…today
Yesterday…
Amazon invests in its own enterprise to stay competitive. If they were to try and balance their budget, it would mean cutting the lifeblood that is ensuring the only thing about themselves that people are actually invested in seeing succeed: its own future.
apple is eating the world
that’s my summary of yesterday’s apple event, and also of the past 10 years.
one way you can tell how much a company is winning is by the other companies/industries/technologies they leave in their wake.
having already effectively killed off all other portable music players, cell phones, consumer tablets, music/app stores, and consumer laptops, yesterday apple revealed the next set of competing technologies who will soon join the deadpool: set top boxes, console gaming, consumer digital photography, and enterprise tablets.
apple has a ways to go before they can declare victory in the enterprise laptop/computing space but i am bullish. their rate of innovation is a curve ahead of anyone else [speaking specifically about computers but it also applies to everything else they do], and eventually they will win based on one or more of these factors:
1. superior security - one of the benefits of controlling the entire vertical stack from chip to app store
2. end users becoming comfortable using macs, especially using office applications on macs [and tablets like ipad pro]
3. catering to enterprise needs. apple’s loyal users were always creative/designer types, and have grown to also completely dominate startups and corporations with rational IT departments. the big set of potential users remaining includes the larger companies with dinosaur IT departments. this tide will turn as the dinosaurs retire and rational thinkers replace them.
final thought - the thing about apple that has always been most impressive to me is their ability to chart out a long term vision and product roadmap, and then actually have the dedication, patience, and ability to execute on it. not just execute but win. yesterday the vision for the apple TV was finally revealed after 8+ years of incubation. other products are in the middle of their roadmaps: payments, wearables aka watch.
did i mention how much i love this company?
How Taylor Swift Saved Apple Music
thought this was a great write up on recent events in the taylor swift / apple music story.
my take:
i thought it was admirable of taylor to write and post the letter in the first place. she saw something wrong and took action to fix it. most people see this whole situation as a win for artists, especially smaller and independent artists. but right from the moment i saw eddie cue’s tweet i saw that this was also a huge win for apple. kudos to apple for recognizing the PR disaster that was about to unfold and taking SWIFT (get it????) action to address the very public issue and resolve it immediately.. oh yeah and then THEY got the free publicity as a result.
let’s unpack a bit. pricing structure and economics behind apple music were not conceived overnight. they were very thoughtfully designed, discussed, reviewed, modeled, etc.. many people across many organizations and levels either helped to define the structure or approved it. apple knew what they were doing - freeloading on artists’ work to drive engagement to their new music service. they had talking points prepared for why this was a fair deal – artists got free publicity on what will soon be a popular streaming platform.
so when poop (taylor’s poop in this metaphor) started to hit the fan, apple reversed a key stance within like 2 hours. all of that thoughtful design and discussion, reversed. that is not something that’s easy to do at a company with 100k employees.
did they anticipate that there could be backlash due to this one part of the pricing structure, and therefore did they prepare an “option B” to fall back on? that would be forward-thinking of them if so, but who has the time to think through every possible scenario to everything? i tend to think that, though they have tons of bureaucracy like other large corporations, they are structured in such a way that big decisions can be made and approved quickly and only require a few executives’ sign off.
full disclosure: i love apple and taylor swift.
Sunset after the storm
First quiet morning in a long time
Pixar spends a lot of time building these short films where they can develop technology that they can then apply to their longer films. For us, Paper was like a short film that let us explore a lot of things without the constraint of, a billion people need to be able to use this.
Chris Cox, head of product for Facebook, talking about the role Paper played in the development of Instant Articles. (via parislemon)
this is either an interesting approach to product innovation or a nice way to spin failed or semi-failed products. either way, i liked the message that each feature/product is a stepping stone to the next one – which can be from the perspective of code reuse, drawing insights from data, learning from mistakes, building on successes, or even leveraging confidence to try something more bold.
(via parislemon)
