via @tim_nolan

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

• Steve Jobs, on his demanding reputation, CNN Money, 2008
  via @johnmaeda

A page full of title screens from old 8- & 16-bit games (via kottke).

Over at Fotune, Philip Elmer-DeWitt tells us iOS’s Internet market share hits a record 54.65%.
He writes:

You would think that with nearly 50% of the global market for smartphones that Google’s (GOOG) Android would also dominate the Web.

So how does the competition stack up?

Android, with 16.26%, is still trailing Java ME’s 18.52%. Nokia’s (NOK) discontinued Symbian, at 6.12%, is fading fast and Research in Motion’s (RIMM) is holding steady at a negligible 3.29%.

Elmer-DeWitt points out the fact that Apple has an advantage with iPhones and iPads and iPod Touches. This is true, but I think there’s another piece to this equation.
If you’ve opened a Best Buy flyer/insert in the last year, you’ll usually see a 2-page spread of Android phones. They range from $199 to $99 to free with no recognizable differences to the average, non-techie user.
Now with over 50% of the phone share, Android is clearly kicking ass in raw numbers, but if you happen to have used some of the phones in the in range featured at Best Buy, you’ll know some of them offer horrible Human Experiences.
Chuggy, choppy, buggy, crashy.
So my theory on why Android has over 50% market share but only 16.26% Internet market share is: People are getting suckered into buying these Android phones (“hey, they look slick like the iPhone”), not understanding there’s a huge difference in quality between models. Then they start to use their phone, only to realize it sucks. People don’t like their Android phones, so they stop using them.
I was in the car with a good friend of mine recently and I handed him my iPhone 4 to help me navigate to our other friend’s house. He started flicking around the Google Map, and said “Oh my god, this interface is so smooth.” He happened to have an Android phone on the lower end of the quality spectrum and was only now coming to understand what he had bought.
Quality and quantity are mutually exclusive characteristics.

I won’t lie, when I came late to GroupOn craze less than a year ago, I was somewhat seduced by the allure of bargain prices for interesting activities. Activities that got me up and away from my laptop and iPhone screens (Holy shit, my wife loves anything to get me away from my gadgets).
After a short while I started to do crude math in my head to understand the longterm viability of sites like GroupOn and Living Social. My own skepticism brought to mind questions my boss used to drill us with at my first job out of college (circa ’99). This was during the dot-com boom. He would watch us oogle over dozens of amazing interactive sites for products and services and ask, “So how do these guys make any money?”
We would just shrug our shoulders and say we didn’t know.
We now know, of course, how that story ended for many businesses.
Now it seems, the true colors of coupon sites are coming out. The New York Times says these sites are not a great for some merchants:

Some entrepreneurs are questioning the entire premise of the industry. Jasper Malcolmson, co-founder of the deal site Bloomspot, compares the basic deal offer with lenders’ marketing subprime loans during the housing boom.

“They were giving these mortgages to every consumer regardless of whether he could handle it,” Mr. Malcolmson said. “But sooner or later you find that you can’t make great offers to people if they’re not making you money.” He recently revamped Bloomspot to focus on merchant profitability.

There’s no shortcut to success, and once you’re successful, there’s no guarantee you’ll maintain it.
The advice for successing in any business is the same as optimizing your site for search engines.
Create original, relevant content repeatedly.
I’m not saying it’s easy, but that’s the recipe.
UPDATE: I should note a crucial ingredient to the success equation I left out. After you repeatedly create original, relevant content repeatedly, you don’t give it away. Or sell it for a loss. You charge money for it.