NYT: Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real?
David Pogue asks an important (but not new) question:

I have to admit that when I saw the winners revealed in a previous issue, I was a bit taken aback, too. I mean, composition and timing are two key elements of a photographer’s skill, right? If you don’t have to worry about composition and timing, because you can always combine several photos or move things around later in Photoshop, then, well — what is a photograph?

Saving Sony: CEO Howard Stringer Plans to Focus on 3-D TV

But after a few minutes of playing Wipeout with Hirai, whipping my hovership around curves and caroming off hyperrealistic guardrails, I have to stop. The experience is ridiculously intense — maybe too intense. I’m worried that I might vomit. Sony has studied physiological responses like mine, and executives seem to be unconcerned. After a period of adjustment, most players adapt to the experience without ill effects, they say.

So Sony is betting on another hardware format, is that correct? Have they learning anything from their “win” with Blu-Ray over HD-DVD? Is Sony reaping the benefits of Blu-Ray?
Not only does media want to be free from hardware contraints, but our hardware devices that play said media need great software. Sony still doesn’t seem to be understanding that.

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse

—Henry Ford
Seems Nokia is asking it’s customers to help it build a faster horse. They’ve set up a Design By Community website that is, “… is capturing the collective thoughts of Conversations readers to define the ultimate concept mobile device.”
On the site you use sliders to customize the attributes of the phone. There’s going to be several rounds that focus on different parts of a mobile device like: Display and UI, Size and Shape, Materials, Operating System, Connectivity, Camera and Enhancements. The scale for the sliders ranges from ‘Not Ambitious Enough” to ‘Way to Out There’. If your customization is ‘Way to Out There’ it won’t let you submit it for consideration.
?
Talk about a recipe for mediocrity.
I’m not sure what amazing insights Nokia expects to glean from this experiment, but whatever it’s going to be, it’s not going to be innovative. The only output I see coming from this is some sort of mutant mobile device who’s DNA resides in the iPhone and the competitors it inspired like all the Android Devices, the Palm Pre and the Blackberry Storm.

Senator Pat Geary: Mr. Cici, was there always a buffer involved?
Willi Cici: A what?
Senator Pat Geary: A buffer. Someone in between you and your possible superiors who passed on to you the actual order to kill someone.
Willi Cici: Oh yeah, a buffer. The family had a lot of buffers!
—The Godfather: Part II

Job titles are important. Very important. But this doesn’t mean they should dictate everything. Job titles should be warranted. They should be earned.
This doesn’t mean, for instance, that an art director can’t let a junior design act as lead designer on a project. In fact, it means quite the opposite. The only way you can grow in your field is to take on more challenging projects than your title dictates.
In the career trajectory of an interactive designer there’s a substantial amount of time you can operate in a ‘silo’ and create designs that you and you alone are responsible for. I have known many visual designers, senior visual designers and art directors who have worked within a team of developers and Human Experience designer where they are the only visual designers on the project – no one junior assisting them and no one senior to them, guiding the direction of the final design.
The art director level in the career of a visual designer represents the point at which it’s no longer about your design chops alone that make you great at your level – how fast and precise you are in Photoshop, or how beautiful you can animate a scene. If we take a quick jump into the etymology of these positions, we notice that the change comes when ‘designer‘ is replaced with ‘director‘. As an art director, you’re no longer designing on the project, you’re directing the design efforts of others (ideally). As a creative director you’re directing the conceptual and strategic efforts of others.
Getting to a director level is also about how well you present your ideas and designs to your internal team and your client. It’s about how you work with and mentor junior designers. It’s also about how you delegate responsibilities. It’s about management.
Despite these characteristics, you’d be surprised how many people consider themselves art directors. This doesn’t mean the people I’ve known who have been art directors couldn’t perform the non-visual tasks I mentioned above or that they’re not worthy of the title. It just means they’ve never had the opportunity to (disclosure – I’m guilty of this ‘silo’ work lifestyle too).
We have to be very careful when we assign titles to people within the companies we work for. I don’t give a shit if you’ve worked for a company for 20 years. If you’re not qualified to be a manager or a director or a senior vice president, then you shouldn’t be one. End of story. What salary compensation you give someone is another story. That is something between your management and you, and doesn’t get added your email signature next to your email address and job title.
When people who are given titles they never live up to, it might give that person an ego boost, but it demoralizes others in the company who look to them for vision, direction and strength and never receive it.
Giving the wrong job titles to the wrong people effectively makes job titles meaningless, and inevitably confuses everyone, making them question their own worth in the company.

