I was the sole responsible for product planning and development in a nice, small cloud software provider. About 20 developers, roughly the same amount of other staff, and huge growth year-by-year. Any decision, no matter how large, could be made in hours by the people present in the office, as 100% of the company was owned by a small group of people still working there full time.
So, inevitably, the company was sold to a huge player, immediately putting a lot of committees, bosses, plans, competing-but-not-competing products, etc.
I agreed to go to one meeting to see if I was willing to stay, lasted 10 minutes, and handed in my resignation via email while still in the meeting.
For me it's the feeling that someone, somewhere, actually cared at all stages of designing the product. There is no single feature or bullet list, just the general feeling that everything (apart from the god-awful touch bar) has been properly thought through and that small but irritating issues has been ironed out.
Well, yes. Some problems can only be properly solved by planning ahead. That does not mean that the problem is any more difficult, just that one needs some planning (and probably some laws for when no planning are in place).
I've just been through this process and signed the appropriate contracts (in Norway).
When freezing embryos here, both parents sign an agreement that the embryos will be frozen for a maximum of five years, and that the explicit consent of both persons needs to be given before they are removed from the freezer, either for destruction or implantation. After five years they are destroyed anyway.
I'm not sure where you learned to do percentages, but the fact is that OS X has ~300% more market share than Linux for the desktop (four times as much, e.g. 300% more or 400% of the market share). Not 5% as you state.
While your description of our grid is spot on, you are actually wrong about the connector. Norway _does_ have its own charging connector that's different from the ones shipped in the rest of Europe. Our works everywhere, while the european version does not work in Norway.
You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start.
1) Electric cars are a proven technology. Simple as that.
2) The Tesla works great in the cold. There used to be a charging problem on dirty connections (fixed now!), but that's it. The car works great in -30.
3) Where I live (Oslo) winter means temperatures hovering between 0 and -10, with very rare dips down towards -20. Using electric cars in the Norwegian climate is a non-problem as long as you do not drive across the entire country on a regular basis. Which very few people do - we fly instead.
Basically because it makes maintenance hell. I work on a large legacy system where the "settings" description document is literally hundreds of pages (yeah, it's enterprise software). We have a setting for "should we show an application icon in the tray on the server when logged in via RDP".
Having a large amount of possible customizations for everything makes regression testing extremely hard as the number of possible permutations grow exponentially. Therefore, you have to spend a lot more time testing and checking and double-checking - resources that could have been spent improving the product instead.
Choice is not always bad, but it always comes at a cost. Sometimes that cost is substantial.
Well, it looks like the market has spoken on these things. I've never heard an ipad user complain over the loss of any of those things. External storage is a mess because it makes you have to expose the file system to the user. Bluetooth and wifi beats USB host mode any day, and all tablets have hdmi out, so that's not really an advantage for the Surface.
The surface has nice hardware, a decent OS (apart from the desktop mode, which really does not work in full HD with touch), and a totally worthless ecosystem.
So what you're saying is that MS chose to make a shitty product and launch it prematurely, while Apple chose to wait until the right hardware was available and then design a suitable OS for it?
$10 would be very silly. They should base the price upon the number of followers - a big corporation selling to consumers would probably easily pay $100.000 a month for a Facebook presence if it had no choice.
"A metro app" being the keyword. I regularly use ten applications at once, keeping most in the background with a little bit of the window visible so that I can see state changes. Metro breaks this usage pattern.
You have obviously never used multiple windows at once. At work, I have two 24" screens and regularly have lots of open windows at once. If even one of the programs I use are a "metro" program, I am not able to use regular windows programs at the same time. This problem will only get worse with time, and is a showstopper for me.
Windows 8 is the solution to Microsofts problems, not the users' problems. That kind of disrespect for your customers never pays off.
A while ago I set up a wireless network at a friends house, and chose to name it "Al Qaida Network". This way, everyone that used their base station would get the message "Windows is now connecting to the Al Quaida Network".
Actually, I was really surprised last summer when I spent some weeks in Beijing, and was able to successfully use a java SSH client on a hotel computer to access my university server in Norway. On the other hand, lots of web pages (especially encrypted ones) didn't work at all.
"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root, I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself."
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You know someone is a ms enthusiast when they think that more functionality is a good thing in itself.
I was the sole responsible for product planning and development in a nice, small cloud software provider. About 20 developers, roughly the same amount of other staff, and huge growth year-by-year. Any decision, no matter how large, could be made in hours by the people present in the office, as 100% of the company was owned by a small group of people still working there full time.
So, inevitably, the company was sold to a huge player, immediately putting a lot of committees, bosses, plans, competing-but-not-competing products, etc.
