digital markets is impeding essential library activities that are necessary to ensure that all Americans have access to information, both today and for posterity. If these abuses go unchecked, America’s competitiveness and our cultural heritage as a nation are at risk.”

In a matter of minutes after setting up, I was able to get 3x better performance with a single device than with two Amplifi HDs or with enterprise-grade UniFi equipment (UniFi Security Gateway, Switch, and AP) both on iPhone 11 Pro, which has Wi-Fi 6 support and devices without it.

Chris Hoffman from HowToGeek on Wi-Fi 6:

As usual, the latest Wi-Fi standard offers faster data transfer speeds. If you’re using a Wi-Fi router with a single device, maximum potential speeds should be up to 40% higher with Wi-Fi 6 compared to Wi-Fi 5.

Wi-Fi 6 accomplishes this through more efficient data encoding, resulting in higher throughput. Mainly, more data is packed into the same radio waves. The chips that encode and decode these signals keep getting more powerful and can handle the extra work.

Better battery life for your devices through Target Wake Time and better performance in crowded areas:

When the access point is talking to a device (like your smartphone), it can tell the device exactly when to put its Wi-Fi radio to sleep and exactly when to wake it up to receive the next transmission. This will conserve power, as it means the Wi-Fi radio can spend more time in sleep mode. And that means longer battery life.

[…]

Wi-Fi tends to get bogged down when you’re in a crowded place with a lot of Wi-FI enabled devices. Picture a busy stadium, airport, hotel, mall, or even a crowded office with everyone connected to Wi-Fi. You’re probably going to have slow Wi-Fi.

The new Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, incorporates many new technologies to help with this. Intel trumpets that Wi-Fi 6 will improve each user’s average speed by “at least four times” in congested areas with a lot of connected devices.

Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.

Inspiring examples from many different industries and types of entities. Motivated people can do almost anything.

Everything I’ve talked about so far is infrastructure we’d run and pay for regardless of our programming language or web framework. Whether we run on Python, PHP, Rust, Go, C++, or whatever, we’d still need databases, we’d still need search, we’d still need to store files.

So let’s talk about what we spend on our programming language and web framework. It’s about 15%. That’s the price for all our app and job servers. The machines that actually run Ruby on Rails. So against a $3 million budget, it’s about $450,000. That’s it.

Let’s imagine that there was some amazing technology that would let us do everything we’re doing with Ruby on Rails, but it was TWICE AS FAST! That would save us about ~$225,000 per year. We spend more money than that on the Xmas gift we give employees at Basecamp every year. And that’s if you could truly go twice as fast, and thus require half the machines, which is not an easy thing to do, despite what microbenchmarks might delude you into thinking.

“Ruby can’t scale” or “Ruby is too expensive” my ass.

It will affect your deadlines today or sometime down the road. The difference is that today, it’s your choice to make.

Thinking that you get away with this is just naive. It just can’t happen. Not unless you give up on the project or decide to rewrite the whole project, which is an entirely different problem.

Balancing the feature and fixes needed with the necessary cleanup work is difficult. It’s hard. You are not alone in having to make these choices. Making those calls is hard, whether you are the developer, internal or external client, product owner, or even an end-user. The work is needed. Sooner or later, it will become inevitable, and the choice won’t be yours.

There aren’t many options other than just “doing it.” Just as it’s not wise to argue the existence of gravity, you can debate whether it exists. If you try to debate this, you will have the wrong time.

It’s been proven repeatedly that all the money in the world can’t get you off the hook. There are enough examples to go around.

What makes you think you can get away with it? Is it hubris or inexperience, or do you get an adrenaline rush from living on the edge? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you should figure out a way to do it sooner rather than later and make communication front and center since your team, clients, or users need to understand and give you the necessary support.

The term work-life balance has taken a beating lately. It seems to be a favorite punching bag for grandstanding about what you really need is integration or that balance is a mirage anyway. Wat?

Balance simple means that each portion of the system has a sustainable weight which keeps the composition in harmony. Going down a pedantic, semantic rabbit hole of “well, actually, work is part of life, ergo seeking balance is wrong” is some perfidy circular logic.

