rkuo.com

The Steve Jobs biography tells a fascinating tale of how Steve wanted to implement a uniform for his employees in similar fashion to Japanese workers.  While the idea didn’t transplant so well organizationally, the personal aspect was something Steve could implement, and did.  Hence his iconic black turtleneck and Levi 501 jeans look.

Surprisingly, this is one of those concepts I had to read about to really question for myself.  If it was good enough for Steve … could it be good enough for me?

Ignoring the social utility of wearing different clothes, the engineer in me realizes that wearing a bunch of very different clothes every day is very inefficient.  It wastes my mental power in deciding what clothes to wear.  I find my wardrobe gravitates away from certain clothes over time.  The extra clothes waste space.

So what do you gain from wearing a uniform?

Pros

1. No outdated clothes.  It’s a very common problem to tire of certain clothes and stop wearing them.  Eventually, half your wardrobe is just taking up empty space.  With a uniform, your wardrobe is always up to date and current.  In the future, I can anticipate that I may need to make a wholesale change to one or more pieces of the outfit when things start to wear out.
2. Compact wardrobe.  When you have only a few types of clothing, it becomes very easy to pack all items of the same type together.  All your clothes fit into less space.  This is useful both in daily life as well as on trips.
3. Highly refined look.  When you have a single carefully chosen outfit, the refinement of that outfit is present every day.  It is simply not possible to put as much thought into a look that you change each day as one that you wear all the time.
4. Easy to recognize.  With an iconic look, it becomes much easier for your friends to find you in a crowd.  Your clothes become part of your look, and you become a much larger and more identifiable target to locate in a crowd.
5. Easy to wash and sort.  It can be burdensome to toss around all the different kinds of clothes that should go together by group when you pull your stuff out of the wash.  With just a few types of clothing, grouping everything becomes much simpler.
6. Save money. Extra clothes simply cost more money.  They cost even more when you don’t end up wearing them after a while.  And reselling clothes is a virtually worthless activity.  A uniform means that 100% of your clothing budget goes towards clothes you will actually wear.  That’s efficient!

Cons

1. Lack of daily expression. While I would argue that a uniform defines your persona more strongly than daily outfits, you can’t really express yourself in seasonal or daily ways with the same outfit day in and day out.  I very much believe this is even more important an issue for the female gender than for males.
2. Some events really do require different attire.  I can’t wear my uniform into a fancy restaurant or to a funeral.  That means I still need a bit of extra space for the dress shoes, shirts, and slacks that accompany such events.
3. Extreme weather requires different clothing. I imagine Steve did not wear his jeans and turtleneck while skiing.  He would have been damned cold!  Sometimes, the weather demands something different from you.

After reviewing the above points, I decided the experiment would be worth conducting.  I went through all the items in my life and decided to figure out what colors and looks I had gravitated to.  I gradually become convinced that black with subtle red accents was the way to go.  But as I started to pay more attention, I realized there were more requirements.

1. The uniform must balance casual with business attire.  If I need a different outfit for work and for going out on the weekends, I’ve basically doubled my clothing load.
2. The uniform must be comfortable.  Sometimes people will put up with uncomfortable clothing to look good.  But day in and day out?  No way.
3. The uniform must be adaptable to a reasonable range of weather and temperatures.  Again, if I need a different outfit in the summer vs the winter … I’ll have a bunch of clothes sitting around doing nothing for half the year.
4. The uniform should favor easily replaceable items. While it’s not the end of the world, if you do happen to start experiencing wear and tear on some items, it’s a little easier if you can just cycle in replacements.  Otherwise, you will have to replace the whole shebang at once or rotate in new but different replacements over time.

So here’s what I ended up choosing.

