“In Word 2008, you have at least three different ways of viewing the same information (the style[s] of the current selection), i.e. a palette, a toolbar control, and a dialog box, and none of them is able to provide any useful information. In addition, each of them provides a difference piece of false information!”

Lots of screen shots. Good write up. Check it out.

“Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.”

This seems so natural and correct when talking about design. Applied to other professions, you might see:

• Great software does not come from great processes; it comes from great developers.
• Great engineering does not come from great processes; it comes from great engineers.
• Great testing does not come from great processes; it comes from great testers.
• Great management does not come from great processes; it comes from great managers.

Yet time and time again, we lean back on the processes that in the best of situations are mediocre and brittle.

“Over the past two years I have seen a lot of debate about the success of Agile software development. Agile methodologies can produce great results. This is well documented. Yet, in many companies, they don’t. This has lead many people to question Agile. Some reject it altogether. However, the root cause of the problem isn’t in the Agile methodologies. The root cause that makes Agile fail is in the companies adopting Agile methodologies.”

Let me rectify this.

iPad:

• The iPad will not replace a laptop. But it will replace more of your laptop than you think. Pick up the keyboard that goes with it, and it’ll be closer still.
• Not having a traditional desktop with files and folders is an asset to the iPad. It makes it easier to use, and easier to understand. If you don’t believe me, walk around your office and see how many people “file” things into their desktop.
• Reading books with iBooks works fine, and is a pleasure. The highlighting and notes abilities are very nice. I’ve read a few books on it now.
• The screen is not useable outside. I tried it on a cloudy day, and the reflection was too much.
• It is far better for consumption than creation. However there are some creative bits that work well on it (drawing, short emails, etc). As such, I haven’t quite found a good fit for using it at work.
• The iWork apps (I have Pages and Keynote) are great, but are not compatible with last-years desktop version of iWork. This is really disappointing, and worse: the iPad Keynote app reads my ancient PowerPoint files just fine.
• There are some really fun, addictive, and innovative games available for only a dollar or 2 each.
• I didn’t get the 3G version, but will next time The ability to pay for 3G access a month here or there would be perfect for vacations.
• Overall: if you have room in your budget for another device, you’ll love the iPad for surfing, social networking, sharing photos, and playing games.

iPhone 4:

I still have a 3GS, and will likely get the new phone (iPhone 5?) next summer.

First, lets talk about the antenna: From what I understand, the antenna thing might be an issue in certain situations, for some people, but for other people, they get reception where they never previously were able to. If you are concerned, get one of the bumpers – it fixes the death-grip problem. If you are really concerned, wait till January. The rumors are stronger than usual, and suggest that January is when there will be an iPhone on the Verizon network.

Other than that, I hear the screen is amazing and the camera is as good as many dedicated cameras. FaceTime is great, and I’m waiting to hear if this latest incarnation of video conferencing will be one that the public actually adopts.

If you’re concerned about an “open” platform and are thinking of picking up an Android phone, I’d highly suggest reading this, this, this, this, or this.

Overall: Apple is still making the best smart phone, at a competitive price. Other phones are at least a year behind in technical capabilities, and if you look at their usability, I have yet to see a report of a new phone that is better than (or as good as) the original iPhone that was released 3 years ago.

“Most of us believe in positive self-talk. “I can achieve anything,” we mouth to the mirror in the morning. “Nobody can stop me,” we tell ourselves before walking into a big meeting. We believe we’ll do better if we banish doubts about our ability or our strategy and instead muster an inner voice that affirms our awesomeness.

But not Bob [the Builder]. Instead of puffing up himself and his team, he first wonders whether they can actually achieve their goal.”

Pink then dives into some research on whether positive self-talk actually improves performance or not.

Spoiler: Having doubts improves performance.

Links:

• RSS in Plain English
• Infographic on how people spend their time
• Google Reader
• Pulse on iPad
• Reeder on iPad
• Instapaper
• Social Networks Twitter and Facebook
• Twitter on iPhone
• Flipboard on iPad

I thought I’d share what the 1st filter pulled out of the water in the last 6 months.

The filter on the left is after 6 months of use. The filter on the right is what it looked like new.

