Google’s answer to this problem is that the device doesn’t matter. Its all about the browser. Apples answer is iCloud — it’s all about apps.

[A short recap for those just joining the conversation, iCloud is a thing that enables sharing of data between your devices. You take a picture on your iPhone, and moments later that photo is on your iPad, in iPhoto on your Mac, and even the photos folder on your PC. Apple is initially building this into many apps: iTunes, Photos, App Store, iBooks, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Backup, Contacts, Calendar, and Mail]

Why is this important?
Today maintaining state between computers, smartphones and tablets relies on a hodge-podge of technologies:

• Mail is kept in sync using special imap server settings on each device.
• Music is sync’d only with a cable connected to iTunes running on just one computer. Same for bookmarks, photos, iBooks.
• Kindle books, probable the closest in style to iCloud, syncs through my Anazon login. Yet that one login on each device gets me precious little beyond the books.
• Calendars use a mashup of CalDAV, Googles services, and Microsoft Exchange. My address book is in a similar situation.
• OmniFocus todo’s are sync’d through a custom WebDAV folder on my edstrom.net server.
• Dropbox, one of my favorite utilities, also comes close. Their big claim to fame is their open API which many applications have adopted instead of building their own sync layer. And there is certainly demand for it: take a look at all the Dropbox apps.
• Games may or may not save state…

In a lot of ways, I think iCloud is the answer to the old buzz catch-phrase: Single Sign-On. Now I can sign into any device -once- and all my apps, my photos, my documents, my music … will all be there. Outside of the browser window.

“It’s a hunk of rubberized plastic with a threaded bushing that will ultimately retail for $15. Last week, its designers hoped to raise $10,000 through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. In the first three days, the total contributions were $70,000.”

For some reason, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. Manufacturing seems to be one of those things that I am under the delusion you need a full team of people for, not just a couple people in a garage. What is next? Full-sized automobiles designed, delivered, and sold by a 2-person team working from their parents basement?

“We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”

I think vision and strategy are important (just watch the Knowledge Navigator from Apple’s distant past to understand how they got to be where they are today), but getting the right people in the right places is far more important.  Studies have found 10-fold differences in productivity between different programmers, and I see no reason why that wouldn’t apply to other roles. New tools routinely are found to be exponentially more useful than their predecessors.

“the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline – a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.” – Jim Collins

“People can learn skills and acquire knowledge, but they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.”- Jim Collins

I’m not a fan of calling people resources, but perhaps in the sense that they are the foundation of any company, people are by far your most important asset. Get the right people on the team first, and there’s nothing you can’t do exponentially better (or 10-fold better) than your competitors.

Seth Godin, describes these people:

“Is there anyone in an organization who is absolutely irreplaceable? Probably not. But the most essential people are so difficult to replace, so risky to lose, and so valuable that they might as well be irreplaceable.”

Now that is the type of person you want filling each and every role on your team.

Video:

• Blue Skies
• Corporate Policy on Social Networks

“Yes, we know you know that in the space of three short years Apple’s iPhone has humiliated the entire cellphone industry. But we bet you won’t FULLY APPRECIATE just how completely Apple has laid waste to incumbents like RIM, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson until you look at these two charts from Goldman Sachs (via FT).”

Remember: 50% of Apple’s revenue this year came from products that didn’t exist 3 years ago. That is some serious change.

“constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world”

Certainly learn from others, but it reminds me of #9 in Bre Pettis’s Done Manifesto:

“People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.”

To make real advances, to innovate and to learn, will require that you try, fail, and try again. It’s called experimentation. And as they said at Grumman Aerospace in the 60′s, “1 good test is worth a 1000 expert opinions”.

Amen.

