It’s been a long few weeks of programming here, completely bogged down in trying to make HTML behave the way I need to behave. I’ve read tons of amazingly good articles with little time to link to them or write about them, so instead I will dump an entire batch on you at once.

• The Perils of Shiny New Objects by Mark Suster. Oh, man, is this killing me right now. We are so close to shipping Equals. After months and months of working hard it is so easy to feel like all of this will be for naught. So my mind wanders to shiny new things. The “grass is greener over there” syndrome.
• The Innovator’s Curse by Horace Dediu. Horace argues that innovators are cursed with the need to always innovate, to always use previous innovation revenues to funnel future innovation revenues. But markets rarely believe in the next thing until it has already come to pass, at which point the innovative company is already using those proceeds to funnel the next innovation. Fascinating argument on why innovative companies are undervalued and why markets reward companies who stop innovating, eventually killing those companies. Oh, what a tangled web we weave.
• Sometimes The Best That A Company Can Hope For Is Death by John Kaye. Following The Innovator’s Curse post, here is an incredible article on corporate death. John argues that death is as natural apart of corporate life as it is human life. At some point all companies come to their conclusion, and that’s okay. (via Ben Thompson)
• Giving Up the PED Guessing Game by Gabe Kapler. Interesting look from the inside on what drives athletes to use performance enhancing drugs. Gabe played major league baseball during the steroid era, was a solid to good ballplayer, and says he was tempted but never used PEDs.
• Anatomy Of A Hack: Even Your ‘Complicated’ Password Is Easy To Crack by Dan Goodin. Oy! Maybe the best we can do is make it harder. After all, if a thief has one house with an alarm and one with an open window and no alarm, he will likely pick the one with the open window and no alarm.
• Balky Carriers And Slow OEMs Step Aside: Google Is Defragging Android by Ron Amadeo. In short, Google has figured out how to protect itself by embedding an updatable runtime within Android that only it can update and is only available to Google apps. Oh, Google, have you ever heard the phrase, “eat your own dog food?” You created this mess. You should have to live with it, too.