1. Shirt – Hanes ComfortBlend Polos – $5.00 a shirt.  I could probably find something better, but these seem to be just fine for now and are easily replaced for the foreseeable future.
2. Jeans – 7 for all Mankind.  Ran to the outlet and picked up 5 extra pairs (for a total of 6), then had them hemmed.  Not cheap, but decided to make a bit of a fashion statement here.
3. Socks – Gold Toe UltraTec Crew Socks.  The nice thing about these socks is that they are very absorbent, so you don’t end the day with your feet feeling grimy.  Technically, they aren’t dress socks, but nobody will be able to tell the difference, so this saves me the pain of finding extra dress socks for those rare no uniform events.
4. Underwear – Alfani Boxer Briefs.  Not that any of you will ever see these, but this is what I went with.
5. Jacket – Adidas Icon Courtside Track Suit Jacket.  A great light jacket.  Very happy with this.  I probably should buy another one.  The inside pocket happens to fit my iPad mini perfectly.  This adds on perfectly to the uniform to balance out colder weather, but isn’t uncomfortable at all to wear indoors with air conditioning.
6. Shoes – Adidas Porsche Design SP1.  I bought two pairs in black with red accents.  They aren’t perfect because rain seems to soak through the toes.  But otherwise, I’ve actually been quite happy with them.  Seems to be out of production at the moment.
7. Watch – Let’s just say it’s black faced, with red accents.
8. Wallet – Tag Heuer Billfold 8CC – Black, with carbon fiber, and red accents.  Expensive, but perfect for this.

OK … it took a while to pull all the clothes together, and get the right quantities.  For the washables … I purchased roughly 20 of each item (except for the jeans).  This allowed me to build up enough of a washload in the hampers while still having enough quantity of clothes to wear or take on a trip without worrying about running out of clothing.

Has this experiment been a success?  For me, yes.  The pros far outweigh the cons.  I travel lighter, have more space in my apartment, pack more quickly, and spend zero effort on picking clothes to wear each day.  Recovering time and flexibility is one of the most important things you can do to enhance your life.  While I believe this approach will generally work less well for those of the female persuasion (for social reasons), it works very well for me.  In conclusion … I have to say, Steve, you got this one right.  I feel like I’ve unlocked another one of life’s little puzzles.

Edit: And here’s a link to the final look.  After that huge essay, you might be surprised at how simple of a look it really is.

The iPad mini is an odd beast. Technically, it’s completely unremarkable. No retina display, last gen processor and RAM.

And yet, I’m going to dump my iPad 3rd gen and go whole hog with this one. Why? Because it’s half as heavy as the iPad biggy, and it can be held for long periods of time in bed like a paperback book or carried around without requiring a death grip. In fact, it’s more often than not able to fit into a jacket pocket or a purse. The screen size is just usable at the smaller screen size without being too annoying. Text is occasionally annoying to read in portrait mode, but if you switch to landscape mode you have a full 1024×768 screen, which basically all sites are designed for. So not perfect like a retina display, but quite livable.

When the retina iPad mini comes out, it will be fantastic. But in the meantime, choosing between the mini and the biggy means some real tradeoffs. I think the mini satisfies my “carry” anywhere tablet criteria better than the biggy, so I’m going with that. Plus I’ll be fully Lightning connector transitioned that way.

I also had a second chance to play with the Surface. The more I use it, the more I dislike it. In portrait mode, it’s too tall and thus holding the tablet and using the virtual keyboard makes it feel like it wants to tip out of your hand. In landscape mode, the home button on the center bottom of the tablet is unreachable with your thumbs. It’s just a bad design and seems like it was intended to be used on a tablet with the kickstand … which is the only way having the home button here makes sense.

I checked out the Surface RT tablet today.

I disliked the 16:9 form factor, as expected. It looks like i’m reading a sheet of legal paper when held in portrait mode. I think the 16:9 could work in a smaller form factor, but here I thought it was too ungainly.  Especially in pure tablet mode, you can hardly reach your thumbs to the center of the screen to hit the virtual keys.

The software is unpolished and buggy. Example … you take a picture with the camera and you can’t see the picture you took. You have to navigate to the photos app to do that?

You try to play an game app from the store and it throws a guid error at you and asks you to download to play. I cannot imagine a single good reason to show a guid to a user on this tablet.

The store demo could not get their own internet working on the first tablet. They brought over another tablet that locked up right in front of me. Finally, they found another tablet and navigated to the website (reddit.com) and placed it in front of me. Not impressive.

The browser is responsive while scrolling and pinching/zooming. Good.

The universal gestures of dragging from one of the edges onto the screen are odd. At the very least, they are not intuitive or discoverable easily. But it’s a simple thing to learn, so I think I can let that go. What I don’t understand is the idea of dragging off the screen onto the screen again to remove the sidebars. That is very unintuitive. You would think that dragging the bar off the screen would be how this would work.

A lot of the UI seems to be designed around showing you a full screen of something, but even the most immediate actions are hidden behind an extra layer of gestures. example: maps and entering a location. browser and navigating to a website. This is a bad mistake.

The touch cover is nice. It does not accidentally register inputs and behaved without surprises. I would like one of these for my ipad.

The kickstand is useful, although I suspect it adds to the weight of the tablet unnecessarily. Why not make it a strong hollowed structure or something that isn’t a totally solid metal rectangle? I noticed folks were flipping the kickstand open and supporting the weight of the tablet with their hand gripping under the kickstand. Nice and I like it. I’d like something like this on the iPad as well, although it is not sexy.

The screen resolution was not as bothersome as I thought it might be. I didn’t really notice it while I was playing with the tablet.

Verdict: no cigar. This doesn’t bring anything new to the table for me. If I was obsessed with ms office or typing heavily from the surface, it might. But I’m not.  The Intel version of this will be a lot more interesting … and hopefully by then they will have refined the software more as well.

The world needs another iPhone 5 review.  So I’m here to give you one.

I’m not going to get into all the specs.  Maybe in a past life, but plenty of other folks have done that quite well in today’s day and age.  So I’m just going to stick to impressions.

Box and packaging

The iPhone 5 comes in a nice box like the older iPhones. The main difference here is that instead of a USB AC adapter cube you get some bigger EarPods.  I couldn’t give a whit about the EarPods (I do not like things in my ears)  so I’ll leave those out of this review.

Weight

First impressions upon holding the phone … it is quite a bit lighter than the iPhone 4 (22% lighter, if I recall correctly).  I find the extra lightness to be a notably successful challenge of constraints, but practically of little use.  But good bragging rights for the hardware engineering team.

Thinness

The iPhone 5 is about 20% thinner than the iPhone 4 series.  Contrasting it with the previous generation, it is as if the back layer of the glass sandwich design simply went away.  While there are thinner phones out there today, this is probably the thinnest phone that you would care to use.  Again, I consider the “thinness wars” today to be of little practical use.

The front

The front of the phone is obviously taller now.  This is the most obvious change to the iPhone 5.  You get one extra row of icon space in the vertical direction.  This has been accomplished by both making the phone slightly taller and removing some extra space between the vertical edges of the screen and the edge of the phone.  So the phone is itself is only about 10% taller, whereas the screen itself is taller by 20%.

The taller screen is less useful than one might think.  The primary issue of tiny text on a phone is constrained in a horizontal direction, not a vertical one.  So when browsing a webpage in vertical format, you see more tiny text, not bigger and more visible text.  I find the lack of additional scrolling/swiping supposedly afforded by a taller screen to be of little extra importance.  Where the taller screen really shines is giving you extra space when the onscreen keyboard is in use, such as when texting or entering data into web forms.  There is far more screen real estate here; in this area, it is welcome.

In addition, the taller screen pushes the limit of one handed use.  At 5′ 8″, I have average or perhaps slightly larger than average hands, when you take the fairer sex into account.  I find it hard to bring the thumb over to the top right corner of the screen.  In addition, with the taller size of the phone, there is some confusion as to how to hold the phone.  If you hold it centered, you need to really stretch your thumb to hit the home button.  If you hold it at the bottom and treat the taller screen space as an extra bonus in the vertical direction, then you have quite a hard time getting to the top of the screen.  Arguably, Apple did a good job of walking the line here, as I can’t imagine it could get any larger without impacting usability for smaller handed folk.

Aesthetically, the front is similar to the iPhone 4S.  But while the top looks OK in terms of negative space, I feel the bottom area containing the home button looks cramped.  I think we should do away with the front location of the home button altogether.

