fedward, tumbling

Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord - NYTimes.com

I’d just like it to be known that I have never been to the Philippines and don’t carry a gun. It wasn’t me.

How to compete with iPad » Matt Legend Gemmell (via Neven Mrgan’s tumbl)

This nails one particular thing I hate about all the yammering on the internet, and not just about the iPad. “It doesn’t do X [which is important to me out of proportion to all other things] and therefore it sucks.” One: your opinion doesn’t matter to anybody but you (neither, for that matter, does mine, which is why I tend not to write things like this). Two: your opinion isn’t universal, and while you may think you speak for legions of potential customers, you really only speak for yourself. Three: get a sense of proportion (and maybe a life). Four: just shut up already.

The rest of the piece is quite good too. It’s all about developing a product as the best version of itself, not merely as the cobbled-together facsimile you can make from the parts you have lying around. Other companies can make hardware that would rival the iPad as an electronic device, but no other companies go to the extent Apple does in allowing form and function to shape each other. For a while there Nokia was pretty good at developing new phone products this way, but I think they’ve gotten off in the weeds of late.

I don’t know that there are any companies besides Apple that would both allow such a project to get anywhere internally and subsequently take it to market. Lots of skunkworks projects never see the light of day, and many companies are so invested in the culture of their own product lines that they’d never consider releasing a product that doesn’t look and function just like all their other products. Apple takes risks, and those risks pay off almost every time.

Op-Ed Contributor - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction - NYTimes.com

I don’t have a problem with Microsoft the company, but I’m not particularly fond of Windows or Office - because neither one shows much evidence of anybody ever being willing to take anything out, much less leave something out to begin with. Got an idea? Throw it in! Got another idea that makes the first idea seem ill-considered? Throw that one in too, but don’t take the first one out!

That said, though, the op-ed is worth reading because the long, slow failure of Microsoft (as it can’t come up with anything new the way Apple or Google can) is sad more than anything else. A company that mighty ought to be able to innovate, and that they can’t is very telling.