The sixth chapter, Inventive Spirit, cite several examples of how Jobs used his relentless management style to refine products, and most interestingly the Apple Store. He went so far as to develop a prototype store in warehouse at the edge of the Apple campus, and how he was willing to completely scrap the design of the store when it wasn't exactly right, costing him months of time.
Anyone in retail that builds successful (or even ultimately unsuccessful) stores knows that building a full scale model is a huge help when building a new retail brand (or updating an older image).
Jobs was not a retail guy before the advent of Apple Store. Clearly, Jobs hired some pretty bright retail people to help pull it together. If nothing else, Job knows when he needs outside experts.
There are dozens of warehouses around the country that have partial or full retail stores within them. The fact that Apple Retail did the same is not a sign of Job's insanity or insight.
Excellent rebuttal. That's exactly the point. And Apple's profit margin on the iPod is clearly stronger than, say, the other MP3 players on the market which must heavily compete in terms of price. I bet the Zune and the other less popular players have a substantially more narrow profit margin.
but anyone with a brain can see that the oil money is headed out of the country like a black hole on our economy
Excellent point. And it doesn't stop with oil. In fact, nearly all manufactured products are now in that same condition. Margins on such products are super-low; in the end, a huge proportion of the money you spend on your iPod, car, or even tooth brush is basically money that is leaving the country permanently.
Oh, and it doesn't stop there. Food? Don't kid yourself - although the US has many farms, a huge proportion of our food comes from overseas. And most food grown here goes to migrant workers who send the money back home. Again, slim margins and foreign connections mean that the US is retaining a very tiny amount of the money spent on a product.
And it gets worse. Many of the largest, fastest growing companies are now overseas, in China and India and other third world countries. The investment banks aren't stupid - they're investing more into overseas corporations than in US startups. If you're an American startup, you're at a gross disadvantage versus having your operations in India or China or Taiwan. And yes, even that mutual fund that your 401k is invested in is primarily about pumping the value of companies with foreign assets or foreign operations. Why invest in a US company that gets 5% return when you can invest in a Chinese company that is more likely get a 25% return? The only answer is "diversification", which is more of a self-insurance strategy versus a way to maximize return.
At the end of the day, Pickens should invest wherever he wants to invest - its his money. But he is looking out for himself, as he is an investor looking for a money-maker in energy or any other sector. If he needs to convince the market that wind is a good investment, then he has already made his investment and is looking to pump its value for his own profit.
"It's not just governments that lose private data.
Golly, I just assumed that governments agencies, such as "TJX", "HSBC", and "Radio Shack" lose data.
Really, does the writer really think that Slashdot readers don't read Slashdot? TJX and HSBC certainly aren't part of any government, yet there have been numerous reports about the loss of a ridiculous number of records.
As for Radio Shack - I'm pretty sure that the government is propping them up. Then again, the government seems to be propping up banks too. OK, I stand corrected. Never mind.
It's pretty shitty that Apple is dropping support for machines less than 4 years old, and older machines that run 10.5 very well. It's especially galling that they are dropping support with a release that sounds like it should really be a free service pack or point release to 10.5 anyway. I never heard it expressed that Apple is dropping support for PPC before that platform is obsolete. I also never heard that this is a "service pack", but instead delivers quite capable new internals that can be leveraged by developers like me. The fact that it isn't delivered with a new feature like "spotlight" may make it less interesting to users. But at the same time, as a developer, it adds the promise of running my applications much faster, using much less expensive custom code.
I do suspect that Apple will eventually drop support for all operating systems that support the PPC chipset. But for now, both Tiger and Leopard are fully supported operating systems. Only power-hungry applications that absolutely require the capabilities of modern hardware would require this new OS. And to be honest, if you're running power-hungry apps like the one my company makes, you certainly spend much more cash on software versus hardware, and would be willing to upgrade your hardware to the latest and greatest to save yourself money and production time.
Obviously, new hardware will bring new opportunities that the older platforms won't be able to take advantage of. That's what Snow Leopard is all about. I'm sure that Apple will continue to strive for the core OS to continue to be buildable against many CPUs, including PPC - after all, that is a major reason why the iPhone and the Touch can run OS X - platform independence. I don't think Apple wants to lock into Intel X86 forever, but if they want to milk it for all its worth, they need to take full advantage of esoteric features.
Then realize that when you drive a compact or subcompact and have a mechanical failure that puts your vehicle out of your control while it is going in excess of 35 miles per hour, if you kill a pedestrian, you should be charged with manslaughter [...].
That sounds ridiculous, and it is If a car is so poorly maintained that it kills your mother walking down the street, then sorry, but it is the owner's responsibility. If it due to a poor mechanical repair by the mechanic, then responsibility should be transfered to the mechanic. If it is because the manufacturer designed it so it could readily fail even if properly maintained, then, the manufacturer should be found responsible. If it is due to a failure of another driver, or the road surface maintenance, then those respective parties are responsible.
If a tornado picks up a car and throws it upon your mother walking down the street, then we can blame it on "an act of God". Otherwise, there is a chain of human responsibility. People should be more responsible for their actions (or lack there-of), not less.
There is simply no compelling reason for me or my organization to deploy the new version of Office - why spend thousands for new licenses (and associated deployment and support) when I can stick with the tried-and-true 2004 and just wait a couple years for "Office 2010"?
I find that Office 2004 is quite a bit faster than Office 2008 on my Intel-based MacBook. I'm not sure what they did to it, but it isn't impressive in terms of performance. You'd think that converting from translated PPC code to native x86 code would be a huge performance advantage, but somehow the Microsoft managed to slow it down quite a bit.
Oh, and Office 2008 has fewer features, like no VBA.
What was Microsoft thinking during design and testing? Clearly they have totally lost focus and ability to release a decent product.
Sorry, they don't want a dish because it might ruin the looks? Put it on a pole. This sounds the classic NIMBY crap we always get from this corner of the country. Not only do they not live in your trailer park, the fact of the matter is that satellite sucks for internet connectivity.
since no company wants to spend the fortune it would cost to serve a few customers you want me (aka the guy who funds the government with the help of a bunch of other income earners) to pay for it? I actually agree with you on this point. Lots of people want rural living with all the benefits of Urban living... like hospitals, high speed internet services, nice roads, good schools, and public transit. And they ask the urban tax payers to spring for it.
Anyone can get high speed internet - for a fee. If they want it, they can pay for it. If they're really savvy, they can fire up their own non-profit and split the costs with others within the town.
Just a few weeks ago, one of my guys was looking at an old system that we have running. It is an old IMS application running on an IBM mainframe used to manage some factory equipment. We want to replace that system (even though "it just works"), so my guy was looking into it to see how it worked, as documentation is, of course, non-existent.
The source code was written by my first CIO in the mid 1980s (who retired in the early 1990s), and it had a comment at the top which stated that it was created in January, 1968. It is quite sloppy... clearly before anyone thought about writing pretty code. There is no doubt in my mind that it was originally written on coding forms, and subsequently loaded into a machine via the long-defunct keypunch department. The program, of course, is running on much newer hardware now, but the code that is running was written in 1968.
I speculate that there is a bunch of older code outside of my company.
[Children] will etch their names in the case, drop it, routinely hold it by the lid, drop it, spill stuff on it, drop it, get that cookie-saliva goo mixture from their fingers on it, etc. I bought an inexpensive sub-$500 laptop a few months ago, and it came with ALL of those features.
PC World has an article about 10 gadgets that are available in Asia but not here. It is a review of some quirky toys that the Japanese have and we don't! Just because the manufacturers have determined that American's don't want to buy some of their junky products doesn't mean that American's are missing out on "great stuff".
At the same time, the people in Asia don't have a lot of the junk sold in American stores. That's because a lot of American junk wouldn't be attractive to that market.
Remember why Chrysler was complaining that the Japanese were not importing American cars? I wonder if the Japanese thought they were missing out on something awesome, like that 1982 LeBarron.
This is a piece about some egomaniacs that want to express that they're simply smarter than so many others in business.
They actually think that their "11 Innovation Lessons" are new, different, and special.
Even a junior manager at a McDonald's has learned this stuff within their first 30 days on the job. Really. They are intrinsic to running any service organization.
Read through them, and ask yourself: would a McDonald's Junior Manager know this as an intrinsic part of his job servicing customers?
The short answer is YES, a junior manager at McDonalds would know 10 of 11 of them. The 11th just doesn't apply to McDonalds. Because Big Macs are perfect.
60 million very unique network users I can make the argument that a particular network design is "very" unique, suggesting that the design has "many distinctive attributes". Many grammar weenies would vehemently disagree with me.
But I have a tough time understanding that there could be 60 million "very" unique network users. I'd suppose that they'd just be unique.
We've been studying Vista at work, and our decision for now (which holds through at least Sepember) is to stick with XP. All the new PCs have Vista installed, and we're downgrading them to XP before deployment to customer's desks. Thank goodness for Microsoft's advancements in deploying XP!
The short story - we certainly don't want 1/3rd XP, 1/3rd Vista, and 1/3rd Win7, and that's what it is looking like when we don our future-hats.
So we decided this week that we'll stay with XP for as long as we can, using the principle that it is less expensive to support XP today, and we have no idea where Vista and Win7 will be. And we'll still have plenty of time to upgrade across the board if MS sticks with their current XP sunset plan.
We'll only start deploying Vista when Microsoft gives us clarity on the Win7 timeline, or when we conclude that Vista support will be less expensive than XP to support, or when we feel that we need to start converting to meet Microsoft's XP retirement plans.
When I was working for a software developer and wrote code, I didn't get a copyright on the code. My employer owns the code the code that I wrote. That was the deal you made with your employer - common in the software business. They could have let you retain copyright. Remember that employment agreement you signed? It explicitly mentioned that they own all your works that they pay you for (and maybe even more!)
The same way my employer paid me to create code, the school pays the professor to create and deliver lectures. If anybody owns a copyright on those lectures, shouldn't it be the school? It depends on the contract the school has with its professors. In the higher ed world, it is common for the professor to retain the rights to his or her own work. Unlike the software business.
I'm now part of BuzzCorps, a word-of-mouth marketing firm I always thought that Word of Mouth Communications (WoM) could be a great way to spread news about the best products and companies, but I realized that my friends were simply unable to communicate their thoughts and opinions all on their own.
That's likely why I went and installed Linux - the word-of-mouth for Windows just simply wasn't there.
But now there is a whole emerging INDUSTRY leveraging the idea of word-of-mouth!
Just think: This new industry could make this whole recession thing go away by spreading the word! American innovation remains strong! (spread the word!)
One huge reason for Walmart's fall is their unthinkable lack of choice. If you want the top 100 pop songs from the last five years, or the top 100 pop songs from the past 20 years, then Walmart is for you. Otherwise, the only choice seems to be on-line services, like Apple's wildly popular iTunes.
Apple's sales are so high because it is simply selling a lot of music that isn't available in any Walmart - the recording industry has no idea how to sell less popular tracks in a brick-and-mortar store. So they go unsold. Stupid.
No wonder Walmart is thinking less and less of the recording industry.
It is tough being the public face of a company. One of my friends was the spokesman for a large aerospace company. He was always "on-call" and had to be familiar with a ton of information at his fingertips.
In contrast, a blogging spokesperson sounds easy, as you can triple-verify everything through the tech staff, legal, and the upper echelons before publishing.
I'd be quite surprised if he left due to anything related to Vista. Heck, MS paid him to support Vista, and I'm sure he will continue to do so under the principle of "never bash a former employer until you retire".
Instead, I think he left for either an easier life and/or more money.
Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1 and 79/100 for the latest Opera 9.5 snapshot Just last week Opera was at 100/100 and Safari was at 98/100 for ACID3. What happened???