“To get an idea of how deeply Apple continues to penetrate the market, last year the company produced 50% less in sales and over 71% less in earnings than it will this year. That means the 2010 Apple is nearly 50% larger than the Apple of 2009 – almost an entirely different company. If this growth continues into 2011, Apple will surpass Exxon (XOM) to become the largest corporation in America.”

There are a lot of numbers in the article. Pretty interesting though. Especially when you consider “Microsoft spent seven times as much as Apple on R&D over the past four years” (via Daring Fireball). One has to wonder how Apple does so much with so little.

Building a product or a feature that works is only half the problem, and probably a lot less of the problem at that. How do people find get it? How do they learn how to use it? When do they use it? How do they fix it if it breaks? How do they pay for it? What happens if they don’t use it?

Do they even *like* using it?

“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.

“History suggests the mobile Internet has potential to create / destroy more wealth than prior computing cycles based on 10x user multiplier effect (from cycle to cycle, the number of users / units increases tenfold). Regarding pace of change, more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.”

You don’t have to read between the lines to get that mobile is a *big* thing, and coming fast. Good read.

“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”

“[They] are using the tablet-style computer for tasks as varied as accessing work e-mail, approving shipping orders, and calling up on-the-spot auto-finance options.”

It takes time to change things, but now that Apple is bigger than Microsoft, one has to wonder how long corporate will continue to cling to the underdog.

“I never make technology-buying decisions based on future promises, rumors, or potential. I let other people be the bleeding-edge extremely early adopters, and I stick with what I know will work and stay out of my way. I don’t buy things that are “getting better”, because they usually don’t. Whatever caused them to be lacking in their current release will usually prevent them from being great in future releases.

I buy things that are great today. They’re usually things that have been great since day one. And, more often than not, they’re Apple products.”

So much could be said about the promises of the future vs the realities of today. You have to make your decisions based on todays reality, because tomorrow’s promise may never come.

Here are some of mine. Which do you disagree with? Why?

Workarounds are never a good thing. Short term workarounds are never short-term. They should be avoided. Do it right the first time, and if you can’t due to time or budget, delay the project. I hate technical debt.

Plan as you go is more appropriate to life and to projects, and returns better results, than planning everything up front (ie agile vs. waterfall). What we are talking about is predicting the future. Sure, you can be somewhat accurate, some of the time. But it’s just a guess. You’ll be more accurate if you don’t predict too far out. If you’re more accurate, you’ll be happier.

The problems of new are less than the problems of the old. On occasion you will run into a bug by upgrading software to the latest version. But I’ve found that on balance, I have far fewer compatibility & stability problems if I keep up to date. And as a bonus, new features!

Buy the well-built item once instead of the cheap thing multiple times. It’s eco-friendly, and you get to have the quality item to use every day. My wife and I had been wearing out a $10 garlic press once every 12 months or so with basic wear and tear — till we bought the Rösle Garlic Press for (at the time) $30. Five years later, it still looks good as new and works brilliantly.

Price is not correlated to the value. Just because it’s expensive doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot. Conversely, just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it has no value. Open-Source Software, Wikipedia, a walk with your kids – these all have a lot of value, and they don’t cost you a dime.

Deals are rarely worth it. Everything is “on sale”. Everything is discounted. Of course, there are good deals to be had. It’s just that the effort to find and take advantage of the deal is more costly than any savings I might obtain. There is a reason why rebate forms are difficult to complete: it is in the company’s best interest that you never fill them out.

I believe in Scaling Software over Scaling People. See my blip on Techies and The Business, or the whole article here.

The most important attribute to any employee is their willingness and ability to learn. I’ve written about this one a lot. I think learning is the key to innovation, that through mistakes you get better, that Adapting is the Most Crucial Skill You’ll Ever Learn, and that progress (and who doesn’t want progress?) is an act of discovery.

So!  What are some of your beliefs?

