Microsoft is still trying to make Windows Phone relevant:

According to The Information, Microsoft this week will show off “a single code base inside the software that will allow an app to run well on phones, tablets and PCs, as opposed to being optimized for one screen size.” This is a big deal because while Windows Phone doesn’t have a strong app developer base, the desktop version of Windows absolutely does. So in theory, anyone who makes software and applications for Windows should soon be able to make Windows Phone apps with ease.

Microsoft reminds me of the smart student in college who misses the deadline for the thesis paper, but manages to get it in late, accepting the grade deductions and has tons of typos and continuity errors. They eventually turn in a solid paper over the summer, but by then it’s too late. This cycle continues into the next semester as Microsoft brags about the amazing but late paper they wrote but everyone has moved on to new classes. No one cares.

Analogy translation: Microsoft joined the smartphone competition over 3 years after the iPhone and Android were announced. They keep refining and fixing things on their platform, but everyone else has moved on so they’re stuck in a perpetual state of catch-up.

Apple announces the iPhone in 2007 …three years later Microsoft announces Windows Phone

Apple announces the iPad in 2010 …two years later Microsoft announces the Surface

Apple announces the Apple Watch in September 2014 …and Microsoft announces the Microsoft Band a month later.

People used to buy Windows computers because everyone used Windows at the office. This is no longer the case. More often then not, the reverse cycle has been happening in the last decade: people decide to get a Macbook or iMac for work because they use iPhones and iPads at home.

Microsoft needs to throw in the towel on consumer electronics. Focus on enterprise. It’s over.

Samsung wants to get better at design:

Can Samsung Electronics design its way out of its recent profit slide?

As the South Korean smartphone giant struggles to fend off a slew of low-cost Chinese and Indian handset makers and a reinvigorated Apple, it is increasingly drawing from its Cupertino, Calif. rival’s bench of talent to bolster its design chops.

The latest move: Samsung plucked Lee Don-tae, a top executive at U.K. design agency Tangerine that consulted for Apple in the early 1990s, as senior vice president of Samsung’s global design team, giving him oversight of the company’s global design centers.
Listen: Jony Ive worked at Apple years before Steve Jobs came back to the company and while he did his best to design great products they pale in comparison to what he designed under Jobs (and after). The 20th Anniversary Mac, anyone? How about [the second generation Newton](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)?
Just because you hire a talented person does not guarantee they’ll be empowered to make great things.

While reviewing the new logo for the University of the Arts London in 2012, Armin Vit tears Helvetica a new asshole:

As it concerns identity design we all recognize Helvetica as a bastion of the rise of the practice of corporate identity in the 1960s, deployed with unrelenting passion by the likes of Massimo Vignelli and Unimark in the U.S. and Total Design in Europe. It helped shed decorative logos and present a unified front for corporations of all sizes in the most serious of manners. It was, in a way, a unifying technology of the era, establishing a specific standard for how logos should look. And that’s my biggest issue with Helvetica: It’s 1960s technology, 1960s aesthetics, 1960s principles. You know what else is technology from the 1960s? Rotary-dial telephones. The BASIC computer language. Things we’ve built on for the past 50 years and stopped using as the new, more functional, more era-appropriate products took hold. Today there are dozens of contemporary sans serif typefaces that improve the performance and aesthetics of Helvetica but yet some designers still hold on to it as if it were the ultimate typeface. It’s not. Just because it’s been glorified in a similar way as the suits and clothing in Mad Men doesn’t mean it’s still the right choice. You don’t see people today dressed like Don Draper or Lane Pryce — the business-person equivalents of a business typeface — because fashion has changed, attitudes have changed, the world has changed. But, like cockroaches, Helvetica seems to be poised to survive time and space, no matter what. When you see someone walking down the street, today, dressed like a 1960s business person, you (or at least I) think “what a douche.” That’s the same thought I have when I see something/someone using Helvetica.
Amen.
I think of Helvetica like an E-Type Jaguar: A classic, but also a car that doesn’t perform anywhere close to what a modern car (at any price range) does. Not to mention an E-Type doesn’t have any of the useful amenities a modern car has: USB outlets, better mileage, climate control, Sat Nav, better overall handling.
When I see a designer using Helvetica, I don’t necessarily think “what a douche” but I do think, “what a lazy bastard.”