The back

The phone itself is a much newer design when viewed from the rear.  Instead of the glass front and back, there is a mostly unibody aluminum band on the back with two tiny glass windows at the top and bottom of the phone.

There has been much ado about ScuffGate … wherein the black anodized aluminum case scratches through during normal use to reveal the raw aluminum underneath.  The phone is supposedly especially vulnerable at the chamfered edges where the unibody construction is cornered off from sides to back.  I cannot comment on this as I chose the white iPhone, but it seems valid.  I went with the white iPhone primarily for this reason (any scuff just reveals more raw aluminum anyway).  I also felt it was time to have a change of pace from the black iPhone.

It’s probably a quite difficult engineering exercise to cut the top and bottom glass panels exactly to fit flush with the aluminum case.  This is pretty impressive from an engineering standpoint.

Sides

The sides are largely similar to the iPhone 4 series.  The main changes are that the headphone port has been moved to the bottom, the speaker grill at the bottom is a series of drilled holes and not mesh ports, and the venerable 30 pin port has been replaced by a much smaller 8 pin Lightning port.  The new port does not care what orientation you plug the cable into it, which is a hugely welcome change in terms of usability.  In this case, I say this is one of those genius little changes that really matters.  However, there was no speed increase.  Not a deal breaker, but puzzling.

This port change, of course, causes quite an upheaval in the accessories industry.  I know I have a lot of gadgets that are going out the window.  But it was a necessary evolution.

Design as a whole

I believe that the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S are simply better looking than the iPhone 5.  The pure glass and steel looking of the iPhone 4 series has always appeared very modern, refined, and symmetrical.  I feel the white/black bands at the back of the iPhone 5, while presumably necessary to maintain the proper reception characteristics, look aesthetically out of place.  As does the front home button.  This was a very hard exercise in constraint.

Coming back to the unibody construction … the use of aluminum to house the entire phone and the back makes the phone significantly more sturdy and resistant to drops.  So while the glass sandwich design of the iPhone 4 and 4S looks great, the glass was structurally vulnerable to shattering and weighed the phone down.  So there were gains to be had by switching to more aluminum construction, and Apple eked them out.

It is worth noting that if you aren’t a phone dropper, the iPhone 4 series and the glass back would actually be more durable to light scratches and other wear and tear use.

Speed

The iPhone 5 contains a new A6 series processor, running at 1.2 or 1.3 GHz.  The old iPhone 4S ran an A5 dual core processor at 800 MHz.  The new processor is remarkably fast … easily doubling the iPhone 4S in benchmarks, while utilizing less power.  I had slight complaints about the speed of the 4S, but have virtually none about the 5.  Apple did a fantastic job in managing constraints here.  I do not feel that I need extra speed in anything but web browsing right now anyway, so this represents a potential plateau in terms of my requirements for speed from mobile phones.  Hopefully something new and innovative will change my mind.

Speed (LTE and Wi-Fi)

The LTE support is excellent.  It is not uncommon to get speeds from 10 to 40 mbps down.  Combined with the A6 processor, the iPhone 5 truly feels unconstrained, and, paradoxically, users are likely to have a faster internet connection through their phones than their home broadband setups.

However, it also seems to sip battery life.  See below.

In terms of Wi-Fi, the iPhone 5 now supports the 5GHz band, as well as dual antennas for more throughput.  I am a big fan of 5GHz wireless, especially in crowded living environments such as apartments and condos.  But while this is a necessary evolution of the technology, and Amazon made a big deal out of it, it is a negligible real improvement for users.  Mobile devices generally don’t need that much bandwidth.

Battery life

Apple claims the battery life matches the iPhone 4S – 8 hours of talk time, web browsing, etc.  In practice, I find the iPhone 5 battery drains quickly, which makes me keep an eye on it through the course of the day.  I have been using a Mophie battery pack on my iPhone 4S, which, while somewhat unwieldy, has really given me enough battery life to truly make the phone a little more fire and forget, especially on trips … where I think the extra battery may just be necessary.  I don’t much enjoy the idea of tending my phone so I can use it throughout the day.

The new iOS 6

I find iOS 6 does little in the way of truly necessary new features.  The best changes … iMessage sync with your phone number across devices, faster safari performance, turn by turn directions, smoother app store interactions and less “enter your password” scenarios.

Apple Maps is getting a lot of flak, but the real bottom line is that it’s not as bad as you think.  I find turn by turn directions to be incredibly useful, and I don’t anticipate losing enough IQ points to drive into a ditch or head to the top of a building to get gas.

Some apps are still oddly lacking … Reminders continues to be a UI disaster, the Stopwatch portion of clock looks like it was coded as a sample app and never updated, and I still find organizing apps to be underfeatured.  The settings area is completely unorganized and really needs a complete rethinking.  More on that later.  Still, iOS 6 is better than not upgrading … but I really think more polish could have been had here.

Conclusion

Overall, the iPhone 5 may well round off the rapid pace of evolution that smartphones have undergone over the past year.  I enjoy the little design details and commenting on them … but the dominant change is that web browsing with LTE and the new A6 processor is blazingly fast … and there’s a cap on how fast I need web browsing to be.  I would be happy with this phone for a long time if web pages don’t get much more complex, and a battery pack will probably round out my biggest complaint with the phone.  You can tell Apple ran up against some tougher design constraints this time around, but it’s still the best phone out there.

Changes for the iPhone 6 I would suggest

Move the home button to the side.  The iPhone is so ubiquitous that users don’t really need an “intuitive” way to hit the home button right now.  It will save significant space and it will be easier to hit one handed than the home button anyway.

Kill the sim card tray.  Build some sort of sim cloning tool into the hardware and “load” sim cards into it with a lightning accessory.  Sim cards are a ridiculous waste of space.

Take the screen out to the edges horizontally.  This would help text size issues, and it’s pretty much the only way to go without killing one handed usability by further increasing the screen size.

Make an iPhone for business.  This may go against some design sensibilities, but there are a lot of people that would benefit more from extra battery life and buttons nowadays.  I would gladly buy a thicker, denser iPhone if it had more battery.  I really feel like this niche is underserved.

Wireless charging – I want this badly, but it may be difficult to accomplish.  Ignoring the technical challenges of coil windings and inductive charging, etc … it would be great to see it.  Setting down your phone and having it charge on its own means one less thing to worry about.

More battery – Granted, it’s hard to make this a selling point in specs, but, honestly, this is one of the few additional changes I would really benefit from now as things like speed reach diminishing returns.  As it stands now, I’m going to need an extra battery case anyway, so all that painstaking design work from Apple is sort of out the window hidden behind an ugly plastic case.

Merge the headphone jack with the lightning port – Again … more space for more battery.  Make tiny lightning to headphone adapters for everything else that needs to plug in.

In the process of getting a Hadoop cluster running on many of the machines around my household (made possible and relatively uniform thanks to virtual machines running in VirtualBox and VMWare), I ran across issues with getting an old Mac Mini to help the cluster out.  It was of the first Intel Mac Mini’s from 2006 and was a 32-bit processor only (a 1.83 GHz Core Duo, to be precise).  New Cloudera deployments only go 64-bit.

Luckily, I had an old Core 2 Duo lying around from another Mac Mini that bit the dust a year ago, so I was able to put the processor in.

In the process, I rediscovered the plastic push pins that hold the cpu heatsink in.  In short, these things were never meant to come out again, and invariably break.  Again, luckily, some 4-40 machine screws and nuts from Lowe’s helped replace those pieces of plastic junk.

Finally, 64-bit is good, but 2GB of max RAM by default isn’t that much.  The firmware on the 2006 Mac Mini was limited to 2GB, but it’s the same hardware as the 2007 Mac Mini, which supported 4GB of RAM (3GB addressable).  So I found the user hack to get the new firmware on there … and voila … a 2GB + 1GB config installed and the machine sees 3GB of RAM … which gives me a little bit of breathing room to put VM’s on the machine.

As a side note, I really dislike the OS obsolescence being forced on some of this perfectly working hardware.  There isn’t much good reason to stop updating these machines.  In fact, I rather like the Mac Mini’s because the idle power consumption lets you run them 24/7 without burning money.  Even as old hardware, they end up still being useful to host apps and background services.  I suppose if push comes to shove, I will probably find a way to hack Ubuntu onto the native hardware.

