Linked List: May 7, 2012

Monday, 7 May 2012

Joe Biden Endorses Same-Sex Marriage 

Vice President Joe Biden:

Look, I am Vice President of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights. All the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.

What Retail Is Hired to Do: Apple vs. Ikea 

Interesting comparison of Ikea’s and Apple’s retail stores, by Horace Dediu and Dirk Schmidt at Asymco. Includes this excerpt from Clayton Christensen’s Integrating Around the Job to Be Done:

The company has been slowly rolling its stores out across the world for [close to 50] years; and yet nobody has copied Ikea.

Why would this be? It’s not trade secrets or patents. Any competitor can walk through its stores, reverse engineer its products and copy its catalog. It can’t be that there is no money to be made: its owner Ingvar Kamprad is the third richest person in the world. And yet nobody has copied Ikea.

eBay’s iPad App 

Mikhail Madnani, writing at Beautiful Pixels about the new 2.0 release of eBay’s iPad app:

The overall app is very smooth, responsive (are you listening Facebook?) and supports both portrait and landscape mode. The app is full of pleasing subtle textures that make you want to use the app more and more.

Good design. From eBay. Think about that. This is Apple’s influence on the industry as a whole.

Apple Releases iOS 5.1.1 

Only 50 MB. Hurrah for incremental updates.

Dalton Caldwell: ‘Two Brilliant Moves That Helped Create the Apple iOS Powerhouse’ 

Dalton Caldwell, hailing the strategic wisdom of Apple’s 2002 decision to take the iPod (and iTunes) to Windows, and the way they segment the iPhone market with older models, rather than designing new low-end models from scratch:

Why hasn’t Dell or Samsung or HP implemented their own version of the “Moore’s law market segmentation” strategy? Nothing about this strategy would seem to require it to happen at only Apple (or is specific to mobile devices). I am sure there are a lot of reasons, and there is a very good chance I simply don’t understand the hardware supply chain complexity.

I suspect one reason no other phone maker does this is that so few high-end phones from three years ago would have any appeal today. iPhones are designed to stand the test of time.

Update: Apple shipped iOS 5.1.1 yesterday. iPhone 3GSs bought in June 2009 are eligible to upgrade to iOS 5.1.1 today. How many Android phones from 2009 are running an even vaguely up to date OS? None.

Evernote Acquires Penultimate 

Phil Libin, writing for the Evernote weblog:

Penultimate is hugely popular. In fact, according to Apple, it’s the #4 best-selling paid iPad app of all time. When you have such a great product, the last thing you want to do is mess with it. That’s why Penultimate creator, Ben Zotto, is joining Evernote to head up future app development. Penultimate will stay a separate, elegant application and will get many much-requested Evernote-y improvements including full search and synchronization. Ben will also lead the effort to put handwriting and digital ink functionality into other Evernote products and platforms, so you’ll see handwriting cross-pollination popping up everywhere.

Penultimate is a great app, but I think it’s been eclipsed by Paper.

Apple ‘Forced’ to Respond to Ultrabooks? 

Erica Ogg:

Today, you can buy an “ultrabook” that’s thicker than an inch, is heavier than 4 pounds, has a 14-inch screen, a traditional spinning hard drive, and decent battery life. They’re also priced between $700 and $900, or slightly below the $999 entry level 11.6-inch MacBook Air. In other words — nothing has changed. PC makers have been making laptops for years that could beat Apple on specs and often price and still Apple has done its own thing and continued to rake in profits.

Exactamundo. Apple is about as fearful of ultrabooks as they were of netbooks.

2007’s Pre-M3 Version of Android: The Google Sooner 

Steven Troughton-Smith:

When Google first showed off Android, they showed it running on a device very similar to Blackberries or Nokia E-class devices of the time. This device was the Google Sooner - an OMAP850 device built by HTC, with no touchscreen or WiFi. This was the Android reference device, the device they originally built the OS on.

Recently, I got access to a Google Sooner running a very early version of Android. With all the recent information coming out of the Oracle vs Google trial, I thought it would be interesting to take you on a brief tour of the OS.

Fascinating stuff.

‘Wake Up. Be Bold.’ 

I’m sure this campaign will sell a lot of BlackBerrys and turn RIM right around.

Update: Neven Mrgan:

I’m sure RIM’s new “You’re either in business or you’re not” campaign won’t be ironic at all two years from now.

‘The Avengers’ 

Saw The Avengers last night with my boy and we both loved it. Good characters, good effects, relentless pacing, and a nice sense of continuity with the movies that came before it. In a word: it was fun. And: it was funny. Ruben Bolling tweeted:

You can spend $800,000 on a certain special effect, and the audience can yawn. Enhance it with a genuine laugh and the audience is vibrating.

Writer/director Joss Whedon wielded a deft touch and deserves acclaim. It really offers the best of what theatrical big-budget blockbusters can offer. Effects that demand a big screen, and laughs that are best shared with a packed house.

If VLC Can Ship a Free DVD Player, Why Can’t Microsoft? 

Ed Bott on Microsoft’s decision not to include DVD playback in the regular versions of Windows 8.