Here’s what happens when you use focus groups to test Apple’s “1984″ ad.

If this isn’t the best example of why relying on market research is a very bad idea, I don’t know what is. And, for that matter, what can happen when multiple people or groups are given control over what amounts to art: they can destroy its integrity.

(Via Jessica Watts.)

Seems like a good time to revisit Steve Jobs’s thoughts on Flash:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

Moonbot Studios is the group that built the inventive and beautiful “Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” iPad app/interactive book, and the Atlantic has wonderful profile of the group:

A color image of the cityscape shows up on screen with a triangle of pale blue sky at the top left of the image. Everyone ooohs. Ellis immediately starts noting its flaws. “This is just me playing around with color,” she says. “I wanted to play with the buildings. So, yeah, it’s not done. Eventually there will be Numberlies and letters.”

Joyce, sitting down near her, starts to imagine a different blue in the sky. He sounds as if he’s talking from a long way away. “What if that blue in the sky was really old Technicolor?” Joyce says. “That crazy fucking Technicolor blue. You saw some of it in A Star is Born. You can have it drop off, but have the really crazy blue in there.” His laser pointer flashes to the spot of sky. “Do that Star Is Born Blue.”

They’re using the iPad to build an altogether new medium for storytelling and are making beautiful artwork. I’m skeptical about integrating game-like elements into text and animation-based stories, but there’s huge potential with combining text and animation into a cohesive whole to tell a story. (And, more importantly, I’m not really the target demographic for these “books”—kids are—and they seem to love it.) I’m just excited to see a group creating a truly new way to tell stories, and by all accounts, making some great stories.

What’s interesting, too, is this kind of stuff shows the limits of the App Store for selling “applications” and iOS’s round-rectangle icon for managing them. Should “applications” like this really be sold the same way as, say, a Twitter app, and accessed the same way on iOS devices, too? I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel right. It feels almost like it’s devaluing this application by representing it the same way as any other, because it’s something else entirely. It’s a new kind of media, and should be treated as such.

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If you don’t already own them, both iA Writer for iPad and iA Writer for the Mac are on sale today. The iPad version is $0.99 and the Mac version is $4.99.

Great deal.

Leave it to Adam Lisagor to provide some real perspective:

Of course, for the heavy lifting I do in post-production, I’m tied to my Mac Pro, but for any of the heavy thinking, I’m just in love with the notion of using the Air as a shell for all my crucial data, relying on Lion working with Dropbox, iOS 5 and iCloud to make a real advance towards the cloud-based computing that Steve [Jobs] foretold way back before he rejoined Apple. It’s a bit of a conceptual hurdle to those of us who grew up daisy-chaining Firewire drives or lugging around Zip disks, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. One instance, many screens. It’s still an early phase of a whole new way of thinking about computing. I feel like the word “computer” is not going to be in the lexicon much longer, and that’s pretty exciting.

Horace Dediu:

Just like David’s sling, these technologies are not powerful in and of themselves, but rather, the way they are used makes them unpredictably sinister. The context of using capacitive touch on a handheld device rather than on a table-top makes it disruptive. Coupling it with high-speed mobile networks and powerful but efficient microprocessors made it into a force.

That is now ancient history. The consequences and repercussions are still being felt and weighed, but the smart money should be focusing on the next shift. From the time frame in the diagram above, it’s clear that the cycle time between “Revolutionary User Interfaces” is shrinking. It’s been five years since multi-touch. Is the next “RUI” already here? Is Siri the next RUI?

On the last episode of the Critical Path, Horace argues that it is, but also that Apple shouldn’t merely think of it as a sustaining technology—that is, a new technological advantage that will strengthen their current lead, rather than provide the next disruption in the industry.

I suggest you listen to the episode, if only because it’s a very powerful way of analyzing industries.

There’s little doubt that Apple has the most well managed supply chain in the world:

That mentality—spend exorbitantly wherever necessary, and reap the benefits from greater volume in the long run—is institutionalized throughout Apple’s supply chain, and begins at the design stage. Ive and his engineers sometimes spend months living out of hotel rooms in order to be close to suppliers and manufacturers, helping to tweak the industrial processes that translate prototypes into mass-produced devices. For new designs such as the MacBook’s unibody shell, cut from a single piece of aluminum, Apple’s designers work with suppliers to create new tooling equipment. The decision to focus on a few product lines, and to do little in the way of customization, is a huge advantage. “They have a very unified strategy, and every part of their business is aligned around that strategy,” says Matthew Davis, a supply-chain analyst with Gartner (IT) who has ranked Apple as the world’s best supply chain for the last four years.