Lifehacker headline:
Study Confirms All Suspicions: Fitness Trackers Aren’t Magic Bullets
They quote The Journal of the American Medical Association:

Although wearable devices have the potential to facilitate health behavior change, this change might not be driven by these devices alone. Instead, the successful use and potential health benefits related to these devices depend more on the design of the engagement strategies than on the features of their technology. Ultimately, it is the engagement strategies–the combinations of individual encouragement, social competition and collaboration, and effective feedback loops–that connect with human behavior.
No fucking shit?
Let me get this straight: little electronic wristbands can’t magically get you in shape?
Next thing you’re going to tell me is Siri isn’t a real person.
Or that I have to make a concerted effort to achieve important things in my life.

via Re/code

Seth Godin on the difference between your logo and your brand:

Spend 10,000 times as much time and money on your brand as you spend on your logo.

Your logo is a referent, a symbol, a reminder of your brand.

But your brand is a story, a set of emotions and expectations and a stand-in for how we think and feel about what you do.
Too many people don’t understand this.

From a 2008 post at The New Yorker:

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as “My bowels are troubled.”) There is a biochemical basis for Jewish abstinence. Many Jews–fifty per cent, in one estimate–carry a variant gene for alcohol dehydrogenase. Therefore, they, like the East Asians, have a low tolerance for alcohol.
A “howling of kittens.”
I love me some collective nouns involving animals.
via ParisLemon

Evan Williams, founder of Medium, on Medium:

I was recently quoted as saying, “I don’t give a shit” if Instagram has more users than Twitter. If you read the article you’ll note there’s a big “if” before my not giving of said shit. As quoted:

If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter – important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.

Of course, I am trivializing what Instagram is to many people. It’s a beautifully executed app that enables the creation and enjoyment of art, as well as human connection, which is often a good thing. But my rant had very little to do with it (or with Twitter). My rant was the result of increasing frustration with the one-dimensionality that those who report on, invest in, and build consumer Internet services talk about success.
via Daring Fireball

This week Michael and Bryan discuss how iPhone cases sucks, the useful things missing from womens’s purses, Charlie Hebdo, bugs in iOS, and Michael’s car finds on eBay. The episode opens with a clip from Ghostbusters.
Listen Now (and subscribe on iTunes)

—T.S. Elliot

Intel’s $150 HDMI Stick Turns Any TV Into a Windows Desktop

Got an HDMI port handy? Sure, you could plug in a Chromecast, Fire TV Stick or Roku Streaming Stick to get your Netflix fix. Or you could pay $150 to get a full Windows 8.1 PC in the same form factor.
Why would anyone want to do this to their TV?
It’s like saying, “I’d like to turn my TV into a piece of shit.”

Re/code: This Is the Unofficial Brothel of CES:

When new women arrive to work at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about 65 miles west of Las Vegas, they have to be taught a lot of new techniques. Social media is one of the most important of them.

During this week’s sprawling International CES gadget show, which ends tomorrow and draws more than 150,000 people each year to the Las Vegas Convention Center, the sharing-savvy brothel sees some of its busiest nights. Sheri’s Ranch calls itself “the unofficial brothel of CES” — and says that business is up about 70 percent this week.

Brothel matron Dena, who uses humorously bawdy social media to attract CES attendees, also trains the ranch’s rotating roster of 75 to 100 on-site sex workers to create online personas and unique voices, which Dena says makes the women feel more empowered, and helps skirt the legal ban against advertising their services.

Andrew Watts, a 19-year-old at the University of Texas, posted an interesting piece on Medium titled, A Teenager’s View on Social Media.
He breaks down the popularity of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, Tumblr and YikYak in the “highly coveted” demographic of which he is a part.
Most interesting to me are his views on Facebook:

In short, many have nailed this on the head. It’s dead to us. Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can’t really leave.
This makes total sense. Mom, Dad and all your and all your aunts and uncles are on Facebook. LAME-O. But, wait:
Facebook is often used by us mainly for its group functionality. I know plenty of classmates who only go on Facebook to check the groups they are part of and then quickly log off.
And:
Messaging on Facebook is also extremely popular among our age group, mainly because they provide the means to talk to those people who you weren’t really comfortable with asking for their number but comfortable enough to send them a friend request.
So, despite being “dead” to the kids, they continue to use Facebook a lot. I’m willing to bet they use it potentially as much as other, more cool social networks like Instagram. What’s interesting is Andrew seems to define “using” a website/app as posting content to it. Simply “checking in” on it—like teens do on Facebook—doesn’t count. Server logs and analytics tools would beg to differ.
It also seems Facebook’s move to decouple messaging from the core Facebook product was a smart move. Facebook is perceived as a crazy, loud, public zoo (because it is), but Facebook Messenger is a discreet way to talk to someone.