The one thing looked down upon the most is not lack of funds, certain clothing, or even an “education”. It’s not knowing
Latest Finds & Thoughts
In a poetic essay thinking over Steve Jobs death:
…the quicker you can kill a dream by making it real, the quicker you see bigger, more important dreams once blocked by the first. The same goes for celebrity: the deconstruction of celebrity removes excuses. With mystery, and thereby celebrity gone, so also goes the pedestal. Their achievements can be more easily assessed at human scale
Steve finally launches this website and can check off an item from the list of dreams but now see the launch as just the first step. The idea of owning a simple website was just a curtain obscuring and holding back other ambitions wanting to emerge.
Ideas are popping in to think beyond:
- use website to showcase photography
- place raw thoughts online to allow others see thought process
- get more involved in the tech industry via writing
- use blog to document language learning journey
- etc
Achieving a goal is like a Pandora box, more dreams spring up.
Of course, going after dreams stem from one’s inner ambition and one could ask when does the wanting stop? When do you become satiated?
Back in 2004, John critiques an open source advocate on Desktop Linux usability
UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. In my estimation, the difference between:
- software that performs function X; and
- software that performs function X, with an intuitive well-designed user interface
isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work
…
Great software developers don’t design for morons. They design for smart, perceptive people — people just like themselves. They have profound respect for their users.
and then turns his attention to open source
The distributed, collaborative nature of open source software works for developer-level software, but works against user-level software. Imagine a motion picture produced like a large open source project. Different scenes written and directed by different people, spread across the world. Editing decisions forged by group consensus on mailing lists. The result would be unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable.
Movies are collaborative art, but require strong direction. So it is with end user software.
While reading this old and long essay— but new to Steve — these two parts stood out as key points. Steve has been using Linux on a PC (dual boot) and hadn’t thought about the difference when using Linux software as opposed to Windows.1 Hey, Steve does whatever to get things working. But it’s as though at times you have to think and work harder for every inch, sometimes unnecessarily so.
In the end, still like working with Linux since it’s a nice change of pace. At least this puts things under perspective and explains why things are the way they are.
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Although have an iPad, at the moment, don’t own a Mac so can’t say much about it. ↩
In the last Hypercritical episode of 2011 titled, “Blue Ocean”, John Siracusa goes into an hour explaining Nintendo’s situation and how the gaming industry parallels the tech industry.
A few online articles have spread calling Nintendo to drop their hardware and focus game development on Apple’s iOS platform. John, however, disagrees and recounts Nintendo’s history to point out what exactly made them successful over the years, something they shouldn’t forget going forward.
Steve likes. The whole episode goes into other topics and is pretty long so just skip to 1hour 12min to hear the good part. (^_-)
For about an hour in his radio show, Rob Morris talks one on one with Steve Blank. Always great listening to a man with such vast experience.
The interview circles entrepreneurship, business models, and a tiny bit on Steve Jobs. If you’ve been following Mr. Blank for awhile, the ideas may seem like a repeat but all the better for them to stick. ^_^ Check it out
Listening in on the Critical Path Bob Moesta interview, Horace Dediu continues his elaboration on the Job To Be Done theory. Steve never heard of this theory spelled out clearly before but sounds familiar. That’s not to say this isn’t original, just that it has remnants of other closely related ideas, the first that comes to mind is Mark Magnacca’s So What book.
Anyway, the whole interview is informative but one point that struck a chord is when they mention the attempt to recreate the story a customer goes through before buying something. This breakdown is used as a way to better understand why a customer purchases a product or service and, upon hearing of this story creation, the customer journey map smacked Steve in the head, which is something Steve has been looking into for awhile now. 1
As you can probably figure, the Job To Be Done talk kept Steve tuning in closer as it seems to be an umbrella enveloping & connecting other business concepts, an idea you need to nail down first. Can’t wait till Horace dives more on this topic.
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What is interesting is the lack of online material on Customer Journey Maps. Either not looking hard enough, looking in the wrong direction, or too good to be free ^_^ Just a thought… ↩
Do you know when you are stressing over your busy schedule and find yourself always inundated with stuff to do? Well, those are symptoms of a larger problem which could be time management. But one thing you may also overlook is the danger of helping others.1
You see the chances are good that if you’re having trouble managing time, you have trouble saying no to people. So Steve wrote an essay initially inspired while assisting a friend.2 The main problem is we feel bad when people we know ask for help.