jan korbel

Marco Arment thoughts on free as a business model in the light of Google Reader shutting down:

In other industries, this is called predatory pricing, and many forms of it are illegal because they’re so destructive to healthy businesses and the welfare of an economy. But the tech industry is far less regulated, younger, and faster-moving than most industries. We celebrate our ability to do things that are illegal or economically infeasible in other markets with productive-sounding words like “disruption”.

Much of our rapid progress wouldn’t have happened if we had to play by the rest of the world’s rules, and I think we’re better off overall the way it is. But like any regulation (or lack thereof), it’s a double-edged sword. Our industry is prone to many common failures of unregulated capitalism, with the added instability of extremely low barriers to entry and near-zero cost per user in many cases.

Via Daring Fireball

John Gruber does some reality checking:

The desire for the “Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen” narrative is so strong that the narrative is simply being stated as fact, evidence to the contrary be damned. It’s reported as true simply because they want it to be true. They’re declaring “The King is dead; long live the King” not because the king has actually died or abdicated the throne, but because they’re bored with the king and want to write a new coronation story.

— Daring Fireball

If you are in the business of building anything for users, you must watch this. For those of you who know her “Creating the passionate users” talk, this is an updated version of the theme.

Via @paveldolezal & @davegreiner

Free and open source.

Jason Fried writing for the Inc.

You don’t have to analyze the bottle like I just did to understand that it is well designed. You know it, because you can see the bottle, feel it, and use all of its features immediately. You can see where it starts and ends. It is not complicated. It is in balance with its purpose. Imagine a bottle without a spout or a bottle that was burning hot or a bottle that was as slippery as ice. Every reasonable person would know that wouldn’t work.

Contrast that with software. What are the criteria for evaluating software? Software doesn’t have mass. It doesn’t have shape. It doesn’t cast shadows. It has no edges. It has no size. You can’t pick it up. You can’t feel it. It doesn’t obey the laws of physics. It’s not really even there. Nothing is pushing back, saying, “That’s a bad idea; that won’t work; that’s going to burn someone or hurt someone or make someone drop it or…” Almost none of the tools we’ve developed to evaluate physical objects apply to software.

This is why most software goes bad over time.

Sir Jonathan Ive quoted in The Independent:

“We have been, on a number of occasions, preparing for mass production and in a room and realised we are talking a little too loud about the virtues of something. That to me is always the danger, if I’m trying to talk a little too loud about something and realising I’m trying to convince myself that something’s good.

“You have that horrible, horrible feeling deep down in your tummy and you know that it’s OK but it’s not great. And I think some of the bravest things we’ve ever done are really at that point when you say, ‘that’s good and it’s competent, but it not’s great’.”

You know, I believe he actually means it. It’s not marketing bluff. Then I am content with how and what Apple is doing.

Via @keff85

Benedict Evans has an interesting view of Google’s strategy:

In other words, Android, like Plus, allows Google to tie searches and advertising to individual people and places. In the long term, the data that Google gets from Android users is probably just as important as Pagerank in understanding intent and relevance in search.

Hence, the real structural benefit to Google from Android now comes from the understanding it gives of actual users, and the threat comes from devices that do not provide this data – even if, like the iPhone, they do provide plenty of search traffic.

Via Daring Fireball

John Moran on strategy (P&L is Profit&Loss):

For a coherent strategy to work, then, the organization executing it must be measured as a whole, rather than as parts. In other words, if a company is to have a single strategy, it must be driven by a single P&L.

Via Daring Fireball

This 5 minute video by @claychristensen is the most influential thing I’ve watched in 2012: youtube.com/watch?v=VmbSpT…

— Jason Fried (@jasonfried) December 14, 2012

Horace Dediu brilliant as usual:

Microsoft’s problem is not that it has difficulty offering an operating system for tablets. The problem is that the economics of both systems and application software on tablets is destructive to its margins.

Via AllThingsD

Another piece the my mosaic of ideas. This outtake from book “Anything You Want” by Derek Sivers resonates with my own thougts.

