John Gruber:
I just don’t get the pricing, and I find it hard to believe there are many people willing to pay $455/year for digital access to a newspaper, no matter how good the newspaper is.
NYT’s big secret is that such a pricing structure usually is only a marketing fuckup, nothing more. The problem is not the price being too high (who are we to judge that?), but the whole product structure being too stupid.
The wrong kind of “magic”
Virginia Postrel at WSJ published an article on what’s making the iPad magical.
Something bothered me at the end of the reading, but I couldn’t say what.
She goes like this:
Apple has long had an aura of trend-setting cool, but magic is a bolder—and more provocative— claim. In a promotional video, Jonathan Ive, the company’s design chief, explains it this way: “When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical, and that’s exactly what the iPad is.
Do you remember the Yahoo hoaxes “officially announcing” they’ll delete your account at a specific date unless you send “this” message to your entire address book or roster? Well, I never thought somebody would take it serious, until now: Google will actually delete your “Google Profile” if, at 31st of July, it’s still marked as “private”.
If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile.
Daniel Terdiman, CNET, on Apple’s hit at SXSW:
[SXSW] is an interactive conference, after all. It’s where companies that are changing the game with what they do online show the rest of the technology world how it’s done. It’s not where a hardware company—albeit one with a pretty healthy online presence of its own—comes to drop in about five blocks away, and say with all the calm confidence in the world, Who’s your daddy.
Creative vs political entrepreneurship
“While entrepreneurs are out there busting their humps, making something cheaper, expanding its usage, increasing productivity, fending off fierce competition, and hoping to turn a profit along the way, there are those who, through the stroke of a pen, make a killing doing absolutely nothing of value. These “political entrepreneurs” leverage their political power to own something and then overcharge or tax the crap out of the rest of us to use it.
Any third party code that overrides system defaults without user consent is a no-go and should not be accepted by any OS curator or developer.
As a corollary, any OS that permits some third party code to overwrite its own, without user consent, is a no-go.
If such a code passes though, its author becomes the real administrator of both the OS and the user. That OS is thus obsolete and needs to be terminated and replaced.
Horace Dediu on Nokia / Microsoft stopping Google’s Android from gaining more market share:
Quite the contrary, the removal of Symbian from the marketplace will accelerate the penetration of Android in emerging markets.
(…)
Android will gain the largest share of Symbian loss due to overlap.
What if Microsoft paralyzing Nokia was actually Google’s…. Nuh…!
For some, having a better looking sticker on the windshield means having the better car. It also means dumb publicity.
How else could you read a non-backlit display but under “direct bright light”?
yourhead:
A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm. A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. — I. Developer
On the face of it, it’s hard to believe those claiming outrage aren’t primarily motivated by the fact that this is Apple, and any Apple headline is “news.” Let’s face it, “Amazon’s 70% Cut is Evil and Publishers Will Perish” is an article few would have read. TheSmallWave via @counternotions
Some days ago “I wrote an answer at Quora”; but I’ve missed a detail: the answer was more of a post than an answer. Therefore here is the story:
The (anonymous) question:
Am I an elitist to think that most people are stupid? Or am I just too smart?
“I am what one would call a self made man. Put myself through college and business school by working hard, no grants, no loans, I worked full time ++ during the day and went to school full time at night.
Using Tegra 2 as a baseline, the chipmaker expects to see Kal-El quad-core processors delivering a 5x performance boost – bringing Kal-El roughly in line with the performance you’d get from an Intel Core 2 Duo processor
(Intomobile)
Our philosophy is simple — when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing
and
[…]publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.
Have you ever thought of a 3G / wi-fi iPod, instead of a cannibalizing-iPhone-dwarf? More of a “nano-iPad” than a “nano-iPhone”?
I’d say this new N97 doesn’t have a voice module (but only a data modem).
(iPhone 3G’s codename was N82, iPhone 4’s – N90, iPhone Verizon’s – N92, while iPod’s codename was P97, iPod touch’s – N45. I’d also rely my guess on Apple giving even code numbers to its phones and odd numbers to iPods.
Let’s see: Google’s first priority is beating Apple; Nokia’s first priority is beating Google.
This may translate with “We are fighting for number 2”; but is doesn’t. It actually translates with: “Nokia will be copying Google who will be copying Apple” (in terms of strategies, mobile products, marketing etc).
They’ll never gonna sell that elephant…
If you put a sheep to lead the herd, instead of a ram, there are several consequences you’ll notice:
– the herd will eventually move in circle: the leading sheep will try to follow, and the tail of the herd is the perfect thing to be followed;
– there is no way making the herd move from one place to another, as it is stuck in the circle I’ve mentioned above;
Snappy Flipboard secrets
If you look at this page you’ll see at a glance 2 previews: first upper band – Twitter’s 140 characters – 5 seconds read time, second preview – some 200 words in the mid band – 20 seconds to read. This is more than enough for the full web page to load in the background. The “customer journey” thus remains continuous and everything tastes good. Now, tell me how come you wait for 3 minutes for the latest “The Daily” to download, have everything you’d need in offline and still get a crappy experience pulling and pushing thru screens?
Stephen Elop’s…
…Small thinking: “me too”
The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience
.
…Good logic: “accelerated delta”
As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.
.
…False problem: “money and fame”
On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch