Steven Sinofsky responds to the fall of Blackberry on his blog:

Disruption happens when a new product comes along and changes the underlying assumptions of the incumbent, as we all know.

Incumbent products and businesses respond by often downplaying the impact of a particular feature or offering. And more often than folks might notice, disruption doesn’t happen so easily. In practice, established businesses and products can withstand a few perturbations to their offering. Products can be rearchitected. Prices can be changed. Features can be added.

What happens though when nearly every assumption is challenged? What you see is a complete redefinition of your entire company. And seeing this happen in real time is both hard to see and even harder to acknowledge. Even in the case of Blackberry there was a time window of perhaps 2 years to respond-is that really enough time to re-engineer everything about your product, company, and business?
…says the man who left Microsoft.
His post is decent, but hindsight is 20/20. It’s like an alcoholic with a revoked driver’s license telling you not to drink and drive.
Sinofsky mentions “Christensen” once, but it would have been good to mention the actual book that obviates his blog post—The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.

Mobile is ubiquitous. As such, every website needs a mobile version. It just makes sense (except over at my site; we’re keeping things REAL). But, mobile websites don’t just fall from the sky. They need to be designed and developed with the same amount of care as a site made for desktop browsers. So, for all you small business people who are planning on hiring some people to design and build a site: If you want a mobile version, mention it in advance. Bringing up the subject at the end of a project, and expecting it to have been part of the package, is not going to do much to foster good relationships with your contractors.
If there has been no mobile design that you saw or approved of, there will be no mobile site. If there is no quote for a mobile version in the estimate, there will be no mobile site. And most importantly, if you do not ask for a mobile version of the site, you will not get one. Someday soon, it will not need to be said that a mobile version is required (it will still have to be paid for), but that day is not here yet.

First, Microsoft shows up a few years late to the tablet party with a half-baked product, Surface.
Then they sell about 9 Surfaces total in the year it’s been on the market.
…wait, I mixed that up, that should be $900,000,000 that Microsoft had to write off for all the unsold Surfaces.
Then they announce the Surface 2, who’s updates include a new docking station, a new kickstand and better battery. People are going to be all over that shit for sure. Are you kidding me? My parents love kickstands and docking stations. Doesn’t everybody?
Now Dell announces their own Windows 8.1 tablet priced to undercut Microsoft’s Surface 2. Yeah, that’s right. A licensed, Microsoft partner is trying to undercut Microsoft because, well, Microsoft wants to have it’s cake and eat it.
Doesn’t this whole thing seem like a bad dream?

via The Loop
(Title attributed to sci-fi author William Gibson)

Over at Campaign Monitor they’ve published an article on how to design iOS 7 style icons.
Bad idea.
Apple has introduced some great, new features in iOS 7—iconography and typography are not on the list (more on this in a forthcoming post).
Aubrey Johnson has an insightful post on the cognitive issue with hollow icons.

Take a look at the example above. The red lines indicate areas where cognitive load is occurring. Your brain traces the shapes on the first row an average of twice as much. Your eye scans the outside shape and then scans the inner line to determine if there is value in the “hollow” section.

Icons without this empty core are processed as definite and only the outer lines are processed. Depending on the outline of the shape, this happens pretty fast. No matter the shape, though, the hollow icons take more time to process.
I completely agree. Since I installed iOS 7 on my iPhone 5 a few weeks ago I’ve been thinking the icons aren’t icons so much as they’re wireframes of icons. This makes them hard to distinguish from each other (particularly in Mobile Safari).
In short, the iconography in iOS 7 is a perfect example of form over function.

–from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

On September 4th, Samsung announced their smartwatch, Gear (It looks and sounds weird without “the Samsung” in front of it, right?).
What’s ironic about Samsung’s efforts to beat Apple to market with their own smartwatch is that in cobbling together a half-baked product with no clear purpose and problem to solve, they’ve set up Apple to look even better when Apple announces whatever it is they’re cooking up with the M7 chip.
Samsung is much more successful when they follow Apple’s lead, as they’ve done up until now.
Just check out these reviews below. Pretty harsh.
Gizmodo:

