Linked List: February 8, 2008

Friday, 8 February 2008

Pogue on Design 

David Pogue on the shoddy design quality of many consumer electronic products:

But you don’t have to have an M.B.A. to understand that refusing to compromise on design, for any reason, can lead to fantastic commercial success. Look at Apple, Google, Sonos, R.I.M. (makers of the BlackBerry), or (in its glory days) Palm. So what goes through the minds of executives who don’t sweat the small stuff? Don’t they realize that critics and bloggers will find and publicize the limitations? Don’t they realize that customers nowadays can compare notes, can warn each other away?

I think a lot of these MBA-type executives have no idea what good design really is.

Wil Shipley at C4[1]: ‘On the Creation and Maintenance of Hype’ 

One of the best sessions of the conference.

‘What Is Graphic Design?’ Poster Competition 

Veerle Pieters is holding a “What Is Graphic Design?” poster competition. Great prizes, and some great entries already in the pool.

The Men Behind the Curtain 

Cringely on the Microsoft-Yahoo saga. I like his comparison of Microsoft to General Electric.

FileChute 

My thanks to Yellow Mug for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. FileChute is an $18 utility that makes it easier to exchange large files. Here’s how it works: after you configure it with your .Mac credentials, you drop files onto FileChute and it uploads them to your .Mac iDisk and gives you URL to send to the recipient to download the file. FileChute can automatically wrap the files in a zip archive, and also works via FTP and WebDAV.