What allows them to even do that is they are so focused around a few products and such a tightly unified company. If Apple was structured into basically autonomous divisions that made decisions based on what’s best for them, their operations strategy would be impossible. Apple is reaping the benefits of a focused company.

Square just updated their Card Case iPhone app with a new feature: automatic tabs. Basically, you can now walk into stores that support Square and pay without ever taking out your phone or wallet. Pretty neat.

To end his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson printed an extended excerpt of what Jobs said during their interviews. This section, if you haven’t read it already, is worth the price of the book alone. I don’t want to quote too much from it (yet), because some of it is very insightful both into how Jobs operated Apple and his own personal motivations and ruining it for you all just isn’t kosher, but I did want to talk about something he said at the beginning. Jobs said,

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

When I first read that, I didn’t think too much of it, because that’s something we’ve heard all along from Jobs, and the idea that profit is a means, not an ends, is pure Drucker. But half way into the next paragraph, I stopped and went back and re-read it.

What struck me were the last two sentences. What Jobs is saying is that not only does focusing on the product make for better products, but it completely changes the corporate, business and organizational decisions you make, too. If you are focused on maximizing profit (in the short or long-term), you end up making choices that inhibit great products and great success at best, and destroy your ability to succeed at worst.

Your goals and priorities define who you are and what decisions you make. If your overriding priority is maximizing profit, that means what the company does—the products it creates, the change in society that results, the experience customers have—is all a means to making money. And if that’s the case, sacrificing your product’s integrity to squeeze out a bit more profit is a decision you’ll make every time. If, for a new product, you have to choose between a really great design that will just delight customers but that’s much harder and more expensive to make, and a merely good design that’s cheaper to produce and less of a challenge, you won’t blink. You choose the easier one; for you, it’s the pragmatic choice. It’s good enough for customers, and it’s much easier (and cheaper) for you to produce, which means less investment in development and higher margins.

But if you, as management, are willing to sacrifice the product for profit, that changes your organization. Everyone knows what’s prioritized, so they’ll make the same decisions, too. Why should your design team pour every ounce of themselves into building the best product they can, if that isn’t what management wants? Why should someone who isn’t even directly involved with the product sit around and think about how they could be better, and make sure they tell their idea to the right person? Why should anyone in the company put their absolute best effort into everything they do, when “excellence” is defined by management as a 5 percent decrease in cost of goods sold, rather than the new idea that makes it obvious to everyone they have to stop all work on a new project and start over, because this new idea is just so clearly right? Why would anyone take personal responsibility and say that what someone else is doing is shit and it needs to be done this way?

No one will, because what kind of company you have is defined at the top. You might have the finest people in the industry, but if the culture doesn’t demand excellence, you won’t get it. And worse, as Jobs argues, this becomes self-reinforcing: instead of hiring people whose obsession is creating the best product they possibly can, you’ll start hiring people who are good at increasing sales of an existing product, decreasing costs and improving efficiency—people whose motivations are running a business or furthering their career, instead of building things. Then that feedback loop will keep on going; other people who are there to build things will either give up and submit to the new culture or leave, and you’ll hire even more similarly-minded people, until that’s all there is, and you’re left with a company that can’t do anything meaningful.

Jobs said that one of his primary tasks was to make sure that only “A” people were hired, and when he finds someone that isn’t up to that standard in the company, they are fired. That sounds cruel, but it’s necessary, because if you don’t pursue that rule without mercy, that feedback loop is difficult to reverse.

The only way to even do that, though, is to have the right values. Your most deeply-held motivation must be to make the best product you can possibly make, because you care about it. Because you want the best product. When that’s what has your heart—you think about it all day, and you find your mind wandering to it when you’re watching a movie or falling asleep—then you’ll only hire people who are talented and have that same excited look in their eye when they get to explain some new project they’re working on. You’ll make the tough decision to enter a new business that could cannibalize your existing business, because you just know it’s going to be something great. You’ll demand everyone’s best work and won’t accept half-assed effort, because dammit, we can do better. And even better, your employees will pour themselves into their work, will be their own worst critic, because that’s how things are done there. Inter-division politics and bullshit conflicts will drop away when everyone’s focused on creating the best damned thing they possibly can.

It isn’t a magic balm that, when applied to a company, will suddenly make it super-creative and effective. The primary reason for that, of course, is it’s so rare; management can make a thousand mission statements and speeches telling everyone how everything they do is about the product, but in most cases, that’s corporate bullshit talk, and everyone can see through it in a second. You have to really believe it. But even when you really do believe it, it’s a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for creating that kind of company. You have to have smart strategy and execute, too, not just feel fuzzy feelings about your products.

