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.

Randy Murray gets poetically hyperbolic on Steve Jobs and the future of Apple:

Isaac Asimov wrote a very interesting series of novels called “The Foundation.” In them, his character, Hari Seldon, developed a science called psychohistory, with which he was able to accurately predict the large scale course of human events. It’s a great series, and was added to by some other popular science fiction writers over the years.

This idea, that one man could both predict and influence human events, is both fascinating and incredible.

And yet we have our own Hari Seldon. It’s Steve Jobs.

It’s great to see Joshua Davis is not only still creating great designs, but also using Flash, a technology we keep hearing is no longer relevant in today’s mobile world.

As you can see from the Voice Visualizer application Davis created, Flash is an extremely powerful instrument in the right hands, capable of outputting immersive work that HTML5 and Javascript (still) can’t even come close to.

(Hat tip Analogue)

If you’re like me and dig retro graphics, things from the 50’s & 60’s and computers, you’ll have to check out the Computer History Museum (via cirox). They have large PDF versions for all sorts of old computer brochures.

Influencer: Steve Jobs announces the iPhone, January 2007


Influenced: Jeff Bezos announces the Kindle Touch, September 2011

Raymond V. Gilmartin over at Harvard Business Review says CEOs need a new set of beliefs:

In my experience, these beliefs have led managers and boards to take actions that have had unintended, destructive consequences. When observing the behavior of management and corporate boards, when reading the management literature and the business press, and when assessing the outcomes of management behavior, it seems as though CEOs are recognized and rewarded handsomely for downsizing and outsourcing, acquiring or merging, and making the quarter — all justified by the responsibility to maximize shareholder value.

Any of these actions can be necessary in certain circumstances; most of us have taken one or another. My concern is that these actions have become the standard by which CEOs are expected to manage. Furthermore, these actions are taken seemingly without regard to the consequences for the community, the employees, the survival of the company as an institution, or the creation of long-term firm value.

Aza Raskin recounts the story of Henry Kremer and the competition for the first plane powered by human and how Paul MacCready approached it in a much different way than everyone else:

A decade went by. Dozens of teams tried and failed to build an airplane that could meet the requirements. It looked impossible. Another decade threatened to go by before our hero, MacCready, decided to get involved. He looked at the problem, how the existing solutions failed, and how people iterated their airplanes. He came to the startling realization that people were solving the wrong problem. “The problem is,” he said, “that we don’t understand the problem.”

The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. He built a plane with Mylar, aluminum tubing, and wire.

Carscoop on how technology is making our cars more vulnerable to attack:

The modern automobile is a microcosm for our networked society. Everything from the brakes to the dual-zone climate control and from the windscreen wipers to the CD player is connected through a Controller-Area-Network (CAN) bus.

Like the nerves in our bodies, this network passes information from one component to another. It allows the anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control to work in unison, disconnects the cruise control when you step on the accelerator and allows the headlights to switch themselves on in low light conditions.

Like all networks, however, the ones in our cars are vulnerable to attack from hackers. Last year, researchers with the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security (CAESS) at the University of California San Diego and the University of Washington demonstrated how a car could be hacked through its ODB-II port.

Totally important and valid point.
The counterpoint to this is that cars have always been vulnerable to attack. Screwdrivers in tumblers, hotwiring, slim jims. Those are yesterday’s tools.
Today’s have gotten more sophisticated is all.

Wiesmann