TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
As they were hyper-focused on improving and slowly evolving their products, they lost sight of their market as it went through a massive revolution. It doesn’t matter how good you are at evolutionary iteration; no amount of evolution will make up for a revolution.
I don’t think it’s that simple in this case. While Kodak moved slower than other companies on digital cameras, they didn’t move that slow—they introduced their line of point-and-shoot digital cameras in 2001, and became the top-selling brand of digital cameras in the U.S. in 2005.
The problem was that as the camera business shifted from film to digital cameras, it lost what made it a profitable business—film. Companies could sell their cameras at attractive prices and then make a lot of money on higher-margin film. But there is no film for digital cameras, and digital cameras became a commodities business, which meant very low profit margins. Consumer digital cameras simply aren’t a very good business.
But wait! Kodak could have out-innovated their competition, made dramatically better digital cameras, and then charge higher margins. That only works, though, if the other option isn’t already good enough—which digital cameras very quickly became. For most people, the difference between eight and five megapixels or a much better lens were negligible, because all they wanted was an affordable camera that took decent photos.
Kodak’s real problem was not that they didn’t move quickly enough or innovate enough in digital cameras. Their problem was that they were in the digital cameras business, which had little future.
(Via Marcelo Somers.)
January 17th, 2012Susan Cain on the “rise of the new groupthink”:
To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.
She points out that American businesses, classrooms and religious organizations are moving toward open, “collaborative” set-ups, where individuals work in public areas exposed to everyone else, and students work almost entirely in groups. She argues that not only is this ineffective in increasing productivity and creativity, but it’s worse than the much-derided cubicle set-up.
Being exposed to your co-workers and their different ideas certainly is a good thing for creativity, but that doesn’t mean locking everyone up in public is a good idea. In this case, because a little is good doesn’t mean a lot is even better. Cain links introvert personalities to creativity, and argues that introverts need solitude to produce great work, but we all need it. Everyone needs their own space, where they know they’re alone and can focus on what they need to without interruption, a place they can always go to when they need it.
Cain’s suggestion—for private spaces along with public spaces—is precisely right. When Pixar built their new building, they gave ample room for each person to have their own space, that they controlled and could do what they wanted with. But Steve Jobs also insisted that the building be designed in such a way that people have no choice but to bump into each other:
“The philosophy behind this design is that it’s good to put the most important function at the heart of the building,” Catmull said. “Well, what’s our most important function? It’s the interaction of our employees. That’s why Steve put a big empty space there. He wanted to create an open area for people to always be talking to each other.”
Jobs realized, however, that it wasn’t enough to simply create a space: he needed to make people go there. As he saw it, the main challenge for Pixar was getting its different cultures to work together, forcing the computer geeks and cartoonists to collaborate. (John Lasseter, the chief creative officer at Pixar, describes the equation this way: “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.”) In typical fashion, Jobs saw this as a design problem. He began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the atrium. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria and the coffee bar and the gift shop. But that still wasn’t enough; Jobs insisted that the architects locate the only set of bathrooms in the atrium. (He was later forced to compromise on this detail.)
In a 2008 conversation, Brad Bird, the director of “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille,” said, “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space…. But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.”
That’s the ideal, where people have their own space, but naturally run into different people they would otherwise never talk to.
(Via Tyler Cowen.)
January 16th, 2012Ford intends on using web services to make their cars more efficient:
McGee believes the computing power available on the Internet will allow cars to become smarter. Last spring, at the annual Google I/O conference in San Francisco, McGee announced a deal to use the search giant’s prediction algorithms—online software that analyzes large data sets to spot trends. Ford’s idea is to send data from your car to Google’s data centers, which would then predict where you are headed every time you key the ignition. Google might predict, say, that there’s a 59.24 percent chance you’re headed over to Bob’s house. A hybrid car might use a map of low-emission zones to determine when to switch to battery power as you drive. Or the algorithm could pick a fuel-efficient path with few hills, no rain, and the least traffic.
“Fuel optimization depends on the topography, traffic patterns, and how a customer drives their car,” says McGee. “The cloud will allow us to use these three data points that historically were not aligned in real time.”
This is all talk, of course, but it’s a very good idea. One of the biggest jumps we can make this century in innovation and efficiency is capturing all of the data we never have before, and use it to make better decisions. When we drive a particular place, we all have a route we feel to be the most efficient way to get there. While it might really be the most efficient, we don’t have a good way to verify it. We base that mostly on our own intuition, rather than actual data.
Individually, these changes might not mean much to us. A few seconds, a small fraction of a gallon less gas (or of battery capacity), and a bit less emissions. But in the aggregate, those small amounts add up.