But your motivation is the beginning of a great, and lasting, company. Without it, your company will never be truly transformative. With it, you can change the world. You have to look at your company as a tool for making something truly meaningful and sublime and beautiful. Business is a paintbrush for making the most inspiring art we’ve ever seen.

Mona Simpson’s eulogy for her brother:

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Just beautiful.

Apple is organized around functions, rather than divisions:

The result is a command-and-control structure where ideas are shared at the top — if not below. Jobs often contrasts Apple’s approach with its competitors’. Sony (SNE), he has said, had too many divisions to create the iPod. Apple instead has functions. “It’s not synergy that makes it work” is how one observer paraphrases Jobs’ explanation of Apple’s approach. “It’s that we’re a unified team.”
…
Specialization is the norm at Apple, and as a result, Apple employees aren’t exposed to functions outside their area of expertise. Jennifer Bailey, the executive who runs Apple’s online store, for example, has no authority over the photographs on the site. Photographic images are handled companywide by Apple’s graphic arts department. Apple’s powerful retail chief, Ron Johnson, doesn’t control the inventory in his stores. Tim Cook, whose background is in supply-chain management, handles inventory across the company. (Johnson has plenty left to do, including site selection, in-store service, and store layout.)

This doesn’t just mean that the best person is handling a specific task (like the photos in Apple’s online store)—it also means that the company is interwoven and has no choice but to work together. Rather than have engineering lay out the specifications for a new product, hand it off to the design department so they can create a design that meets them, and then hand it off to marketing, Apple instead integrates design, engineering and marketing from the beginning of the process.

There’s a lot to learn from Apple’s corporate and business strategies, but I think there is even more to learn from how the company’s organized. Apple is defining how companies must be organized and managed to succeed in this century.

Dan Frommer on why Apple has to sell a TV, and not just an accessory:

Apple sells complete experiences, not just devices.

That’s everything from the box it comes in to the status and emotion that owning and using one of its products provides.

There’s not much special about plugging an Apple TV box or Blu-ray player or game console into your HDTV, turning the TV on with one (obnoxiously complex) remote control, toggling over to the right HDMI input, and then resuming with the Apple remote.

Good argument. I’ve gone on record arguing Apple won’t release a television, but I do think Siri changes that. My argument was Apple couldn’t build a TV that’s iPod-better than current TVs, but with Siri (and the right content deals), they could.

It’s still a difficult business—TVs are too expensive for people to replace every few years, so the computing hardware included in it would be out of date on most people’s sets (which, after a few years, precludes new software updates), but I do think Apple wants to be in people’s living rooms long-term, and this might be the best way to do it.

Unless Apple’s going an alternate route, though, and gets exclusive content for its ecosystem (which is an interesting idea; imagine a TV show that’s only available from iTunes), this is all still going to depend on getting the right content deals. If they have enough TV shows and movies available, an Apple TV with Siri will be absolutely incredible. If they don’t, it’s not going to be so great.

From Steven Levy’s profile of Nest:

Though Fadell isn’t specific, he says that the company may offer more services, perhaps ones that bring more money to Nest. For the long-term, Nest plans to move beyond thermostats and exploit similar green opportunities in the way that only a tech company can. This particularly excites Nest’s investors.

“The Internet so far has been a collection of connected people. We think that the next step is connected devices,” says Randy Komisar, of Kleiner Perkins. “This could be the edge device that drives other things connected to the home.”

Nest can also be a model for another phenomenon: applying the skills of Silicon Valley to transform other seemingly mundane but nonetheless important objects.

I love this. They’re tackling something that we all assumed was boring, would always be boring, and there was nothing we could really do. And they’re turning it into something exciting.

Nokia showed off their first Windows phone, the Lumia 800, and it’s really nice. I hope it is as good as it looks and they sell a ton of them.

Jacqui Cheng reviews the new iPod nano:

I’ll cut to the chase: Nike+ on the new iPod nano was not particularly accurate for me on speed or distance, but the poor speed calculation is likely because of the inaccurate distance estimate. On the three runs I did with the nano, Nike+ over-estimated my distance by about 25 to 33 percent. In some cases, that added up to more than a mile of extra distance. The nano did keep the time correctly though—this is the easiest part, of course—but because of that, the data on how fast I ran was grossly over-estimated. (I sure would like to believe that I can put away 5 miles at 7 minutes per mile, but it just ain’t the truth.)

Too bad. If it was accurate, the new iPod nano would be even better for runners.