Month: December 2011

The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why

The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why:

I think there’s a TCO argument to be made against the proliferation of the App Internet. The more companies build their own apps, the more maintenance work they’ll need to do, the more employees they’ll need to maintain their apps and the further the innovation drain. I know this is a harder concept to quantify and intellectualize but I’ve seen it first hand in 20 years of working with large corporation on “legacy” IT projects. The App Internet opens the door to many more legacy apps.

This argument never features into any young developers mind because it takes years to see the decaying effect of legacy infrastructure in corporations (plus, many app developers prefer the sexy world of consumer apps).

To be clear … I think that the App Internet won’t disappear overnight. I also think certain apps will always be more effective built natively. But the same is true of today’s non-mobile computing. Still, most apps need not exist. Long live the Mobile Web.

[I agree.]

Apple’s Grand Central public toilet distortion field

Apple’s Grand Central public toilet distortion field:

Trying to get a straight answer to one of life’s simplest questions

The facilities at the top of these stairs are off limits.

One of the great public services Apple (AAPL) offers in its flagship stores — besides free repairs at the Genius Bars — is bathrooms for its customers.

So when Apple was getting ready to open an enormous new store in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal — its fifth retail outlet in a city notorious for its lack of public facilities — I made a point of asking whether there were toilets in the store for customers.

Here are the answers I got:

[Funny.]
Source: FORTUNE: Apple 2.0

Getting the OS right (for the iPhone, the iPad and the Kindle)

Getting the OS right (for the iPhone, the iPad and the Kindle):

But let’s not forget that some people actually like shopping. Are the online stores for these devices fun or exciting or social? Do they live and grow and change or are they static warehouses?

The seeds of what we buy and how we buy it are being planted with these early versions of the devices. I wonder if we’re being cheated out of discovery, productivity and a bit of fun.

[I’d agree that shopping experiences and information are going to change in big ways. Consider, as an example, Apple’s in store app, that allows you to self service. Not for everyone, or all the time, but for quick grab and go, it’s cool. A nice way to evolve the retail experience. Now what if Apple takes another step and allows my store to work the same way? Your “iTunes” account becomes a payment gateway.]
Source: Seth’s Blog

IMHO what’s become wrong with most transactions is a lack of trust, which can be hard to develop with large corporations not represented by an individual. Finding ways to restore person to person trust is the real solution to a lot of problems.

As a further aside, it is a problem Apple should be considering. Steve was the face of Apple for a long time, and his passing proves to me that many people thought that when they bought an Apple computer they were buying it from Steve, true or not. Who are you buying it from today?

VW agrees to kick the Crackberry habit | Reuters

VW agrees to kick the Crackberry habit | Reuters:

Carmaker Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) has agreed to deactivate e-mails on German staff Blackberry devices out of office hours to give them a break.

Under an agreement with labour representatives, staff at Europe’s biggest automaker will receive e-mails via Blackberry from half an hour before they start work until half an hour after they finish, and will be in blackout-mode the rest of the time, a spokesman for VW said.

The new email regime applies to staff covered by collective bargaining so it would seem board level executives will still be slaves to their Blackberries.

Very few companies have taken such drastic measures to force workers towards a better work-life balance.

[What’s interesting to me is the need to enforce this… that said, I can appreciate that many folks don’t understand and don’t respect the notion of “after hours”.]

TM2 – Back from the smoke break (a note on consumerism)

Back from the smoke break:

If you are one of the many who kept using TextMate over the past few dim and hazy years, even if you don’t find the alpha usable yet its mere existence is fantastic news. It’s a pretty good sign that—despite all the cynicism from jerks like me—the thing’s actually going to be released. It’s missing features and has some performance issues, but hey, it’s an alpha.

[It’s been interesting, no doubt. But even as I was tweaking Mark Hurst about his “works just fine” monitor, I admit that for the most part the original TextMate was working just fine for most things. BBEdit gets used for certain situations still, and in some ways always feels like home. Either way, the “it’s not new” syndrome is a problem from my perspective because I feel like that model is broken. I’m not alone, Patagonia (the clothing company) is getting a lot of press about their recent ad telling you to “not buy this jacket” and explaining why. So while it was fun to poke at Mark about his monitor, as he said, it’s working for him just fine. And while a new monitor might use less energy (as I teased), and Mark will no doubt give away the old one working or not, I can’t make the case that more energy overall would not be used in the creation of the new monitor. He’s doing the right thing. When it comes to software the model has shifted. Adding features used to be considered a good thing. Now it’s not that simple (no pun intended). And sometimes the best “new” feature is the one that causes the rethinking of all the old features. But that’s a topic for a different day.]
Source: Coyote Tracks

Steve Jobs and Rudy Van Gelder as Trustees Award honorees

Lifetime Achievement Award | Grammy.org:

“This year’s honorees offer a variety of brilliance, contributions and lasting impressions on our culture,” said President/CEO of The Recording Academy Neil Portnow. “It is an honor to recognize such a diverse group of individuals whose talents and achievements have had an indelible impact on our industry.”
 