I agreed to go to one meeting to see if I was willing to stay, lasted 10 minutes, and handed in my resignation via email while still in the meeting.
Did the same thing in 2013. They didn't like it then either :)
For me it's the feeling that someone, somewhere, actually cared at all stages of designing the product. There is no single feature or bullet list, just the general feeling that everything (apart from the god-awful touch bar) has been properly thought through and that small but irritating issues has been ironed out.
Well, yes. Some problems can only be properly solved by planning ahead. That does not mean that the problem is any more difficult, just that one needs some planning (and probably some laws for when no planning are in place).
I've just been through this process and signed the appropriate contracts (in Norway).
When freezing embryos here, both parents sign an agreement that the embryos will be frozen for a maximum of five years, and that the explicit consent of both persons needs to be given before they are removed from the freezer, either for destruction or implantation. After five years they are destroyed anyway.
Problem solved.
Wait, what?
I'm from Norway, and have been using my Norwegian issued Visa cards in the US for a long, long time. No problems whatsoever.
I'm not sure where you learned to do percentages, but the fact is that OS X has ~300% more market share than Linux for the desktop (four times as much, e.g. 300% more or 400% of the market share). Not 5% as you state.
While your description of our grid is spot on, you are actually wrong about the connector. Norway _does_ have its own charging connector that's different from the ones shipped in the rest of Europe. Our works everywhere, while the european version does not work in Norway.
I live in Norway and I've ordered a Tesla.
You are wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start.
1) Electric cars are a proven technology. Simple as that.
2) The Tesla works great in the cold. There used to be a charging problem on dirty connections (fixed now!), but that's it. The car works great in -30.
3) Where I live (Oslo) winter means temperatures hovering between 0 and -10, with very rare dips down towards -20. Using electric cars in the Norwegian climate is a non-problem as long as you do not drive across the entire country on a regular basis. Which very few people do - we fly instead.
Basically because it makes maintenance hell. I work on a large legacy system where the "settings" description document is literally hundreds of pages (yeah, it's enterprise software). We have a setting for "should we show an application icon in the tray on the server when logged in via RDP".
Having a large amount of possible customizations for everything makes regression testing extremely hard as the number of possible permutations grow exponentially. Therefore, you have to spend a lot more time testing and checking and double-checking - resources that could have been spent improving the product instead.
Choice is not always bad, but it always comes at a cost. Sometimes that cost is substantial.
Well, it looks like the market has spoken on these things. I've never heard an ipad user complain over the loss of any of those things. External storage is a mess because it makes you have to expose the file system to the user. Bluetooth and wifi beats USB host mode any day, and all tablets have hdmi out, so that's not really an advantage for the Surface.
The surface has nice hardware, a decent OS (apart from the desktop mode, which really does not work in full HD with touch), and a totally worthless ecosystem.
So what you're saying is that MS chose to make a shitty product and launch it prematurely, while Apple chose to wait until the right hardware was available and then design a suitable OS for it?
Sounds about right :)
I'm not sure when MS came up with their first tablet sketches, but Apple made this film in 1987: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w
It's scaringly accurate.
$10 would be very silly. They should base the price upon the number of followers - a big corporation selling to consumers would probably easily pay $100.000 a month for a Facebook presence if it had no choice.
"A metro app" being the keyword. I regularly use ten applications at once, keeping most in the background with a little bit of the window visible so that I can see state changes. Metro breaks this usage pattern.
Well yeah, kind of. Microsoft managed to pick the very worst UI choice Apple has made in the last year and doubled down on it.
Yes, that's correct, but I am not willing to jump through hoops just because MS has made bad choices for me.
At work, I use Win7 (and I will for as long as possible), at home I use Macs. Problem solved.
You have obviously never used multiple windows at once. At work, I have two 24" screens and regularly have lots of open windows at once. If even one of the programs I use are a "metro" program, I am not able to use regular windows programs at the same time. This problem will only get worse with time, and is a showstopper for me.
Windows 8 is the solution to Microsofts problems, not the users' problems. That kind of disrespect for your customers never pays off.
Isn't it also true that one can adjust the sensitivity of the controller? I wonder if this will help with the issues mentioned.
Well, yes. But that has nada to do with the timing and all to do with the book itself. Anytime is a bad time to recommend that piece of crap.
In one word - Wii!
A while ago I set up a wireless network at a friends house, and chose to name it "Al Qaida Network". This way, everyone that used their base station would get the message "Windows is now connecting to the Al Quaida Network".
Actually, I was really surprised last summer when I spent some weeks in Beijing, and was able to successfully use a java SSH client on a hotel computer to access my university server in Norway. On the other hand, lots of web pages (especially encrypted ones) didn't work at all.
This calls for a Bill Hicks quote:
"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root, I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself."