Compete to maintain, Disrupt to succeed
There is a huge difference between competing in a market and disrupting a market. When competing, a company tries to make a similar product in a given market segment, then competes against incumbent products on price or features to gain share and hopefully profits. When disrupting, a company produces a whole new product (or a viable derivative) that creates or changes a market, then dominates share and profits in that segment.
Non-upgradable Smartphones
Today, Microsoft announced it’s new Windows 8 smartphone platform, and it looks quite good. But they also announced that their recently released Windows 7.x phones cannot be upgraded to Windows 8. Which means all those early Metro interface adopters who purchased the brilliant Nokia Lumia smartphones are screwed until their lock-ins expire in two years time. It’s the same in the Android space, whether caused by manufacturers or carriers, they both seem to spend too much time blaming each other so in my book, they’re both responsible.
Single-pay, Ad-pay or Both-pay?
Author’s note: This article makes no point, takes no stand and argues no single position. I wrote it to see if I could come to come conclusion on which of ‘user-pay’ vs ‘ad-pay’ vs ‘both-pay’ makes sense, and failed. But published it anyway to see if it spurs others smarter than me to explain and solve this conundrum. It used to be in the old days when news was delivered to your home in paper form that the only way to get coupons or know about a sale at Macy’s was from the advertising in this newspaper.
Learn to Automate
It’s been almost six months since the Codecademy launched learn to code in 2012, headlined by Mayor Bloomberg. Lots of people pledged, lots signed up. And I’ll be flabbergasted if any of them are still doing it. I’m not going to go into why having everybody learn to code is a bad thing in detail, Jeff Attwood nails that in Please Don’t Learn to Code. Short version, it puts the method before the problem, programmers like to solve problems and create solutions, and the tool they mostly use is code.
Markdown Metadata
As you all know, I write everything in Markdown, see my The Markdown Mindset. It would be nice, though, to also save metadata - information about the document - in the document, to make it searchable, but not to have it appear in the final output. Turns out, MultiMarkdown (and other new Markdown processors) do support this. It’s easy. Simply add the metadata to the top of a markdown file as follows:
Unrepairable
Last week, Apple launched the new retina Macbook Pro. Which, of course, was immediately followed by a brouhaha (Definition: A noisy and overexcited critical response, display of interest, or trail of publicity.) Kyle Wiens, who runs a web site called iFixit which creates videos for people who want to fix things, posted an article in Wired entitled The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable claiming that the new laptop is unfixable by the general public, and that this is, of course, obviously “a very bad thing” and part of a trend that will destroy the tech industry as we know it.
The care and feeding of software engineers
Nicholas C. Zakas (@slicknet), writing in NCZOnline in The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy), writes: And here’s the real crux of the problem: software engineers aren’t builders. Software engineers are creators. Building is what you do when you buy a piece of furniture from Ikea and get it home. The instructions are laid out and if you go step by step, you’ll get that comically small table you wanted.
I love my lawyers
As an experienced indie running my own business, there are things I know I am good at, things I know I am passable at and things that I simply cannot do. And one thing I will not do is enter into an engagement without a good contract. And I cannot do contracts. So one of the first things I did when I set up Noverse was to find and engage the best lawyers I could find to take care of this for me.
My WWDC 2012 Scorecard
I published my WWDC 2012 Keynote Predictions a few days ago, lets see how well I did: Sales: [0/1] Instead of the boring “we sold a lot”, they went emotional, “we helped a lot”. Nice, but not worth the 10 minutes as it made them hurry the laptop announcements. Hardware updates [2/4] No Mac Pro updates (Correction, they did bump the Mac Pro, just silently, but not to the new E5 CPU’s) Lovely Macbook Pro updates Lovely Air updates And the new Retina Macbook Pro (I was so wrong there) OS X 10.
Sandboxing and Productivity Utilities
Apple’s recent requirement for all App Store applications to be sandboxed has led to a problem for us pro users, many of our magical productivity utilities will no longer work. And if you think that’s a problem for us, imagine how the developers feel. Er, Sandboxing? Sandboxing is a computer security term for separating running programs so that they can only access a limited set of files and resources on your computer and not interfere with other programs and files.