As a founder you can choose to look at an obstacle as something that keeps you from moving forward (a roadblock), or as something that slows you down for a minute as you continue along your path (a speed bump).

[…]

Roadblocks put stress on your mind. Stress on your body. Stress on your relationships. It’s no way to live, especially for folks who are building startups to improve our lives rather than re-arranging our lives around our companies.

This seems easy and obvious, but it’s not.

When you’re in the middle of a crisis it can feel overwhelming and almost impossible to surmount. I always try to keep my head down and keep working on the problem.

If working on a problem doesn’t seem to be getting you anywhere, then walk away and do other things.

Let your mind do the thinking in the background. Once you are ready, you’ll come back to solve the issues wiser and stronger. A calm mind will take you further than you can imagine.

Paragraf is producing graphene ‘wafers’ and graphene-based electronic devices, which could be used in transistors, where graphene-based chips could deliver speeds more than ten times faster than silicon chips; and in chemical and electrical sensors, where graphene could increase sensitivity by a factor of more than 30. The company’s first device will be available in the next few months.

[…]the real lesson of the Soviet experiment has been lost on us, and the corporations of the world should take note: Planning doesn’t work.

Corporations must and do plan, of course. Their leaders call these plans “strategic” to give them gravitas. But typically strategic plans are just budgets and goals. Budgets and goals are important, but they are not “strategy” if by strategy we mean the logic that drives action.

…after working through common arguments and misconceptions, such as that the RISC (ARM) instruction set architecture is inherently inferior to CISC (x86), that the benchmarks spruiking excellent ARM performance are inaccurate, that the performance gap is explained by different operating systems, and more, I’ve found that the central claim of these articles largely holds true: ARM processors, particularly those produced by Apple, have caught up to high-end x86 processors in most perspectives of performance.

I am looking forward to two things from Apple this year: ARM based Macs with desktop optimized CPUs and iOS 13 optimizations for iPad, that allows all that processor power to be fully utilized.

That has worked fine until now since Google just released the .dev TDL.

It might be time to switch that to a different local TDL; otherwise, your local setting could potentially override an actual functioning app or website with your local configuration.

Granted, it is unlikely to happen unless your website uses the .dev extension, yet, conventions are an important part of a healthy development environment.

With an increasing list of TDLs, the best option might be to start using .development or .local until those get snapped up.

There are three big things that remain before the first feature-complete build (which will be 5.0a1): searching, the app icon, and syncing with FeedBin.

NetNewsWire got me hooked on RSS over 12 years ago. Now it’s open source and rewritem from scratch in Swift. I have been using the alphas for a while and it’s the same great app from all those years ago. Can’t wait to get the Feedbin sync feature, it’s my preferred sync service.

Two-factor authentication is an additional layer of security designed to ensure that you’re the only person who can access your account, even if someone knows your password. This significantly improves the security of your Apple ID and helps protect the photos, documents, and other data you store with Apple. For more information read Two-Factor Authentication for Apple ID.

If you didn’t enable two-factor authentication and believe someone else has access to your account, you can return to your previous security settings . This link and your Apple ID security questions will expire on February 27, 2019.

If you are like me and have a main personal account for all your Apple ID-related stuff and a separate one for your work email or developer account, you are probably trying to figure out what to do if said account isn’t permanently registered on any of the devices you use.

Here’s the simple workaround:

1. Set up a new user account on your Mac
2. Login into your iCloud account tied to the developer account under the new macOS user.
3. Activate two-factor authentication and add your preferred phone number s a backup.
4. Verify you can login into your account via another device or via browser at appleid.apple.com.
5. Log out of iCloud account on the temp macOS user and switch back to your primary macOS user.
6. Delete the temp account; now, you should be able to use the 2fa via the phone validation every time.

Hopefully, Apple will soon allow dual Work/Personal accounts within a single device or iOS 13 and/or macOS 10.15. Until then, this workaround should help.

You’ve probably seen them used to describe software products. Maybe you use them to describe your own product. They seem like great descriptors, because you know they’re truthful, and what’s true must be convincing, right?

