Why I’m Writing More and Other Life-Changing Decisions

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Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic

Great post from Brian Lam (through MG Siegler):

Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives, it is important. I’ve always suspected that sitting around on the internet was a sort of rot, but I had no proof until I read this piece on the Stanford study. … People think I’m crazy for complaining about tech news and how stupid and boring the mass media internet has become, but I think they’re wrong. And I think most are writing about the wrong things.

If you are unfamiliar, Brian Lam was the Editorial Directory for gadget site Gizmodo before retiring mid-2011. He has tons of experience with this problem.

He’s right, of course. I have been guilty of this myself from time to time, caring more about my online reputation than the impact I’m having, and even wrote about it and made some significant personal changes last July.

I am 38 now with two young daughters (5 and 3). I have been watching a steady stream of my biggest influencers die over the past six years. The passage of time is only accelerating and it is time I can’t get back. So I made some decisions before the New Year.

I haven’t been happy with my health so I decided to do something about it. I have been going to the gym almost every day.

I have cut back on my hours working in front of the computer. By nature I am a work-aholic so put me in a start-up situation and I literally will work until I pass out, I’ll dream about work and then rest just long enough to start again. I can’t keep that pace up anymore and am working hard to be more efficient with my time so I can get my work done.

In connection I am giving myself more time to think about this business and the impact technology has on it, part of why I am writing more than ever before. I am also trying to stay focused on writing about the things I care about and things I think you should care about, things that might help your business, and caring less about finding new people to read my work.

I still read a lot but have cut down on the minutia of tech, trying to keep my reading focused on bigger and broader themes about the world, tech and business. I am reading less news — giving myself permission to skim — and reading more books.

And most important I am trying hard to take time for my daughters. We eat dinner as a family almost every night where we always discuss the days’ events. The weekend mornings are for me and my girls, too. We make breakfast together and talk a while and play a little. I hope this is a foundation I can keep in place as they get older. I have an open door policy here in my home office. The girls can come in and talk to me any time during the day and I often take breaks to check on them.

I know that this mentality doesn’t jive with starting (or re-starting) a business. But I’ve never believed in conventional wisdom anyway so I’m not about to start now. Here’s hoping I have the strength to keep with these much healthier practices.

What Will Apple Do With $100 Billion?

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Apple, by now, has passed the amazing $100 billion mark in near-term and long-term cash and equivalents. I thought it would be fun to take some guesses as to what Apple might do with all of it.

The easiest guess is they won’t do anything. The company was very close to going bankrupt in 1997 and maybe it wants to horde cash to ensure its future safety. Somewhere on Apple’s campus there has got to be a Scrooge McDuck room, you know the one filled with cash that he’d swim through? Man, that’d be fun. (McDuck was hard-core though. He swam through coins. That’s gotta be rough on the skin.)

Or maybe Apple wants to give huge cash dividends to their stockholders… Ha! That’s funny.

The most likely guess is that it wants to control supply lines. Hard to compete when Apple buys up all the gorilla glass or flash memory. They’ve done this before.

Maybe Apple wants to buy out the US government. (It seems to be for sale anyway. Of course, it would probably be cheaper just to buy California.) There are laws, you say? Since when do those seem to matter? There are enough loopholes in campaign finance laws to drive a Mac truck through. Apple could find a way. With that it can move its factories back to the States by abolishing all labor laws, especially the minimum wage. Unemployment is high and housing is still expensive. Apple could start their own “Apple cities” where people would clamor to get jobs on the assembly line building iPhones and iPads in exchange for free, dormitory housing. It could be like the military but with fewer guns.

Or maybe Apple will buy Silicon Valley and spin it out into its own country. Then Apple could kick Google out and tell them to find a new home.

What if Apple bought a carrier? This has been speculated about before and frankly, I just don’t see it as Apple’s style. Maybe they’d buy all the cell towers in the world and then they could do what they want with them. Buying a carrier makes no sense (does any of this post?) since they are local and Apple sells devices worldwide.

How about Samsung? Man, would that piss off Google or what? I don’t know how the US Justice Department would feel about this one. Besides, they’d only buy them to shut it down. Oh, forget Samsung! Why not buy Google?

What if Apple bought a cable carrier? They’d own distribution rights but it might give Apple a content deal that would let them negotiate with the rest of the country. Instead of distributing through cable boxes Apple could stream channels as podcasts through iTunes. You’d just “subscribe” to whichever show you’d want to watch and it would be sitting in your account ready to watch. Maybe this is what Steve Jobs in biography said he’d figured out about Apple TV. He didn’t mean the technology to control it. He meant the content.

Education is a mess and Apple just announced a huge education initiative geared around text books. That’s, what, 65 million US customers alone. Maybe buying the entire text book industry for $20 billion and then giving away (or making really cheap) all of their content would pay off. Even if it didn’t pay off for Apple, it sure would pay off for the US.