There’s bigger gains to be had, too, if we move toward autonomous cars. Imagine fleets of autonomous cars-for-rent that, when you request one in an app, it shows up to your house in minutes, ready to take you wherever you need to go. If that becomes reality, and it’s affordable, there’s little need for families to own multiple cars, because most of their needs can be handled by a rented car. That reduces the number of cars on the road, which means less emissions, less congestion, and more open parking spaces.
(Via Rebecca Rosen.)
January 16th, 2012Cody Fink has a great look at Phraseology on Macstories.
Interesting new app from Greg Pierce, who also made Terminology.
Phraseology is for writing, and it looks quite good. I love the archive idea. Instead of deleting pieces you don’t think work anymore, you can just archive them—which is great, because sometimes I realize what an old piece needs to work, so getting them out of sight, but not out of storage, is great.
January 16th, 2012Bloomberg reports on the iPad 3:
Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s next iPad, expected to go on sale in March, will sport a high-definition screen, run a faster processor and work with next-generation wireless networks, according to three people familiar with the product.
In other words, John Gruber called it back in February 2011, when he wrote that he thinks the iPad 3 will have a double-resolution screen, and he’s said rather definitively since then. Of course, he also said that Apple may release the iPad 3 in Fall 2011, but one thing’s for sure: if you want to know what Apple’s going to do ahead of time, Gruber’s the guy to listen to.
Interesting that they are pushing for LTE support—it could indicate that they are targeting the next iPhone for LTE support, too, which I didn’t expect.
I can’t wait to see what the double-resolution screen looks like in person. Imagine just how beautiful applications can be with so many pixels and such a great screen.
January 13th, 2012I stepped in from of the thermostat and waved my hand in front of it. Instantly it came to life, and presented me with a speech bubble that said, as best as I can remember, that “Away Mode has been activated. Press to continue.” I pressed the face of the thermostat and instantly the heat kicked on, bringing the room back to the desired temperature. Crisis averted.
Why was our thermostat set on “away mode”? Because every Sunday morning my family happens to be out of the house for a couple of hours. And our thermostat had learned that by watching us. See, we have a Nest thermostat.
How awesome is it that Nest is getting us excited about a thermostat?
January 12th, 2012Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom released a few details about their plan for how to do advertising:
“I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry have joined Instagram.
“They’re sharing pictures of products and the message of their brands. That shows we’re at the beginning of what will come with brands,” he said.
As Marco points out, this likely means they’ll insert photos from companies—advertisements—in our timelines. I’m not sure how they’ll do it otherwise.
This could be an interesting form of advertisement, if advertisers use it as such—rather than show straight print-like adverts, they could use it to tell stories about their products. Audi could use it to take well-done photos of their cars in use, ones that fit with Instagram’s purpose, to convey a more general feel of what Audi is to viewers, rather than simply try to convey specific information (e.g., “best-in-class safety!”). Of course, other forms of advertisements could be used in more interesting ways—print adverts in particular—but they tend not to be.
Advertisements could be done in an interesting and effective way, but not only is it likely advertisers won’t use it as such, but the entire concept walks a fine line. Delivering ads within someone’s timeline—a stream of photos from users the user decided to follow, and thus is inherently private—will likely end up feeling invasive. I wonder, too, if Instagram will target ads to users. What personal information do they have to target ads? And if they don’t, that makes the venture a lot less likely to be successful.
January 11th, 2012Thanks to HelpSpot for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed.
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If you’d prefer a professionally developed and supported help desk application, then give us a look: HelpSpot: Help Desk Software.
January 11th, 2012One of the questions most founders always ask is about the key secrets to hiring. What they need to understand is that there’s a big difference between “hiring” and “talent”. I’m continually surprised how rarely I see people put down their strategy for talent compared to hiring. It’s so prevalent, in fact, you’ll often see on a company’s priorities a bullet of “hiring”. And that slight shift in wording fundamentally sets up the wrong dynamics. Hiring, is a sub-bullet of talent and if you’re focusing on hiring you’ll be quickly setting up a revolving door.
I think that shift of focus changes who you hire, too—because if you’re focused on hiring, or getting the right amount of people to do what you need to do who have a specific skill, you’re focused on the micro rather than the macro. In a company, each new hire is not just an addition. They change the dynamic within the company, and thus what effect they have on the system has to be fully considered. For each potential employee, they cannot be considered in isolation.
(Via Marcelo Somers.)
January 10th, 2012Thank You, He Said
January 10th, 2012Thank you, he said. Maybe you don’t need me to say it, because I think you know, I think we’ve always understood each other, in that quiet and unacknowledged way, where you don’t say much but I know exactly what you’re saying, what you really mean—but I want to say thank you, he said, looking out into the distance for a second, beyond her, eyes unfocused, then back. Isn’t it funny that when you have something, you don’t realize what it is? That it’s something that won’t ever exist again, and you should thank God or nature or providence, or whatever it is—every second you have it, and every second afterward, too, because you had it, you were lucky enough to have that moment in time?
You infuriated me. You talked too much for too long. You made me listen, when I am the one who likes to talk. We infuriated each other. We argued about gun regulations, we argued about music, we argued about whether a restaurant was any good. You had to be right, and so did I, so everything was a potential debate just waiting for a spark. When you thought I was wrong, you said so. If you thought what I said was bullshit, he said, you said so. And when you thought what I was doing was right, you said so, too, because all you said is what you thought. Thank you.
You and I, he continued, were friends for eight years, through high school and college, and—the edges of his lips arced up slightly—wasn’t there a sort of strange symmetry there? You had such a difficult time in high school, you know, that stuff a lot of people go through then, not sure where your place was, who you were sort of, and we talked and talked, and I tried to listen and understand, but I probably wasn’t very good. And in the last year, I went through something where what I thought was my purpose dissolved and I wasn’t sure anymore—and you told me I needed to get stronger, what I was doing was right, and everything that happened would be for the better, that I’m capable of great things and I should achieve them—and I deserve someone great, too. You made me believe it. And you made me laugh—really laugh—when I hadn’t for weeks. Thank you, he said.
Between the tournaments, the classes and the lunch breaks, the movies, the breakfasts, the bon fires, the long conversations, the drives, the concerts, God—we had more good moments than any two friends could ask for. We did. A lot happened in that time, didn’t it? You and I graduated from high school, stopped speaking for a few years because of a disagreement (and doesn’t it seem so silly now?), you graduated from UCLA in three years, I started graduate school, we both had long relationships, we started speaking again the year before—calmer people, more willing to listen, less arguments, but that same understanding, that never goes away, I think—and you talked me through those few months where I didn’t know what was up and what was down, like we had never stopped talking.
Thank you, he said. A calmness rolled over him, like a slow tide inching along, because he had finally told her what he never had—the calmness that comes when a task of great importance is finished. But under this was a splinter, a small bit of pain almost unnoticed but unmistakably there, because he knew he would wake up soon. Thank you, he said one last time. Thank you for that time you were here, for that time we were friends, and I hope you knew what it meant to me.
Five years ago today, Apple introduced the iPhone. We haven’t quite seen a presentation like the one Steve Jobs gave that day before, we haven’t seen one since, and we may never see one on that same level again. Typically, we have a fairly good idea of what Apple will introduce. That day, we had no idea—and what they did introduce was so far beyond what we thought capable for mobile phones, it blew our minds, and shifted the entire mobile industry. And laid the foundation for the iPad, which is doing the same for computing generally.
Here’s a link to Apple’s video of the presentation. Here’s Ryan Block’s coverage of the presentation for Engadget.
January 9th, 2012The Labor Department announced today that the economy added 200,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent. Most encouraging, though, is the decrease in the unemployment rate was not primarily due to people dropping out of the job market, as has been true in previous months:
Among the pieces of good news in Friday’s report: the drop in the jobless rate came largely from real gains, not from discouraged workers giving up the job hunt. The new jobs were spread broadly across industries, with transportation and warehousing, retail, manufacturing and restaurants all hiring.
200,000 jobs is significant, too, because it’s more than the 125,000 jobs or so a month required to keep up with population growth. We need much more growth than that to dig ourselves out of the hole the 2007-2009 recession dug, but at this point, any growth is positive.
January 6th, 2012Tim Ricchuiti’s Reply
January 6th, 2012Tim Ricchuiti takes exception with my characterization of Greece, Italy and Spain’s problem as being too much debt:
Not quite. It’s not the heavy weight of debt (as Krugman has posted about at length the past week, most notably in this column) that’s causing European nations to struggle. What’s causing those nations to struggle is their inability (until recently) to finance that debt at any sort of tenable rate (7% or under). The reason those governments couldn’t finance their debt is that investors don’t want to purchase debt that might not be paid back. The reason the debt might not be paid back is that, unlike the case of the United States, Great Britain, Finland, and various developing nations, European countries like Spain, Italy, and yes, Greece, can’t print their own money (their own money being Euros). Therefore, they’re at risk of not being able to pay back their Euro-denominated debt. The United States, on the other hand, will never be unable to print dollars, and will always be able to pay back its dollar-denominated debt.
Greece and Italy used substantial amounts of debt to sustain their welfare states, and while their economies are doing reasonably well, there’s no problem—they can roll over their debt before it comes due at similar interest rates and everything works out fine. The problem they now face is their economies are not doing well at all, tax revenue has decreased, and thus their deficits have shot up as they continue to fund their expensive government programs.
