IPad, Mercantilism and the Chinese Plantation
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” ~F. Scott Fitzgerald This is not a post about CRM. If you could apply Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence to a thing or group endeavor—always a dubious [...]
Apple and US labor
Steve Jobs supposedly told President Obama ““Those (iPhone) jobs aren’t coming back,” according to this article in the New York Times. Apple’s labor in China is also showing up in much hand-wringing in the Presidential race. Let’s explore a few other dimensions of the issue: The Chinese labor is a small part of the iPhone [...]
Flash: Misunderstood by Adobe, Apple, the Haters, and the Press
Seldom have I seen a technology so widely adopted yet so poorly understood, so polarized between haters and fanboys, and so indifferently managed by its owners. It may have many other problems, but Flash’s worst problem is how widely it is misunderstood by key parties. Flash is Misunderstood by Adobe Adobe misunderstands not just Flash, [...]
Does Profit Motive Kill Companies?
There’s an interesting article out in Forbes that contains a couple of fascinating ideas well worth digging into. The first thing is their argument that Steve Jobs was able to eliminate Innovator’s Dilemma at Apple by getting rid of the profit motive. The same article also mentions a fascinating study by Deloitte called “The Shift [...]
iSalute : Remembering Steve Jobs
I was about to board my flight at Chicago’s O’Hare when the news of Steve Jobs passing away broke. When I landed in San Fran (My United flight did not have Wi-Fi)- my thoughts were with the family, Apple colleagues and the huge number of Steve Jobs and Apple supporters. Innumerable iPads, Macs, iPods inside [...]
Think Different
Yesterday afternoon, while live Tweeting Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s live streamed keynote from Oracle OpenWorld I saw a Tweet in my #oow11 stream saying that the AP had just reported that Steve Jobs had died. A quick search on Twitter…
Minimum Viable or Insanely Great? We’ll Miss You, Steve Jobs
We live in a world that has learned to embrace and even worship the notion of a “minimum viable product,” not products that are the best that we can do. This is done for risk mitigation reasons. We are concerned that we may not know what’s best, we need to get feedback, and we need [...]
Amazon’s Kindle Fire diverges the Tablet market
In his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species. Last week Amazon enhanced their Kindle range of e-readers, but also applied some divergence to the tablet market by extending in to a new sub-category of mobile tablet devices with the Kindle Fire. I think it’s [...]
On the Perils of Not Taking iCloud More Seriously
In 2007 I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and sat in on a session on the mobile workforce. At the time, Steve Jobs had introduced the original iPhone but it wasn’t yet shipping. As I remember it, the panel for the session included several industry analysts as well as representatives from Nokia, Motorola, [...]
Speed is a Feature – Further Thoughts on Windows 8
I noticed a tweet from Get Satisfaction marketing dude Jeff Nolan recently about the Google advantage – namely speed as a feature = which reminded me of a post of the same name a couple of years ago from my founding partner Stephen O’Grady, which led to me thinking about the performance engineering work Microsoft demonstrated [...]
