⌘ ⌥ ⌃

Thomas Richards is a lawyer, technologist, and the Executive Director of OETC, a non-profit that seeks to effectively integrate technology into education to improve student achievement.

[commandoptioncontrol]

>If Jay Cutler would just put the dishes in the dishwasher instead of just leaving them in the sink, we'd all have gone to the Super Bowl a long time ago. Change, acceptance, and success: Marital advice in a sports column.

[commandoptioncontrol]

A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word “failure” from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes.

Reminds me of another saying:

Everything happens for a reason. But sometimes the reason is that you're stupid and you make bad decisions.

[commandoptioncontrol]

By today’s standards, it’s not cheap to grab Day One on both Mac and iOS ($9.99 total, currently), but it’s still quite a bit less than a Moleskine.

I love the Day One apps. They are beautiful, fun and functional. And reading the above puts software's unnatural price depression is sharp relief: There is no way the Day One apps (who never get used up) should be worth less than a single moleskin notebook.

[commandoptioncontrol]

> At least six firms are looking at the Facebook and mobile game maker for potential violations of federal securities laws and breaches of fiduciary duty by certain insiders, including CEO Marc Pincus. I am shocked! Absolutely shocked to learn that Marc Pincus and others at Zynga - makers of horrible–time–wasting–money–sucking–contribute-nothing-low-grade games, might not be of the highest moral character. Shocked.

[commandoptioncontrol]

> Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like income, so why tax it? Payroll taxes discourage creating jobs. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households. I also like: >Six: Legalize marijuana... Criminalizing drugs also drives drug prices up, making gang leaders rich. But then we wouldn't have Breaking Bad, so...

[commandoptioncontrol]

> The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end. The enterprise market is already there. It's now just the consumer market that's left to make this shift. And by consumer market I mean the mobile phone app market. Evernote is already there. Dropbox is already there. And away every piece of software that supports itself through advertising is already there. Games with in app purchases are already there. All that's really left is the productivity app market and consumer desktop software. In two years if you're not getting recurring revenue for your product you're giving it away for free with some other path to monetization. That's my prediction and honestly that's probably how Apple feels about it. How else can you explain iAd?

[commandoptioncontrol]

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions.

[commandoptioncontrol]

Brutal.

[commandoptioncontrol]

Kevin Turner of Microsoft:

We believe you can have touch, a pen, a mouse, and a keyboard.

There are no tradeoffs. Eat your cake and have it too. We'll see.

[commandoptioncontrol]

Keep your nose to the grindstone, or your fingers on the keyboard and your eyes on the screen. Because the more time you put in, the more you’ll get done, right? Wrong.

[commandoptioncontrol]

Execute - A 1% PM grinds it out. They do whatever is necessary to ship. They recognize no specific bounds to the scope of their role. As necessary, they recruit, they produce buttons, they do bizdev, they escalate, they tussle with internal counsel..

That's just one of nine great bullet points on being a great manager, of any sort from Ian McAllister's answer on Quora.

[commandoptioncontrol]

>While Mr. Johnson and his supporters are seeking patience — 12 to 18 months — I think it's time to pull the plug. Sure, in an ideal world, it'd be great if J.C. Penney did not have to run hundreds of expensive promotions annually to draw consumers into stores and shoppers would happily purchase knowing that they are getting a good (but not necessarily the best) deal. Unfortunately, shoppers do not behave this way - they love deals. I agree. Ron Johnson is correct that coupons and confusing pricing strategies are poor business tactics, but they are employed when you have low margin products that are undifferentiated from competitor's offerings. If the strategy is to offer unique products in boutique stores, and town halls (whatever those are), why not implement those first, with your new pricing model? Meanwhile keep the old way of doing business for the rest of the stores to keep cash flow going to finance the boutiques and new initiatives. It is tough to be the new CEO and not want to change things fast. But habits of consumers, and your organization's culture take time to change. I'd rather see 12-18 months of small successes to build momentum then take a "rip off the band aid" approach and then preach "patience" as the wound continues to bleed.

[commandoptioncontrol]

Nik Bilton writing for the NY Times on how how Kodak and others failed to make something like Instagram:

“It’s a little like asking why Hasbro didn’t do Farmville, or why McDonald’s didn’t start Whole Foods,” said Mr. Hawley, formerly of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Cultural patterns are pretty hard to escape once you get sucked into them. For instance, Apple and Google are diametrical opposites in so many ways, have all the skills, but neither of them did Instagram, either.”

I'd argue that Apple didn't need to build Instagram in the way the Kodak needed to (or arguably even Google-I'm sure they'd like to serve ads up against all those photos). Apple benefitted greatly from the Instagram disruption. No, not a billion dollars worth of benefit but Apple doesn't need to. Instagram was built on their platform. Apple and Instagram are (were?) a symbiotic relationship. Apple is a disruptive force in the industries it chooses to compete in and provides a platform that help others disrupt other industries of which it benefits from.

[commandoptioncontrol]

Remember Google is awesome because they are open. Except when they aren't.

[commandoptioncontrol]

There’s never been a shortage of whistles; there’s always been a shortage of people willing to blow them. WikiLeaks was a new kind of whistle, but I think looking back the historic figure to emerge from all that will be the guy sitting deep inside a federal prison: Bradley Manning.

[commandoptioncontrol]

The selection of tools for workers by a group that claims to understand their needs better than they do is an archaic concept.

Horace Dediu on RIM's desire to focus on the enterprise instead of consumers.

[commandoptioncontrol]

> The move is an effort to turn around sluggish sales of tablet computers powered by Google's Android software. Has the problem for Android tablets been hardware or software? Because this only fixes the former.