On Grammar

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I’ve been writing a lot on this blog the past year and based on the number of visitors, a lot of people enjoy my writing. I love writing and sharing my insights and knowledge with others. It’s no good locked solely in my head.

But the reality is writing every week day is taxing. It’s extremely hard to come up with topics every single day, write well and coherently and always spell and use correct grammar. Most of the time my process is pretty simple. I write my posts and re-read them at least once. Then  I read them again as soon as I get the post in my RSS feed. Each time I inevitably find something to fix.

As you probably can sense by now, I’m pretty anal retentive. I hated this when I was young but have found that it is a benefit for what I do now. One of my pet peeves is poor spelling and grammar. Hey, I’m not perfect. Nor is my ego tied up in it.

So I ask, if you see something I spelled incorrectly or used the wrong word or need to re-write something grammatically, please tell me. I won’t take offense.

Luck

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One of the commenters of my post on Apple’s Churning of the Gut said this:

We all agree that success is partly down to luck. Call it X percent. What you think of Apple’s future depends on what you think is the value of X. If you are young and inexperienced, you probably think it’s low, so Apple must have mainly succeeded on merit, which means it will continue doing well. As you get older and experience the world, your estimate of the role of luck rises, so Apple is riding a lucky streak which will inevitably end.

I’m convinced that luck is a huge component of success for a young company. Getting all the pieces right to get a company off the ground and to any high altitude is a combination of timing, the right relationships, the right marketing and the right customers. So much of that is luck.

But for mature companies, the Apple’s, IBM’s, Samsung’s of the world, I’m not convinced that luck is a significant factor. It seems that most mature companies die by their own mistakes, whether literally screwing up or not reacting to market changes.

Besides, if we want to talk cliches, any pro athlete will tell you that you make your own luck.

Wayne Dobson Doesn’t Have Your Cell Phone

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The technology integrated into cell phones that make it possible for us to be found is also the same technology used to find your phone. Apparently in  Las Vegas, though, a software glitch means Wayne Dobson has your lost phone, or at least that’s what GPS is telling Sprint customers. Not a long read this weekend, but it didn’t take too many lines of copy to relay one of the weirder stories I’ve read in a while. Enjoy!

Who Owns Your UX Philosophy?

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Brad Feld wrote a great post on UX philosophy over the weekend. His question was not who contributed to it but instead who owns it.

I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product. I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user.

In my experience, many small companies are 1) running for their lives and 2) consensus driven. Both of these kill good UX. For one, running fast means not taking the time to contemplate how we’d expect to interact with an application and also means no time spent thinking about the implications of design, features and experience across platforms. Some things just take time and this is one of them. In order to plan for consistent interaction the UX “owner” must have both a deep understanding of ways of interacting and vast experience across platforms, not to mention a deep understanding of the product’s intent. Acquiring those skills takes time.

As to the second point, when there are only a couple of employees it is really easy to go with the opinion of the room. This doesn’t work at all for UX. UX is a dictator’s game, for anal retentive ones at that. Someone has to have the iron fist that says this goes here and that goes there and I expect this other thing to work like this. The group can contribute, provide feedback and better be willing to challenge the dictator, but one person must take responsibility for consistently enforcing the philosophy. Everyone else, then, must follow or get out of the way.

Apple’s Churning Of The Gut

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It’s the funny season in technology land. The holidays are over, the major technology trade shows are soon to pass, and thousands of tech writers have nothing to report. So we get stories like the Wall Street Journal quoting unnamed sources that say Apple halved their component orders for calendar Q1. I find the whole thing fishy (via Loren Brichter) and never personally made the connection that a decrease in parts meant a decrease in orders. John Gruber linked to a great Forbes article that could explain the situation.

Personally, I’m really bored with these stories. Unnamed sources say such-and-such, the blogosphere goes wild, some rise up to defend Apple while some rip it down. The stock price moves. Then everything returns to normal, waiting for the next big “story” to appear days or weeks or months later. Yawn.

What interests me more is why does this stuff keep happening in Apple’s name? No one comes out and says this crap about Samsung, Google, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft or any other big name in technology. It’s all Apple, all the time.

One possible answer is that Apple’s headlines are perfect link bait. Write something disparaging about Apple and everybody who follows technology clicks the link. Posts get written about it for weeks. The irony is that all the commentary keeps the story alive, drives more traffic to the original writer’s web site, which gets them to write more of this garbage. The second possible answer is that we thrive on building up companies (and people) then tearing them down. Apple was the underdog for so long and now that it is one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world, well, we can’t root for them anymore. A third is that the company is just that divisive. These have been talked about endlessly; none ring perfectly true to me. They all strike me as symptoms, not causes.

I have come to believe that the true cause is something bigger than all of this. I think the right answer is that Apple just fails to pass the gut test for most people. It’s an incredulous reaction to Apple’s success. Look, how is it even remotely possible that a company with such a small market share could really be doing so well? How can a company that had so little success, a company that survived by the skin of its teeth in the PC era, be one of the largest companies in the world now? How can a company with so few products be such a behemoth?

I honestly believe people read their gut and say it can’t be possible therefore it isn’t. Apple can’t be this successful. It’s not possible. And I know that because my gut tells me so.

I had lunch today with one of my old college professors and his attitude was almost “about time.” Apple had its day in the sun, it did well for a while, but it’s time for market realities to catch up to the company. Apple has been a fad for a decade now — since the iPod launched in 2001 — and it is time for it to fade into the sunset like some hokey 1950s western.

Which I think leads to the last unfathomable point that makes Apple’s case so gut-wrenching. There is no way, the gut tells folks, that Apple can continue growing at the current rate. There’s no way! But what the gut can’t fathom is that the markets Apple is playing in are so ridiculously large that there are only a handful of other things that play at that scale, and all of those are at the base level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I mean how in the world is it possible that smartphones could play at a seven billion unit market scale? After all, everyone needs air, water and food. Not everyone needs a cell phone.

The gut can’t believe it. Reality, though, can be brutally hard on the gut.