As their deficits have continued to grow, and their debt has continued to grow as a percentage of GDP, investors became afraid that they would not be able to pay their debt. Which is why, as Tim says, investors would not purchase their new debt at a sustainable rate: because their debt burden is too high.
Tim argues that this is only a problem because Greece and Italy are on the euro—rather than their own currency—they cannot “print” more money, that is, devalue their currency so the past debts are worth less now than they were then and are thus more affordable to pay.1 Tim further argues that the U.S. will never have this problem, because since we do control our own currency, and our debt is denominated in our currency, we can inflate our currency to reduce the magnitude of our debts.
That’s perfectly accurate, but that does not happen in a vacuum. Everything else is not held equal. Investors will factor the risk of intentional inflation into their investments, and expect higher interest rates for future debts, too. Perhaps Greece and Italy (and the U.S., if we don’t right our ship in the interim) will leave the euro, re-denominate their debt, and pay their existing debt of a smaller magnitude. But what happens when Greece and Italy go back to those same investors, who just received substantially less than they were supposed to from their debt, and ask them to purchase their new debt? It’s going to be expensive, and unless Greece’s and Italy’s economies begin growing strongly, they’ll have the same problem all over again.
I never intended “…the heavy weight of their debt” to be a conclusive summation of Italy and Greece’s problems. Their problem is a confluence of a very poor economy, low tax revenues as a result, and debt used to finance an expensive welfare state. It’s but a piece. A very large, very heavy, piece.
- Let’s set aside normative criticisms of this, which are substantial—”inflating” your currency for the purpose of making past debts more affordable is essentially stealing from creditors, because in real terms, they receive less than they were supposed to. [↩]
The idea that all this stuff is potentially grist for your mill has been very liberating. This process of cultural mongrelization seems to be what postmodernism is all about. The result is a generation of people (some of whom are artists) whose tastes are wildly eclectic- people who are hip to punk music and Mozart, who rent these terrible horror and SF videos from the 7-11 one night and then invite you to a mud wrestling match or a poetry reading the next. If you’re a writer, the trick is to keep your eyes and ears open well enough to let all this in but also, somehow, to recognize intuitively what you should let emerge in your work, how effective something might be in a specific context. I know I don’t have a sense of writing as being divided up into different compartments, and I don’t separate literature from the other arts. Fiction, television, music, film- all provide material in the form of images and phrases and codes that creep into my writing in ways both deliberate and unconscious.
I’m not sure when this interview was conducted, but this couldn’t be more relevant today.
January 5th, 2012Idaho will require all high school students to take some online courses to graduate, and are giving each student and teacher a computer or tablet. Instead of lecturing, Idaho intends for teachers to increasingly provide guidance for students as they move through lessons on computers or tablets.
Unsurprisingly, many people are angry. One teacher doesn’t understand how this could possibly improve education:
Rather than relying on technology, she seeks to engage students with questions — the Socratic method — as she did recently as she was taking her sophomore English class through “The Book Thief,” a novel about a girl in a foster family in Germany during World War II.
Ms. Rosenbaum, tall with an easy smile but also a commanding presence, stood in the center of the room with rows of desks on each side, pacing, peppering the students with questions and using each answer to prompt the next. What is an example of foreshadowing in this chapter? Why did the character say that? How would you feel in that situation?
…
She said that while technology had a role to play, her method of teaching was timeless. “I’m teaching them to think deeply, to think. A computer can’t do that.”
She said she was mystified by the requirement that students take online courses. She is taking some classes online as she works toward her master’s degree, and said they left her uninspired and less informed than in-person classes. Ms. Rosenbaum said she could not fathom how students would have the discipline to sit in front of their computers and follow along when she had to work each minute to keep them engaged in person.
Nothing wrong with the Socratic method—my favorite high school teacher used it extensively, and I learned more in that class than I did in many of my college courses—but perhaps Ms. Rosenbaum should re-consider her strategies if she has to “work each minute” to keep them engaged. There’s no way the Socratic method is effective for her if her students are so chronically disengaged.
In-person classes still require a lot of self-directed effort from students, like actually reading the material, and there’s nothing she can do if they aren’t doing it. The problem she’s facing has nothing to do with technology. Her problem is the same one all teachers face and that they will face regardless of whether there is technology involved or not: motivating her students.
Her job is not just to get her students through the material. Her job is to get through to them. Her job is to make them see why the piece of literature they are reading is relevant and meaningful and insightful. Without doing that, whatever teaching method she employs will be completely ineffective.
Which is why her criticism is completely beside the point: whether she has to adopt the state’s new method of teaching, or sticks with her traditional method, her primary purpose remains the same.
(Via Fraser Speirs.)
January 5th, 2012-
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