You and I are on the same team. We all are. We may link to the same articles, review the same products, develop apps for the same market, and design with the same intense perfectionism, but we are a community. Let’s continue to fight for each other, encourage each other, and work together to make amazing things.
Steve used my app. It was the best and the worst. Of course you want to hear that someone big and important and smart is watching what you’re doing, but there’s a second meaning to that kind of attention. He was watching my every move. It was highly unlikely that a some crappy bit of UI I made would result in an email from Steve, of course. But what did happen was, I installed a sort of innerSteve, an Angel of Better telling me to make it simpler, try once more, don’t forget to delight, and remember that greatness is possible.
I have written about many lessons we should learn from Steve Jobs and how he ran Apple, but the single most important lesson I learned from him is this: be genuine.
It is an incredibly simple phrase, but it is also incredibly meaningful. What I learned from Steve is I should follow my heart and do what’s meaningful to me, and when I choose to do something, I should put everything I have into it. There is no use doing something that doesn’t mean anything to me. This is the only life I have, and I want to make every second of it valuable.
I am so grateful for that lesson, and for living while he worked. He is the reason I studied business. He showed that business can be used to accomplish wonderful things for people, and can genuinely make people’s lives better. That’s what I want to do.
Beyond the products he helped build, I think Steve’s greatest legacy are the people who were influenced and inspired by him.
Let’s honor his work and his life by accomplishing our own triumphs. Let’s build incredible things, write fantastic stories, make beautiful music, dream a little bigger. Let’s create. Let’s put a dent in the universe.
People are paying their respects to Jobs across the world:
In Chicago, Zack Martin bought a set of tea lights and arranged them in line in front of an Apple store next to a small bouquet that had been left by someone else. “I’m a computer programmer because of Steve,” said the 23-year-old, after kneeling to light the candles one after another.
Similar scenes unfolded in Asia. In Tokyo, Kazuho Asano, 35, was passing the Apple store in the Ginza shopping district when he paused to take a photo of the store with his iPhone. “There’s no one else like him,” Mr. Asano, a designer, said of Mr. Jobs. “He was a huge force.”
Michael Li, meanwhile, stood outside Beijing’s Apple Store, head bowed and teary-eyed. “We all knew this day was coming, but it doesn’t make it any less painful,” said the 30-year-old Beijing native.
His wife, 29-year-old Wang Xi, bought lilacs for her husband to place at the door. The card read: “Thanks, Steve!”
Incredible. He is an inspiration to so many people, all over the world.
In a post-Steve-Jobs world, there is no longer an excuse for large corporations to be less bold than start-ups. Elegance, character, artistic integrity, and ruthless dedication to design can no longer be derided as luxuries of those who don’t have anything to lose. Apple is now one of the largest, most successful companies in the world, but it still behaves as if all of its employees could fit in a 9×7-inch photo.
Steve’s legacy can, I think, be summarised in a single sentence: it shows when we take care.
My life, and the lives of countless others, has been shaped by that philosophy.
That is as apt and succinct an explanation I’ve seen of Jobs’s influence. That’s what’s been directing me for years, and something I hope directs everything I do the rest of my life.
Steve devoted his professional life to giving us (you, me and a billion other people) the most powerful device ever available to an ordinary person. Everything in our world is different because of the device you’re reading this on.
What are we going to do with it?
Jobs’s greatest legacy is that we all should approach life as our canvas for achieving something truly great. It doesn’t have to be on the scale of Jobs’s achievements. All it needs to be is truly meaningful to you.
Here’s Apple’s page for Siri. Interesting that they kept the name.
It’s hard to understate how important this is. Siri isn’t the first time voice recognition will be used by the masses, but it is the first time voice recognition coupled with powerful artificial intelligence will be used by the masses to do every-day things. That’s a big deal. We’ve been waiting on voice as a form of input for computers for far too long, and it’s finally here.
With Apple’s integration of Siri into iPhone 4S, the Siri app is no more.
That’s unfortunate, albeit understandable. Siri was a great application, and in some ways is still more powerful than Apple’s integrated Siri. Siri-the-app made it dead-simple to make reservations at restaurants, among other things, and it doesn’t seem like that made the jump (for now, at least). Too bad, I loved using it for that.
