Drugged or sober, the proud iPaq owner falls into the following point: The basic ingredients are the same. Software is all zeroes and ones, after all. The quantity and order may vary, but that’s about it. Hardware is just protons, neutrons, electrons and photons buzzing around, nothing original. Apple didn’t “invent” anything, the iPad is simply their variation, their interpretation of the well-known tablet recipe.
By this myopic logic, Einstein didn’t invent the theory of relativity, Henri Poincaré had similar ideas before him, as did Hendrik Lorentz earlier still. And, come to think of it, Maxwell’s equations contain all of the basic ingredients of relativity; Einstein “merely” found a way to combine them with another set of parts, Newtonian mechanics.
[…]
So, yes, if we stick to the basic ingredients list, Apple didn’t invent anything…not the Apple ][, nor the Macintosh, not the iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad…to say nothing of Apple Stores and App Stores. We’d seen them all before, in one fashion or another.
The sincerest form of jerkery
But it’s not just Samsung that’s sussed out the natural evolution of things. No, no, no, no, no. A world of five nos. Take Ultrabooks for example. Lenovo’s COO Rory Read told us a year ago that the fact that Ultrabooks all look exactly like the MacBook Air was …
“…just a natural evolution of the space.”
Natural. Evolution. See? It’s simple. And natural. And evolutional.
Forms evolve over time and they just naturally evolve into designs Apple happens to not necessarily invent but certainly popularize. See? What could be more natural? Or evolutional?
The Macalope Weekly – Macworld
No weekend is complete without my dosage of laughter from The Macalope weekly column.
Browser plug-in and website warn about data harvesting by Facebook apps
The App Advisor Security Network website has profiles on more than 500,000 third-party Facebook applications that describe the user data they collect, what actions they can take and whether they are considered unsafe. The application profiles also display user ratings.
Meanwhile, the App Advisor browser extension, which works with Safari, Firefox and Chrome, gets activated when users visit either application sites or call up an application’s page in the Facebook App Center.
interview with Asymco’s Horace Dediu
Business education is predicated on storytelling, also known as the case method. Business management is not a discipline that has “axioms” defining basic truths, or if it does, they change frequently. Therefore business education (i.e. the MBA) is the equivalent of people teaching each other by telling stories around a campfire. The best stories get repeated more often and are better ‘teaching tools’. So it is with Apple. It’s a great medium for story telling because people can see the stories unfolding in real time or at least within their lifetimes. They are not about a distant past or an abstract industry. There is also a lot of passion around the brand, both positive and negative and so it leads to more attention.
That has become my main point of interest in technology. The way how I can see different ways of making business, strategic management of companies and the key point of leadership with a vision and their effect on the rise and fall of gigantic companies. And in much less than a decade.
When I got back my interest in technology in 2007, after the long stagnation years of Windows XP, Apple was still coming back, Linux on the desktop was on the route to slightly usable for a standard user, Nokia and Blackberry were still phone market kings, and Microsoft was floundering in confusion and dumb mistakes.
5 years, later, Apple is technological king (( at least in influence )), Blackberry and Nokia are a couple of quarters from bankruptcy, Linux is now a king in smartphones and much more usable on the desktop (( although still a bit more to go. But have you seen Ubuntu 12.04? )) and Microsoft is still floundering in confusion and dumb mistakes, one after the other and each one increasingly dumber and perfectly avoidable.
I could read most of the Strategic Management undergrad books and i would never get so much info and real-life perspective as i get from paying very close attention to the computer&technology market.
Why Microsoft Got its Logo Right
This year has seen a full immersion into Microsoft’s now publicly catchy Metro design philosophy that favors flat colors, light sans serif usage, and user interface elements on a grid — an approach that is hard to be in disagreement with as it saves us from the 1980s, 90s, and early 00s Microsoft design philosophy which never get an official name, but let’s just call it Hideous.
Diaspora Founders Distance Themselves From Project, Give It to Users
You could see this one coming: The remaining Diaspora co-founders, who are now working on remixing community site Makr.io, are pushing off from their open source social network, which initially aspired to be a privacy-conscious Facebook killer. Shark Week on Makr.io They said today they “are giving control of Diaspora to the community.”
I seriously doubt it but if the governance model is done right, maybe Diaspora* can actually go somewhere.
The National Security Agency’s Domestic Spying Program
To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.
Make sure you see the video.