We’re making iPhone software primarily for three reasons:
- Dogfooding: We use iPhones ourselves.
- Installed base: A ton of other people already have iPhones.
- Profitability: There’s potentially a lot of money in iPhone apps.
Sounds obvious? Well, it certainly is not for some companies trying to create new application ecosystems.
If you're doing a Web query and some of the computers break in the middle and you don't get exactly the same result as someone else doing the same query, well, OK. You don't want to drop the top result; if I do a search of the New York Times, I want nytimes.com to be the top result. But what should the 10th result be? There is no right answer to that. If a hardware error means we dropped one result and somebody had a different result at No. 10, there's no way of saying that's right or wrong. Whereas if I'm a bank, I can't say, "Oh, one out of every million transactions, I'm just going to lose that money." I can't have that level of failure. But at a search company, you're more tolerant of error.
Interesting interview with Peter Norvig on making and avoiding mistakes at Google, on technical and business level.
With such grand designs, isn’t Vernon Hill, one of the bank’s founders, tempted to build an IT system of his own? “I hate programmers,” replies this dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. “They only cause trouble.
The article reminds me that coming from a second world country has its advantages too, like skipping entire technological eras to go straight to more modern solutions.
Joe Hewitt, creator of Firebug and Facebook iPhone API:
The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app "closed" is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can't just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.
A reply from Dave Winer, the pioneer of blogging:
When I was young, some of us envisioned the world we live in today, only we tended to think only of the upside of networked thinking, never the dangers. I guess that's human nature and the nature of youth. Won't it be great if everyone can access everyone else's ideas anywhere, we thought -- on any kind of device, all inter-connected and fast. Some believed, me included, that computers without networking interfaces were totally uninteresting. Everything I created was designed to communicate. I ached because early Macintoshes had such awful networking APIs. Eventually all that got sorted out when we got HTTP -- it was so simple, the big companies couldn't control what we did with it.
But ever since that watershed moment the big tech companies have been trying to get the genie back in the bottle. It's the nature of bigness and corporateness to do that. Facebook didn't exist when I started my work, but now they're here and they're huge, and they view the world the way a big company does.
The enthusiast vs the idealistic skeptic.
Hopefully that's it for the iPad news.
Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images
Interesting concept.
As the boss, you need to design ways to reduce communications paths. Eliminate companywide mailing lists -- or at least charge $1.50 to post to them. Stop having large meetings. You need a culture in which people don't get uptight because they weren't included in a meeting, which means you need a culture that rewards people for doing their jobs and frowns on meddling in other people's work.
Joel Spolsky on overcoming unavoidable cost of growth. Also, a link from the comments, by Scott Berkun: Exceptions to Brook's Law.
the engineers didn't like Jobs. His unkempt appearance, and his belief that his fruit and yogurt diet meant that he could go without showers, didn't add to his popularity. Jobs's supervisor finally arranged for him to work late at night.
On Jobs and thinking different.
