Linked List: February 18, 2013

Monday, 18 February 2013

NYT Public Editor on That Tesla Story ★

Margaret Sullivan:

My own findings are not dissimilar to the reader I quote above, although I do not believe Mr. Broder hoped the drive would end badly. I am convinced that he took on the test drive in good faith, and told the story as he experienced it.

Did he use good judgment along the way? Not especially.

Why Don Melton Retired From Apple ★

Don Melton:

The truth is I was done.

I accomplished far more there than I expected. And I had no dreams of greater power and glory, if such a thing were available to me. When I looked inside myself, I didn’t see ambition or even drive to continue. I’m not sure how that happened. Maybe I was just tired.

And when you’re responsible for so many people, you owe them more than that. Better to step aside and let others have their turn. So I did.

Reminds me of Dean Smith’s explanation for retiring as coach of the men’s basketball team at North Carolina:

He had come to believe so after a former North Carolina player and assistant under Smith, Larry Brown, brought his Philadelphia 76ers to Chapel Hill for training camp in the first week of October. The old coach, 66 now, measured himself against this younger one and found himself wanting. “Watching Larry out on the court, I said to myself, I used to be like that,” Smith said. “If I can’t give this team that kind of enthusiasm, I should get out.”

Adam Rifkin: ‘Tumblr Is Not What You Think’ ★

Adam Rifkin:

Tumblr provides its users with the oldest privacy-control strategy on the Internet: security through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity. Its users prefer a coarse-grained scheme they can easily understand over a sophisticated fine-grained privacy control — such as Facebook provides — that requires a lot of time and patience. To quote Sweet Brown, Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Tumblr proves that the issue is less about public vs. private and more about whether you are findable and identifiable by people who actually know you in real life.

123D Creature ★

Cool 3D modeling app for the iPad from Autodesk.

Bing’s Real Problem ★

Matt Yglesias, on Microsoft’s “Scroogled” anti-Google ad campaign:

The problem with Microsoft’s online service offerings isn’t that their TV campaigns are lame. It’s not even that the products are bad. But they’re not wildly better than Google’s search and email and so forth. Most people are just incredibly lazy. It’s easy to forget, but it took Google Search and Gmail a remarkably long time to rise to dominance during a period when they wiped the floor with the competition on the merits. Now Google has that change-aversion and laziness working in its favor. To beat them, you have to crush them on quality. And Microsoft’s not doing that. No ad campaign can overcome the basic reality of human inertia.

That’s the core problem with a lot of Microsoft’s products, like Windows Phone and Surface. They’re good products, but there’s no holy shit! in them. When you’re an upstart in any market, you need a disruptive product. That’s what happened with the iPhone and iPad for Apple, and with web search and Gmail for Google.

‘That Beautiful Thing’ ★

Mike Sielski, reporting for the WSJ:

One year from today, the Mets will add to their payroll a 47-year-old, past-his-prime power hitter who has a reputation as a malcontent — a player who has been retired from professional baseball for nine years and won’t play another game again.

Nevertheless, starting on July 1, 2011, Bobby Bonilla will remain on the franchise’s payroll for 25 years, collecting an annual salary of $1,193,248.20. Those are the terms the Mets agreed to Jan. 3, 2000, when they bought out the final year of Mr. Bonilla’s contract.

“That beautiful thing,” he said here Monday.

Nice work if you can get it.

Baseball Card Vandals ★

Spring training has started.