I’m sure this headline is leading a pack of “Amazon’s iPad-killer” heads out there—the 9to5 piece quotes a Bloomberg piece that starts, “Chief Executive Office Jeff Bezos is betting he can leverage Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce to pose a real challenge to Apple’s iPad after tablets from rivals have fallen short.”
No, he isn’t, you blithering morons. The Fire is not directly competing with the iPad. It’s directly competing with the Nook Color.
True—there’s very little, if any, reason to purchase the Nook Color now. But I do think the Kindle Fire will end up taking away some of the iPad’s low-end sales. Browsing the web, watching movies and reading books are why a lot of people buy an iPad in the first place, and from the looks of it, the Kindle Fire will do those things well, and at a very attractive price.
The Kindle Fire is interesting because it isn’t trying to compete with the iPad on its own terms. Rather, it is playing a different game—it’s a media tablet, not a computer. It’s easy to hold for reading books or watching video, and small so it’ll fit in any bag. Whereas the iPad has a grand vision for the future of computing, the Kindle Fire simply wants to be a great companion device for reading books, watching movies, browsing the web and playing games.
And that’s a convincing device. It’s going to sell well. What I’m really curious to see, however, is what effect it has on iPad sales. If the iPad 3 is released and continues to sell like crazy, we’ll know that they very much are in different categories and people don’t buy the iPad just for those basic functions. But if it puts a damper on iPad sales, that’ll tell us something important, too.
Zach Epstein on what Windows 8 promises:
But the iPad was only the beginning.
Apple paved the way but Microsoft will get there first with Windows 8. A tablet that can be as fluid and user friendly as the iPad but as capable as a Windows laptop. A tablet that can boot in under 10 seconds and fire up a full-scale version of Adobe Dreamweaver a few moments later. A tablet that can be slipped into a dock to instantly become a fully capable touch-enabled laptop computer. This is Microsoft’s vision with Windows 8, and this is what it will deliver.
Epstein, with just a bit of snark, calls this the “post post-PC” era, because he doesn’t think the iPad is a “post-PC” at all. He argues that because the iPad isn’t as good at doing “work”—spreadsheets, word processing, et cetera—that it isn’t what’s going to replace the PC.
Instead, he believes that Windows 8 tablets will. The PC is still the future, he argues, because it will allow us to do work as comfortably as before, while enjoying the benefits of a touch-based tablet for browsing the web, reading, watching video and playing games. He lays out this vision above.
What I think his vision actually points out, though, is Windows 8′s central problem: it takes no position, it has no central theme or integrity. This isn’t a vision so much as a refusal to choose between fundamentally different user interfaces. Rather, Microsoft decided to combine the PC’s mouse and keyboard-based user interface with the iPad’s touch-based interface and have the best of both worlds.
What makes the iPad so compelling is that it is designed to work for touch and for a simpler kind of computing. We don’t need to worry about the file system, whether a runaway process is eating up our device’s resources, or if a certain file happens to be on our device at that time. Apple’s vision for computing is one where the user doesn’t even need to remember they’re using a computer, because the device gets out of their way and allows them to do whatever it is they want to do. This applies both to the hardware (no vents or fans to remind users what’s going on inside), the operating system, and applications themselves. “Designed for touch” doesn’t simply mean that it works with touch, but that the application is fundamentally re-designed to be simpler to understand and use, so it’s not just functional, but a joy to use. I summarized this vision in April like this:
The technology is a means to an end, and it is best hidden away, so the device’s purpose becomes one-and-the-same with the device itself. Apple’s vision for post-PC devices is not to make personal computers mobile. Apple’s vision is to make the technology so seamless, so effortless to use, that people forget they are even using a computer—so invisible that all people see is the web, or their book, or their movie.
Apple is seeking to make the technology irrelevant, so we can use these devices to do—to make, to create, to be inspired from. Don’t worry about what processor or display it has. Just read. Just write. Just draw. Just do.
Because Apple’s built a device that is so compelling and so successful, current application types that don’t map well to it—things like spreadsheets—will be re-conceptualized to work within their vision.
In Microsoft’s vision, none of this is true. Their vision is for a continuation of the PC as we know it, where we deal with task managers, filesystems and interfaces primarily designed for the keyboard and mouse. In their version of the future of computing, we have full compatibility with past applications. We can use our current copies of PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Photoshop and Dreamweaver on our new tablets, while still enjoying the benefits of touch.
