The Macalope Weekly: The Noyes machine
[Via Macworld]
An entire Macalope column devoted to one silly pundit? Oh, you know it’s going to be bad. And it’s bad.
[More]
Here a professional does it better than I ever could. Also a couple of more names to add to the list.
Craig Federighi – a worthy replacement to Serlet, and a nerd impostor to boot
[Via Edible Apple]
Will Shipley writes nicely on the departing Bertrand Serlet and his replacement, and seeming nerd impostor, Craig Federighi who began working at NeXT in 1994 and took over the EOF group (Enterprise Objects) in record time.
We’re all around this table in some generic conference room, and in comes Craig – the new guy – and he’s like seven feet tall and gameshow-host handsome and he’s smiling like a used car salesman. I will admit it; I was prepared not to like him. I mean, nerds have a certain look to them, and if you violate the unwritten nerd contract then you risk ostracization, dammit.
You naturally expect a tall, handsome dude to be, well, kind of a jerk. Like, his ideas are more important than yours. But what struck me so hard in that first meeting, so much so that it’s still in my head 17 years later, is that he was there to listen. And not just to passively listen – he wanted to make sure he understood what we were saying, yes, but also to get to theheart of it. Are you saying we need this? Is this what’s really important, or is it this other thing? Active listening. In an industry where most engineers just want to talk about how big their metaphorical dicks are, this was a huge surprise.
The NeXT EOF team had some of the smartest engineers on it I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, but they tended to be kind of lone wolves. They did their thing, they had their ideas, the wrote code. Craig brought ideas together. He didn’t care who they came from – I’ve got mail from him asking if we want to put sample source code on an EOF release, I’ve got mail where he followed up on bug reports he filed against OmniWeb and OmniPDF. Why was Craig so concerned about third-party software? Craiglikes to get things right. Sure, he’s damn charming, but he’s not really concerned about politics, he’s concerned with making sure we the needed things are done well.
Shipley concludes, “So, we’re losing a great man in Bertrand, and we’re gaining one in Craig.”
[More]
Anyone who is watching knows that Apple’s executives are just different from others in the high tech arena. Here we read another story demonstrating just what effect the NeXT takeover of Apple had.
Good people are more important than good ideas.
2-year old uses an iPad with ease [Video]
[Via Edible Apple]
From the original Mac to the iPhone, Apple has exhibited unparalleled expertise in creating user interface designs that are not only easy to use but unbelievably intuitive. Nothing personifies Apple’s success in this regard more than the iPad, a device used with equal enthusiasm by engineers, pilots, doctors, and yes, even babies.
In the video below we see a two year old named Bridger using an iPad with ease. Moreover, Bridger’s dad Mike explains, “his speech, understanding, word recognition, and even hand eye coordination have improved within just a short while.”
[More]
There are already studies demonstrating some social changes in the cohort of young adults who have had access to computers and the Internet for most of their lives. What will happen to this cohort that expects to directly interact with a computer form a very early age?
It may be that the ability to ‘handle’ these so-called fads is what separates them. Manipulation is bred into our very being. For the first time, we can manipulate a computer directly with our hands.
And Bridger is very cute.
On Working for Bertrand Serlet
[Via Daring Fireball]
David Cásseres:
Pretty soon he was standing up in front of seasoned Apple software engineers and lecturing us on how not to make mistakes when cutting and pasting code. I said at that time that I had never felt so thoroughly disrespected as an engineer in my entire career. The NeXT/Apple culture wars were at their height.
Seems like ancient history now, but the NeXT/Apple engineering cultures did not mix well at first.
[More]
Not everyone got it at the time. But the results have demonstrated what Jobs and his team from NeXt was trying to do was historic. They shifted a software company to an entirely new operating system and a hardware company to any entirely new CPU all without breaking the usability of their devices.
No other company has ever done that and succeeded.
‘Just a Fad’
[Via Daring Fireball]
PCWorld’s Katherine Noyes says “tablets are just a fad”:
Yet strong sales are backing up the hype — at least for now — suggesting something about the devices has caught on with consumers. What is that mysterious “something”? Purely marketing, I believe. Apple is nothing if not master of the glitzy sales pitch, and there’s never been better proof of that than the iPad’s current success.
Mark my words: The device — and all the others of its ilk that have sprung up for a piece of the action — are nothing more than a passing fad, at least in the mainstream.
Words marked.
[More]
Tens of billions of dollars of world wide sales and hundreds of thousands of apps and thousands of developers in a year. I imagine most people would love to be part of a fad like that.
If she is wrong here, shouldn’t she either be fired or should no longer be anyone that anyone listens too? Unfortunately there is no code pf personal responsibility from pundits of any class. They are free to continue to be wrong all the time. In fact, the more times they are wrong the more likely the MSM seem to listen to them.
So, Katherine Noyes now joins Rob Enderle in the list of tech pundits whose track record needs to be thoroughly checked out. In Rob’s case, he is usually best used as a negative marker. Take what he says and go 180 degrees the other way.
More Open
[Via Daring Fireball]
J-P Teti:
The iPad only does less than a regular computer to us geeks. To everyone else, it does more. This is what Motorola and Google and Samsung and BlackBerry and everyone else, with the sole exception of Apple, do not get about “open” computing.
Astute analysis of the iPad to regular folks.
[More]
Very nice insight. One of Apple’s great innovations is giving the majority of people what they want and need, not what the geeks want. It is always interesting to read a geek site because any new tech device is devoured simply by tech specs, with little real consideration of real world us by most consumers.
I’ve been a geek long enough to know that specs mean little, that novelty does not mean success and that a strong strategic plan is better than copycat hardware.
SpreadingScience
Sustainable Path Foundation Idea Club
