Linked List: February 8, 2013

Friday, 8 February 2013

Apple’s Biggest Problem: Retention of Talent 

Dan Frommer tweeted:

This is not at all a scientific study, but most of the Apple employees I follow on Twitter have quit within the last ~9 months. Huh.

Methinks Guy English’s #3 problem that Apple faces should have been #1:

If there’s a problem for Apple it’s that they’ve already invented the future. It’s a done deal. The best and brightest engineers and product managers may move on to other ventures. Less likely to succeed, of course, but that’s less of an issue for them given the rainfall of AAPL gains. We’ll have to see what happens.

To be clear, this is not an exodus. Far from it. But it’s a continuous challenge for the company to retain the enormous number of talented people it employs.

Let’s Make Mistakes 

No new episode of The Talk Show this week, but to fill the void, may I suggest the latest episode of Mike Monteiro and Leah Reich’s Let’s Make Mistakes, with special guests John Moltz (my wife) and Amy Gruber (my other wife). You can also catch Amy guesting on the latest episode of Dave Wiskus’s Unprofessional, which was recorded live on stage during Macworld Expo last week.

Click to Flash in Chrome 

Another good tip for minimizing Flash but keeping it around for when you really do need it.

Trailer for ‘Room 237’ 

Not sure how the trailer for a documentary about The Shining could be any better than this. (If you’ve never seen the trailer for The Shining, watch that first.)

Flickr’s Comeback 

Mat Honan:

Thanks to bureaucracy and inaction, Flickr missed out on the mobile and social revolutions that have defined the last five years. Meanwhile, Instagram became the billion-dollar photo-sharing service and Facebook became, well, a company that could afford to buy a billion-dollar photo-sharing service. […] Flickr could have been Yahoo’s Instagram, or maybe even Facebook. Instead, it became its Friendster — a reminder of a bygone era and what could have been but never was.

But something funny happened.

Webstock 2013 

A week from now, I’ll be speaking at Webstock 2013, in beautiful Wellington New Zealand. I spoke there two years ago, and I don’t hesitate to call it the best conference I’ve ever attended. Everything about it was great: city, venue, speakers, attendees, hosts. This year’s lineup of speakers is crazy good: Jim Coudal, Michael Lopp, Mike Monteiro, Bruce Sterling, just to name a few.

There’s a handful of seats still available for the conference (as well as for some of the workshops earlier in the week); if you can swing it, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Adobe Issues Emergency Flash Update for Attacks on Windows, Mac Users 

Dan Goodin:

Adobe Systems has released a patch for two Flash player vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited online to surreptitiously install malware, one in attacks that target users of Apple’s Macintosh platform.

If you somehow think you need Flash Player on your Mac, you have to update. But consider that you probably don’t. I wrote “Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It” back in November 2010, and have been using that strategy ever since. A few years down the road now, I encounter fewer and fewer “only works with Flash” online videos.