muraPOI: November 21, 2011

Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think: I think Steven Levy is pandering to Bezos and Amazon, I don’t buy his comparisons between Amazon and Apple and all the cloud versus download stuff. Nevertheless, some of Bezos’ quotes are interesting. I’ve replaced his references to be more relevant to my day job.

As a company institution, we are culturally pioneers, and we like to disrupt even our own business. Other companies have different cultures and sometimes don’t like to do that. Our job is to bring those industries along. The music industry should be a great cautionary tale: Don’t let that happen to you. Get ahead of it.

The common question that gets asked in business education is, why? That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, why not?

(StartupDigest, November 18, 2011)

The Death Of The Spec: Apple sells a MacBook Air that’s “faster” than the previous model (and it truly is, it was also faster than the MacBook Pro’s available when it launched). All the PC-makers sell a spec, no this spec, no that spec. Pft, it’s a pain to spec a PC. Too many choices, too long to research the choices and *try* and make an informed decision (I know I’ve spent like 10 hours looking at how to spec a new PC, in the course of 3 or 4 days spread over a couple months).

“What matters is how the device performs, the ecosystem, and the price. In other words, the way you compete in computing now is to do so by focusing on things that human beings understand. On things that matter.”

(TechCrunch, November 14, 2011)

Improving Slowly? Meh. Here Are 3 Keys To Making Giant Leaps In Product Dev: Robert Hoekman, Jr. at Fast co.design gives three guidelines to make those giant leaps.

1. “Stop designing solutions”: “Stop making problem-solving your end goal. Don’t just solve the problem; solve it in a way that leaves your customers astounded and your competition dumbfounded.”
2. “Start at number 11”: “Make incremental improvements and you get a design that’s incrementally better; make significant improvements and you get a design that’s important.”
3. “Extreme usability is the goal”: “Usable products are…more understandable, more approachable, more accessible, often (but certainly not always) cheaper, and frequently more beautiful.”

(Fast Co.Design, November 9, 2011)

The 6 Pillars Of Steve Jobs’s Design Philosophy: In Cliff Kuang’s article, the most interesting thing to me was his story of “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” memo written by Mike Markkula in the early 1980s.

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; it we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

It amazes me at how “simple” yet powerful these three points are, and how well they’ve served Apple for 30 years.

(Fast Co.Design, November 8, 2011)

24 Hours at Fukushima: A blow-by-blow account of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl: Eliza Stricklend writes a fascinating piece about the first 24 hours at Fukushima. Perhaps not surprisingly, any one thing could have prevented much of what happened, but the cascading failures, that exceeded prior planning, caused lots of problems.

(IEEE Spectrum, November 2011)