Oh yeah, those were numbers for non-production browsers, in-the-lab builds.
I was under the impression that iTunes allowed music sharing to other Macs and PCs with iTunes. Shouldn't you just be able to use that? Yeah, but then you wouldn't need a rack-mount server or a whole-house audio distribution system. And that ruins a lot of the fun.
Plus, if you wanted 20 digital streams running independently in your home, well, iTunes can't do that unless you have iPods as well - as iTunes is restricted to only 5 authorized computers at a time.
How do you distribute simultaneous streams of DRM-protected iTunes from a single computer to multiple rooms of the house? Would I really want three streams of centrally controlled audio from MY single 1U rack mount server with a single sound card coupled with a whole-house audio distribution system?
Installing the analog wiring in all my rooms would cost me thousands of dollars. This seems like a very expensive solution to a problem that doesn't impact most people. It might make sense if you run a museum or something, with independent audio pumped into each room - but that's it. And it seems quite fragile to run - too many parts.
increasing both by the maximum 7% allowed under its exclusive contract with ICANN But that 7% increase is in U.S. dollars.
Given the recent drop of the value of the dollar, that means that much of the rest of the world whose currency isn't based on the US dollar will see a 1% price drop, instead of a 8% price drop.
It is awesome that web standards are being fully embraced by important browser vendors.
Although this "competition for standards compliance" is a huge leap forward for the industry, we should give accolades only to those who have delivered production software products, versus those who say they will based on numbers that they see within their non-production builds.
Because in the end, the services that my organization delivers like quality browsers in the hands of real users.
Slashdot Mirror
I am keeping mine! Ha, ha, HA! Take that Stevie!
Whoa, you actually BOUGHT one of these? You do know that it is just cheap generic hardware with a specially modified, over-priced copy of OS X, right?
The sixth chapter, Inventive Spirit, cite several examples of how Jobs used his relentless management style to refine products, and most interestingly the Apple Store. He went so far as to develop a prototype store in warehouse at the edge of the Apple campus, and how he was willing to completely scrap the design of the store when it wasn't exactly right, costing him months of time.
Anyone in retail that builds successful (or even ultimately unsuccessful) stores knows that building a full scale model is a huge help when building a new retail brand (or updating an older image).
Jobs was not a retail guy before the advent of Apple Store. Clearly, Jobs hired some pretty bright retail people to help pull it together. If nothing else, Job knows when he needs outside experts.
There are dozens of warehouses around the country that have partial or full retail stores within them. The fact that Apple Retail did the same is not a sign of Job's insanity or insight.
And where did the other $226 go?
Excellent rebuttal. That's exactly the point. And Apple's profit margin on the iPod is clearly stronger than, say, the other MP3 players on the market which must heavily compete in terms of price. I bet the Zune and the other less popular players have a substantially more narrow profit margin.
but anyone with a brain can see that the oil money is headed out of the country like a black hole on our economy
Excellent point. And it doesn't stop with oil. In fact, nearly all manufactured products are now in that same condition. Margins on such products are super-low; in the end, a huge proportion of the money you spend on your iPod, car, or even tooth brush is basically money that is leaving the country permanently.
Oh, and it doesn't stop there. Food? Don't kid yourself - although the US has many farms, a huge proportion of our food comes from overseas. And most food grown here goes to migrant workers who send the money back home. Again, slim margins and foreign connections mean that the US is retaining a very tiny amount of the money spent on a product.
And it gets worse. Many of the largest, fastest growing companies are now overseas, in China and India and other third world countries. The investment banks aren't stupid - they're investing more into overseas corporations than in US startups. If you're an American startup, you're at a gross disadvantage versus having your operations in India or China or Taiwan. And yes, even that mutual fund that your 401k is invested in is primarily about pumping the value of companies with foreign assets or foreign operations. Why invest in a US company that gets 5% return when you can invest in a Chinese company that is more likely get a 25% return? The only answer is "diversification", which is more of a self-insurance strategy versus a way to maximize return.
