End user value

T-Mobile Pulse Android phone





WTF phone for old people?





Note the prices... Wow...


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Hungary

Maja segit apanak csomagolni az utra

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Budapest,Hungary

Pebbles

Okay, so maybe Mick, Goro and myself have too much stress.










-- Posted from my iPhone

Working hard

I came by this link on Facebook: http://www.caterina.net/archive/001196.html

And I don't fully agree. Ir's easy to do it better the second time around, once you've already done it and you know the ropes. But making it work for the first time requires an incredible amount of work and dedication. Those frustrated and stressed hours in the office staring at a problem might not be well spent, but without giving it all your waking hours you can't give it all your sleeping hours as well. Of course someone who already learned the mistakes by building up and selling a startup can do it the second time around AND get home for dinner. Because there will be someone else pulling long hours this time around. Someone else will immerse himself in the problem. Also, against all rational-sounding BS from people who never did it, I beleive in the extreme usefulness of late nights. Not every night. Maybe once a week. But on a late night with a release to deliver you are forced into a pattern you might not be forced into otherwise. You have to prioritize, decide, go for the lowest hanging fruit, make the necessary compromises, hack a little - all in all, you have to switch to 'product finishing mode'.
You also need the atmosphere of it every now and then. Again, not every day. But having less interruptions, a bit less noise and fewer people around can help to enter the flow. You and your work can become one and good stuff happens.

Btw, I think mixing Mozart and Crick and Edison with a SW company for analogy is really weird. Why not throw Napoleon in there as well...

Level of Detail

Postal mail: The summer was good, we're planning a holiday.

Postcard: Greetings from Budapest.

Forum: Where should I go on holiday?

Blog: We're travelling tomorrow! Here's my packing list.

Facebook: In Vegas. The hotel's nice.

IM: yeah, just arrived. brb, nature calls

Twitter: I just farted.

I think the next evolutionary step will be too much detail. I don't want to see, nor hear some events in real time.

Strategy schmategy

I've always thought of myself as someone who understands strategy, especially when it comes to technology strategy. There's only one company that really surprises me regularly, proving that I have lots to learn. It's Apple. They always seem to be doing something completely braindead and moronic, somehow get away with it and it almost always turns out to be an extremely smart and strategic move a year or two later. I wish I could work there and be involved in coming up with this stuff. It's just amazing smartness, and if there's a single thing I respect in life (and I think there is exactly a SINGLE one) then it's smartness.

Just take a look at Microsoft. I don't think they did ANYTHING that I'd consider really strategic or smart in the last decade. It's not that they make bad products, because in general they don't. (Although they have zero idea about cool factor and usability in some of their departments) They just didn't do anything smart or unexpected that turned out to be smart in a year.

They're bleeding all over the street on a very crucial shortcoming, for example. Their whole UI architecture, which is the underpinning of almost all the user experiences in their products, is getting very old. It all originates from the DOS times, and it was pretty neat back then. But a couple of decades later, it's archaic and limiting. Just take a look at the architecture of Cocoa, or Android's UI framework or anything, really, anything that happened in the last decade. And the worst thing is that they're so heavily invested in this stuff that they can't even change easily. Silverlight is coming along nicely, but nobody's using it. Ever. MFC and Managed bullshit and all this is just another abstraction layer on top of the same old engine.

I really hope they'll get their act together. They're too big and too important to be so stupid.

On the topic of strategy... I think what most people don't realize is that it's important to have a strategy, but it's a luxury to be able to execute one. You can have the brightest idea on how you could steer a market in a certain direction or how to create a new ecosystem, but without tools to execute, you're just daydreaming. And for those of us who don't have the resources that Google or Apple commands, our best chance is to have a strategy, and hope it executes itself through coincidence. What I mean is, if you have a private jet and you want to get to a party in Rome, you get on board and go there. If you're a hobo, you hitch a hike, or take a train that is going roughly in that direction and get closer and closer to it slowly. And most of the time by the time you arrive either's everyone already drunk, or they have already ran out of booze, or most likely the party's already over. I know that we're heading in the right direction. I know that we can party like hell. I just wish we'd have the money for a ticket.

On second thought.. It's easy to always say that I could have done it better if I had an army to command. But probably the road to having an army is also paved with strategy. And probably your own strategy should be based on your capabilities. And be just as smart and surprising as Apple's, only on a smaller scale.

Which one is Daddy?

Maja - my 2 year old angel - is getting real artistic. While drawing she murmurred which one is who. Mom, dad, Nati, Maja.
When I asked again who's in the picture he pointed at them and gave me our names. But not in the same relation to the 'potatoes' drawn. So, out of curiosity I checked a third time. Now I'm convinced that potatoes are basically reassignable representations of family members. As long as there are four, we're happy.
After this day - our almost complete large family of 17 people (3 generations) - trying sushi for the first time for most of them - and then eating a whole lot of hungarian food to compensate - I actually feel like a big fat round potato.
A stuffed potato, none the less.




-- Posted from my iPhone