Alaska Bound

Posted on by

When I turned 30 my wife and I went to Alaska to celebrate (actually our second trip there as our first was our honeymoon). We had an amazing time and said when she turned 30 three years later we’d go back. Well, life got in the way. Two kids, a new house, a very different Infinity Softworks and nine years later, we are finally going back. On my way out the door I thought I’d share a number of extremely thought-provoking articles for you to read. This should be enough to tide you over until I return.

Fred Wilson and Mark Suster wrote some great strategy articles over the past couple of weeks. I recommend reading them in order. We have:

Derek Sivers wrote a post on the rules, or rather, the fact that there are no rules called No Rules In This Game. After all if the rules matter none of us would start companies.

Speaking of start-ups, Steve Blank wrote a post called Fund Raising Is A Means Not An End. Too many companies think fund raising is the event. It’s not. The product, the market, the job to be done, those things matter. Fund raising is just a way to get there.

Speaking of product, here is something we’ve all done: prioritized feature lists. Ken Norton writes why they are poison in Babe Ruth and Feature Lists. Ken includes a wonderful example from his days running Google Apps. (via Om Malik)

George Will had a thought-provoking article on the American Dream and the role of education called America’s Broken Bootstraps. In short, it won’t be good enough to have a college degree. In the future, my kids will need the right college degree.

Finally, I’ll link you to two excellent business stories, one on the destruction of Kodak and another on a rising Twilio. I highly recommend both of these, too:

See you when I get back!

Software, The Art Form

Posted on by

Cory Doctorow as the guest on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, The New Disruptors, said the following:

Don’t quit your day job is advice you should keep even after quitting your day job. The odds are not with you maintaining a career through your whole life. There’s a recurring narrative where someone finds a pop star who was once in the top 10 and they are now working in an office as an insurance underwriter or something. And they go, “Oh my God, how is that possible? You were annointed!” Well that’s not the exception, right. That’s the norm, right. Most people who had careers in the arts where they were at the top of the field ended up just having anonymous lives for the rest of their lives after their stars peaked and after they faded away.

And that’s the people who reached the top of it. The people who reached near the top, ya know I’m in the 99th percentile, the people who got to the 99&5/9th percentile, those people too often finish their lives as university professors or as Vegas performers or fellowships or something but not living in the industry, not continuing to publish. This is the reality of the arts. This is not a new reality of the arts; it’s an ongoing reality of the arts.

When I was in college, the Computer Science program was apart of the math department. Computer Science, like mathematics, is consistent and stable. Computer Science, the academic study, was. In 1996 they were still teaching Pascal even though Pascal wasn’t used much in industry at all.

But once I graduated I realized that Computer Science, the real world form, was anything but stable and consistent. If anything, being a practitioner of Computer Science, wanting to learn and expand on my art, was about as unstable as it gets. At least if I wanted to practice the craft of writing I could use paper or a word processor or a typewriter, all of which can still be found today. Or, alternatively, I could be a Russian writer or French writer. Once I learned the language it was mine to wield how I wished for the rest of my life.

When I graduated from college, though, I chose to hone my craft in Computer Science at the hands of Palm OS. You know the value of being one of the world’s foremost experts on Palm OS code today? Nothing. The skill is worthless.

And that was one of my thoughts last week as Apple introduced an amazing array of new iOS and OS X capabilities, that’s what I thought about reviewing the plethora of announcements at Google I/O just a few weeks ago, and that’s what I think about every time I write JavaScript.

As much as us developers like to think of ourselves as scientists, we are in fact artists. Our craft is being able to take an archaic, confusing language that most people couldn’t understand if they wanted to and turn it into products, into apps, that come alive in our customer’s hands.

Our medium is code, but unlike mediums used in other art forms, ours are constantly evolving and changing, becoming more important and obsolete, more complicated and easier to use, all at the same time.

Apple’s Brush Fire

Posted on by

I wrote this in August 2012:

I just spent a few days camping in the middle of no where in central Oregon. … The forests in which we stayed are decades if not centuries old and over that time period the trees have grown quite large. We saw some that had to be 200 to 300 feet tall. But those trees form a canopy and that canopy keeps rain and sun from getting to the forest floor, snuffing out new trees in the process. Eventually, though, these trees die and fall over [whether due to age, fire, or some other natural event]. Not only does sun and rain get to the forest floor but these trees are stock-full of nutrients that new sprouts use to grow. These fallen monsters are called nurse logs.

Marco Arment, in one of the best posts he ever wrote, believes iOS 7 is the brush fire we need to revitalize iOS development:

The App Store is crowded: almost every common app type is well-served by at least one or two dominant players. They’ve been able to keep their leads by evolving alongside iOS: when the OS would add a new API or icon size, developers could just add them incrementally and be done with it. Established players only became more established.

iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards far beyond the extent of any previous UI changes. Existing apps can support iOS 7 fairly easily without looking broken, but they’ll look and feel ancient.

I have to admit I was feeling down after last Monday’s keynote. The fundamental shift was apparent to me even at a glance and I knew we were stuck between the old design and interactivity paradigms of iOS 6, paradigms perfectly represented in powerOne, and the new vision for iOS 7.

At the same time powerOne calculator is an aging product that, mostly due to app store dynamics, has not been a cash flow positive endeavor but a product nonetheless that we love and have supported for over a decade. I felt trapped: sticking with the old design and interactivity decisions in the current version of powerOne or investing a lot of time and effort into a product that doesn’t pay for one developer, let alone the small company we are.

Then I read Marco’s post and it reminded me that all things that die sprout new life, that this change isn’t just an opportunity to present powerOne again, but also make some fundamental changes that makes it more valuable to both you and me. Back to Marco:

This big of an opportunity doesn’t come often — we’re lucky to see one every 3–5 years. Anyone can march right into an established category with a huge advantage if they have the audacity to be exclusively modern.

I’ll be invading one as soon as I can. Here’s hoping I’m right.

Disrupt or be disrupted. I hear you, Marco, and I’m following right behind you.

Designed by Apple in California

Posted on by

This is Apple. This is what attracts me to the products they create. Those products aren’t always what I want and often are missing features I find so desirable, but it is hard not to feel affection for a company and product that thinks of itself so clearly and presents itself so starkly, that just fundamentally expects more from each of us.

if everyone
is busy making everything
how can anyone perfect anything?

we start to confuse convenience
with joy
abundance with choice
designing something requires
focus

the first we ask is
what do we want people to feel?
delight
surprise
love
connection

then we begin to craft around intention
it takes time
there are a thousand no’s
for every yes.

we simplify
we perfect
we start over
until every thing we touch
enhances each life it touches.

This Is Tim Cook’s Apple Now

Posted on by

Ben Thompson wrote another very astute article, this time on Tim Cook and Apple:

While Jobs’ mission in life was personal computing, and Apple the by-product, Cook’s mission in life is Apple, and iOS 7 was the by-product of his commitment to ensuring that Apple endured.

The job of Apple’s CEO is, first and foremost, to understand what makes Apple, Apple. That is far more important than product sense, or operations excellence, or taste, or a million other attributes thrown around by pundits and analysts. On this criteria, it’s clear that Cook is the right man for the job. I would contend that anyone that says otherwise doesn’t understand revolutions, doesn’t understand culture, and doesn’t understand Apple.

I saw what Ben saw in this video: Tim Cook seemed happier and more lively than I’d ever seen him before. This is the first time I can remember an Apple presentation where I didn’t feel like there was something missing. It’s the first time that Steve Jobs’ ghost wasn’t standing next to Tim Cook passing judgement.

This is Tim Cook’s Apple now. And this is the first time he has let us see it.