At the end of the day, Pickens should invest wherever he wants to invest - its his money. But he is looking out for himself, as he is an investor looking for a money-maker in energy or any other sector. If he needs to convince the market that wind is a good investment, then he has already made his investment and is looking to pump its value for his own profit.
"It's not just governments that lose private data.
Golly, I just assumed that governments agencies, such as "TJX", "HSBC", and "Radio Shack" lose data.
Really, does the writer really think that Slashdot readers don't read Slashdot? TJX and HSBC certainly aren't part of any government, yet there have been numerous reports about the loss of a ridiculous number of records.
As for Radio Shack - I'm pretty sure that the government is propping them up. Then again, the government seems to be propping up banks too. OK, I stand corrected. Never mind.
I do suspect that Apple will eventually drop support for all operating systems that support the PPC chipset. But for now, both Tiger and Leopard are fully supported operating systems. Only power-hungry applications that absolutely require the capabilities of modern hardware would require this new OS. And to be honest, if you're running power-hungry apps like the one my company makes, you certainly spend much more cash on software versus hardware, and would be willing to upgrade your hardware to the latest and greatest to save yourself money and production time.
Obviously, new hardware will bring new opportunities that the older platforms won't be able to take advantage of. That's what Snow Leopard is all about. I'm sure that Apple will continue to strive for the core OS to continue to be buildable against many CPUs, including PPC - after all, that is a major reason why the iPhone and the Touch can run OS X - platform independence. I don't think Apple wants to lock into Intel X86 forever, but if they want to milk it for all its worth, they need to take full advantage of esoteric features.
That sounds ridiculous, and it is If a car is so poorly maintained that it kills your mother walking down the street, then sorry, but it is the owner's responsibility. If it due to a poor mechanical repair by the mechanic, then responsibility should be transfered to the mechanic. If it is because the manufacturer designed it so it could readily fail even if properly maintained, then, the manufacturer should be found responsible. If it is due to a failure of another driver, or the road surface maintenance, then those respective parties are responsible.
If a tornado picks up a car and throws it upon your mother walking down the street, then we can blame it on "an act of God". Otherwise, there is a chain of human responsibility. People should be more responsible for their actions (or lack there-of), not less.
There is simply no compelling reason for me or my organization to deploy the new version of Office - why spend thousands for new licenses (and associated deployment and support) when I can stick with the tried-and-true 2004 and just wait a couple years for "Office 2010"?
I find that Office 2004 is quite a bit faster than Office 2008 on my Intel-based MacBook. I'm not sure what they did to it, but it isn't impressive in terms of performance. You'd think that converting from translated PPC code to native x86 code would be a huge performance advantage, but somehow the Microsoft managed to slow it down quite a bit.
Oh, and Office 2008 has fewer features, like no VBA.
What was Microsoft thinking during design and testing? Clearly they have totally lost focus and ability to release a decent product.
Anyone can get high speed internet - for a fee. If they want it, they can pay for it. If they're really savvy, they can fire up their own non-profit and split the costs with others within the town.
Just a few weeks ago, one of my guys was looking at an old system that we have running. It is an old IMS application running on an IBM mainframe used to manage some factory equipment. We want to replace that system (even though "it just works"), so my guy was looking into it to see how it worked, as documentation is, of course, non-existent.
The source code was written by my first CIO in the mid 1980s (who retired in the early 1990s), and it had a comment at the top which stated that it was created in January, 1968. It is quite sloppy... clearly before anyone thought about writing pretty code. There is no doubt in my mind that it was originally written on coding forms, and subsequently loaded into a machine via the long-defunct keypunch department. The program, of course, is running on much newer hardware now, but the code that is running was written in 1968.
I speculate that there is a bunch of older code outside of my company.
GM has a VP for Quality. Exxon has a VP for Environmental Protection. Why shouldn't Microsoft have a VP of Open Source technologies?
At the same time, the people in Asia don't have a lot of the junk sold in American stores. That's because a lot of American junk wouldn't be attractive to that market.
