That should help things a little. Now a non-iPhone survey for the same should help put things a lot more in perspective.
I’d also like to bring a little attention to comment by Dave Drager because he makes a valid point about perceived versus real performance hit, which people sometimes miss.
Peter Coffee for eWEEK:
… Jobs actually turned the knob [of his reality distortion field] up to 11 by claiming that next springs general release of Leopard would steal a march on Microsoft, delivering to Apple users the equivalent of “Vista 2.0.” That kind of claim, now that Apple and Microsoft have become direct rivals on essentially identical hardware platforms, represents a challenge that eWEEK Labs will not hesitate to take up.
Of course, we went on to see the fates of Vista and Leopard, but is still an amusing read as to how Microsoft’s future was becoming clear to us even before it was to itself.
“Apple is about the idea that people with passion can change the world”
One of the more attractive derivatives of Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus theme.
This feature would really put the ‘awesome’ in Awesomebar.
I quickly wrote up a hacky filter that removes news item submissions from certain sites over at Hacker News. I left Digg for a reason, and didn’t want it to be the same for Hacker News, because it usually contains quality submissions. Sometimes though, there pops up a submission from TechCrunch or ArsTechnica that I don’t want to bother seeing (or reading). This gets rid of them.
Proper description and functioning is given over at the Userscripts page.
Canadians had one for Rogers. Now Indians have one against Vodafone and Airtel.
(Sidenote: I’m glad it’s not on hosted on Blogger)
Microsoft, for some inexplicable reason, thinks it is a good idea to put CEOs (retired or not) in their own ads. We saw it happen with Ballmer (and know how those turned out), and now we’re going to see Gates. Why can’t they hire regular actors like everybody else?
Clever, but only when you have it backed up with a good product. Hiring ex-comedians is never a good idea though, so I hope nothing backfires like what happened with the Majove Experiment.
… when [more] people start blocking a spam account, we go to red alert.
If you notice a spammy account, do your bit and block it.
When was the last time you saw a family of three all walking around with Blackberrys?
I’m not a big fan of lists, but these - including ways to reduce memory usage, interface tweaks and change a few timeouts - are handy to have.
Today in the technology industry, there are mainly two departments: management and development. Management includes the head honchos, the public relations, and generally all the people who are not involved in the technical side of things. Development includes everyone who is involved in the technical side of things, who bring the technical skill to the table. It’s once a millennium that we have a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, who bring both those worlds together in a nice little package with glasses, but taking the general consensus, the two are separate.
After a long talk with Amit Upadhyay (@amitu) of Vakow, I concluded that success means different things to the two sections. There is no absolute success, but only success relative to the goal you’ve foreseen or set for yourself. The beauty of this being that you can be a complete dud, but still be a success, and vice-versa, which is where I will take the example of Apple and Twitter to make my case.
Success is subjective: The formal definition is “an event that accomplishes its intended purpose”. That makes success an extremely subjective end point to any undertaking. It can depend from person to person, or from company to company. It can even depend from market to market, where a one track but a sizeable user base might not be considered success. Defining success to me is harder because of the variable width definition which can be stretched and pulled to cover holes of various sizes if it means showing yourself as a “success”.
Depending on who you talk to, there will be two kinds of success (not going into their magnitude and taste): Business, and artistic. The management department I alluded to above looks for a business angle to success. More people, more money, more funding, more, more, more. They want tangible proofs to consider themselves successful. There is nothing wrong with this, mind you. Many people will agree that gaining mainstream adoption and acceptance is a huge thing, and if you achieve that, you’ve reached your goal. The term “sell out” comes to mind when I see these types of success stories of how services and companies became huge overnight.
Artistic success is all about reaching your aesthetic goals. Your place of Zen. For a developer, it could be nailing that one feature that the world has never seen. As a designer, it could be the next new UI controller. It could be many other things. But it is always based on skill and pushing that skill, as a creator, to the limits to achieve something nobody has achieved before. A successful artist doesn’t care about acceptance, because he knows that the world will not (immediately) understand the value that your invention has created. As Steve Jobs once said:
There’s a lot of things that are risky [right now], which is always a good sign, you know, and you can see through them, you can see to the other side and go, yes, this could be huge, but there’s a period of risk that, you know, nobody’s ever done it before.
Take Facebook for example. The exclusivity of being a member of Facebook was the de facto viral point. Everybody wanted in, to see what it was all about. And the fact that they couldn’t get in until they were in college (which, let’s be honest, not even 25% of the world population is) was what made it so alluring. Then slowly and steadily, they opened up to regions, companies and high schools. Now you can be on Facebook and not be a part of any network. They did this so that they would get more and more users.
While they were doing that, they also took care to constantly innovate the social network space. The F8 platform; easily the game changer for the way we looked at social networks, because it drove the view point of a fun, collected place on the web to interact with the people you know in real life, to a platform open to exploiting and forming businesses out of based on nothing but user data. Their personal information, their interactions with their friends, etcetera. They continue to create new things which rivals have copied to stay in the game themselves. But ultimately, the credit goes to Facebook and nothing can change that. Such innovation counts for artistic success.
I consider Facebook an all round success because of those reasons. They’ve managed to bring in the people, but they’ve also innovated on their own merit. They continue to do so, and are just not content with having all the people in the world as members. I wouldn’t have cared if they wouldn’t have been as big as they are today1, as long as they continued innovating. Keeping aside the argument that if they weren’t so mainstream, I might have never signed up and used it, I admire Facebook for what they’ve achieved technologically.
