Where’s Waldo?
Go back to your student days and try to remember your best textbooks… They always started out with the basics, then went deeper and deeper. Each chapter led you stepwise through a concept, using examples, painting a picture then rounding off with some exercises before moving on to the next chapter. They were not half [...]
Building Apps is Wrong!
Software developers, too many of them in fact, are still building apps. That could be a mistake. For decades, software developers have identified business functions and transactions that they could create applications around. The job of an application usually was to permit the recording of a business or accounting event, perform some computational magic upon [...]
Happy Birthday, Personal Computer. Rest in Peace.
Business Insider reminds us that today is the 30th birthday of the original IBM PC: the computer’s brain was a 4.77Mhz Intel 8088 processor (for my younger readers, it’s Mega not Giga) and it had a grand total of 256K RAM (again, it’s not 256 GB, not even MB, but Kilobytes). Yet it was a [...]
Mac vs PC: A Picture is Worth 1000 Words
I saw this over at Google+ (second thing I’ve posted from there): These are McDonald’s instructions for how to connect to WiFi. If you have XP, a full page plus another third of a page. Vista is a little better, taking essentially a page. Maybe there is some progress in Redmond, after all. On the [...]
Why Do the Cool Kids Keep Missing the Tragically Knowable?
I just read an article on GigaOm about Facebook (Techmeme caught it too) app vendors being up in arms because Facebook’s new spam control was too strong and knocked out a bunch of legit apps. It isn’t just Facebook, we read these stories constantly about various Valley companies. Mostly they are companies that don’t have enough [...]
When Will Your Job Be Consumerized?
It’s become all the rage to talk about the Consumerization of IT in the last few years. There are a lot of definitions of what the term means. Those who are looking to downplay it somewhat will toss out the idea that it’s copying consumer web technology into business software. One gets the idea that [...]
The Real Problem With Mobile WiFi: Terrible UX
Stacey Higginbotham with GigaOm wonders why WiFi doesn’t relieve some of the congestion on the mobile networks. Apparently an AT&T executive says it’s like this: The executive noted that AT&T didn’t see Wi-Fi helping the nation’s No. 2 carrier offset congestion because in most cases people don’t use Wi-Fi unless they are sitting still in [...]
The 7 Kinds of Software Developer Wushu
James Governor got me thinking along these lines by asking how to segment developers. He asked whether the web “killed” the professional developer, or at the very least radically reshaped the segments. I don’t know about all that, in fact I’m pretty skeptical. But what I do know is that the way James talked about developers [...]
Fred Wilson is Still Wrong About Streaming Music and Amazon’s Locker Will Rock
Fred and I have tangled before over the issue of owning your music versus streaming it. Fred continues undaunted in his latest post, a reaction to Amazon’s Music Locker announcements: I don’t get the idea of music locker services like the one Amazon just announced. If I’m going to stream music from the cloud, why should [...]
The GUI is New Again
I saw an interesting CRM user interface the other day and, while I don’t usually write about something as basic as the UI, I was drawn to this one. Actually, I’ve been very interested in a new class of UI emerging lately; something we haven’t thought about in a long time is re-emerging, possibly as [...]