The Lifetime Achievement Award honors performers who have made contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording while the Trustees Award recognizes such contributions in areas other than performance. Both awards are determined by vote of The Recording Academy’s National Board of Trustees. Technical GRAMMY Award recipients are determined by vote of The Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing Advisory Council and Chapter Committees as well as The Academy’s Trustees. The award is presented to individuals and companies who have made contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field.

[Are the Grammys jumping on the bandwagon or is this well deserved?]

How SOPA Will Destroy The Internet

How SOPA Will Destroy The Internet » blog.easydns.org – Happenings and observations:

If this becomes law, it’s a short stretch from SOPA to NODA (No Online Dissent Anywhere) and if you think I’m a nutcase for saying so, I’d like to remind everybody what happened just over a year ago, when US politicians were tripping over themselves to shut down wikileaks (a royal fiasco in which this company was embroiled) and to this day, they have not been charged with a crime anywhere.

Many of the “dirty tricks” employed against Wikileaks would be enshrined on law under SOPA (and someday, NODA):

A requirement that service providers block access to offending domains, including that they stop resolving their DNS
Search engines to purge search results for offending domains
Payment processors to sever ties to offending domains
And they added an extra provision that it will be an offense to knowingly create a service or system to provide a workaround to a banned domain or host. So for example, they would no longer have to hassle Mozilla to remove that firefox plugin that let’s you reach ICE blocked websites, it would be illegal to make it or distribute it.

[snip… emphasis below is mine -Ed.]

Already we get business from companies whose stated corporate IT policy is to not use US based servers to hold email or route web traffic. I’m not talking about torrent hosts, whistleblowers and fake Rolex vendors. We’re talking large enterprise entities whose legal departments find even the theoretical legal ability for Homeland Security to monitor their corporate communications simply intolerable.

[Land of the free eh? Don’t stand on the sidelines for this one. Disclosure: I use easydns to host domains.]

It wasn’t meant to Be

I was reminded by John Gruber that today was the day Apple acquired Next and with it the return of Steve Jobs started.

Back then I had kinda assumed that Apple was going to die and had already invested some amount of money buying a Be developer machine and started learning all that there was to this really neat OS. It had a lot of forward looking ideas built into it. Apple meanwhile was also failing to deliver any of its varied nextgen OS things (remember Pink?). The rumors swirled that Be, being built by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée (who for a while there had Steve’s old position), was going to be purchased by Apple giving BeOS a home, and Apple a way forward. But at least from the outside, at the last second, Apple changed direction (all of this could have been rumors, I no longer remember) and bought Next instead. I was very disappointed. I thought the energy of the Be development community and Apple’s user base would jump start things. Of course, there’s no way to know if that’s true or not. I was not pleased.

Since then there’s been a lot of changes to Apple—now one of the largest companies in the world. Be is long gone. Little attention is afforded to operating systems by users. They’ve become a layer of services upon which we rely. Occasionally some bit of UI delights us. We have more devices hanging around but most folks don’t know what OS their phone runs, nor should they. It’s not relevant. The choices people make are based on what they wish to do with their phones, tablets, and laptops. If there’s something that they believe is crucial that runs on Windows, that’s what they’ll have, whether it’s true or not.

In fact, that’s kinda what all of this is about. It’s about what we believe, and what’s important to us. And someone believed that Steve could still do some good. What was appealing when I started using computers and then programming them was that Apple had menus when no one else did. Menu’s “remembered” things for me. Since I never had a good memory for trivia (and that’s what my brain considered all that command line stuff) I was more comfortable with Apple’s computers than the others. I could get menus to remember things for me. Also, being a musician full time back then, Apple had the best music software and the hearts and minds of the artistic community. I believed that they were better.

Some things aren’t meant to be. And in this case, who knows what the shape of the world would’ve been if Steve had continued to ply his trade elsewhere. Would he have given up on changing the world via technology? Would he have grown antsy with Pixar and meddled in the story creation process to the point of disaster? Would he have found a way, with a whole new company to create devices that so many love?

Pre digital

Pre digital:

School is pre-digital. Elections. Most of what you do in your job. Even shopping. The vestiges of a reliance on geography, lack of information, poor interpersonal connections and group connection (all hallmarks of the pre-digital age) are everywhere.

Perhaps the most critical thing you can say of a typical institution: “That place is pre-digital.”

All a way of saying that this is just the beginning, the very beginning, of the transformation of our lives.

[This is exactly right. It is what I wrote earlier today.]
Source: Seth’s Blog