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

Bubbles

-- Posted from my iPhone

Peace

I come in peace, take me to your leader, chief, king, president or CTO.



-- Posted from my iPhone

Boot process

Locate and identify peripherals
Verify main components connected
Initialize camera autofocus
Run quick self check on memory
Identify environment
Sit up and try not to collapse back to bed

-- Posted from my iPhone

Unplugged

Being left without 'net is similar to the middle ages being left without...
Okay, no idea. Probably being left without your mouth and ears. And eyes. And 'net.

I just learned today that a mirrored and distributed system critical service breaks down just as easily as a single pc. If something gets screwed up, it replicates the problems to all other servers, making sure they'll be down as well. That's like anger. Spreading and duplicating and screwing up everyone's attitude, taking ages to restore any sort of peace.
A virus is easier dealt with than the hidden pockets of anger built up over the years. You either die or recover. But the anger and bitterness in people takes forever to control, and I'm not sure you can really ever cure it.



-- Posted from my iPhone

Unique value

There's always that BS how you need to offer unique value to sell, and that's the only way to sell something. I wasn't buying it.
The real deal is that if you want to sell something at a given price you either need unique value, a lot of value or a lot of marketing.
A lot of value is easy to sell. Selling a hundred dollars worth of shit for five bucks is easy.
A lot of marketing is also easy, as it's somebody else's job and usually it's done by throwing a lot of money at it, with a limited amount of brainpower involved.
The problem is that both of these cost a lot.
So unique value is what marketing and sales like, because it's cheap and sells itself.
But unique is rather vague. Just doing something badly in a different way creates uniqueness but not a lot of value. Typically unique value is being the first or the only one doing something valuable to the consumer.
The problem is that it needs a lot of brains, a lot of smart people, a great culture for innovation and individual contribution (almost like a working democracy), a few people with excellent ubderstanding of the market and the customer and a huge pile of pure luck.
Expecting that 'good kind of of unique value' without understanding these factors is a very popular mistake.
Asking why we're not doing a unique new paradigm changing thing AND why we're not doing everything that any of our competitors do, only better - this pisses me off sometime. It's either a choice you have to make or a very tough balancing problem.


-- Posted from my iPhone

Sleepyhead

-- Posted from my iPhone

Chinese 3d

Taipei automotive show. What?

They say R&D in China means Rip off & Duplicate.


-- Posted from my iPhone

Are the leaders in the right position?

Our hp office printer is very critical towards our management. The hungarian text translated back to english means something like: 'please insert paper in rhe tray or check whether the leader (managers) are in the correct position. I guess we really should.






-- Posted from my iPhone

Sleeping beauties

I love my daughters. They're angels. When sleeping.



-- Posted from my iPhone

WinCE on Lufthansa

Catched in lufthansa. I didn't know they were using CE for it. It makes sense of course. What's strange though is why are they showing the CE bootup process to everyone on every flight...

Do not press this button

Sometimes I wonder how common sense is not so common after all. I was in Chicago last week, staying in a westin hotel. Arrive, checking, go to elevator, press button, go to room, collapse. Well, this time I ended up looking for the elevator's button for two minutes. Why? They put up a large firefighter instruction panel with a big red 'lets fight fire' button and put the elevator's call button right next to it. WTF
It's actually logical in a sense. There's really only two use cases there. You either want to go up to your room OR you're a firefighter trying to save lifes. Saving lifes is more critical and you have to make sure they notice the relevant button quickly. Nobody wants to be responsible for the terrible firey death of hundreds of people just because the firefighter did not notice the correct button to press, right?
The inside of the elevator also contained an untitled button with a description a few inches further away, saying 'must be used in case of fire'. Since they were far apart, it got me thinking that the elevator should be used in a fire, which was weird.
Come on Chicago, designing usable interfaces is not that hard, is it?





-- Posted from my iPhone