Obsessive rambling about technology and products will ensue
Product design & technology are not separate competencies
Technology is the application of knowledge & tools to solve a problem. Product design is the practice of understanding a problem and producing the most efficient & effective product for the problem at hand. Complex problems require relatively complex solutions. The two disciplines, technology and product design, go hand in hand. In Henry Blodget’s latest article, And Here’s The Secret Reason Apple Is Crushing Google…, Henry states:
Google has an engineering culture, in which brilliant technologists are the rock stars.
Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images
The brilliant student.
Apple, meanwhile, has a product-design and marketing culture, in which “technology” merely serves to support a product’s function and form.
There are two things I’d like to call out here. First, engineering is the “how” in technology and product design is the what. If Henry’s point is that Google lacks the product design element, then what he is actually saying is that Google is ran by brilliant engineers, not technologists.
Second, “technology” is not used to support a product’s function and form. A product’s function and form are inherently critical to the efficacy of the technology. Despite the negative wrap that marketing gets, the effective use of marketing is about getting technology into the hands of the right people and to educate them on how the technology should be used. Apple obviously gets this as all of it’s marketing has the technology and it’s use cases front and center.
Succeeding at engineering is not succeeding at technology. Technology is a super set that includes engineering and product design. At a training I attended a few months back, Marty Cagan, author of Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love unapologetically said that the product design element is the harder part of technology. If that is indeed true, it’s not hard to see why Apple is the most valuable technology company on earth.
My Birthday post. One of the cool things about tech is that it’s value is often directly correlated to the way it is leveraged. One could argue that the best tech has a low variance between minimum and maximum yield with respect to work done by the user. Timeline, and many of the tools on Facebook do not satisfy that condition, but that’s why the Facebook development ecosystem is so relevant and booming. In laymen’s terms, to be epic at Facebook requires a lot of work and expertise (or really sexy products).
It’s like steroids for web developers.
Q: How do you take on the competitive console industry
A: Build a media consumption device that outsells every PC manufacturer, develop a massive development community and support higher resolution than any TV on the market… and make it portable.
A recent article I wrote on the BazaarVoice blog. Like any other technology, Facebook solves problems when used appropriately. When misused the results are unlikely to impress.
Cobook, A Slick Address Book App That Doesn’t Upload Your Data
Jon Orlin, techcrunch.comThe mundane Address Book was big news this week due to the privacy fiasco, but here’s a post about an impressive address book app with a different approach to privacy. Cobook is a Mac contact management app that’s simple, powerful a…
Check out this article but definitely watch the video. Very cool software. This video just kind of blew my mind. Very cool UX. Mac only for now.
High-res
How Much Do Tech Companies Make Per Employee?
Matt Silverman, mashable.comAs the U.S. limps back from recession, the tech industry has been hailed as a boon for growth and job creation.
But upon closer inspection of multi-billion dollar valuations and scrappy startups on their way to profitability, you…
Awesome perspective.
Hogwash: Top Mobile Designers Are Not Pushing Back Against HTML5
Dan Rowinski, readwriteweb.comEntrepreneur aficionado extraordinaire Robert Scoble posited a question on his Rackspace blog yesterday asking if there is push back against HTML5 by the top mobile designers in San Francisco. He cited new apps Path, Storify and…
Is it me or is this debate getting old? Just let people vote with their product development.
Facebook Messaging can revolutionize communication, period.
There have been various mentions in the blogosphere regarding the question “Is Facebook killing email?” Based on the stats we know that it isn’t… yet. However, after breaking down the problem email sets out to solve, we can see the potential of Facebook as a communication medium.
In the web’s early years many of the constructs were web based interpretations of real world components, mail->email, commerce->ecommerce. Each migrant construct ferried over a set of problems similar to those that exist in the “real world.” In the case of email, junk mail persists both mediums To solve this problem we’ve enlisted junk mail algorithms, government regulation, and various other hacks to compensate with this failed model. At the end of the day, these approaches are just hacks; duct tape to keep this mode of communication together. Despite the increasing sophistication of these hacks, they are inevitably flawed.
Facebook presents us with an alternative mode of communication that at first glance may seem underwhelming, but the power and ubiquity of Facebook’s OpenGraph and user base quickly dismisses this understatement. Facebook provides us with a network of nodes that ties our online identity to various third parties. These third parties can be friends, family members, restaurants, other applications, games, music, videos, and the list goes on. Each node is confirmed by us and cannot be effectively infiltrated. If a node gets corrupted by illegitimacy it can be removed manually by the user, but is often removed automagically by Facebook’s watchdog algorithms/moderators. The only sources of information that can reach out to us on Facebook are those that we have authenticated (unless you have enabled your @facebook.com email address which can be removed or changed at any time). Each and every message/notification can quickly be tracked to it’s source. If the source becomes unpleasant or spammy, we can sever the tie with a simple click. Update: According to Microsoft 97% of email is spam. Symantec suggests this number is closer to 70%. How much of your Facebook inbox is spam?
Facebook has been built with authenticity in mind since it’s inception in 2004. The problem with email is that it lacks the ability for users to police the nodes. The best we can do is unsubscribe from email lists, but this is not a catch all method of protection. In fact, many spammers use this as a way to find active email addresses. Clever eh?
Facebook may or may not kill email, but for the sake of my inbox I sure hope it does. The potential is there, it’s all about execution.