Apple could buy Netflix. Ah, okay. Don’t know why they would. Apple never buys and keeps brands.

I’ve got one: what if Apple bought Disney. That’d be fun, wouldn’t it? Plus the symbolism would be awesome. Steve Jobs buys Pixar, Steve Jobs comes back to Apple, Disney buys Pixar (making Steve Jobs the largest shareholder), Apple buys Disney. Fun! Apple would be in a pretty powerful position, owning cable and regular channels as well as movies. We always talk about Apple controlling the next generation. What better way to do it then to own all the movies these kids love. And think of the deals. Suddenly every Disney and Pixar movie is $5 to own or $.99 to rent. ESPN would be available for $20 per year for anyone with an Apple TV. It might force the rest of the cable and movie business to match pricing or risk losing the rest of their subscribers. Hmm… This one might make too much sense for this article.

It’s impossible to know but it sure is fun to speculate!

Guessing Ones Way To Success

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In 1997 I was graduating college and looking for real world experience writing code. I had majored in business, not computer science, and realized my folly way too late. A friend of mine was working for a publisher of Newton software titles and was getting all excited about this little device called a PalmPilot. What the heck, I said, and dove in.

Soon thereafter, 1999 if I am reading correctly, a little company here in Portland formed named Panic [1]. Panic came about to develop some really killer Mac software. I don’t know much about their story, only bits and pieces that I’ve read over the years and even though we are in the same town I have never met them, but that is all besides the point. Panic bet Apple, I bet Palm. At the time it felt like a smart bet. But here we are 13 years later and Apple has become one of the largest companies in the world and Palm is gone.

The point is luck plays such a huge part in all this. It could have easily been us Palm aficionados hearing earnings calls a day and a half ago and realizing we made an incredible bet. Instead, the platform we bought into 15 years ago faltered, sold and failed. The platform Panic bought into exploded.

So I was telling my story to someone today, talking about the decisions we made and the platforms we chose, and she asked me, what advice or input could I have had that would have helped me correct course? And I told her none. The bet we made, the bet on Palm, the bet on education, was the right bet at the time. There was no way to foresee the stupidity of Palm’s management, the dumb decisions and missed opportunities.

We all make these decisions, a platform to bet on or a technology to buy into. And it’s nearly impossible to correct if the decision proves wrong. So to all of you that guessed right about Apple long before the iPhone and iPad turned the company into a juggernaut, congratulations! You more than deserve the success you are experiencing now.

Please, though, leave a little for the rest of us.

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[1] If you love a great story, you’ve got to read the story of Audion, a Panic Mac app. Not only is it amazingly well written and entertaining, but it just makes me cringe to think how close to history these guys got! (Don’t go yet, though. Finish my post first.)

Owning Hollywood, Apple Style

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Apple’s Massive Numbers and Some Context

Of all the great nuggets pulled off the web by MG Siegler yesterday regarding Apple’s earnings call, my favorite is this one:

Apple’s profit last quarter was $3 billion more than all of Hollywood’s gross box office receipts for all of last year, notes Eric Spiegelman via Anthony De Rosa.

So… Apple tired of playing games with Hollywood? No problem. It can take a small portion of its almost $100 billion in cash and just buy it.

Once We Have Attention Then We Only Have Trust

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All of this discussion about trust really started with me thinking about the role of trust in building a business. Building Infinity Softworks has been all about building a relationship with my customer. At the center of that relationship is trust. Trust, then, is the only true currency we each have. That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? And when the trust is gone, so is the relationship.

That’s where SOPA and PIPA failed. The entertainment industry lost our trust. The government lost our trust. This is the fundamental problem facing Google, where it has bastardized search results to ensure that Google+ is at the top. This is why no one really trusts Facebook. The company builds itself on privacy but every time money is at stake Facebook is more than willing to throw privacy out the door.

In the early days of building a company we have a choice: we can ask for money today or ask for money tomorrow. If you ask for money today then we are each attempting to make money before we have built a trusting relationship with the customer. If we wait and make money tomorrow then we have built a relationship with the customer before asking her to pay. Once we have trust, the relationship between the company and customer is much stronger and worth a lot more money.

Unless I am referred [1], I have no knowledge of who you are and no interaction to trust you.

In the old days there was little choice. We walked into retail stores and asked a clerk or shelled out $50-200 because we had no options. But now the App Store has 500,000 titles and the Internet has 450 million web sites. We have option overload. Now we need different methods of building trust: free versions, freemium business models, trials. Without those we drop the price to $.99 and hope it is too low for anyone to care, even though they do. Funding, too, has become a currency of trust. If I have it then someone must have decided this was a good product and worth trying.

This mentality isn’t just invading the tech world, though, it is invading everywhere. Companies that don’t make the transition, from automatic trust to earning trust, are all going to die.

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[1] In this case the trust is inferred and built off of the relationship between the referee and referrer. This is why my dad trusts my opinion about technology but doesn’t trust my opinion about coffee, since I don’t drink it.