“Have been in New York. (I am the Man, I suffered, I was There.)”
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Letters of Note: Salinger reviews Raiders of the Lost Ark
I am going to re-use this quote til the day I stop commuting between SF and NYC.
February 2010
72 posts
“I don’t believe that everyone should be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, that everyone should quit their job and go work for themselves. I do believe this: The less a project or task or opportunity at work feels like the sort of thing you would do if this is just a job, the more you should do it.”
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Seth’s Blog: Everyone’s model of work is a job
via @hiten
“It boils down to control. I’ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There’s no bug Apple can’t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can’t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for. That’s just not true for Mac OS X, where a component like Flash Player is controlled by Adobe.”
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Daring Fireball: Yet More on the Unfolding Future-of-Flash-and-the-Web Saga
No surprise, but Gruber gets it. Performance is a distraction, and it all comes down to control. Going back to my point about Apple producing its own processors from the other day, you can look at the introduction of the iPod, iPhone & iPad as evolutionary steps towards greater and greater control of the device ecosystem - all the way down to the silicon.
Play
“Q: Why did you launch your own processor for the iPad? What was missing?
A: Apple has for years been in the silicon design business. On PowerPC, Apple always personally crafted the northbridge and southbridge chipsets. It’s not new to us. For the iPad, we felt we had the best knowledge of what we wanted the silicon to do and were in the best position to do it ourselves rather than going to someone else offering something that wasn’t really exactly what we wanted. At the end of the day, we want to make the world’s best products. By doing it ourselves, we were putting ourselves in the best position to do so.” —
A: Apple has for years been in the silicon design business. On PowerPC, Apple always personally crafted the northbridge and southbridge chipsets. It’s not new to us. For the iPad, we felt we had the best knowledge of what we wanted the silicon to do and were in the best position to do it ourselves rather than going to someone else offering something that wasn’t really exactly what we wanted. At the end of the day, we want to make the world’s best products. By doing it ourselves, we were putting ourselves in the best position to do so.” —
Apple COO Tim Cook Speaks at Goldman Sachs Conference - Mac Rumors
10 years from now, Apple’s decision to roll its own processors - optimized entirely for its’ devices OS (!) - will be seen as a transcendent moment in the marketplace.
“In other words, it is indicative of bigger things. It means that the NY startup scene is maturing. It means that we are focusing less on the media-crowned personalities driving “the tech scene” in New York City and (hopefully) more on the awesome things that tech startups are creating. It’s a democratization; It means that tech in NYC is coming out of media’s shadow.”
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This is effectively why I’m in NYC this week, and I’m seeing the evidence that everyone’s been talking about. Talking to prospective clients out here, there’s an energy that’s certainly unique - people have a feeling that a fundamental shift has occurred/is occurring.
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“Google executives likely reckoned that in a single day Buzz would garner more users than Twitter has been able to in two years after all that celebrity publicity. That really is why Gmail users woke up one day to find their private account details exposed to the public, unannounced and unprepared, because without such default exposure Google executives likely didn’t believe they could deliver a critical user base for Buzz. That’s not “improper testing,” it’s a platform strategy. And the fact that Google reacted quickly to public pressure doesn’t negate the fact that its arrogance was thoroughly exposed. The correction isn’t significant, the exposed intentions are.”
—Buzz launch wasn’t flawed, Google’s intentions are « counternotions
“It certainly doesn’t hurt to have code jedis at the helm of your starship, but engineering for consumer Internet startups need only be competent. The real challenge is finding designers and product managers who can build an awesome product experience, and marketers who can figure out effective, scalable, integrated distribution strategies (whether organic or paid, whether technical or creative).”
—The Value of Design to Startups - BusinessWeek