Perhaps I’ll be wrong when Windows 8 is released, but I don’t think this will be true. Instead, what we will have are keyboard and pointer-less Windows computers that also happen to have a touch layer for inconsequential things like checking the weather, playing a game, or browsing the web. “Real” work will still be done with traditional PC applications, and they will remain fundamentally the same. Why would software makers completely re-think their applications for touch—for post-PC devices—when they will run just fine on them? Why wouldn’t they simply re-work them a bit by making their UIs “touch-friendly” and call it good?
The problem with Microsoft’s vision isn’t the Metro UI, which is original and beautiful. The problem with their vision is that they don’t have one. Microsoft realized the iPad threatens the PC and thus their business and so now they’re trying to figure out how they can preserve the PC as it is while incorporating touch. This doesn’t come from a grand desire to unify the PC and the post-PC, but rather a desire to preserve their current business. If they had made a bet on the post-PC and based it entirely on Metro, like they did with Windows Phone 7, there would be good reason to laude Microsoft for not only creating an altogether new user interface, but for having the courage to say, yes, this is the future of computing, and of our company.
Instead, Microsoft’s said the past is the future. And that’s disappointing.
At D8 in 2010, Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs whether he wins all inter-company disputes. Jobs replied:
Jobs: Oh no I wish I did. No, you see you can’t. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.
Your app shouldn’t hedge its bets. Be opinionated about what’s the ‘right way’ to perform a task, and do it that way – so that the user doesn’t have to decide. If you leave all the choice to your users (and sidestep the critical choice of which features to omit), you’re committing the worst crime of the software world: valuing your own time above the user’s.
It’s sort of like having a strong narrative in a story—users understand the general way the application functions, and thus can surmise how a different part of it they haven’t used before will work. That’s a large part of what “it just works” means; it works because people grok the application’s concept and know, based on that, how different functions will work.
Tim Carmody, on the Amazon tablet:
You sit on the couch and flip your fingers across the screen like you were thumbing through a catalog or a magazine. But every image and advertisement is connected to a digital store, powered by Amazon. With one click, you’ve bought it: Either it’s delivered to your machine immediately, over the air, or is delivered to your door in less than two days.
That’s one way to get advertisers to embrace a device.
(Via Tory Briggs.)
Ben Brooks wonders whether Microsoft should make their own PC:
If Microsoft did do this and they decided that they wanted to make the best possible PC — something that competes directly with, say, MacBook Pros — wouldn’t that be an interesting change?
I don’t even think it is a market that Microsoft would have to be making more than 2-3 models of computers to be in just a laptop, desktop, and tablet. All Microsoft would need to do is make the best stuff a Windows user could buy and then sell it with a healthy profit margin. Doing that, by comparison to all other PC makers, would make all others look pretty bad — both to consumers and investors.
HP exited the PC market because it’s a dying market—not only has it peaked and become a commodities business, but the iPad has shown that most people really don’t need a PC at all for what they do. HP realized that sales are going to decline in the next five to ten years and so there was no reason for them to stay in a business that isn’t profitable now and has no future.
Entering the PC business doesn’t make any more sense for Microsoft than it does for HP to remain in it. Even if we look at it purely as a question of whether it can (1) turn a profit and (2) improve the Windows PC image, they shouldn’t. The only possible path to profitability is selling a higher margin, nicely designed PC to Windows users who appreciate it. That’s possible, but they would be doing so (in the best case) at the expense of Lenovo’s Thinkpad line.
What’s the gain for Microsoft? Not much. A bit larger bottom line, at best, and they would be investing a terribly large amount of money, time and focus into a dying business.
Building a tablet, though, is a different question, and an idea that makes more sense for Microsoft to do. At the moment, Microsoft believes that “post-PC” really means “PC plus touch”—that their original tablet PCs are where we’re going to end up. That certainly isn’t a view point supported by the market, so they have a lot to prove. If they can build a tablet running Windows 8 that does everything we want a post-PC device to do, they certainly stand to benefit from it, because they would make their concept viable.
I don’t think that’s how they’re going to play it, though, because Microsoft is deluded about the future of computing. Whereas Apple sees the post-PC and PC as separate markets, Microsoft wants to believe that the tablet is another PC, and thus they can gain market share by selling them as such. They figure that they already have the vast majority of the market for PCs, so if they just conveniently make new PCs tablets, too, people will buy them just as they’ve bought every other PC they’ve ever owned. And if that’s the plan, there’s no way they’re going to build their own.
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