Ultimately, though, this feels like a beta product. Apps feel unfinished, gestures are finicky, and very little about the whole experience is fluid or easy. It often takes a lot of scrolling around to finally find the app you want, and even then it’s easy to accidentally back out of it because it mistook your tap for a swipe. It seems like Samsung just wanted to put some feelers out there and try to get some feedback from consumers, while charging them $300 for the honor.
The Verge:
A smartwatch the Galaxy Gear is not. Frankly, I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to be. Samsung describes it as a companion device, and the Gear is indeed chronically dependent on an umbilical link to another Samsung device, but it never left me feeling like it was a helpful companion. The notifications are Orwellian, the media controls are exiguous, and the app selection has no substance to underpin the hype. Samsung’s attempt to turn the Gear into a style icon is also unlikely to succeed, owing to the company’s indecision about its target demographic. Trying to please all tastes has resulted in a predictably charmless and soulless product.
BGR:
Wearables may or may not be the future of computing, but the Galaxy Gear makes envisioning that future very difficult.

Samsung is pitching the Gear as a smartphone companion device that is designed to make your life easier. It does not. In some cases the Gear adds conveniences to the mobile experience but they are minor at best and they come at too great a price: Another device to charge each day, an awful experience where voice controls are concerned, and a constant uncomfortable feeling shared by the user and those around him or her.
Engadget:
The Gear isn’t bad for a first-generation Samsung product, and it’ll get better as the ecosystem grows. Of course, that’s if the watch catches on and developers decide it’s worth their time to produce a special app for it. Of any Android manufacturer, Samsung stands the best chance of gaining support. If it doesn’t succeed, however, the $300 retail price will be even harder to swallow than it currently is, and no assortment of hot colors will change the fact that it’s little more than a glorified time-telling device.

Uh-oh. DE contributor Bryan Larrick is back with the October Horrorshow:

October is here. Rejoice! For this is the best month in which to watch horror films. Summer has just died and the month ends with Halloween. The chill that has suddenly arisen in the air portends the coming cold slumber of winter…or the passing whisper of a phantom. To celebrate, Missile Test once again dedicates the month to reviewing horror films. The good, the bad, or the putrid. It doesn’t matter. If there’s blood, it gets a watch. Welcome to the fifth annual October Horrorshow. First up is a real winner.
He’s going to be posting a new horror film review each day this month.
The first is a real winner, Resident Evil: Retribution:
As for the casting choices, it’s rare to see an ensemble this uniformly bad in a movie that doesn’t have the words “fast” and/or “furious” in its title. Or, to put it another way, how does a cast get worse AFTER it loses Ali Larter from one film to the next? The answer: it adds Sienna Guillory.

The single worst acting I have ever seen in a film was turned in by Robbi Morgan in the original Friday the 13th. With her performance in Retribution, Guillory has seized the crown. It was a stunningly inept performance, on par with a class of kindergarteners putting on a Christmas pageant, or the awkward openings of porn scenes. Although, I’m pretty sure Sasha Grey or Traci Lords would have been better in this movie. I will never forget how maliciously Guillory butchered the art of acting for as long as I live, unless some other brave soul surpasses her level of futility in some future project.
Grab the popcorn.

—Billy Beane, Moneyball
…and you know about loss aversion, even if you don’t know the term.

From the Verge:

Intel promised to unveil an internet TV service by the end of 2013, but with just months to go, the project’s prospects may be floundering. According to All Things D, Intel needs additional funding to keep the project going. It’s reportedly spoken with both Amazon and Samsung about the possibility of them pitching in money or distribution services to help keep the internet TV project alive. But if Intel can’t find a partner, that may be the end of the line: ATD says that the project could simply be scrapped.
How about this: Don’t talk before you ship.

BGR: Samsung exec reportedly admits Galaxy Gear smartwatch ‘lacks something special’

The last thing you want to do when entering a new product category for the first time is launch something that isn’t your best effort. According to a report from The Korea Times, however, a Samsung executive may have admitted that the company is doing just that with the Galaxy Gear smartwatch. “We’ve acknowledged that our Gear lacks something special,” an unnamed Samsung official is quoted as having told the site. “With more investment for user interface and user experience, Samsung devices will be better in terms of customer satisfaction.”
Give ’em some time.
As soon as they see what Apple has planned for the motion-tracking capabilities in their M7 chip Samsung will have a clear picture where they need to take their smart watch.
The expression, “lead, follow or get out of the way” comes to mind.
In the realm of mobile computing innovation we have Apple leading, Samsung following and Blackberry, well, getting out of the way.