As we enter a new year, one in which technology promises to move faster than ever, it’s worth considering what our 23 problems might be.

Good starting point for what we need to work on as a species.

People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

The third-largest U.S. wireless carrier unveiled what it claims is a patented customer-service program on Wednesday called Team of Experts. Subscribers who call or message for assistance will be assigned a group of employees to fix the issue.

This might sound like a corporate joke, but the few times I’ve had to interact with T-Mobile support have been via iMessage for business or their in-app chat. My experience has been incredible so far.

For now, no matter how good your AI or chatbot is, a well-trained human with full authority to get stuff done for you will outperform any tech out there. Glad they are investing in customer support as a differentiator.

The social media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.

This sounds like an all-around bad idea. Glad to hear some banks are walking away from these conversations.

If you’re still worried about it, don’t sit on your router, and use your speaker function on your iPhone.

You can always buy tons of tin foil.

Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.

Being evil is now encouraged at Google?

VPNs are for everyone. This is why.

Yes. End of story. Stop reading and get one. Do it. Now.

Summarizes in relatively simple terms why you do need a VPN, especially if you use any type public Wifi.

The researchers suggest, for example, that graphene could now be used to create new types of superconducting quantum devices for high-speed computing. Intriguingly, it might also be used to prove the existence of a mysterious form of superconductivity known as “p-wave” superconductivity, which academics have been struggling to verify for more than 20 years.

It amazes me how much research is being done on possible commercial applications for graphene—everything from electronics to structures stronger than steel.

Developing an in-house OS is fine as a bargaining chip during Android contract negotiations, but a new OS with no apps won’t resonate with customers when Android is available from every other OEM. Tizen hasn’t been able to compete with Android on smartphones, but Samsung has used it almost exclusively on smartphones and other “smart” electronics that don’t have much of an established app ecosystem.

How good of a bargaining chip could this be if it didn’t work for Windows OEMs back in the 90’s and Samsung recently. Google knows this. Not sure why Huawei doesn’t yet.

As you may already know, existing iPhones start taking photos the moment you open the app. This is how Apple provides the camera with the ability to take photos instantly, with none of the delay (‘shutter lag’) you see with some digital cameras. The camera has already taken and temporarily stored a whole bunch of photos, and it simply keeps the last one taken as you press the button and discards the rest …

Additionally, there’s good info on what the camera does for the new Live Photos.

Researchers from Palo Alto Networks have discovered that a piece of iOS malware successfully stole more than 225,000 Apple IDs and passwords from jailbroken phones, using them to make purchases from the official App Store.

If you wanted to start a successful software company today, you wouldn’t want to follow Bill Gates’ playbook. Creating a new desktop operating system, and an expensive office suite of applications to run on top of it, won’t work in 2015. It worked for him in the 80’s and 90’s, but that was a different time.

Understand what others did, but don’t try to copy. It usually never works for many reason. I learned this the hard way.

The companies will also work together to make new digital payments experiences possible, though neither side had many details to discuss. Lastly, Visa plans to help Stripe expand quicker in emerging markets where the credit card company has strong relationships with other financial institutions.

Credit card processors could you more competitive in emerging markets. In Colombia, you need to pay close to $1k to enable recurring payments - ridiculous.

At least 14 companies, including Google, Amazon, Verizon and Harris, have signed agreements with NASA to help devise the first air-traffic system to coordinate small, low-altitude drones, which the agency calls the Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management. More than 100 other companies and universities have also expressed interest in the project, which will be needed before commercial drones can fly long distances to deliver goods, inspect power lines and survey crops.

Hopefully this system will have government oversight but not be operated or controlled by it. Decentralization of the system is key to foster innovation in a quickly evolving space like this.

I’ve long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win. Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.

Decisiveness is so critical to a company’s success that I worry when a decision falls through the cracks at Koombea or when we’re working with a founder or product manager who can’t make up her mind.

The most important thing to remember is that you don’t have to live with most business decisions for a long time. If you do things right, most decisions will be obsolete within days or weeks.

The idea behind the talks is a universal standard for embedded SIM cards (“e-SIM”) that are built into the phone and not user accessible. These subscriber identity modules would allow customers to sign up for service on any network they wanted, then allow them to switch at any time (obviously with some limitations placed by the carriers).

The one caveat is that most carriers suck at anything software. Case in point: Movistar in Colombia hasn’t implemented visual voicemail eight years after iPhone’s debut.

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $49.6 billion and quarterly net profit of $10.7 billion, or $1.85 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $37.4 billion and net profit of $7.7 billion, or $1.28 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.

Compared to Microsoft and Google’s $22.2 and $17.7 billion(respectively).

When you look at the landing pages (or homepages or marketing sites, however you want to call them) of today’s SaaS companies, they usually look quite beautiful. They typically have a clean, simple and friendly look, with very little text and a lot of images or videos. In many cases, these websites could just as well advertise a consumer product. This doesn’t come as a surprise, since the consumerizaton of enterprise software has been one of the most important driving forces in the software world in the last years. But B2B software websites haven’t always looked like this and it’s fascinating to see how much things have changed.

Google likes to have multiple, competing products that go after the same user base. That way, if one product doesn’t work out, hopefully the other one will.

Throwing shit at the wall to see if it’ll stick will work eventually but not the best strategy.

This multi-product approach is good for Google’s long-term health, but it also wastes a lot of resources. There is duplicate work going on all over the place, but if Google is flush with anything, it’s resources. Adsense and Adwords bring in so much revenue that, for now at least, the company can afford to be wasteful.

Guess it didn’t take long for this strategy to become wasteful. This reflected a lack of focus, not a “hedging your bets” strategy. Curation is the most important thing about product design. Having multiple products you offer competing against each other is not “healthy competition.” It’s a sign of a lack of unified product vision across the company.

Google revenue grew 19% in 2014, down from 21% in 2013, 22% in 2012 and 29% in 2011. But operating expenses grew 31% last year, according to S&P Capital IQ; spending on research and development soared 38%.The result: operating-profit margin declined to 32%, from 38% in 2011, according to Goldman Sachs.

The company has matured and still relies on a single product for the overwhelming majority of its revenue. In contrast, Apple has diversified much of its revenue - even though much of its growth is still tied to iPhone.

Initiatives like Google Glass, Project Loon, Google Fiber, robotics, and self-driving cars are the future. With that said, they are far from being able to monetize them, plus the sheer amount of these moonshot-type projects makes them look unfocused. Pressure from investors was bound to happen as growth started to slide.

Wearables represent the first step of a revolution that gets us closer to being hyper-informed, not only on what’s happening in our digital world but, more importantly, what’s happening in the physical world. How we interact with both will change thanks to readily available wearables and increasingly connected devices.

As Ben Thompson wrote a few months back:

To fully interact with this sort of software-enabled environment, I will of course need some way to identify myself; for all the benefits of the human body, projecting a unique digital signature is not one of them. The smartphone clearly works, but it’s not perfect: the more you need it for interacting with your environment, the more noticeable is the small annoyance of retrieving it from your pocket or handbag.

 A wearable is different, particularly if it’s on your wrist: simply raising your arm is trivial. This makes it much more likely you will actually interact in a meaningful way with software-enabled objects around you, which makes even having said objects much more likely. To put it another way, I don’t think it’s an accident that the two hot new technologies are wearables and the Internet of Things; they are related such that each is made better by the other.

Being able to pay without pulling out my wallet or the option to scan my boarding pass with a watch is only the beginning of the bridge between us and the physical world around us. Many of these things were possible via smartphones, but we can now accomplish them without going out of our way. To some extent, we are seeing the first steps of a wearable revolution, similar to but more impactful than the smartphone one. Using technology to augment oneself with the world won’t be confined to people’s phones. This means that we now have an opportunity to create entirely new applications to solve inefficiencies that weren’t possible before.

In hindsight, Apple and Google have been laying the groundwork over the past few years with technology such as iBeacons (built on top of something as widespread as Bluetooth), indoor mapping, personal identity, Apple Pay, and the Internet of Things. When you bring these together, the possibilities for personalized physical interactions on a massive scale are endless.

