Linked List: November 15, 2011

Tuesday, 15 November 2011

Tough Questions, Indeed 

A “the sky is falling in Cupertino” piece by Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider:

One reason Jobs was so good at selling was that his product demonstrations were, for the most part, grand reveals of closely held secrets. Apple secrecy has made for great theater. Great theater makes for an excellent brand.

Our source close to Apple employees says that with Jobs gone, some of them are starting to loosen up about what they’re working on.

“Everybody has kind of dropped their guard,” he says.

OK, what have they “loosened up about”? Do tell.

Crickets.

The Chairman 

Board of director news from Apple:

Apple today named Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D. as the Company’s non-executive Chairman of the Board. Levinson has been a co-lead director of Apple’s board since 2005, has served on all three board committees — audit and finance, nominating and corporate governance, and compensation — and will continue to serve on the audit committee. Apple also announced that Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company, will join Apple’s board and will serve on the audit committee.

The Parable of the Stones 

Re: the previous item, on ideas being merely multipliers and the real value of anything being in the execution, here’s a terrific excerpt Philip Elmer-DeWitt pulled from Robert X. Cringely’s 1995 interview with Steve Jobs:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. […]

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic.

Ideas Are Just a Multiplier of Execution 

I’ve linked to this short 2005 piece by Derek Sivers once before, but it’s worth a re-link today, in the context of assessing Steve Jobs’s accomplishments:

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

So succinct, so accurate, so widely misunderstood.

Hypercritical, Episode 42: The Wrong Guy 

After finishing Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, I was disappointed overall, but didn’t take the time to completely formulate why. John Siracusa did, though, and his multi-faceted critique of the book is simply devastating. I went into this podcast knowing that I thought the book was flawed, knowing that Siracusa did too, and expecting to be nodding my head in agreement with him throughout the show. But it’s worse than that. Isaacson blew it, a one-time opportunity forever squandered. Jobs picked the wrong guy.

‘I’m Really Sorry About This, but I Can’t Take Any Requests Right Now.’ 

I got this yesterday afternoon, trying to use Siri. Seems like Apple has added a bit of self awareness regarding Siri’s online availability — if the problem is on Siri’s end, she’ll tell you so.

New Netflix ‘Tablet’ Experience 

Netflix:

Today we’re excited to let you know that we’ve launched a fully redesigned experience for our free app on all Android tablets including the Kindle Fire and NOOK Tablet. […]

This experience will be ready for the iPad in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. We listened to you, revamped our design, and hope you’ll enjoy it.

“(iPad Coming Soon)” is a phrase you don’t see often. Anyway, the current Netflix iPad UI really is pretty lame. Interesting spot they’re in — Apple has its own tablet, Amazon now has its own tablet, but Netflix instead relies solely on apps they’re creating for use on its competitors’ tablets. Apple and Amazon both offer end-to-end solutions, Netflix doesn’t, and I don’t think ever could.