tech

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.]

Two case studies in feeds

Two case studies in feeds:

We all have to recognize that we don’t do everything. Even the huge companies, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook eventually learn to specialize. But the individual developers, have no choice but to work with each other. It also means you have to work with chaos — throw your feeds out there not knowing who will pick them up. That’s the magic of the web. Trust it, and it’ll work for you.

[It’s actually larger than that. Trust it, and it’ll work for you.]

Source: Scripting News

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

How Apple will turn the Net’s top into TV’s bottom

How Apple will turn the Net’s top into TV’s bottom:

These deals will be motivated by a shared sense that Something Must Be Done, and by knowing that Apple will make TV look and work better than anybody else ever could. The carriers have seen this movie before, and they’d rather have a part in it than outside of it. For a view of the latter, witness the fallen giants called Sony and Nokia.

I don’t know anything about Apple’s plans. But I know a lot about Apple, as do most of us. Here are the operative facts as they now stand (or at least as I see them):

[A must read (if you care about content distribution).]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Apple Television, AirPlay and Why the iPad is the new TV Apps Platform

Apple Television, AirPlay and Why the iPad is the new TV Apps Platform – Jeremy Allaire – Voices – AllThingsD:

But it won’t matter, because with Apple TV, cable content is just an app. What matters is that soon potentially tens of millions of HD capable monitors will become a screen for the hundreds of thousands of apps running on devices that are already in your hands.

[Jeremy Allaire priced plenty of reason and detail, but the truth is what else could it be? Dive into the morass that is networks and related contracts? I can’t imagine…]