Posts

John Gruber’s analysis of the current state of Windows really struck a chord with me, because it reminded me of an article I read a long time ago about Wal-Mart. (I blogged about it in 2006.) Gruber’s writing about Microsoft’s declining revenue and the recent news that Apple now holds 91% of the retail market for laptops that cost more than $1,000. Here’s the key bit: Microsoft is no longer ignoring Apple’s market share gains and successful “Get a Mac” ad campaign. But the crux of these ads from Apple is that Macs are better; Microsoft’s response is a message that everyone already knows — that Windows PCs are cheaper. Their marketing and retail executives publicly espouse the opinion that, now that everyone sees Apple computers as cool, Microsoft has Apple right where they want them. ...

In a long and really interesting look at Julia Child’s legacy, Michael Pollan makes the following point about the Food Network: On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster. ...

Everybody has heard of the famous (perhaps fictional scam) where someone embezzles millions of dollars from a bank by skimming a penny (or even a fractional penny) from every transaction and waiting. As it turns out, this sort of pocket lining is a key component of the business model for many transaction-based businesses. For example, David Pogue points out that mobile carriers increase their profits by inserting that annoying instructional message that’s played after your personal greeting but before the beep when you get someone’s voice mail. ...

Here’s a dramatic reenactment of this conversation between an iPhone developer and the Apple representative who let him know his application was being removed from the store because it “duplicates features of the iPhone”:

Go read Kirrily Robert’s OSCON presentation on women in open source. What I find interesting beyond the basic gender issues is a cultural problem often found in software development communities – a general lack of hospitality for newbies. As the article points out, when we shut people out (either unintentionally or intentionally), what we’re really doing is limiting the scope of what we can achieve. And we should expect to have to go to extraordinarily lengths to fix this problem, because lack of diversity is a self-reinforcing problem. Non-diverse communities generally become more and more out of touch with the things they need to do if their goal is to achieve diversity. All sorts of habits that are invisible to members but incredibly off-putting to the people who are excluded creep in. Breaking that pattern is tough, but worth it. ...

Teresa Nielsen-Hayden has a post explaining what, exactly, happened between AT&T and 4chan this week. If you’re not familiar with 4chan, definitely read the post.

I have been avidly devouring everything I can on the health care debate. There are certain aspects of health care reform that I’m very strongly in favor of for selfish reasons, and for reasons of conscience, I think every American should have some form of health insurance. That said, I’m not sure there’s much point in paying a whole lot of attention to the individual bills that are being drafted. ...

Shelley Powers describes the hoops you need to go through to submit changes to the HTML5 specification: The draft of the HTML5 spec out at the W3C is under continuous change, the formal Working Draft hasn’t been updated for some time, so we’re having to make changes on the run. To actually make these changes requires a degree of technical proficiency that has nothing to do with HTML markup. We’re told that to propose changes to the document for consideration, we need to, first of all, send our SSH2 public key into the Michael Smith, who will then set us up so that we can check out the existing documents, using CVS. We will then need to use a variety of tools, SVN, CVS, makefiles, XSLT, and so on, just to get reach a point that our concerns and suggestions are actually taken seriously. ...

Paul Graham explains on how people who make things must manage their time to maximize their productivity: When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it. ...

Jeff Bezos has posted an apology for deleting books from Kindles: This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission. ...