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2011

  • 2 min read

We Are All Weird

I generally enjoy the observations, insights, and inspiration that Seth Godin offers daily on his blog, but We Are All Weird doesn’t feel like his strongest work. If you’ve been anywhere near Internet culture in the last few years, you can easily think of 10 trends that support his primary thesis: mass anything is becoming a thing of the past. The barriers of entry to a huge number of industries have dropped so low that anyone can form the beginnings of a successful business with a minimum of investment. Those businesses can be successful by creating products that cater to a narrow niche of customers rather than the broad masses. The definition of success might differ a bit in this world of weird, but in general this is a positive trend that offers enormous opportunity for those who seek it.

That said, Godin fails to explore the potential downsides of this new paradigm. Weird can be great but it also has dark sides and the lack of that discussion in Godin’s book weakens his argument. If it is ever-easier to find the positive things that interest us, surely it is also ever-easier to find the negative things that interest us. Mass had the great benefit of building consensus by decree. Weird has the potential to fragment consensus irreparably. As we become more invested in niche communities, we may find that we are exposed to fewer and fewer uncomfortable ideas. The result is an insular population caught up in their own weirdness and whose weirdness is only ever reinforced. Weird may be a boon for marketers, but for a society that requires consensus to progress, it has the potential to be a significant obstacle.

(Amazon.com)

  • 1 min read

Design Is How It Works

This isn’t a bad book, but the author’s observations shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone: the best companies are great because the people who run them are passionate about the products they produce. That’s not the intended point of the book of course, the intent is to show that the success of these companies and their products stems from their design processes and design cultures at the core of the organizations. But the only reason that design can be central to these businesses is that the leadership teams have made a commitment to produce things that they themselves desire. And rather than making compromises to stay on budget or meet arbitrary deadlines, the managers (and most frequently it’s the founders) of these companies opt to redouble their efforts to manufacture something great.

(Amazon.com)

  • 1 min read

NASA’s Next Mars Rover to Launch in 15 Days

In 15 days we’ll be launching a car-sized robot at another planet 140 million miles away and it will be lowered to the surface by a rocket-powered crane. Science is awesome!

  • 2 min read

John gruber linked to this piece critiquing

John Gruber linked to this piece critiquing Microsoft’s new future vision video:

Why Microsoft’s Vision Of The Future Is Dead On Arrival
What “future of” tech/design videos need is a little less Minority Report and a little more Alien. Director Ridley Scott famously told his production designers to make Alien’s spaceship and costumes look roughed-up, slightly messy, and above all, lived in. Otherwise, it just isn’t believable enough to see yourself in–which is a design problem that both horror movies and corporate promos need to solve. Microsoft’s film is probably going viral as we speak, but imagine how much more reach it would have if it dared to depict a guy stuck in a meeting that sucked, or using his smartphone in an airport that was full of noisy assholes and long lines, or searching his touchscreen-enabled smart refrigerator for a quick meal because his kids are bouncing off the walls and he’s bone-tired from a long day at work?

And while there are many things worth criticizing in Microsoft’s video, a future that is too pristine is not one of them. The video isn’t a movie, it’s a sales pitch and it exemplifies the purest form of advertising: the selling of an idea—the idea that Microsoft is a forward-looking company that intends to build tomorrow’s technology. The film needs to depict a perfect future because that’s the future that Microsoft wants its customers to yearn for. To suggest that they should have made that future rougher is to suggest that Apple should include iPhones with cracked screens in its commercials, or the frustration of having no cell service.

Movies require realism to be believed. Products need idealism to be desired.

  • 2 min read

Honestly as much as i enjoyed the previous future

Honestly, as much as I enjoyed the previous Future Vision video, this one is kind of a disappointment. It is beautifully produced, and there are a couple of interesting ideas, but ultimately It’s just more of the same. Instead of feeling like a vision of the future, the video feels like a vision of an alternate reality where Microsoft makes products that people actually want to buy (rather than the products they have now that people begrudgingly_have_ to buy). Instead of seeing these concepts as something slightly out of reach, I see them as bizarro copies of things that Apple and Google have already achieved. In the first scene I couldn’t help but think, “The car doesn’t drive itself? Google has self-driving cars now, why doesn’t Microsoft have them in the future?” And in the closing scene, the girl with her tablet I instantly thought, “Oh, she has an iPad,” not, “Oh a future tablet from Microsoft.” Where is Microsoft’s iPad competitor? Windows Phone 7 is barely out of the starting gate and apparently only for phones while Windows 8 won’t be released for at least another year.

It’s been 4 years, I think, since the last video, and you have to start to wonder, who is actually delivering this future? How many MS Office products are gesture enabled, designed for touch, optimized for mobile, enable remote collaboration, or have voice assistance? How about Google’s productivity suite, how about Apple’s? It’s pretty clear that this future, if it is that, won’t be delivered by Microsoft.

  • 1 min read

The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris makes a strong case for the use of science to vet and direct what would normally be called a moral judgement. Quite simply, he points out that just because the questions we have about morality are difficult to answer does not mean that there are not objective answers to those questions. And, in fact, if we frame moral judgements as answers to the question, “Does this promote human flourishing?” it becomes quite clear that science and all of its associated methods can be used to find objective, rational and meaningful results that will ultimately lead to improvements in the lives of conscious beings. Overall, the book is definitely worth reading, if a bit on the dense and dry end of the spectrum (not unexpected given that the book is based at least partially on his PHD thesis).

(Amazon.com)