Decentralised control strengthens the whole.

Some dick on Mozy's forum:

> Backup is about trust, confidence ...
> Basically Mozy is saying "our business model is not good enough to sustain the service offered, so we have to charge you more". Sorry, I cannot trust you anymore.
> I'm a happy customer since 2006, you saved irreplaceable photos of my kids after a RAID huge failure ... I've recommended you do literally dozens of people.
> I was so happy with the "streaming" recovering utility ...
> And you abruptly (by email unlike some others apparently) ask me to triple my bill. I was more than offended by the "loyalty bonus".
> Like others I've looked at the competitors and I think I'll cancel my account tonight.

He loved their features & they'd saved his bacon for him in the past, but in his own words, Mozy's “business model is not good enough to sustain the service offered, so [they] have to charge [him] more”. What, pray tell, are they supposed to do about that? Keep mum about it until they collapse, taking his irreplaceable photos with them? Go back in time & charge more from the beginning? They're *doing something to maintain the service*, & they're *telling him about it*. What's not to fucking trust? The cunting dickhead seems to think that because they gave him something once, failure to do so in perpetuity is tantamount to slaughtering his firstborn. It's a pain, yes, & perhaps moving to someone else is a good move, but what they have done makes them *more* trustworthy than before; companies die without warning their customers rather than admit to unsustainability all the time. Fucking dickheaded moron.

tl;dr: Twitter provides the feed, & sure, the content is provided by users but it's Twitter who takes the brunt of the cost in terms of cold, hard cash. When they say they just *might* have to restrict that one of these days in order to break even, STFU & be grateful they've funded your gravy train this long.

Can't say I disagree. It's a bit rough on The Icon Factory in particular, since they originated the word “tweet”, the blue bird motif, & a few other things Twitter has adopted wholesale, but Twitter is still footing most of the bill for this thing to happen at all.

There are far too many miners in software. Even people who seem like farmers turn into miners when a software giant comes calling.

* When Facebook bought Sofa, Sofa at least sold Versions & Kaleidoscope on to new developers—many bought-out companies just let their products rot & their users dangle.
* When Oracle bought Virtual Iron, they bought the product as well, & rather than gradually integrating it into VirtualBox or at least providing a migration path, they refused to release updates that were developed *before the deal was closed* & essentially killed the product stone dead.
* The proportion of the market made up of programs like Disco, abandoned by their developers around version 1.0.2 because the dev got bored, is growing fast. The Mac App Store doesn't help with that, as elucidated in Shipley's more recent article about the MAS needing upgrade discounts: Apple's policies strongly encourage this abandonment.

Some fucker in the returns department didn't apply a credit to his account when they took his phone in, so Vodafone harassed the fuck out of him & sold his “debt” on to a debt collector. Happily the staff at a Vodafone retail store helped him work it out, without him “even” having to go to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Bastard company. So you're huge & miscommunications happen… so what? Remove the log from your own fucking eye.

Back in the day it was good, the best even, & short-sighted devs made it into a zombie by refusing to develop for anything else. MS infuriatingly but understandably didn't bother improving it since there were no users jumping ship, & IE6 became the bane of web devs everywhere. Now there are developers doing the same thing for WebKit.

Lying scum.

Nokia is dominated by an engineering-only mindset which eschews design. “Another, blunter way of putting it: there's nobody with any taste in the decision-making echelons at Nokia.”

An ex-Nokia engineer's email to Daring Fireball, explaining why Nokia kept churning out rubbish.

I love some Apple products, particularly their hardware. Their software is shit, but some of it's the best available. But they make it hard to even *like* them as a company. Hell, sometimes they're fucking cunts, screwing their competition & customers alike. Their attitude to iPad-viewable content is one of those times. A depressing but well-elucidated take.

Little bits & pieces of startup wisdom. Not advice per se, but rather explanations of where people go wrong in *thinking* about startup strategy. Most of it seems to be about not doing more than you need to. Interesting reading though.

I save this not because it's interesting in itself—Gizmodo bought stolen property then tried to extort Apple with it, they were juvenile dickwads on a pathetic power trip, blah blah blah—but rather because I have such a visceral reaction to the picture of Jason Chen holding up the iPhone 4 prototype. FUCK he's revolting, & fuck looking at him inspires violent urges in me. He looks like such a smug fucking git, attention-whoring over his stolen goods & ego tripping on "showing Apple". Plus I find him disgusting to look at anyway. There are handsome & beautiful people of the same ethnicity, but he's exemplary of their *worst*. Hideous. Man, talk about digging myself a hole… but at least I'm not Jason Chen.

On Amazon's Kindle Fire & its data collection potential, with a note of how Google loses out in this.

Shitty ads will be the first sign of Apple's post-Jobs-era wane. They may last a long time, but when they do go their ads will be the first sign.

All in the name of advertising. We badly need a decentralised alternative to Twitter & Facebook, to say nothing of Google+. G+ is the best of the three but I can't think of a way of decentralising it off the top of my head. Twitter could be done purely over XMPP with some software support though; the architecture, security, & model are all there already.

Twitter is changing, becoming a more focussed organisation with little of its initial “hippy-programmer“ community-friendly attitude. At the same time it's trying to become more of a central info clearing-house, rather than allowing decentralisation. A pity; like al3x, I think decentralisation is not only extremely desirable from a social point of view, but necessary for "tweeting"'s survival.

They fuck developers over hardcore.

“Asides from it being a complete bonus when there’s no queue for the Ladies, I’d rather a conference was full of eager people who bought their tickets because they were interested and wanted to engage with other attendees. Would you rather there were 100% enthusiastic, participatory attendees or a conference where there was 50/50 male/female attendees where 30% were just there to make up the numbers and weren’t bothered about being there?”

A tale illustrating how the telco business works. Frighteningly accurate concerning Engineering vs. IT.

Google makes billions of dollars in revenue each fiscal quarter. That money comes about by the same process that all companies use: They sell a product to their customers. Their customers pay money for that product. Who's Google's customer? You? Really? When's the last time you paid Google for anything? Advertisers are Google's customer. What do they sell to advertisers? They sell you. Or, at least, they rent you out, or provide access to you.

A recurring tale of an incumbent not being able to stop an upstart beating them somewhere.

They're the single buyer that controls their (various) markets. In hardware in particular, they use their enormous cash stockpile to fund early factories for new tech, then get exclusive access to—& later cheaper prices for—the most advanced components around.

Cisco bought it then killed it the day before their latest product was to launch.

Free apps cost Apple too much to distribute & they've been trying to bandaid it since. It wont work until they stop supporting them & allow installing apps outside the app store.

Why Twitter shouldn't be fucking over third parties just 'cause it's big now. Arseholes.

internal software quality is not tradeable like most things are—well it is, but if it's shit internally its like buying an old jalopy & expecting to be able to drive a race.

Joel Spolsky: companies can get shafted bigtime if they dont own it all, so they insist on it. the only option is really to make agreements per-situation & stop when you're employed.

Under its founder Masaru Ibuka, Sony used to restrain themselves, refusing to make anything crap. That was their mission statement: to change the then prevailing view of Japanese products as rubbish. Now they put out any old thing. Jobs has made Apple into a company with the same focus on quality that Sony used to possess: refusing markets & opportunities where they can't excel.

I sometimes use the phrase “unforeseeable growth” to describe the kind of growth that not even the most knowledgeable observers of a market can predict. It’s usually an indicator that fundamentally transformational change is taking place. If analysts, to a man, fail, you can be sure that competitors are no wiser.

A sad tale of a good magazine being run into the ground because the owner thinks the internet is a passing fad. The first couple of comments are illuminating—Harper's still has a huge readership, & good quality, but no presence & no mindshare.

Things to consider in an employee (or as an employee):
1. Technical knowledge
2. Critical thinking
3. Can you solve problems?
4. Can you learn?
5. Can you change based on environment & evidence?
6. Are you toxic?

1. is least important, & ultimately, 6. is most important.

The successor to Facebook will need to be more trustworthy (not in terms of curatorship, but in terms of the system itself not fucking people over), put the user first, & also be less centralised. As decentralised as practically possible would be nice but I'd settle for the XMPP model, using pubsub etc.

The users aren't buying, they're the product, & as such they'll get pissed off & leave as soon as something better & more trustworthy comes along. Facebook provides a valuable & increasingly indispensable service, but they treat us like shit in doing so, simply because they're the only game in town & they can afford to.

Banks run the financial system, like a utility. They shouldn't be able to arbitrarily shut someone off—they should have to serve everyone equally, like a telecommunications company or a power company.

Centralised vs. decentralised.

a.k.a. why he charges $1000 an hour: it means business.

It's still around, but it could have been great.

Market segmentation, quality, & relatively complicated strategy. Everyone else uses simplistic strategies & churns out crappy feature-products.

Pub-style beer can never put taverns out of business because they're really selling a meeting-place.

People just incrementally improve the same ideas, whether they be good or bad. There's no scientific principle to it, no investigation into fundamentally better ways. The industry is killing the science.

Abstract: We hereby clarify the radical libertarian stance about Microsoft and government, and more generally about monopolies. We explain how the original evil behind Microsoft's monopoly is government intervention in the form of intellectual property privileges, and how any solution should begin by abolishing these privileges.

Keep it to a brief, plain-text checklist, don't be a tosser, & DON'T FUCKING LIE. Can't quite understand why that last one was necessary, but apparently it is.

People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. — Peter Drucker

Corporations have free reign to fuck us any time, but we can't do a thing to them when they make a mistake.

$1000/hour means no dicking around, which is good

He's dreadful

The fraudulent nature of the modern university, with its publishing & problem-invention

They really are becoming Microsoft

On Google becoming the new Microsoft

Charles Munger, USC Business School, 1994

The best analysis & explanation of why Apple will continue to dominate everyone, & indeed *should* dominate everyone—in the field of tasteful quality, they simply have no competition

No demos, only products

Card reader which plugs into the iPhone, with a beautiful software backend as well

Airline companies are stupid.

Tim Bray's idea for how a telco could team up with mobile developers & have them all earn money, while at the same time not being hated by customers. If I were a telco, I'd be keen. Then again, if I were a telco, I'd already be abnormal 'cause I'd not try to rip people off for every little thing.

In his usual colourful & blatantly correct fashion