“The iPhone is the first computer in a long time that doesn’t make people afraid. It affords regular people the same sense of control and deep-seated psychological satisfaction that, on past platforms (even the Mac), required years of learning and acclimation to acquire.” — Dan Grover » Indie Developers and Crossing the App Store Chasm. (This is a big deal for web applications too. Using a computer feels like a highwire act; you’re always one click away from destroying everything. Good web apps - GMail does an amazing job of this - get rid of that fear.)
“And that is what I missed in my first day with the iPad. It feels less like a computer than any computing device I’ve owned.” — I’ve Changed My Mind About The iPad. Sure, computers are dull. Computing is still massively relevant. Fixation on the “computer” form-factor is confusing means and ends.
“The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran Major League Baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. (Bill) James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey.” - Michael Lewis, ‘Moneyball’
“Like Amazon, Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from users who are looking to make an online purchase. Other query types – searches related to news, blog posts, funny videos, etc. – are mostly a loss leaders for Google. The key risk for Google is that they are heavily dependent on online purchasing being a two-stage process: the user does a search on Google, and then clicks on an ad to buy something on another site. As long as the e-commerce world is sufficiently fragmented, users will prefer an intermediary like Google to help them find the right product or merchant. But as Amazon increasingly dominates the e-commerce market, this fragmentation could go away along with users’ need for an intermediary.” — While Google fights on the edges, Amazon is attacking their core cdixon.org – chris dixon’s blog. Once again: follow the money.
“Nonetheless, the Age of Curation (see? anyone can coin a catchphrase) began long before today’s conversation about curated computing. In this Age of Digital Excess (oops, there I go again), we’re surrounded by too much music, too much software, too many websites, too many feeds, too many people, too many of their opinions and so on. Curation is already fundamental to the way in which we view the world these days, and the iPad is hardly the first technology to recognize this.” — Overwhelmed? Welcome the Age of Curation | Epicenter | Wired.com
Let’s say your time is worth £50 an hour. How much do you “spend” on Google? (Anyone thinking about businesses work, and where value is, without thinking in terms of the flow of information is seriously missing out, I reckon.)
psd:
Cold War: diagram of possible massive attack on Soviet Russia, Fortune 1954
This is really quite something for about thirty seconds: then you work out what it’s actually saying.
Eileen Burbidge on women in technology over at Techcrunch;
All of these guys (and others that I know and work with) would love to work with more women. […] They’re not opposed to hiring women and some would prefer evenly-qualified female candidates to male ones, but they (and I) don’t often see enough to choose from.
About half of my technology/business role models are women. Let’s start with my mum: she’s the person who taught me to program. She was doing things I’ll never understand, with military systems which I’d never want to get near to, at Ferranti in the 1970s. Thanks to her, I’ve never thought of computers as something only men did. Another’s Eileen: while we’ve beating our business into shape, she’s always been there to call us out on what we’ve been missing. I could go through the whole list, and the people on it know who they are, but you get the point.
Timetric’s based in White Bear Yard: I’m one of the “these guys” Eileen writes about above. Now, favouring either male or female candidates really isn’t on, but we’re trying to build a company where you’d want to work. The kind of people I want to work alongside enjoy learning, and we work at getting better at what we do. How can you do that if you surround yourself with people who are all exactly the same and exactly like you? What can you learn from them?
Startups are the ultimate in contrarian strategies. If we were typical we wouldn’t be doing it, and if we’re going to make it work, it’s not going to be by doing what everyone else does. Being open-minded and flexible’s one of our biggest structural advantages over our larger rivals. So, when I read comments like these, soaked in fear and so closed-minded, it makes me sad.
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People won’t buy a product if they can’t understand it immediately. They can’t understand it immediately if their worldview doesn’t already have a readymade place for it. And their worldview won’t have a readymade place for it, if they’ve never seen anything like it before.
Steve expertly wields the powerful tool that is the feeling of recognition.