Apparently a few weeks ago my home VPN stopped accepting incoming connections.  I discovered this last week when I was on vacation and tried to remote into my home network, only to discover that it would not work.

I was understandably confused because I hadn’t changed my configurations at all.  And having something like this break is a bit scary, precisely because it is so difficult to get a router set up and configured just the way you want it.

Anyway, when I got home, I decided to begin troubleshooting.

One thing I noticed was that UPnP was mapping ports 4500 and 4501 to computers on my network.  But why?  I ignored this for a bit and played around with uninstalling and reinstalling openswan (an IPSec implementation).  Oddly, it worked after I reinstalled it, but stopped working a few minutes afterwards.

This led me back to try and figure out what was going on with those ports.  I eventually figured out with an IP scanner (AngryIP) that the machines mapping the ports were my Mac’s.  That nailed it down.  I discovered that port 4500, used by IPSec, was getting remapped via UPnP for the Back to My Mac service.  I care more about my VPN than I do that feature, so I blocked that port from being remappable on the UPnP side.

I guess Apple isn’t exactly worrying about this sort of scenario for most users, but I think it’s a bit presumptuous to lock down that port when it has a very common alternate usage.

Occasionally, someone will ask me questions like the following.

“Are you a foodie?”

“Are you a car guy?”

In true engineering (and perhaps anti-social) fashion, I often ask “How do you define ‘foodie’”?  Because to me, the distinction is important.

I love the analogy of when people are asked to rate themselves on a scale of 1-10 of how fit they are.  Inevitably they rate themselves around a 7 or so.  Then they are asked to imagine themselves standing next to Lance Armstrong and rate themselves again. They end up in the 3 to 4 range.

True passions must involve a betterment of one’s self.  And the bar must be high.

Let’s use food as an example.  Some points on the range are:

• I don’t care what I eat at all
• I have eaten at some nice places, and actively seek out new experiences.
• I am a skilled chef.  I regularly create new recipes, and evaluate other dishes in the context of my own creations.

I fall into the second category.  Now, there is nothing wrong with the first two.  We all have priorities, and not all interests can be elevated to expert levels.  However, I hesitate to put a label on this (“foodie”) because I find it to be nothing to be proud of.  Yes, I eat food.  So what?  Is that something I should be proud of?  Of the many labels that I might define myself by, this is not one of them.

Consumption for consumption’s sake is akin to gluttony.  It provides no lasting benefit to the world or to one’s psyche.  Consumption combined with creation … now that is admirable.  A talented chef who can create, consume, criticize and refine is leagues beyond me.  He or she is more of a foodie that I would ever be.  Indeed, I would be embarrassed to call myself a foodie in his or her presence, just as I would be embarrassed to call myself fit in Lance Armstrong’s presence.

My point is … when I evaluate for passion, I evaluate to see if one has done something unique with that passion.  Either in terms of deconstruction of consumption back to modification, creation or enhancement of skill, or perhaps critique via compare and contrast methods to synthesize an opinion (which is another form of creation).

So here’s an exercise for the truly introspective.  Stack rank the things you consider yourself truly passionate about … take the first three or so, and honestly ask yourself: Have I created, changed, or contributed anything to this category?  Would I be perfectly OK and not embarrassed to stand next to an expert in this category and call myself truly passionate?  If yes, great, and keep doing more of that.  If no, then stand back, re-evaluate what passion really is to you, and ask how you can better yourself or the whole category with what you are doing.

Some might question the need for this movie, but the basic problem, according to what I’ve been told, was that:

• Sam Raimi and Tobey McGuire were tired of the franchise and wanted way too much money to continue.
• Sony needs to make a Spider-Man movie every so often to keep the license.
• Continuing within the existing framework would have contractually required Sam’s involvement, since he set everything up.

Hence the reboot.

At any rate, I found this to be a decent movie.  I’m not sure I went into it with high expectations, but I was interested in the darker tone of the movie.  Cliche, but true.