Remember why Chrysler was complaining that the Japanese were not importing American cars? I wonder if the Japanese thought they were missing out on something awesome, like that 1982 LeBarron.
This is a piece about some egomaniacs that want to express that they're simply smarter than so many others in business.
They actually think that their "11 Innovation Lessons" are new, different, and special.
Even a junior manager at a McDonald's has learned this stuff within their first 30 days on the job. Really. They are intrinsic to running any service organization.
Read through them, and ask yourself: would a McDonald's Junior Manager know this as an intrinsic part of his job servicing customers?
The short answer is YES, a junior manager at McDonalds would know 10 of 11 of them. The 11th just doesn't apply to McDonalds. Because Big Macs are perfect.
But I have a tough time understanding that there could be 60 million "very" unique network users. I'd suppose that they'd just be unique.
We've been studying Vista at work, and our decision for now (which holds through at least Sepember) is to stick with XP. All the new PCs have Vista installed, and we're downgrading them to XP before deployment to customer's desks. Thank goodness for Microsoft's advancements in deploying XP!
The short story - we certainly don't want 1/3rd XP, 1/3rd Vista, and 1/3rd Win7, and that's what it is looking like when we don our future-hats.
So we decided this week that we'll stay with XP for as long as we can, using the principle that it is less expensive to support XP today, and we have no idea where Vista and Win7 will be. And we'll still have plenty of time to upgrade across the board if MS sticks with their current XP sunset plan.
We'll only start deploying Vista when Microsoft gives us clarity on the Win7 timeline, or when we conclude that Vista support will be less expensive than XP to support, or when we feel that we need to start converting to meet Microsoft's XP retirement plans.
That's likely why I went and installed Linux - the word-of-mouth for Windows just simply wasn't there.
But now there is a whole emerging INDUSTRY leveraging the idea of word-of-mouth!
Just think: This new industry could make this whole recession thing go away by spreading the word! American innovation remains strong! (spread the word!)
One huge reason for Walmart's fall is their unthinkable lack of choice. If you want the top 100 pop songs from the last five years, or the top 100 pop songs from the past 20 years, then Walmart is for you. Otherwise, the only choice seems to be on-line services, like Apple's wildly popular iTunes.
Apple's sales are so high because it is simply selling a lot of music that isn't available in any Walmart - the recording industry has no idea how to sell less popular tracks in a brick-and-mortar store. So they go unsold. Stupid.
No wonder Walmart is thinking less and less of the recording industry.
It is tough being the public face of a company. One of my friends was the spokesman for a large aerospace company. He was always "on-call" and had to be familiar with a ton of information at his fingertips.
In contrast, a blogging spokesperson sounds easy, as you can triple-verify everything through the tech staff, legal, and the upper echelons before publishing.
I'd be quite surprised if he left due to anything related to Vista. Heck, MS paid him to support Vista, and I'm sure he will continue to do so under the principle of "never bash a former employer until you retire".
Instead, I think he left for either an easier life and/or more money.
Oh yeah, those were numbers for non-production browsers, in-the-lab builds.
Plus, if you wanted 20 digital streams running independently in your home, well, iTunes can't do that unless you have iPods as well - as iTunes is restricted to only 5 authorized computers at a time.
Installing the analog wiring in all my rooms would cost me thousands of dollars. This seems like a very expensive solution to a problem that doesn't impact most people. It might make sense if you run a museum or something, with independent audio pumped into each room - but that's it. And it seems quite fragile to run - too many parts.
Given the recent drop of the value of the dollar, that means that much of the rest of the world whose currency isn't based on the US dollar will see a 1% price drop, instead of a 8% price drop.
It is awesome that web standards are being fully embraced by important browser vendors.
Although this "competition for standards compliance" is a huge leap forward for the industry, we should give accolades only to those who have delivered production software products, versus those who say they will based on numbers that they see within their non-production builds.
Because in the end, the services that my organization delivers like quality browsers in the hands of real users.