Linked List: August 30, 2013

Friday, 30 August 2013

Shutterstock 

My thanks to Shutterstock for again sponsoring the DF RSS feed. Shutterstock has a library of over 27 million stock photos, illustrations, vectors, and videos. The size and breadth of their collection is just amazing. I’ve been playing a game by myself, trying to search for something they don’t have an image for, and it’s nearly impossible. And they add over 10,000 images every day, from photographers around the world.

Shutterstock’s artwork is available by subscription and a la carte, and visitors can browse the entire collection for free. They even have a terrific free app for the iPhone and iPad.

Steve Ballmer and the Innovator’s Curse 

Horace Dediu:

Microsoft ascended because it disrupted an incumbent (or two) and is descending because it’s being disrupted by an entrant (or two). The Innovator’s Dilemma is very clear on the causes of failure: To succeed with a new business model, Microsoft would have had to destroy (by competition) its core business. Doing that would, of course, have gotten Ballmer fired even faster.

I strongly disagree with Dediu on this one. Vehemently.

Look no further than mobile. Microsoft correctly saw that mobile was important to the industry. They saw this early — “Pocket PC” devices first appeared in 2000, and by 2003 they had “Windows Mobile”. They blew it. They had a market lead at some point, but during a time when the handheld market was tiny. The technology wasn’t there yet to make mobile computing desirable to the mass market. By the time the technology was there, when Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, Microsoft was not only caught flatfooted, but Ballmer himself seemed incapable of recognizing just how remarkable the iPhone was.

Microsoft, in theory, could have produced the iPhone first — not the actual iPhone, of course, but the game-changing device that set the stage for the future where mobile is the primary computing platform for most people, most of the time. That wouldn’t have disrupted Microsoft’s lucrative existing businesses — or at least not immediately. And if anything, it might have helped shore up Microsoft’s Office business for another generation.

Chris Kohler on the Nintendo 2DS: Price Is Always the Problem 

Chris Kohler, writing for Wired’s Game Life:

If current 3DS owners look at the 2DS and think “Wow, that thing is dumb and I don’t want it,” I don’t think Nintendo much cares about that. The point is getting a different group of people into the DS ecosystem. Nintendo could drop the 3DS price by a few dollars, but it’s a much better idea to redesign the whole thing and ditch the elements that keep the price high and the margin low.

Good piece, but it only justifies the 2DS as a stopgap. Nintendo’s problem is not about where the proverbial puck is at this moment; it’s where the puck is going to be in the next few years.

BlackBerry Is a Failed State 

John Herrman, writing for BuzzFeed:

At the time of writing, the primary storefront of App World is overgrown and infested with low-quality products and bad omens. Among the most popular is Windows Live Messenger, an app for service that was formally discontinued by Microsoft some time ago; expensive third-party apps for Google Maps, a free service; “Cute Fancy Themes for BBM”; Followgram, which is an Instagram viewer that can’t post pictures; and 4G Signal Booster Advanced, a paid app which almost certainly cannot accomplish what it claims. Only the biggest of the big names are here, and not even all of them.

The most popular free pastime in BlackBerria appears to be a derivative game called “Candy Blast.” The most popular paid game is “Candy World 2,” followed closely by “Revenge of the Pigs,” a crude clone of an otherwise unattainable cultural import. This matches the last and most fatal of the signs of a failed state: an inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.

How the Fuck Did the Q10 Ship? 

Usage diary from a long-time BlackBerry user suffering with a new Q10.

(Another question: Why weren’t the gadget site reviews of the Z10 and Q10 more scathing?)

WSJ: Sales of BlackBerry’s Q10 Keyboard Phone Fall Flat 

Will Connors and Thomas Gryta, reporting for the WSJ:

Chris Jourdan, who owns and operates 16 Wireless Zone stores in the Midwestern U.S. that sell Verizon Wireless products, said customers didn’t show up for the Q10 as expected. His stores only ordered a few of the devices per location and “the handful that sold were returned.”

“We saw virtually no demand for the Q10 and eventually returned most to our equipment vendor,” he said.

In another indication the new BlackBerry devices aren’t selling well, used phone dealers aren’t reporting the flood of old BlackBerrys that typically comes when updated devices are released. Jeff Trachsel, chief marketing officer at NextWorth, which buys used electronics, said both the all touch-screen Z10 and Q10 launches were “nonevents” from a trade-in perspective.

This is no surprise. I actually have a borrowed Z10 (the one with no keyboard). It’s a crummy product.

Hardware-wise, it’s pretty nice. Good screen, good build quality, good size (a little bigger than the iPhone 5, nowhere near as big as those Android monsters). The soft-touch back is both pleasant and useful — it makes the thing less slippery.

Software-wise, it’s a disaster. Remember the half-finished but in fact secretly fully-operational Death Star in Return of the Jedi? Well, the BlackBerry 10 software works like the second Death Star looked — a half-baked mess.

Microsoft’s Stack Ranking and Its Poisonous Effect on the Company’s Culture 

David Auerbach, writing for Slate:

Following Friday’s news of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s imminent retirement, postmortems of his lackluster 13-year reign have pointed to stack ranking — which, to be entirely fair, predated him — as both a cause and a symptom of the corporation’s decline. As a software developer and later development lead at Microsoft between 1998–2003, I had to evaluate others and be evaluated myself under this system. And I can say that yes, stack ranking is as toxic for innovation and integrity and morale as media reports made it out to be, and then some.

In a good culture, A players want to be surrounded by other A players. In stack ranking, A players want to be surrounded by B players.