I quoted to this piece by Michael Lopp back on June 28, but I’m quoting it again:

Your success is delicious. Others look at your success and think, “Well, duh, it’s so obvious what they did there – anyone can do that” and, frustratingly so, they’re right. Your success has given others a blueprint for what success looks like, and while, yes, the devil’s in the details, you have performed a lot of initial legwork for your competition in the process of becoming successful.

More bad news via metaphors. Your enticing success has your competition chasing you, and that means that, by definition, that they need to run harder and faster than you so they can catch up. Yes, many potential competitors are going to bungle the execution and vanish before they pose a legitimate threat but there’s a chance someone will catch up, and when they do, what’s their velocity? Faster than yours.

Shit.

As sucky as it is to watch HP copy the design of the iMac, and Samsung copy the design of the iPhone and iOS (and their retail stores and their dock connectors and everything else) and Jeff Bezos copy Steve Jobs’ presentation style to introduce the new Kindles (last year and this year)—none of these companies will be able to create anything better by copying.
Things get interesting once you leave the copying phase and start mutating ideas to fit your vision. All of these companies copying Apple are acting like me in design school, when I imitated my favorite painters and sculptors and designers while I developed my own artistic vision.
The problem with Apple’s competitors is most of them seem to have no interest in developing their own vision and that is unfortunate because we could have a much more diverse and creative spectrum of technology products on the market right now.

William Moggridge, Designer and Laptop Pioneer, Dies at 69

It’s a hack of old technologies, aimed at creating a calmer vision of social networking. It’s a limited device that’s meant to fit into our day rather than demand attention.

via fastcodesign.com

Ars Technica: Is Surface Microsoft’s confession that Windows 8 isn’t really cut out for tablets?

But Windows 8 exposes the great danger of Microsoft’s vision: a software environment that forces you to go “PC” when all you want is the “Plus” bit. If the iPad has taught us anything at all, it’s that there’s a lot of people out there who are happy with pure tablets, and actively desire pure tablets. Windows 8 gets a lot right, but its PC side is still there, and it’s inescapable.

The beauty of the iPad is in all the way it isn’t a PC. No keyboard. No wires. No pesky file directory explorer. When Henry Ford build the Model T, he didn’t market is on how well it aligned with the horse and buggy. He marketed it on how different and better it was than its predecessor.
The more time goes on and the more I really look hard at Microsoft Surface and Windows 8, the more I see a company not ready to cannibalize one area of their business in order for another part to thrive.
And for innovation to happen, you need that cannibalization.

Over at The Verge there’s a post on the nearly 40 iPhone and iPad prototypes revealed in Samsung trial.
MG Siegler responds:

Let me reiterate my stance that I think it’s fascinating that Apple wants to win this lawsuit badly enough that they’re letting all this previously confidential information get out.

I think Apple is super pissed off they have to reveal all these prototypes, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. And it gives their competition no advantage moving forward. This is because all of these prototypes are artifacts of the creative process, not the creative process itself.
It’s same thing as getting access to the sketchbooks of Da Vinci. Yes, you’re looking at the work of genius, but this in no way helps you create a masterpiece. I would even go as far as saying it’s like getting the source code to a program or website—unless you’re smart enough to know how to work with the code, it’s useless. Marco Arment argued this point in Episode 85 of his Build & Analyze podcast (around the 68-minute mark).
So Samsung and everyone else in the world now has access to old Apple hardware prototypes (rejected ones, I might add), but they’re not getting access to Apple’s creative process for innovation.

Sorry, but I love the fact that Clayton Christensen, the guy who introduced us to “disruptive innovation” and “asymmetrical competition” (Yes, he was Horace Dediu’s Jedi master and where Horace got the name for his website, Asymco) was dead wrong about Apple’s iPhone:

So music on the mobile phone is going to disrupt the iPod? But Apple’s just about to launch the iPhone. The iPhone is a sustaining technology relative to Nokia. In other words, Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone. They’ve launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It’s not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited.

Just goes to show you even smart people get shit wrong.
Let me take a little sip of this schädenfreude. Mmmmmm.
via DF

Scathing review of Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine by Isaac Chotiner:

IMAGINE is really a pop-science book, which these days usually means that it is an exercise in laboratory-approved self-help. Like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it. For this reason, their chestnuts must be roasted in “studies” and given a scientific gloss. The surrender to brain science is particularly zeitgeisty. Their sponging off science is what gives these writers the authority that their readers impute to them, and makes their simplicities seem very weighty. Of course, Gladwell and Brooks and Lehrer rarely challenge the findings that they report, not least because they lack the expertise to make such a challenge.

I’m still reading Imagine, and it’s somewhat interesting, but isn’t grabbing me nearly as much as Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

A conversation I was envisioning at Microsoft:
Bill: “Guysguysguys! I have an idea. You know how Apple is having all this success with their iPad?”
Bob: “Yeah?”
Bill: “Well. I was thinking. The iPad is great and all, but it’s missing something.”
Bob: “Missing something?”
Bill: “Yeah, I mean the multitouch display is great and super responsive and all, but like, what if I want another way to type up a message? Or enter text into search box?”
Bob: “Ok…?”
Bill: “Well, that’s when it hit me, what the tablet needs is a keyboard. I real, physical keyboard. No one has ever done that before. We’d be the first!”
Bob: “A screen attached to a physical keyboard. Wow! How the hell did you come up with that?!”
Bill: “I don’t know dude, it just popped in there. You like it? You think it’s a good idea?
Bob: “Do I like it? Bill, you’re a genius. let’s go tell Ballmer, he’ll friggin’ love it! Apple’s going to be dead in the water!”

via mag+

From Electronista:

HP’s 2012 shareholder meeting on Wednesday saw Apple become a centerpiece of its conversation. During the question and answer session, most questions centered around why HP was not more like its fellow Southern Bay Area counterpart, which had a tenfold larger market worth even though it spent less on research and development. When asked if she had a vision like the late Steve Jobs, CEO Meg Whitman argued that the company had to place more bets on “disruptive” innovation like Apple, creating categories or fundamentally changing them instead of the mostly “evolutionary” approach HP used.

