October, 2008

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31
Oct 08

Techies and The Business

Techies vs The Business pretty much sums it all up [via Global Nerdy]

For technical people, they know computers. They know software. Given the right resources, they can make a computer do anything — anywhere, anytime. [...]

For business people, they know cashflow. They know the symbiotic relationship between employees and business owners. And in this day and age, there will always be people looking for jobs. Given the right resources, they can employ people to do anything — anywhere, anytime. [...]

What technical-minded and business-minded people are doing is essentially the same. What differs is their belief in what scales.

 

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29
Oct 08

Petropolitics

Thomas L. Friedman writes for Foreign Policy:

The First Law of Petropolitics posits the following: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states. According to the First Law of Petropolitics, the higher the average global crude oil price rises, the more free speech, free press, free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and independent political parties are eroded. And these negative trends are reinforced by the fact that the higher the price goes, the less petrolist leaders are sensitive to what the world thinks or says about them. Conversely, according to the First Law of Petropolitics, the lower the price of oil, the more petrolist countries are forced to move toward a political system and a society that is more transparent, more sensitive to opposition voices, and more focused on building the legal and educational structures that will maximize their people’s ability, both men’s and women’s, to compete, start new companies, and attract investments from abroad. The lower the price of crude oil falls, the more petrolist leaders are sensitive to what outside forces think of them.

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27
Oct 08

Message Endpoints

How many email addresses do you have? How many do you use?

Beyond my “normal” inboxes for home, work, gmail, cell, etc, I also send messages to many of my other email addresses:

It seems like email is working out to be a pretty good all-purpose input. A destination, a subject, a message body, and occasionally an attachment seems to be about all you really need for many different software as a service web sites.

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25
Oct 08

Taste

David on acquiring taste:

Having great taste is one of the most important characteristics of designers, programmers, and managers alike. Being able to discern what’s good from that which is bad. Which of the thousands of possible little details are key to make whatever you’re working on just right.

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22
Oct 08

Your next cell will be an iPhone

Here’s the short of it:

  • The iPhone is selling better than Blackberry (allegedly its primary competitor)
  • Apple is now the worlds third-largest cellphone maker (trailing only Nokia and Samsung)
  • Apple quarterly results analysis via Daring Fireball.

Who would think you could get to that scale – having never built a cell phone till a skant 15 months previously? At 10 million units sold in 2008, maybe this is just a fad.

My prediction remains the same: Apple will take over the cell phone market the way it did with the mp3 player market (80% of all mp3 players are iPods).

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