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.

My daughters are both playing soccer this year. I played when I was younger, coached my brother’s team a couple of times, and refereed. Ref’ing in South Florida was the only time in my life I ever felt threatened physically. They used to cuss at us in Spanish. And I was only a line judge!

When I saw this, though, I cracked up. There are some classic lines in these four minutes of fun.

I thought this was quite funny. My wife laughed, too, and said she definitely had this experience once or twice early in our relationship until she remembered it wasn’t her.

Given that, though, what is wrong with this woman? Can’t she just ask what’s wrong with him? I had a teacher in college who would write ASSUME on the white board, underline ASS, U, ME and say, “Assume makes an ass out of you and me.”

That goes double for this one.

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(via Scripting News)

Marco Arment on a recent Accidental Tech Podcast:

People assume because I have an audience in some places means that any app I release will be a giant hit. That really isn’t the case. I have an advantage, certainly, by having an established audience. I have an advantage mostly up-front where I’m mostly guaranteed a pretty good launch. After that I’m in the same boat as everyone else.

Marco released the information to his app BugShot here. Since then, he went on to say in ATP, his sales have dropped further and are now down to about 15-20 per day.

I’m saddened to admit that I apparently was the catalyst for that post based on a footnote in my post The App Store Problem Is Not Price. What I meant by my footnote is exactly what Marco said on ATP: he has an advantage, particularly at launch, and nothing more.

What frustrated me was not annoying Marco, although I wasn’t happy about that. We emailed and worked it out. What bothered me was that other people took my footnote, ignored the point I was really making, and focused on the Marco part, leaving out the update I added to clarify the point.

I’ve had a few highly read posts over the years, that one being one of them. But I’ve never had a post so taken out of context by others before. That was a real eye-opener. It felt like a horrible game of telephone. My offhand, misinterpreted footnote seemed to become something else entirely.

Sorry, Marco.

Most Amazon reviews are straight-laced, honest-to-goodness, I-just-want-to-help type reviews. Others, though… I’ve linked to a few in the past but apparently Amazon has taken it upon themselves to create a list of the funniest ones.

If you just don’t have time for that kind of hilarity, I can recommend instead this blog post, which pulls out some of the best.