Linked List: June 29, 2017

Thursday, 29 June 2017

iPhone: The Bet Steve Jobs Didn’t Decline 

Kontra:

Suppose you were the CEO of Apple in 2005 when a couple of intergalactic visitors with time-warping technology offered you this bet:

Design and manufacture a small mobile device that seamlessly combines the functionalities of a cellular phone, a web surfer, an audio/video player and a small PC, and your company will double its market cap and establish a third mass-market computing platform after Windows and Macintosh.

Would you take it?

Before you say, “Are you nuts, why wouldn’t I?” ponder just a few of the issues involved.

Remarkably prescient — Kontra wrote this back in 2008, but it reads like it was written with today’s hindsight.

‘Not Even Wrong’ 

Love this piece by Benedict Evans last month:

First of all, it’s quite common, especially in enterprise technology, for something to propose a new way to solve an existing problem. It can’t be used to solve the problem in the old way, so ‘it doesn’t work’, and proposes a new way, and so ‘no-one will want that’. This is how generational shifts work - first you try to force the new tool to fit the old workflow, and then the new tool creates a new workflow. Both parts are painful and full of denial, but the new model is ultimately much better than the old. The example I often give here is of a VP of Something or Other in a big company who every month downloads data from an internal system into a CSV, imports that into Excel and makes charts, pastes the charts into PowerPoint and makes slides and bullets, and then emails the PPT to 20 people. Tell this person that they could switch to Google Docs and they’ll laugh at you; tell them that they could do it on an iPad and they’ll fall off their chair laughing. But really, that monthly PowerPoint status report should be a live SaaS dashboard that’s always up-to-date, machine learning should trigger alerts for any unexpected and important changes, and the 10 meg email should be a Slack channel. Now ask them again if they want an iPad.

Joanna Stern Tries to Spend a Week Using an Original iPhone 

She lasted 12 hours.

‘Dear Craig Hockenberry. Please Write Twitterrific for iPhone.’ 

Ten years ago today, just four hours after walking out of the Apple Store at the King of Prussia Mall with my original iPhone (and just an hour or so after I finally got the damn thing activated through AT&T’s overwhelmed servers), I wanted native third-party apps. Not sure what in the world made me write “kthnxbye”, but I wanted a native Twitter client.

(Thanks to Joe Chott for reminding me about this tweet.)