Here’s what I think would happen:

• The completion of work would slow down for a couple weeks. Maybe a month.
• New talents would form.
• Inter-team communication, understanding, and empathy would get amazingly good.
• Cross training would actually happen, and single-points-of-failure would disappear.
• The business would see fewer things down because ___ was on vacation.
• Then the completion of work would start happening faster than it ever had before.
• And new ideas for old problems would start cropping up all over the place.
• And a whole bunch of “broken” things would get fixed (poor processes, kludgy systems, etc).
• And the team would re- self organize, and perform like never has before.

It would be brilliant.

“A tendency to overvalue the ends of technology has become one of the most persistent features of these heady times, but so much technology has been piling up for so long that we are now beginning to see how it transforms the way we thing. We are different for using it. This qualitative change can be seen most clearly in the World Wide Web, which grew from a simple, if subtle, idea into a global unification of all human knowledge, and, perhaps, a catalogue of human experience. Confronted with a space of ideas that has grown well beyond the ability of any person to “know” it, we find ourselves navigators in a familiar but impossibly vast sea of facts, figures, and fiction. Every individual who has become a web surfer has changed the way he thinks and the way he uses knowledge. Every business, as it encounters the Web, changes completely.“

[emphasis added]

“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”

The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!

“if you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.”

“Are most innovations born in environments of control or inspiration? Easy question.”

“Let Learning Lead. Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Learning is defined as the creation of new knowledge through experimentation.”

“So while [techies] trump up our skills at designing “easy to use” interfaces for our applications, millions of people are still trying to figure out how to get our beautifully designed application out of its zip file or disk image.  Or where in fact the Downloads folder is. Or what, exactly, a folder is. [...] I’ve watched firsthand as people who’ve struggled to do basic computer tasks as long as I’ve known them pick up an iPhone and be cruising around within hours, if not minutes. For people who do not already thoroughly understand computers, New World devices are easier to understand and easier to use.”

2) iCam’s latest update now lets you record video on motion and view it remotely on your iPhone. I hear it works through most firewalls that would otherwise block the video (nice!).

3) My favorite innovation in video, however, is USTREAM. They now have a free Apple-approved iPhone app that let’s you broadcast video from anywhere. This is truly amazing and will enable all sorts of citizen journalism. Can’t wait to see how this one unfolds.

“You can’t learn anything from doing something right. If you did it right, you merely confirmed that what you already knew or believed was correct. Nothing learned. But if you make a mistake, you can identify it and correct it.”

And then identifies to types of mistakes: commission (doing what you shouldn’t have) and omission (not doing what you should have).

“Errors of omission signify a lack of innovation in your team. Maybe someone thought of a better way but was afraid to say anything. Or maybe nobody even thought about it.”

He says the first step, is to stop using the word, and instead use a phrase that better represents what you mean. He typically finds that people mean one of these three when talking about “innovation”:

• Having new ideas
• Taking more risks
• Making things radically better

Other advise: “[Scott] tells us you have to be opportunistic and start small. High-priority challenges may be a temping place to start, but he suggested looking first at low-hanging fruit. You can build momentum for positive change by racking up a number of small wins that together move the project in the right direction. Having these small successes under your belt gives you more influence when attempting larger changes later on.”

There was a workshop specifically for Visual Management at Agile 2009 and a subsequent write-up on the presenter’s Visual Management Blog. But don’t be fooled – while this may be gaining traction in more technical areas, this will work for anyone’s project. There are lots of great pictures of examples and is worth your time to browse the pictures even if you don’t read the whole post. I’d suggest starting here.

I’m amazed at how well a non-technical solution can communicate to everyone on (or off) the team.

There are many more stats, and some good stories in the interview, but the question I pose for you is this: has your world and your products changed that radically, that quickly, and with so few resources in the last three years? If not, why not? The tools are there, and freely available, to let you do it.

One more tidbit: The original site was built in less than 6 months using only nights and weekends.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

“If you have to explain how your software works, you’ve failed.”

We could all extol the virtues of simplicity. And an intuitive user interface. And a “well designed” and “engaging” interface. But these are all hard to measure. The number of times people ask how to do <anything> in your software? Well, that’s easy to count, and the goal is a simple one: Zero questions.