That feeling tells us, hey, I’ve been here before, and good things happened, and people were nice to me. Recognition is a poor man’s wisdom. It helps people decide whether to buy. Without recognition, they won’t even entertain the question.
” — The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness : Cheerful. Being too clever-clever is as bad as not being clever enough.
I’m fascinated by the unfolding general election campaign.
The big narrative of the election is the ongoing trauma in the Labour party - or, if you’re less negative, massive upheaval in how voters of the centre and Left see themselves. Okay, it’s mostly about unpopular leaders, and the way any government accumulates so much bad karma after three parliaments that they’re doomed anyway. Still, I’ve got a hunch that it’s still a little bit about ideology and a little bit about power structures.
Except when parties are infected by radicals — like Thatcher and the Tories, and Blair and Labour — they have centres of gravity they orbit around. The Conservatives have the good fortune that their orbit takes them through somewhere electable. That’s because parties of the moderate Right have always, by default, stood for the continuing power of those currently in power; for keeping things as they are. Even if you hate it, it’s coherent. If they’re devils, they’re ones you know. Their support structures are strong, too, because they’re by definition successful and have power; financial and social capital. The funny thing is that as the Labour party have moved away from Blairism, the Tories have become Blairite, because Blairite structures have been in the ascendancy. In the absence of a galvanising force like a Thatcher, the Conservatives are magnetically drawn to orthodoxy.
By contrast, the Left stands up for people who want to change things. It’s harder to homogenise that. Everyone wants to change something different. In that light, it’s almost a historical accident that Labour wound up being the party of the left. What does Labour orbit around, really? Historically, the unions. They’re the party of organised labour. Without organised labour, and the industry you need to support it, then there’s a problem. The structures led the political theory, once Labour broke with Marxism in the early 20th century, rather than the other way around. So when Thatcher demolished the union scaffolding, what’s left other than either woolly niceness — not that there’s anything wrong with niceness, but nice never got anyone to run through a wall, and elections are about that kind of crazed intensity — or naked lust for power?
Like I say, maybe it’s a post-Thatcherite thing. Once Britain was dragged away from industry, then the conditions which bred a strong Labour party just didn’t exist any more. Labour was still, fundamentally, big on hierarchy, though. One way of interpreting what we’ve seen in Labour since the 80s is a big hierarchy responding to evolve-or-die time. What happens if it doesn’t make it? Blair’s tried the lust-for-power idea and it didn’t work out long-term.
So what would a new party of the Left stand for if you were starting over? The Labour Party was about defending the employee from the employer through collective action; working class vs bourgeoisie. But we don’t need defence from employers in the same way any more. Instead, you can imagine a new Leftist goal of defending the individual, or small, economic actor from the large one; not about challenging the existence of the market, but instead about correcting market failures — softening the impact of big corporations’ power, pricing in externalities like the environment, and maximising liberty that way.
The employer vs. employee analysis was, to be fair, the biggest bit of this during the reign of big industry. It made sense at the time. From this perspective — and it is just a perspective, there’s no absolute truth here, but it’s an interesting lens — then it’s down to it being you versus the corporations now, and that’s a different power struggle.
Through this looking-glass, the opposite of the conservative instinct is to emphasise effective, individual, liberty. A new party of the left would be anti-authoritarian: respect for people’s agency would be at the heart of it: so, internationalism so you can go and live where you want with who you want, enabled by free markets. It’d back that up with strong, free education, healthcare and welfare, to support the social mobility which belongs with physical mobility. It’d be about making sure everyone who can is able to participate in those free markets and everyone who can’t is as free as they can be. It’d be reflexively anti-censorship, and it’d be a little suspicious of anything, like copyright or patent law, which looks like censorship. It’d look something like modern liberalism.
Maybe I’m overthinking this and everyone’s just sick of Gordon Brown and doesn’t quite trust David Cameron. I’d love to believe that there might be more to it than that. Regardless of what you or I might stand for, I’d hate to think we were post-politics.
Hipstamatic (http://hipstamaticapp.com/) is a lot of fun.