It’s just that the tide of Android devices is going to be primarily composed of “free with contract” uglies, not the kind of cool phones that compete with the iPhone. (Which is not to downplay cool Android phones, which I suspect will get more competitive, not less.)

Once upon a time there were some innovative farmers that developed a new hybrid crop that could satisfy the hunger of a growing population. This crop grew best in large farms which had to be situated far from where people lived. The food was so tasty and production could scale so quickly that it became necessary and possible to build a novel way to deliver this food to the population. The farmers built their own transportation network, which they called a “railway”.

It’s a typical design problem: it can’t be heavy and light and big and small. Neither decision will satisfy everyone all the time or cover every edge case: if Apple implemented Mute in Ihnatko’s preferred way, millions of people would be just as irritated when their scheduled alarms didn’t wake them up.

There’s plenty of prior evidence that design can come late to a company and still succeed, of course; there’s less evidence that design can come late to a platform and still win over that platform’s whole ecosystem.

To be more precise, analysts value the wave of growth of every new product and heavily discount the post-growth phase assuming commoditization. There is no value assigned to Apple for extending market reach to the mass market.

Weeding out people that don’t have the skills you are looking for is easy, but how do you determine if the person is the right culture fit?

Culture fit is a huge issue, and, in some ways, much more important than the skills the person has. You can teach a person to have the skills, but teaching them to be able to fit into your culture does not work

In a sector where financial resources are relatively low, effective prototyping fills the innovation gap, reducing the risk of innovation practice and solving the problem of the innovation funding calls, which ask for detailed project proposals but often do not provide the guidance or tools needed to come up with the good idea that makes a great proposal.

I’ve know lots of people who got into services thinking that they can use the income from clients to bankroll their own product ideas. That is not an impossible scenario — it’s been done before more than a few times, and it’s a beautiful thing when it happens. But it’s very, very difficult to pull off. To do services, you need to wake up in the morning with a different approach to life from the way you wake up in the morning to do products, and only a few people have the skill — and stamina — to juggle both at once.

A friend compared PHP to the COBOL of the web, and indeed, that seems to be COBOL’s philosophy, too. Yet that philosophy has served COBOL pretty well: it’s (still) being used fairly widely in the kinds of business applications you (still) run on minicomputers and people who know it (still) command a good salary. I don’t think PHP is going to have it nearly so good ten or fifteen years from now.

Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible.

Features don’t matter. Products don’t matter. Outcomes matter. People matter. How does your product benefit the people? What’s the outcome of using your product?

You should use whatever works for you. And I no longer have the patience or hubris to convince you what that should be. All I can offer is one data point: what I use, and how it works for me.

So far, Amazon has not been great to developers. (Or book publishers, for that matter.) By most accounts, dealing with Amazon is actually much worse for developers than dealing with Apple. By putting your app in the Amazon Appstore, you’re giving up a lot more control than Apple asks of us: you’re giving up the ability to set your own price and control your app’s description, among many other restrictions. By comparison, it makes Apple look almost… open.

Even with all those reasons, I just can’t believe that there is still only one Android app that I can look at and say: “yes, that’s what I am talking about.”

Even if all the above reasons for not developing for Android are true, it would still seems highly unusual that I was only able to find one good app.

The best guess I have has to be that the “market share” is just not that high, thus not making it “worth” it for developers to make amazing apps for the platform.

The premise of the stock market today is therefore that being innovative in technology is meaningless. Innovations are valuable but there is no such thing as an innovation process. If there was such a thing then we could measure it and put a number of its value. Until then innovation is nothing more than a spin of the roulette wheel.

It’s a bad game player, a bad app platform, a bad web browser, a bad video player, and, most disappointingly, a bad Kindle.

Find me the people who actually invented anything at any famous company and you’ll find the language they use is very simple. [...] The fancy words mostly come from people who arrive well after the inventing and innovating is done, including innovation consultants.

On October 27th, Nintendo published half year results for the fiscal year ending in March 2012. Management stated that the company lost over $900 million with a negative outlook. Nintendo cited weaker than expected sales of Nintendo DS hardware and 3DS software and Yen appreciation as the main reasons for the miss. Is this the end of Nintendo?

The Readability founders came to me in 2010, shared their idea of paying publishers for what people read with their text-view bookmarklet, and wanted to explore whether we could work together. They’re nice people and we have similar sensibilities, and we had very different priorities at the time: they wanted their service to focus on the publisher-payment system, and I wanted to focus on my iPhone and iPad apps.

What does "craft" mean for designers who work exclusively on problems of services, software, or organizational change and political influence? And how can schools change their foundational focus without abandoning the obvious rigor of traditional craft-based learning?

For a long time I believed an essay was rigidly defined as what I was taught in college. I’ve learned since an essay is whatever I as a writer say it is. Form is just a bag to put things in. If you can find people who keep reading what you’re writing, don’t worry much about form.

Introduced in the CSS3 specification, the rem behaves much like the em: it’s a relative unit of measurement, sizing text up or down from a baseline value. But the rem is sized relative to the root of your document—in other words, the value set on the body element.

And speaking of booze, how come there's a field for declaring I'm an alcoholic (opensocial.Enum.Drinker.HEAVILY) but no way to tell people I smoke pot? Why are the only genders male and female? Have the people who designed this protocol really never made the twenty mile drive to San Francisco?

Studying for a college degree, practicing the piano, going for a daily run, these are all ways to let time work on our behalf, if we just give in. Passion and pleasure have their place, but sometimes that comes only after we’ve put in enough time at something for the payoff to come back out.

Most interesting products for today’s world can not easily align with business models created in 1995. I know many smart people who had great prototypes for new products while at Microsoft, who were saddened to learn the escape velocity of a project is, at minimum, greater than the gravity of its two largest businesses (Office & Windows).

He was in some ways more humble and practical than writers who use his name as a puppet to make half-baked, poorly researched points, that help no one achieve anything.