I am trying to propagate one obvious to me: Web apps are ideally positioned to be very successful in getting done a variety of jobs for businesses and make a lot of money along the way. For now, that seems uninteresting to others.

Thanks to Jiří Sekera for reminding me about this one.

I was fortunate enough to get to talk at Future of Web Apps + Future of Web Design double conference in Prague. First, I would like to thank to Future Insights (previously Carsonified) and personally to Cat Clark for the trust in me to give me the speakers wild card.

Bellow are my slides and complete text of my 30 minutes speech. I spoke from memory so I have probably digressed on a few places. Also, please, forgive any typos or grammatical errors I’m basically posting my notes and I had no time to do thorough proofreading.

Continue reading

In an article “A Trillion-Dollar Transfer Of Wealth Is About To Hit Silicon Valley” Dan Lyons writes something I happen to be in agreement with for last 6 years:

Enterprise customers have been locked into overpriced, underperforming software and equipment for a decade or more, and the’ve been loath to spend money to change things. But now it seems a huge transformation is about to occur, driven by mobile devices, cloud platforms and the software-as-a-service business model.

But his vision is too narrow. This is not just about building better products against SAP or Microsoft. This is about opening whole new market niches which couldn’t be approached before. Ultimately it will be about more than trillion dollars.

Coincidentally, I will be speaking about this next week at FOWA in Prague.

Paul Graham has written another one of his essays.

Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that’s the real recipe.

Good write-up of the thinking behind the basics of SaaS pricing models by Ray Grieselhuber.

As a startup, if you want to survive, you have to pick a model. Everybody starts off by thinking they are low on the complexity scale (“our product is simple!”) so they believe self-service is an efficient model for them. But complexity, in this discussion, has nothing to do with simplicity in the user experience (elusive in its own right) but the complexity of your user acquisition and total cost of service.

Via @jasonfried and @newsycombinator

Horace Dediu in this week’s Critical Path:

The market is changing so quickly and the value is so enormous in the marketplace. This is the future of computing and I’m not saying just personal computing I’m saying all computing. This is in many ways the future of civilization and how money is made. The stakes could not be higher.

Do yourself a favor and listen to it.

James Hamilton wrote and article about using ARM processor in servers. He describes how ARM architecture offers better price/performance ratio and consumes less power.

It’s very nice example of disruption. You see, ARM started in small niche of processors that were constrained by small power consumption. They build up knowledge advantage in this field over the years.

And as mobile computing in form of smartphones and tablets is taking over the world, ARM is no more a niche player, they are providing architecture for billions of processors.

And now, ARM is going up market. Interestingly enough it’s beginning to take the very high-end of the processor market – servers.

How long before it is going to strike the real Intel fortress of desktop processors? Well, maybe not that long.

Another interesting aspect is that ARM is licensing the architecture so that others may be producing the chips or even doing their own design of them, as Apple does for their iPhones and iPads.

Easy could mean faster. Easier could mean more obvious. Easy could mean a lot of things. But the part of easy I like is when you take an existing problem, study it until it becomes clear, toss out everything that makes it blurry, and carefully polish what’s left over.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because we’re finishing up a brand new product. In some ways it’s entirely new territory for us, but in other ways it’s familiar.

— Jason Fried, Signal vs. Noise

I agree with his point and am looking forward to the new product. I bet I will learn something from 37signals again.

This is a great device. It is a new thing, in a new space, and likely to confuse many of Microsoft’s longtime customers. People will have problems with applications — especially when they encounter them online and are given an option by Internet Explorer to run them, only to discover this won’t work. But overall it’s quite good; certainly better than any full-size Android tablet on the market. And once the application ecosystem fleshes out, it’s a viable alternative to the iPad as well.

— Wired

“Likely to confuse longtime customers”? Even from nerd point of view the Surface is “Yeah, nice, but…”, I think from the point of businesses it will be more of a “Why?” and for home users it could be “What?”.

I doubt that anyone expects the Windows 8 and new Microsoft tablets to be great success rivaling the iPad. I think the success will be if it does not flop.

Anyway, Microsoft is looking in the face of falling profits down the road and the question is what it should do?

Via Daring Fireball