If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success. – James Cameron, director of Terminator and Titanic, from The New Yorker [via SvN]

“Designs take a leap forward when you kill the things you didn’t know you were holding on to.” – Ryan @ SvN

“I embrace change like I trust confidence.” @Rands

“1-size-fits-all mission stmnt: We provide best of breed productivity solutions that help maximize ROI for your strategic initiatives.” @jeffpatton

“In agile we plan and we plan to replan” – Ronica Roth [via @dwhelan]

“[When robots attack,] I don’t think you want to be known as a human being that is against computers.” — Peter Thiel [via @dcurtis]

“Flow is the New Center” – Leif Larson

“To understand good leadership, think about how far you’ll go when someone you like asks you for a favor.” @Rands

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – Winston Churchill

“frustration is just passion being slowed down by a conversation” @alshalloway

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  —Benjamin Franklin, 1755

The importance of a task is inversely proportional to the time you need to ignore it to render it moot. —Hugh Greenway

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. —Daniel Patrick Moynihan

1 good test is worth a 1000 expert opinions–coined at Grumman Aerospace during 60s lumbar module dev pgm. [via @dwhelan]

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.

Illiterate may be too strong of a word, but the sentiment is correct. The key talent for people today is no longer to master a trade or a specific skill, but to become adapt at adapting to change. If you can anticipate change and react to it faster than your competitors, it doesn’t just put you a little ahead, it puts you an order of magnitude ahead.

When I started college, they said that 90% of the jobs we would be taking when we graduated 4 years later, hadn’t been invented yet. And you know what? They were right. If change is happening even faster now, what long-held perspectives must you shift to keep from being left in the dust?

“if you want to foster innovation, [let] people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about”

He’s talking about Dan Pink’s video, the surprising truth about what motivates us:

“My cloud extends my reach, my experience and my intelligence, making me much more effective as some sort of weird ‘colony individual’ than I could be on my own.   I have no doubt that within a few years, as the tools improve, nearly every decision I make will be observed and improved upon by my cloud.  Which is wonderful, incredible, and – to quote Tony Abbott – very confronting.”

He talks about a few specific incidents where he’s gotten some very useful and timely advice while traveling, and then notes that some industries have seen major shifts due to the ability for people to be hyper-connected. Specifically:

“There’s a direct correlation between the speed at which a motion picture bombs and the rise in the number of users of Twitter.  It used to take a few days for word-of-mouth to kill a movie’s box office:  now it takes a few minutes.  As the first showing ends, friends text friends, people post to Twitter and Facebook, and the news spreads.  After the second or third showing, the crowds have dropped off: word has gotten out that the film stinks.  Where just a few years ago a film could coast for an entire weekend, now the Friday matinee has become a make-or-break affair.  An opinion, multiplied by hundreds or thousands of connections, carries a lot of weight.”

3 days of movie sales down to one … all because we can get recommendations from each other that much faster. I wonder what other industries Twitter is altering?

I only have 167 followers on twitter (Mark has 6800), so I’m not sure that I qualify for the “hyper” prefix. But I’ve posted a few questions and gotten some  select responses. Nothing big, and certainly nothing that has changed my daily use. I can see the potential if I were to expand my social graph.

So then.

I find the technology-enabled social connections interesting, but not yet vital. What concerns me is that what happens when they *become* vital?

I’ve read about kids getting (accidently) left out of birthday parties because the invite went out over SMS and they didn’t have a cell phone. It’s stupid, unintentional, and yet a real problem. Staying plugged in takes time, but it takes cash too. Cell phones have a hefty cash commitment. I guess what I’m wondering: will “hyper” connectivity (and all of it’s advantages) become a class differentiator? Will there be the hyper-connected-have’s and the hyper-connected-have-not’s? The latter of who will be doomed to spend too much money on bad movies the 2nd day of it’s release?

Mark says:

“We can choose to be entirely connected, or entirely disconnected.  We can let the batteries run flat on our mobile, or simply turn it off and put it away.  But there’s a price to be paid.  Absence from connection incurs a cost.  To be disconnected is to cede your ability to participate in the flow of affairs. Thus, the modern condition is a dilemma, where we balance the demands of our connectedness against the desire to be free from its constraints.”

[emphasis added]

I have no conclusions yet, just interest, and perhaps some questions. Hyperconnected Health was a good read.