Sure, HP just needs to be disruptive like Apple.
And I just need to be musical like Thom York to be a great musician.
Easy.

shoot&scribe on how Steve Jobs cracked the innovation code:

Apple’s growth has been astronomical because Steve Jobs has, in effect, solved the Innovator’s Dilemma. Apparently, during his hiatus at Next, he read the Innovator’s Dilemma and cited it as one of the most important books he ever read.

Essentially it turns around Apple’s complete willingness to destroy its own revenues. It built a phone that destroyed it’s major source of revenue, the iPod. It built Macbook Airs that have now disrupted another major source of revenue, their Macbook Pros. It built the iPad, which is already beginning to disrupt the Macbook itself.

If you dig innovation and disruption but haven’t read The Innovator’s Dilemma or know about Clayton Christensen, get on it.

Michael Loop on why hacking is important.
Read the whole thing, but this is great:

Reasonable people are often scared by the new. This is because reasonable people are not Barbarians and they are not hackers. They appreciate the predictable, profitable, and knowable world that comes with a well-defined process, and I would like to thank each and everyone of them because these people keep the trains running and on time. No one likes Barbarians because the Barbarian strategy is one at odds with civilization. By definition, a Barbarian, a hacker, is building on a strategy that is at odds with the majority.

It’s awesome.

Yes, about halfway through writing my post on Top Gear, this Oatmeal post did pop into my head.

In Michael’s previous post on the subject, he points out that entertainment industries have yet to figure out how to adapt to new media. Everything we’ve seen from media companies, whether it be film, television, music, or books, has been part of an attempt to restrict access to content. How silly is that? Media companies are stuck in a model that says, essentially, “the less people see our product, the better.”
The counterargument is that these companies are not restricting content for people willing to pay, but that’s not necessarily true. E-books are a case in point.
If a book has been published in the United States, there’s a good chance a large library system will have a copy for checkout. I live in New York City, which has not one, but three public libraries run by the city. The New York Public Library, serving Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island is a gigantic repository of books. If you want to read something, it can be reserved online and when a copy becomes available, it is sent to a branch of your choice for pickup. It’s a remarkably convenient system, and this comes from an institution operating on a gutted budget.
Libraries have always been repositories of free content that book publishers have been willing to live with. But the e-book model is changing the relationship publishers have with public libraries.
When a popular book comes out, libraries have to buy many copies to keep pace with demand, just like a bookstore. As copies are worn down with use, replacements are bought, or, if demand has peaked, not replaced. Physical media demands multiple copies for multiple uses. But as libraries are setting up online libraries and warehousing content for e-readers, they are asking the obvious question, “Why should we have to purchase more than one digital file? Can’t we just host one copy on our servers and let our users download it?”
Publishers, understandably, don’t want that to happen, as open access to a library’s content would be legal piracy. So the system the two sides have come up with, and that is still being worked out, is a complicated licensing system whereby libraries pay publishers for a certain amount of checkouts. When a particular book has reached a cap, the library has to purchase more licenses. Users who have the downloaded book on their device have a limited time to read it before it erases itself from their machine. Because digital storage and transmission has completely upended the weight of content, the owners of that content are having to invent artificial barriers (that negate advances in technology) to its distribution.
Public libraries are free for its members. They do not fit into any pay model currently in use today, yet even they are now subject to the methods of an industry flailing to find its place in the 21st century.
For an example from television that breaks the pay model, one need look no further than hulu. Hulu.com has deals with all four of the major broadcast networks to carry their content online. Some of that content includes entire series runs of shows that are long off the air. It’s wonderful for anyone who loves television. But the spectre of artificial restrictions once again rears its ugly head.
The X-Files is one of the most popular shows of the 1990s. It ran for nine seasons and spawned a pair of films. All nine of those seasons are on hulu, but only for users who pay the monthly subscription fee to be part of hulu plus.
This is a television show that aired on network television, where the price to watch was paid in time, in the form of commercials, but in its online incarnation, that commitment is not good enough for the owners of the content, so the show resides behind an artificial barrier. For those not willing to pay with anything other than their time, using a torrent to steal the episodes is now more of an attractive option.
I would be willing to bet that if that content was taken out from behind hulu’s pay wall, and was interspersed with normal commercial breaks, like everything else on hulu, instances of piracy of that television show would decrease. I bet that would work with all shows. Weightless data is inherently hard to hide, and has created a new class of casual criminal. A great way to bring these people in from the dark, for movies and television, anyway, is to make content they wish to see available, and then sell ad space within it. Something like this has only been applied to relatively small amounts of content, so far. As soon as television and film companies realize more of their viewers aren’t wedded to a clock, and that they are willing to pay with their time like they always have been, that should begin to change. But hurry it up, already. I want to watch The X-Files.