The movie redoes the origin story.  It didn’t bother me, but it probably will annoy some people.  The teen romance angle and witty dating banter gets a little more airtime in this movie.  I enjoyed the action more in places, and less in others.  In particular, the practical stunts look good, but also often fail to communicate the real “superhero” like jumps and moves that should be possible.  Spider-Man gets injured a lot, and that isn’t really consistent with his “pre-cognition” powers.  I guess this is done for the sake of movie drama, but I’d like to see the fights be a little more intelligent and consistent with the comic.

The Lizard was not a particularly compelling villain, nor were his motivations interesting.  He’s sort of a bad guy for no reason at all.  They should have done more with the character.  It would have helped.

Garfield was a great choice for this movie, and he and Emma Stone have believable chemistry.  Garfield gets across some of that high school angst with a serious tone and not the comical one that Tobey McGuire was laden with.  It works.

There are some strong parallels with the first Spider-Man movie (2002).  Both villains inject themselves with green liquid to turn into super villains.  Both involve a refusal to perform human testing of highly experimental procedures. Both have a “New Yorkers helping out Spider-Man in his time of need” event.  I would have preferred that the plots diverge more widely.  A reboot needs to distinguish itself from its predecessor.

The movie strongly foreshadows that this trilogy is going to end up with the famous death of Gwen Stacy.  It would be a more complex and interesting twist if that’s where it all ends up.

I still miss the old MTV Spider-Man series.  It had a great trance musical theme, dark overtones (students and people suffering serious consequences from villains left and right), all oddly but well mixed with serious college issues (stalking, hazing, dating, general life etc).  Enjoyed that more than all the movies.

In the midst of all this patent brouhaha, I think it’s important to note that Apple’s success with the iPhone and iPad wasn’t just the result of innovation in one product area.  It was the result of years of constantly putting the customer first.  Years of saying “hey, as a company, we aren’t going to waste your time.”

That’s why when Apple finally announced the iPhone, it hit big.  Rather than all of the initial skepticism people usually have with a product, customers knew there would be something worth looking at.

The fact is, Apple occupies a psychological space in the market’s mind that is closer to the “buy” decision than other companies.  It’s not much different from a friend recommending movies or games to you.  Once or twice … you have similar tastes, and maybe he got lucky.  5 times … you start paying attention.  You may plan a whole night of entertainment around his recommendation.

It’s not a fair race any more.  In the minds of consumers, Apple is already half way to the finish line at the start of each product cycle.  And that’s because they’ve been running the race correctly for 10 years or more.

And that’s also why, even if Google makes a great phone or tablet, it won’t matter.  At this point, it would have to be an order of magnitude better to get attention.  Google just doesn’t have the trust.  Instead, they stand up in front of you and declare that the Nexus Q is best thing since sliced bread.  And that Google+ is doing amazing numbers … all of which you suspect are carefully selected to hide the truth, which is that none of your friends are using the service and you have no reason to go there.  And which you confirm later by reading any number of reasonably researched articles on the Internet, as well as correlating it with your own experience.

This kind of marketing spin does Google no favors.  It is developing skepticism within its customer base, not a willingness and automatic expectation to buy.  It is a bad direction to head in.

It is worth noting that the two models:

• Innovating by seeing what sticks
• Filtering everything so that only the best makes to the customer

are not right or wrong.  Certainly startups tend towards the “what sticks” approach, and many companies (perhaps even most) succeed there as well.

However, the absolute pinnacle of success is only reachable by filtering for your customers.  There is no other way to get that Pavlovian “yes” response to develop.  If your model relies on constant refreshes of products or services to customers, then you will, at some point, be surpassed by a company that filters unless you do it first.

Is this bad?  Not necessarily.  Second or third place products can serve different niches and different needs, but they won’t be an object of desire for the masses.  Just try not to let your ego get in the way if it happens.

Made the switch today.  Looking OK so far, tho I seem to have lost most of my image links.  I suppose that’s the price of progress, eh?

Auto sharing to Facebook and other networks seems to be possible now.  These weren’t even options when I started the blog the first time.