Adam Richardson over at frog design wrote a post last week, Microsoft Finds its Innovation Mojo.
He argues that the new crop of products that are either out or being put out by Microsoft are proof that ‘they’re back in the game’.
Richardson writes:

They have been able, to an extent, to systemetize an approach to innovation that began (it seems) with the Xbox team. The Xbox, especially the 360, established a fresh, distinctive approach to development that had been lacking at Microsoft. Innovating on behalf of customers rather than by linearly extrapolating what they say, consideration of a whole ecosystem, and then taking responsibility for the whole Human Experience in that ecosystem.

and:

We see threads of this Xbox approach showing up in most of the new generation of products – Bing, Windows Phone 7, IE9, and Courier.

If it were true that Microsoft has found the secret formula for extra-tasty innovation mojo, then we’d be seeing very different numbers for Microsoft R&D in this chart (via
Gizmodo):

Apple spends less than 4% of their revenue on R&D and Microsoft spends about 17%, yet despite spending 4 times as much, Microsoft it’s not making MS anymore innovation than Apple.
As I’ve written before, an innovative product is one that makes money for the company who created it. Apple didn’t create the concept of the mobile application store (I was downloading Palm applications from the CNet Palm page 10 years ago), but through their Human Experience, design and SDK, they were able to innovate within that space and thus become profitable from it.
The examples Richardson gives are not innovations. WinMo7, IE9 and Courier aren’t even being sold or used yet. We don’t even know if they’ll sell well.
I’ll accept XBox 360 as an example of a commercially successful and innovative product by Microsoft, but unfortunately for Microsoft, it’s a loss leader (via BusinessInsider):

And finally, when it comes down to it, Microsoft really doesn’t understand consumer products (save for it’s XBox division). As Mark Anderson was quoted as saying in the NYTimes, “Phones are consumer items, and Microsoft doesn’t have consumer DNA”.

Regarding Palm’s recent revenue forcast (via NYTimes):

The company shipped a total of 960,000 smartphones during the third quarter ended February 26, but sell-through — which reflects how many devices actually end up in consumers’ hands — totaled 408,000 units, lagging the 600,000 units or more many analysts expected.

I understand that the point to consider with this news is the decreasing sales trend not the total number of units sold, but it’s still sad to think that a company that moved over 400,000 units is doing badly.
As much of a Apple enthusiast as I am, I really want to see Palm succeed with their Pre and WebOS. They need to break off from their shitty mobile provider, Sprint.

One guy’s story of trying to go Flash-free:

For me, the conclusion after February was clear. I missed out on a few things that annoyed me intensely. Most of the things I missed out on were videos on websites like TED and the New York Times. I had some catching up to do after February. With the help of ClicktoFlash and Youtube and Vimeo’s HTML5 players I was able to watch most of the video content out there, but there is still a lot that you can’t watch without that little plugin. I also ‘missed out’ on a truckload of so-called ‘rich advertisements’, which I absolutely adored.

A good way to tell if you understand your own business plan, product or service is whether you can describe it in the length of time an average elevator ride takes, aka the ‘elevator pitch’. Sometimes that’s all the time you’ll get to pitch it to the person making or breaking your future.
The smart people over at Knowledge Games have a great exercise to help you achieve that level of clarity and simplicity:

Often this is the hardest thing to do in developing a new idea. An elevator pitch should be short and compelling description of the problem you’re solving, who you solve it for, and one key benefit that distinguishes it from its competitors. It must be unique, believable and important. The better and bigger the idea, the harder the pitch is to write.

A great example of a company who understands this is The Future Well.
What is The Future Well and what do they do?
They provide a much needed service with an admirable focus, and they can tell you:

We identify either creative or disruptive business opportunities within the health space and design beautiful solutions that positively impact health and happiness.

And:

Sometimes we identify the opportunity and find the right partners to execute it and sometimes we build it ourselves. Other times, we help guide clients so the product/service is simple, elegant, and wrapped up with a business strategy that leverages their core competencies.

Remember when compact discs cost upwards of $20 each? I’m talking back in the early ninties days of long boxes.
Well, Universal Music has some news (vis iPodNN):

Universal Music Group on Thursday said it would cut the prices on most CDs to $10 or less. Known as the Velocity program, it would see album prices range between $6 and $10. The label would count on sales volume, as well as costlier deluxe versions, to make up for the lower 25 percent profit margin.

The irony is that CDs should have cost between $6-$10 dollars twenty years ago.
We were squeezed for years by the record labels with their enormous profit margins.
Now they can get the squeeze.