A few weeks back I link listed a make-an-example-of type post which compared Twitter and SMSgupshup based on scalability. I will not re-iterate my points here, and if you’re too lazy to click through and read both (my comment and their comparison, which you should), the gist is that SMSgupshup has scaled a crowd much bigger than Twitter, and suffered no downtime.
My problem with that is SMSgupshup hasn’t innovated a nickel in this sphere. They don’t even have half the features Twitter has and manages. I’m taking a shot in the dark here that 99.99% user base of SMSgupshup is Indian. That is an important aspect because of two reasons:
They might have lots of users, but they’re not mainstream. They’re just playing their market well and doing the bare minimum to stay afloat.
They (again) haven’t innovated, or created new value for anything. They’ve taken Twitter’s basic concept and implemented it using a better architecture. Nothing more.
Twitter wasn’t meant to be what it is today, which is not an unknown fact. They might not be the first, but they’re definitely the more popular one. People argue that Twitter isn’t mainstream either, and I usually agree with them - the user base is a niche of geeks. But Twitter is a success to me much bigger than SMSgupshup. Including all their downtime, scaling issues and inferior number of users. The many (and I mean many) unconventional uses Twitter has been put to use for, the unimaginable potential for derivative applications of the platform2, and just the way they’ve handled all the muck that’s been thrown around at them is enough to garner respect from me. They’re survivors, and the world loves survivors. I’m no different.
Apply the same logic to Apple, and you’ll see where I’m going with this. Innovation with a hint of arrogance and stubbornness is a quality Steve Jobs has perfected to an art form. Apple’s design (and I mean that both in the form of internal as well as external efficiency) is by far the industry’s yard stick. Sure, they’re expensive. But that’s the premium you pay to receive a product that promises to “just work”. They’re not perfect, but they’re aesthetic.
It should be clear which definition of success I believe. Everything I’ve written up there might have hints of that bias. I don’t mean to say one form of success is better than the other. But I do say that one form of success is more sustainable than the other.
To sell out, is the easiest thing to do. But that requires a “killer” feature; the coupé de grace to the market that seals the deal. And who gives the management that feature? The developers. It is their vision and drive that gives them the medium to make their PR stand with. If you use innovation as your way to success, you’re the next icon we will be looking up to. But, if you think that quantity can make up for quality, you’re reading the book upside down. Without innovation, your product will become stale, even if you have your user base today.
Everything is a passing fad, and everything is not. What matters is the product you bring to the table. Do you bring a revolution, or do you bring a craze?
If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have been as useful because they’re primarily a social networking service, and then a technology company. But potential is never relative. ↩
I call Twitter a platform now because it is the foundation of so many services that I just cannot look at it as a social messaging phenomenon. While it’s foundations are in that sphere, its extensibility and ability to be adapted into various other forms is just magical. ↩
I guess Live Search Cashback isn’t working like it was supposed to.
An AppleInsider reader has received one of Steve Jobs’ characteristically brief and rare personal responses
Since when did he start giving personal responses to random people?
Fantastic piece by Mark Pilgrim on people cribbing about Apple’s closed-ness, but continuing to buy their products and hacking them open to do their bidding.
Not really a counter point to O’Reilly’s piece, but against his concept in spirit.
Tim O’Reilly looks at linking within your own site as compared to external ones to control the flow of viewership.
Tag clouds have tremendous potential. I don’t know why people keep predicting its death. When combined with search results, it provides as easy to implement context suggestion algorithm to refine them.
Good article about effectively using light, contrast and colour to push focus towards intended areas and create a naturally flowing UI.
Today, record labels grumble about Apple’s tight grip on their business, and many consumers are frustrated because the iPod works only with iTunes, at a time when there are many ways to get digital content.
Yes, people clearly hate iTunes. And iPod only works with iTunes? Err …
“Apple wants to lock you in,” says Robert Enderle, a consultant who has been briefed by Dell. “Dell wants to lock you in to choice.”
Well, if Enderle said something about Apple, it must be insightful.
Given my “Image Captions” script (back from the ol’ Blogger days) a much needed revamp. It now checks if the images are loaded, so that it gets the correct width. The script is only executed once all the images are done, otherwise it patiently waits.
Also, I’ve fixed the way it looks for the capt class. Now it accounts for multiple classes (for “capt left frame” scenarios). Initial instructions here.
You can buy the same guitar, effects pedals, and amplifier that Eddie Van Halen uses. But when you play that rig, it’s still going to sound like you.
Perfect!
While Apple believes in shipping products rather than showing them off, it’s not really a “fools rush in” scenario.
Warning with the first generation Shuffle. Perfect!
Macworld reviews the first generation iPod shuffle hot after its release.
Anything new in Facebook land seems to cause a mass outrage of some sort. The bad thing is, Facebook actually listens to these complaints.
This one is going to sell big ‘uns, unless Apple can come up with their own.
Mark Pilgrim on Apple and Freedom 0:
There are not hordes of fed-up consumers rejecting Apple’s vision of cryptographic lock-in. There are not mass graves where people ceremoniously dump their crippled, non-general-purpose computing devices. Outside of Planet Debian and my own personal echo chamber, nobody gives a shit about Freedom 0.
