Much Ado About Blogging

B. Terhechte — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:04:18 +0000

„Twitter will eventually be worth more than $1 billion, possibly a lot more."

Simon Funk’s online novel After Life depicts (among other plot

B. Terhechte — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:39:22 +0000

„Simon Funk's online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens – not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children.

[…]

"In the end," Simon Funk wrote, "the human species was simply marketed out of existence.""

Published from QuoteVault.org

ars technica on why Apple won’t buy AMD

B. Terhechte — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:27:10 +0000

Via arstechnica.com

„Acquisitions are about enabling growth in a hot new market, and not about sustaining revenue in a mature one."

ars technica on why Apple won't buy AMD

Published from QuoteVault.org

Paul Graham on Addiction

B. Terhechte — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:25:20 +0000

Via paulgraham.com

„But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."

Paul Graham on Addiction

Published from QuoteVault.org

Forecasting: One button. No more, no less.

B. Terhechte — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:50:16 +0000

One of my friends recently linked to this impressive quote from Paul Graham of Y-Combinator fame, writing in 2006:

If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.
(footnote 14 of Chapter 5 (p. 228), Hackers and Painters)

It reminded me a, at least as I see it, equally impressive forecast by Fake Steve Jobs (née Dan Lyons). Back in 2006, in one of his parodical pieces, he contemplated what Steve Jobs might want that mythical iPhone to be like, and wrote:

So as soon as I got back to the Jobs Pod I sent out an email to the iPhone team: We’re back to square one. Starting over. Tabula rasa. Throwing out everything we’ve done so far and making a new phone that just makes phone calls. Small, white, gorgeous, as few buttons as possible. Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less.

Keep in mind, this was in 2006. Back then there was no iPhone, and nobody knew if Apple intended to ever build one. Even more, when people thought what this mythical unicorn could be like, they came up with this, this, this, or that.

On Literary Criticism

B. Terhechte — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:18:03 +0000

Via www.info.ucl.ac.be

„The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves."

On Literary Criticism
Sounds about right to me.

Published from QuoteVault.org

Addendum to my last post

B. Terhechte — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:31:20 +0000

Via www.nytimes.com

„I asked Mr. Tevanian if he thought Microsoft could pull off a similar switch.

“Perhaps, but I don’t know if it has the intestinal fortitude,” he said, “At Apple, we had to. It was a matter of survival.”"

Just found this gem while browsing through my QuoteVault archive.

Mr. Tevanian, the Mac OS X lead System Architect, on whether Microsoft could / should rebuild Windows from the ground up, as Apple did with Mac OS X.

Published from QuoteVault.org

A new Windows? Please supplant the old one.

B. Terhechte — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:54:29 +0000

John Gruber discussed a Technologizer article on the Future of Windows yesterday. In said article some of the “big brains” of the software industry were asked for their opinion on what Microsoft ought to do to keep Windows relevant in the years to come. Gruber quotes a scenario that imagines a tabula rasa, a new Windows without cruft and legacy code (much like Apple did when they switched from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X), but then takes this idea even further, wondering whether it is actually necessary to replace the current Windows.

Or just maintain Windows in parallel. Point is, there’s no reason why Microsoft should have one and only one PC desktop operating system. Why not two: the new cool no-cruft one; and Windows, the established, familiar, chock-full-of-baggage-and-legacy-compatibility one.

I disagree, however. As splendid, as the idea actually feels, the characteristics of the two Windows user bases (Developers and Users) won’t resonate with such a setting. Let’s call the two versions “WIN” (New, no legacy code, cool) and “Classic” (Current Windows) Developers only invest their time and money up front if there is a viable market available (or to come), so that the investment is at least likely to generate a positive outcome. They won’t start developing for a new system until the user base is of a certain size (or a huge growth is expected, see iPad). Windows users, on the other hand, are not really known for their progressiveness. I usually tend to divide them into three groups:

Business users, who have no choice anyway since IT installs their machines. As businesses are actually the main force behind Microsofts keen upholding of legacy code, there is little reason for them to ever leave Classic. So here we have a very low adoption rate.
Non-Computer users: The kind of people who almost accidentally bought their PC at Walmart, still run Windows XP (maybe even 98SE), and mostly use the system to print ugly birthday flyers or play Solitaire. They would probably enjoy WIN, but they won’t ever notice it exists until they go and buy a new PC at Walmart. Here, we have another low adoption rate.
The enthusiast Computer user: These are people that grew up with Windows, know (and sometimes love) all of it’s kinks and quirks, and use it for a variety of tasks. They’re its avid defenders in Engadget comment threads and tend to be a tad regressive, since Classic has always worked for them quite well and as they fear loosing the high investment in Windows knowledge that they accumulated over the years. The less regressive, the higher the chance that this particular person has already switched to Mac or Linux. The more regressive, the higher the chance that he/she would actually reject or even despise WIN as it deviates too much from her/his well known Classic. The adoption rate should be pretty solid, but this market segment is also heavily courted by the alternatives.

The problem with the above scenario is that the actual market for a brand new cruft free Windows deems me not big enough to attract enough developer traction to get a larger user base to switch over. One possibility, of course, would be to leverage .NET so that new applications would natively work on Classic and WIN sans problems (much like Apple did with Carbon). This, however, would disable any chances for Microsoft to radically change the user interface, accommodating usability research and results of the past decade.
Instead, I think it would make more sense for Microsoft to create a brand new OS that still runs old apps by means of a virtual machine or something resembling the classic environment in Mac OS X. Microsoft needs to enforce adoption as much as they can, otherwise most of their user base simply won’t switch. (Even the almost 10 years old Internet Explorer 6 is still being used way too much. This simple fact is telling about the Windows demographic)

Liberalism, Atheism, and IQ

B. Terhechte — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:35:43 +0000

Via www.cnn.com

„Historically, anything that's new and different can be seen as a threat in terms of the religious beliefs; almost all religious systems are about permanence"

Liberalism, Atheism, and IQ

The article states that current research indicates a (statistically significant though not extraordinary) correlation between liberalism / atheism and intelligence.

Published from QuoteVault.org

The iTablet Newspaper.

B. Terhechte — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:39:51 +0000

In my last post I noted the possibility of Apple entering the newspaper market via its iTablet in order to help journalism accustom to modern times (or, as someone else wrote: ‘Pull it kicking and screaming into the future’).
There’s no doubt that the newspaper business, or rather journalism, is in dire need for a concept which establishes it in the internet-centered society looming upon us.
Newspaper sales been dropping year over year, which leads to journalists being fired, which leads to a loss in quality, which leads to less sales, which leads to less advertising, which leads to a higher prices – and that one leads to less sales, again. What we can see in this simple example is the rather inevitable crisis of classic paper-based newspaper journalism. The cause of this hideous process is (among other factors) the fact that news can be consumed for free on the Internet. However, since people reading news on the Internet tend to ignore the accompanied advertising, the shift from paper to web doesn’t make up for the loss of their paper counterparts (and not even for the production costs).
Countless CEO’s, consultants, and scientists have tried to come up with a solution for this conundrum. People want to consume news, but do not want to pay (much) for it. Solutions ranged from micropayments (pay 1pence per article – didn’t work), to government-financed journalism (a rather dangerous thought given the importance of journalism as the fourth power in a democracy). So, why should a new hardware product from Apple offer any kind of solution to this problem, which has already been discussed on a grand scale?

Let’s move back, for a minute, and consider the state of the music industry, ca. 2001. Napster had moved the task of finding, downloading, and sharing digital mp3 music from the realm of hackers and nerds to the broad public. Suddenly everyone was able to get music in an instant. For free. For years to come, the music industry, and its legal companion, the RIAA, tried everything imaginable to hinder mp3 music sharing, and lecture (or even force) people to buy expensive CD’s or download incompatible music instead. As indicated, by this quote from Jimmy Lovine – Founder and chairman, Interscope Records, it wasn’t until the advent of the iTunes & iPod behemoth, that the market of legal digital music exploded. By now, iTunes has surpassed CD sales and is the worldwide major music distribution platform.

How did Apple achieve this? First of all, there seemed to be a latent demand for legal digital music. People oftentimes claimed that they’d buy music in an instant, if it was available in something other than the arcane CD format. It was, however, possible to buy digital music online before the iTunes Music Store came along, a fact that diminishes the strength of the ‘legal music’ argument. Another important reason was of course the combination of iPod, iTunes, and iTunes Music Store. While previous approaches to selling music online were limited & rather unknown, the widespread success of the iPod brought access to millions of potential customers. Finally, there’s an often-overlooked but very important reason: The ease and comfort of Apple’s solution.

Napster reached such a wide audience not only because of the simplicity of the task, but also because the availability of of music. One could enter an artists name, find tons of related (or unrelated) tracks, and download them with a click. But Napster also had a ton of problems: Many tracks weren’t available at all, it was nearly impossible to get complete albums – mostly only a small selection of tracks, the files were not always in good quality, and almost every download took ages because the sharing party was accessing the Internet by modem.
Whereas iTunes brought best-of lists, fast downloads, high quality files, cover art, a big database of content (except for the Beatles), complete albums, reviews, and much more. And best of all, it was only one click away from the regular iTunes music experience.
I’m fairly confident, that the superior success of the iTunes Music Store lends itself a big deal on the usability of Apple’s solution.

So, going back to the future (or rather lack thereof) of journalism, how can we apply the merits of the digital music solution to newspapers? Since news is already free on the Internet, this market lacks a significant demand for ‘legal’ news. However, as explained above, this wasn’t a big deal for digital music either. The difference is actually marginal: Before iTunes, people could buy digital music, but illegally downloaded free stuff instead. After iTunes people could still buy digital music, but did download far less illegal music. Now, people can buy paper news, but they access free, digital news instead.
If Apple really was to try to reinvent the newspaper, it would need to offer a seriously simplified, less cumbersome, very usable interface. But is this possible? Online newspapers have been evolving for years, the NY Times employs a constantly growing team of web developers to optimize it’s site. These sites still follow a model that lends its basics from the classic newspaper. A frontpage, departments, current articles in chronological order, features, and a ton of adds.
These simple thoughts establish a basic framework which allows to draft a set of requirements for a device that could establish itself as a news platform:
- The perfect size: It certainly has to be bigger than an iPhone. It needs space for a splendid layout, big fonts, high quality pictures, and a general feeling of comfort. However, it shouldn’t be so big as to be considered clunky.
- The layout: Visit Google FastFlip), which introduces a blazingly fast way to read news. Instead of html content, the site serves screenshots of news sites. I’m hardly convinced that Apple will not use WebKit for the iTablet newspapers, but that’s not the point: They just need to find a way to make the browsing and loading of articles incredibly fast.

When I applied the probable factors of success of the iTunes Music Store onto journalism, I left one factor out: The giant userbase of the iPod. The Music Store not only did benefit but wouldn’t have been possible at all without the already available incredible amount of iPod owners. The iTablet, on the other hand, isn’t even on the market yet. So, in comparison to the iPod, where the physical product helped sell the digital content, with the iTablet the digital content would need to help sell the physical product. I imagine newspaper access to be one of Apple’s arguments for the iTablet. While this certainly limits the applicability of the thoughts above, the App Store has shown that even a new content platform can quickly become a selling argument.

If only a bit of these thoughts apply, it would be a chance for journalism. The iTablet scenario won’t help solve many of its inherent problems, like bias, uneven news distribution, or the rise of entertainment, but it might at least help journalism to stay alive – maybe until a conclusive ‘future of news’ has been found. Because weblogs, social news, or Twitter cannot replace journalism.