Brands should take note. If smartphones can alter consumer behavior buried in our pockets, wearables will accomplish even more. I wrote more on this in the Koombea blog.

In plain sight, this strategy seems to work for several companies whose founders merely wanted to solve an annoyance they had. It’s easy to assume that that’s all they did to validate their idea, but it’s probably not the whole story. Hence, many people use this thought process to skip what could be considered uncomfortable and redundant: talking to others about their problems and making sure they feel the same pain points you do.

People that build stuff aren’t “normal” because they’re usually power users. Whatever solution is in the market for a particular problem is probably not good enough for us for many reasons. So, we revert to going out of our way and building a new product outright in the hopes that other people will find it valuable as we did. Why wouldn’t they, right?

Here’s where things go sideways: by not validating correctly, we build a more complex product than people need. More importantly, we’re blind to see the workarounds people use to solve the problem we’re solving. Their workaround is usually good enough for them not to need our super sleek, elegant app.

While doing potential customer interviews, it’s important to find out if the problem is significant enough to get people excited by a brand-new solution. If your results are ambiguous, or they don’t care, you’re probably not hitting the right notes. When this happens, stop! It’s a slippery slope from there.

I’ve fallen into this trap before, and without realizing it, I’ve been blinded by the lure of finding the best solution possible when, in reality, nobody cares about it at all. It’s hard to escape this habit, but we’ll need to drop it to build products that can grow considerably. Simple apps should be easy to use, but, more importantly, your users should be able to explain what it does to others without much difficulty.

There are dozens of examples of power users who have created simple yet powerful products with massive adoption.

“Enterprise-grade” used to mean something for corporate IT buyers, who get warm fuzzy feelings from buying software built with security, traceability, and compatibility in mind. The old saying goes: “Nobody got fired for buying IBM.” First and foremost, IT buyers are buying peace of mind since it’s their job; thus, they have set strict features that the vendors must comply with.

The battle for IT mind share will move elsewhere as the so-called “enterprise features” become standard for most SaaS products. It could be argued that corporate buyers will increasingly evaluate products based on their overall UI/UX and mobile capabilities. Companies like Box, Jive, and RelateIQ have a good head start.

The BYOD trend will curve the demand towards better and more usable software in the enterprise. People have seen the difference in what great software can do, and more will want better and more accessible tools to use at work, just like what they have at home.

“Consumer-Grade” software will take on a new meaning. This is the intersection where IT gets their feature checklist (to cover their butts), and end users work the way they like: with easy-to-use, beautifully designed web, mobile, and tablet applications that work. This is not a trade-off where we’re sacrificing “power” features for usability. It results from rising incumbents in the enterprise software space finding their competitive edge by embracing what’s already standard in consumer products. The 800 lb. gorillas will have to adapt, or they will become obsolete very fast.

Aspiring entrepreneurs have an incredible opportunity to take advantage of this shift in buying behaviors and disrupt companies that lack innovation in these critical areas. As more enterprises go SaaS, they’ll look towards changing some of their legacy vendors with new, mobile, and consumer-friendly offerings. As a result, startups have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do what big companies have a hard time: innovate.

When I try to watch the video it, I get this:

FAIL!!!!

As the Saber Pyramid tablet is to the iPad.

The sad part, is that only one was meant to be a joke.

[Image credit: The Verge and The Huffington Post]

Thomas J. Watson in 1943:

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

John Battelle 2011:

Right now, I’d wager that the handful of brands leading the charge to win in this market might be Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and….IBM. About five or so. Maybe Watson will be proven right, even if he never was wrong in the first place.

Things change really fast in this industry.

Amazon is not going to create a Kindle/iPad hybrid. Jeff Bezos knows that LCD technology can’t match e-ink for real reading. That is why I wouldn’t expect the current Kindle form factor to go out the door like most analyst are predicting. If anything Amazon could release a brand new competing product, which brings me to my next issue.

Where do analyst get their data? Predicting Amazon is going to sell 3-5 million of a product they haven’t seen yet is just plain stupid. Even for them.

