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Rands In Repose: Someone is Coming to Eat You

Rands In Repose: Someone is Coming to Eat You:

The reward for winning is the perception that you’ve won. In your celebration of your awesomeness, you are no longer focused on the finish line, you now lack a clear next goal, and while you sit there comfortably monetizing eyeballs, you’re becoming strategically dull. You’ve forgotten that someone is coming to eat you and if you wait until you can see them coming, you’re too late. Just ask Nokia or RIM.

The Devil in the Details

Apple’s current biggest competitor is itself, and I think Steve Jobs learned this the hard way – from the sidelines. When he returned, one of his first hires was a gentlemen named Tim Cook, and while Tim Cook holds a degree in industrial engineering, he is not an engineer, a designer, or a poet. Tim Cook is an execution machine and he exists at Apple to enable them to pull off one thing – the iPod Mini moment.

By initially focusing on getting Apple out of manufacturing and streamlining the supply chain, yes, he dramatically improved margins and it’s a lot easer to kill a bestseller under the warm blanket of an attractive balance sheet. But Cook’s larger contribution is an operations team that enables them to build and ship new products with increasingly ferocious regularity.

The reason you’ll see new iPhone hardware in the fall and yet another iPad come spring is because Steve Jobs knew that he didn’t just need to out-design his competition, he needed to out-execute them. Apple is an ambidextrous organization that is equally adept at designing products as they are at making sure millions of them are ready the moment you want them.

If you think nothing revolutionary was announced at the recent WWDC event, if you think you’ve heard it all, I ask you to think about what they’re not talking about. I was thinking about the iPod Mini as I watched the announcement of the MacBook Pro. While it is certainly one of the sexiest pieces of metal on the planet, it also represents painfully consistent execution by Apple.

Yes, you’ve heard it all before – Retina display, thinner, faster, and more, but I trust Apple when they say they re-imagined everything in the design. I fully expect there is design work in the MacBook Pro that you’ve never heard of that will give the next iPhone or iPad a competitive edge and I believe the experience they’ve gained executing this design will allow them to not only maintain, but increase momentum.

How long can they keep it up? I don’t know, but I do know that Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.

[One of the keys here is to have a next goal prepped and ready for after you’ve achieved success. And possibly a different one if you fail.]

ICANN is wrong

ICANN is wrong:

This may have been an interesting experiment in the abstract, worth doing so we could find out what the problems are. We owe our thanks to the potential registrants for showing us so clearly. Now the answer should be an emphatic No. The TLDs we have are fine. There is no shortage of names that this is needed to address. Let’s work on solving problems, not creating new ones.

[I agree that this is quagmire in the making…]

Source: Scripting News

On Windows Phone 8 & Surface

On Windows Phone 8 & Surface:

Except, of course, that the vast majority of Windows apps have to be rewritten for the Metro UI first. And then—if there’s any lesson anyone should take away from iOS, it’s this—you have to understand that the user experience, no matter how similar both the developer API and the user interfaces are, is different on the tablet, the phone, and the desktop. There’s a reason that iPad users don’t run iPhone apps on their pads unless there’s no other choice, and that iPhone apps don’t look like iPad apps but just smaller. Microsoft appears to be preaching the write once, run anywhere gospel of virtual machines through time immemorial, and it’s quite possible that they’ve got the virtual machine problem finally solved. That doesn’t mean they have the user experience problem solved.

With that in mind, I present my boldly flavored bowl of claim chowder.

[We’ll see.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt

We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt:

This attitude that studies that go against prevailing beliefs should be ignored on the basis that, well, they go against prevailing beliefs, has been the norm for the anti-salt campaign for decades. Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

[Another health care mess that needs cleaning up.]

Writing with Bitly

Writing with Bitly:

As an art and a practice, writing is no less a product of its instruments than are music and painting. We not only need pianos, drums and brushes, but Steinways, Ludwigs and Langnickels. Microsoft doesn’t cut it. (Word produces horrible html.) Adobe had a good early Web writing tool with GoLive, but killed it in favor of Dreamweaver, which is awful. There are plenty of fine text editors, including old standbys (e.g. vi and emacs) that work in command shells. Geeky wizards can do wonders with them, but there should be many other instruments for many other kinds of artists.

[Great insight.]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog