Om Malik argues that Bezos is the inheritor to Steve Jobs’s crown. I agree. Not because Bezos has copied anything Jobs did, but because he has not. What he’s done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.
[Why is it so hard for folks to remember this? Making customers happy is all there is.]
Source: Daring Fireball
Either own what you said, accept both the reaction and the consequences of what you say, or stop saying things that only an asshole would say. To paraphrase Randy Millholland, for someone who doesn’t thrive on controversy, you seem to say some shitty things about people a lot.
Either way, for the love of christ, stop crying that people are thinking unkind things about you when you say things about them that are kind of shitty. If being thought of as an asshole bothers you, stop being one.
Really.
[If nothing else, it’s to the point.]
Source: bynkii.com
New media, old sense of entitlement:
But here’s what I’d suggest you really not do, if you want to actually look like the professional: don’t rise up from your throne and bellow, “How dare you, you little insignificant blogger, question the credibility of someone who was the editor-in-chief of Engadget! Guards, off with their heads!” Because when you do that, then you’re not the professional. You’re the petty asshole. I know it’s a subtle difference—both words start with “p” and all—but it’s important, trust me.
By the way, neither Gruber nor Arment use WordPress. That’s a pretty trivial thing to note, but it just seems to me that a professional journalist would have taken the couple seconds necessary to check.
Just saying.
[The cycle of entitlement is infinite.]
Source: Coyote Tracks
The reason is that these numbers demand that you start tweaking. You can tweak a website or tweak an accounts payable policy and make numbers go up, which is great, but it’s not going to fundamentally change your business.
I’d have you obsess about things that are a lot more difficult to measure. Things like the level of joy or relief or gratitude your best customers feel. How much risk your team is willing to take with new product launches. How many people recommended you to a friend today…
What are you tracking? If you track concepts, your concepts are going to get better. If you track open rates or clickthrough, then your subject lines are going to get better. Up to you.
[Agreed. Now that measuring things is getting easier, deciding what to measure is important. In world where people espouse “measure everything” that firehouse quickly needs some arbitration.]
Source: Seth’s Blog
The main thing to expect, in the short term — the next few dozen or hundreds of years — is rising sea levels, which will move coastlines far inland for much of the world, change ecosystems pretty much everywhere, and alter the way the whole food web works.
Here in the U.S., neither major political party has paid much attention to this. On the whole the Republicans are skeptical about it. The Democrats care about it, but don’t want to make a big issue of it. The White House has nice things to say, but has to reconcile present economic growth imperatives with the need to save the planet from ourselves in the long run.
I’m not going to tell you how to vote, or how I’m going to vote, because I don’t want this to be about that. What I’m talking about here is evolution, not election. That’s the issue. Can we evolve to be symbiotic with the rest of the species on Earth? Or will we remain a plague?
Politics is for seasons. Evolution is inevitable. One way or another.
[It is an unbelievable mess we’re making. As I kid I read Heinlein’s line that the meek will inherit the earth… because everyone will have left because of planetary depletion, overcrowding, etc. and found it cute. We’re a long way from being able to colonize another planet so this isn’t looking quite so amusing anymore. And of course, since this is exactly the kind of news no one is interested in hearing, no Party will discuss it. We’re such children.]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog
Philips just announced a new cordless phone line and the S10 model looks really familiar.
Who “designed” this and why is Philips letting it go to market?
[Seriously? Oy. (From a design ripoff standpoint) The feature set is strange as well. Might work for some though…]
Dave Winer: HowTo: What is river.js?:
It’s called river.js because it represents a river of news in JSON.
It is pronounced as follows: River Dot Jay Ess.
The name is not an acronym.
[Nice. I think I have an immediate use for this…]
If no one has ever come up to you during a group ride to say “watch out for that guy. he’s a squirrel”, then YOU are the squirrel everyone’s watching out for.
One more thing… leave those f*****g earphones in your pocket until you are riding back home on your own completely ready to get hit by a car and wondering why you didn’t hear it coming.
[Some useful advice.]
Source: velogogo
Overview: Version 1.1 of the Twitter API | Twitter Developers:
Consequently, we’ve decided to discontinue support for XML, Atom, and RSS, which are infrequently used today.
[Really? Infrequently used? Wow. It’s not just the politicians…]
Doc Searls Weblog · Will the carriers body-snatch the Net with HTML5?:
It’s at least clear that TV is the elephant in the snake of the Net’s time. It is moving off the air and over the top of cable and telephony. Still, the Internet is sold as a service already by cablecos and telcos that hate the thought of remaining a “dumb pipe.”
If things go the way Crossey expects, the Net’s carriers will likely expand Net service offerings in ways that fracture the Net into pieces, each with hard-wired dependencies on the carrier. The result will be the biggest body-snatch in the history of business. Standing where the Net used to be won’t be Telco 2.o, but TV 2.o, with lots of marketing gravy. (Think of all that jive the “big data” pushers are saying about “delivering personalized experiences.”)
So, rather than having the greatest marketplace ever created, we’ll have a set of entertainment and marketing services, available only from phone and cable companies, working only on devices they sell or sanction: basically the worst scenario imagined by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. We’ll still have some of the Net’s huge open marketplace, but far less of it than would would have been possible if what ran on the pipes were structurally separated from the pipes themselves.
I see little reason for hope here. Big Business and Big Government, enemies in the theater of politics, are in fact completely aligned around the wishes of Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, Verizon and Hollywood. People like me have been remarkably ineffective in advocating for the free and open Internet and its importance for the free and open marketplace, as well as a free and open society. On letting the Net slide into the clutches of its enemies there is no daylight between Obama and Romney, because it’s a non-issue for both of them. Just like it’s a non-issue for most of us.
Hope I’m wrong. And I’d be glad to hear arguments to the contrary. I’m a born optimist, and I try to keep an open mind. But I’m not feeling good about this thing right now.
[Sounds grim.]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 