This is great strategic thinking:

So when we make any big decision, whether in fund-raising, or product design, or partnership strategy, we ask, “would this make it more or less likely that we’ll be around in a hundred years”, and if the answer is less we don’t do it. This financing is just one more solid step in building the hundred year company.

Robert Scobles’s vision of Android tablet future is of single app devices for business and institutions. Apart from the low margins the device manufacturer earns(if they’re lucky), who else gets to win here?

Do developers get to sell dozens of apps? Does Google make any money?

Nope.

Then how is this sustainable?

Why go back to the silly notion that market share is everything. It has to be the right market share: People or business who buy apps. Dozens of apps. No just a large installed base that is virtually useless to the developer ecosystem.

Brad Feld:

Often these entrepreneurs think their idea is brand new – that no one has ever thought of it before. Other times they ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect their idea. Occasionally the emails mysteriously allude to the idea without really saying what it is. These entrepreneurs think their idea is special and magic. And they are wrong. The great entrepreneurs are already focused on the implementation of their idea. They send me links to their website or software. They describe the business they are in the process of creating (or have already created). They point me to what they’ve done to implement their idea and show real users who validate that the idea is important. And they quickly move past the idea to the execution of the idea.

As part of working with entrepreneurs, I see this all the time. People that don’t share their idea freely usually have never built anything before, and thus don’t know how hard it is to build and scale a unique product that pay love or pay for(which ends up being the same depending on you’re market) .

Here’s Google full use of it’s infrastracture to blast past competitors.

Ben Kuchera from ArsTecnica:

In the first few moments of Duke Nukem Forever, your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It’s not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.

Software(or video game development) is not like wine. Don’t forget to release early and often. This fiasco could have easily been avoided.

The Economist:

But [Apple] has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price.

I think Apple applies this principle very effectively, but completely disagree it charges a premium. iPhones, iPads and Macs compete on features and price with their competitor’s products.

Robert X. Cringely on iCloud:

The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

I really don’t pay attention to what Cringle usually says, but this time he’s kind of right. Apple really dosen’t have much to loose if the PC becomes just another device with iCloud. Microsoft does.

The mobile revolution is about data, not files. Until iCloud is released, all data in mobile apps rest in silos, unlike desktop apps. iCloud frees that data and makes it available to other devices in the ecosystem. It’s the bold move and it’s worth it for whoever controls it.

For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

Our plans to support modern browsers across Google Apps - Docs Blog

As we’ve said a few times in the past, the only way to decrease piracy is to compete with it and offer products that are superior to its pirated counterpart.

It appears that for (older) movies Netflix is on the right path here.

Now that there’s proof, how do we get studios on board on releasing movies to Netflix, iTunes and Amazon at the same time as their DVD counterparts? It’s all about convenience and sadly right now pirating is so much easier than having to wait for a just released movie to arrive via snail mail.

Twitter and Facebook are great for organizing a revolution. Blogs are for explaining why we need one.

After reading Freakonomics 2, my respect for Paul Allen and his team skyrocketed as they try to solve big problems like hurricanes, global warming and malaria(with mosquito killing laser beam-not a joke). But now, in my eyes, he’s just a plain old patent troll(like the one near his office).

Does HP genuinely want 3PAR or do they just want Dell to spend as much money on it as they can trying to buy it? When I saw Dell had upped the bid this morning, I thought it had been a brilliant move on HP’s part, by forcing Dell to pay more. Now I am not sure what their real intentions are. Maybe they really need this company to compliment their services, or they just don’t want to loose against Dell in any front. No matter how this pans out, there’s going to be some very happy investors on 3PAR’s side.

Gust Avrakotos:

There’s a little boy and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse… and everybody in the village says, “how wonderful. The boy got a horse” And the Zen master says, “we’ll see.” Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg, and everyone in the village says, “How terrible.” And the Zen master says, “We’ll see.” Then, a war breaks out and all the young men have to go off and fight… except the boy can’t cause his legs all messed up. and everybody in the village says, “How wonderful.”

Charlie Wilson:

Now the Zen master says, “We’ll see.”

I just started a new blog on Tumblr where I plan to focus on writing more insightfull article about startups, business and tech. How wonderful you say?

We’ll see.