Linked List: January 2, 2015

Friday, 2 January 2015

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote BBEdit 11, the latest version of the amazing and long-standing text editor for the Mac. Where do I even start to describe my decades-long love for this app? All DF feature-length articles? Written in BBEdit. Markdown? I created it using BBEdit. I’m more familiar with BBEdit than any other piece of software in the world. I breathe BBEdit. The time I’ve invested learning its ins and outs has paid me back in spades, productivity-wise. Whether I’m writing prose, or writing code, I never feel hampered in the least by my editor.

BBEdit is scriptable, tweakable, fast, robust, and stable. You can try it for free, and buy it for just $50 — an amazing value.

Chris Pepper Responds to Paul Graham on Programming Jobs ★

Chris Pepper:

The immigrants I interview and work with are not 100–1,000 times as effective as US Citizens, which is the implication I get from Paul’s article: that the US has plenty of non-great programmers, but we need to recruit outside our borders to find enough great programmers. Immigrants are not hired with an understanding or expectation that they will be twice as effective as US candidates. We hire immigrants (and employers deal with the costs and paperwork) because we need people to do lots of (often basic) jobs, and there are simply not enough qualified candidates — whether programmers, system administrators, or other tech types. […]

But be honest. H-1B visa demand is not high because companies are striving for excellence. The visas are being used to preserve the existing labor market (salary levels) rather than paying higher salaries as dictated by supply and demand.

Fred Wilson’s 2015 Predictions ★

A slew of DF readers have emailed regarding Fred Wilson’s pessimistic prediction for wearables and Apple Watch in particular:

Another market where the reality will not live up to the hype is wearables. The Apple Watch will not be the home run product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been. Not everyone will want to wear a computer on their wrist. Eventually, this market will be realized as the personal mesh/personal cloud, but the focus on wearables will be a bit of a head fake and take up a lot of time, energy, and money in 2015 with not a lot of results.

I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s predicting “a flop” — he’s just saying it won’t be a “home run”. (Wilson, too, is annoyed by Business Insider’s headline.) But the iPod, iPad, and iPhone were all very different sorts of home runs. The iPod took years before it became a mainstream hit. The iPad started faster than any other Apple product, but plateaued far sooner than the iPhone. And the iPhone is simply unprecedented — it’s the biggest home run in the history of computing.

I don’t think it’s possible for Apple Watch to be an iPhone-type success. iPad- and iPod-like are possible, though.

I thought this was the more eyebrow-raising of Wilson’s predictions:

Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US. This will bring a strong player in the non-google android sector into the US market and legitimize a “third mobile OS” in the western world. The good news for developers is developing for non-google android is not much different than developing for google android. [Lowercase “google” and “android” all sic.]

I don’t see Xiaomi having success introducing a third mobile OS in the West, and I don’t see them having success selling hardware here, either. It’s no coincidence that to date they’re only operating in countries with weak IP laws. I’ll be surprised if Xiaomi even tries to enter the Western markets this year, and I’ll be downright shocked if they do so and succeed.