This is Violence

understatementblog:

The announcement that Nexus One users won’t be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google’s support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I’ve been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones…

Yeah - this is going to be a problem. It’s striking to me that apparently neither Google nor Microsoft seem able to internalize the intrinsic connection between hardware and software. This sort of fragmentation is the result.

The article does a good job of explaining the outcome of this fragmentation and the technical reasons for it, but one additional thing I might add is the cultural aspect to it. It would appear that both Microsoft and Google seem intent on trying to bending society to match their internal cultural rather than designing a company to meet the needs of society. It seems to not be working out well for them.

But the idea, so common in this week’s media coverage, that Jobs was an inspired savant who succeeded by taking big risks on personal hunches, is way off the mark. Rather than worship at the altar of inspiration and “going with your gut,” the rest of us should use this moment to consider the fundamental strategies that drove Apple’s success.

Good article on how great ideas - in this case Apple’s - actually happen.

via Daring Fireball

mrgan:

This is among the harder-to-believe things I’ve seen on the Internet lately. It belongs in Terry Gilliam’s universe, not our own.

A fairly stunning bit of fakery that gets me wondering if there is a point at which you fake something so well you stop being fake and just become that thing.

“Sophie: Well, my grandpa was going to get me a laptop for my graduation gift, but we couldn’t find the one I wanted and my mom said “maybe you should look into that iPad thing” and it’s the same price and it does more.
Bam. It does more.

This is from a blog I just found off Daring Fireball. The writer is 14 (!!) and not only gets the iPad in a way many other tech writers do not, he writes about more elegantly too.

For comparison:

“As far as I can tell, tablets do not offer any significant functionality that’s not already available on a smartphone or notebook computer, yet they lack critical components like keyboards. In fact, you can get a laptop with considerably more memory and storage and a much better CPU for a significantly lower price, as my PCWorld colleague recently pointed out.”

That from grownup writer Katherine Noyes of PC World.

“In the last decade, Apple introduced their first line of notebooks that didn’t have dial-up modems built in, because dial-up modems were on their way out and most people didn’t need them anymore. But for the few that still did, they offered a little USB modem to ease the transition:”

There have been a few articles since the iPad2 was announced talking about Apple’s evolving view of the device. In this case it’s the move from iPad1’s iWork suite to iPad2’s focus on movie and music creation.

In light of the continuing insistence (not in this article, but generally) that Apple doesn’t do customer research, I believe stands a reminded of two super valuable lessons for agencies looking to adapt:

1) Design something that solves some problem for your (or your clients) customers.
2) Design it in a way that those people can take it, mis-use it and hack it, and learn from what they do.

Apple has done this brilliantly with the iPad.

When I worked at Nemo, I used to tell my team that the very best designs, digital or otherwise, are the ones you design and release into the world, and then people use in ways you never imagined they would.

It’s a bar I rarely, if ever, achieve in my own work, but a goal I love.

The space between advertising and a brand’s product has been made huge by digital. It’s my feeling this idea of developing with a goal but also the intent of learning and adapting is what’s needed to fill that gap.

(Source: marco)

“Publishers may well ‘need’ access to subscriber data in their current business models, but there’s no reason they can’t change business models to adapt to a changing market. Just because at one point in history publishers could make large amounts of money selling their subscriber data to junk mail marketers doesn’t mean they have a right to maintain that business model forever.”

There is a saying that if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product being sold. This has been true in publishing forever. While most journalists are themselves in the “news” business, most publishers are in the business of selling people to advertisers. Which is why watching them complain that Apple’s subscription plan a) hurts readers and b) is unfair to publishers has seem so completely disingenuous to me.

This is why I remain so interested in ad based applications, especially on the iPhone. Twitter’s “dickbar” is the prototypical example of what happens once a company shifts focus from users being their customers to users being their product. What had been one of the more loved apps on the iPhone now has people scrambling to either roll it back to an older, pre-dickbar version, or just finding a new option altogether.