When a company's reason for being is in agony, the first order of business is to modify the brand. The logo seems malleable, the business plan requires integrity and perseverance.
Dave Winer:
... the only way to shut [WikiLeaks] down will be to shut down the Internet itself. Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.
Paul Graham:
The advantages of doing things in software on a single device are so great that everything that can get turned into software will. So for the next couple years, a good recipe for startups will be to look around you for things that people haven't realized yet can be made unnecessary by a tablet app.
In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is ... they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force.
Necropsy: pathological dissection of a corpse, belonging to any life form; particularly to determine cause of death. A dissection is a minute and detailed examination.
Autopsy, from Ancient Greek αὐτοψία ("the quality of being seen for oneself"): dissection performed on a cadaver to find possible cause(s) of death. A cadaver is a dead body, a human corpse. By extension to human artefacts and activities: an after-the-fact examination, especially of the causes of a failure (more common term in this context: post-mortem).
In my experience, and that of others I've spoken with, reading Ayn Rand's works has often elicited a feeling of recognition -- yes, this is how the world works, this is how I've been operating -- but with the tremendous addition of a whole system, integrated principles, knife-sharp definitions, and vivid descriptions. Of course, it felt like coming home, being welcomed on Earth by a benevolent, far-seeing mind that would not preach self-sacrifice or mysticism; reading ideas towards which one had groped but never quite found the right words for; and understanding thoughts one didn't know had been developed, illustrated, and presented with such a degree of rationality. She was a towering giant, and the only reason we are close to her is that we had what it took to approach her, something in common before we even heard about her.
At startup #4 we developed a product, and we went to a trade show. We had a willing buyer who wanted a quantity of tens of thousands to equip all of the ministry employees in their country. We had a manufacturing facility producing hundreds per week and aching to ramp-up to thousands. What did the CEO / sales guy do? nothing. He didn't return the buyer's calls, didn't send 10 samples as promised in person (right in front of me), never had an explanation of why that sale wasn't happening, why we weren't signing a contract. What he did do was interrupt meetings with his mobile phone, make bad jokes, never write down what the founders agreed needed to be done; and he always asked when the next version of the product would be ready to sell. A business cannot exist with salespeople who neglect to take money from buyers for available merchandise. The sales guy was not listening to the market.
This applies to much more than restaurants and web sites. Dave Winer:
When I go to a great restaurant I don't want the waiter to interfere with the experience. I came there to eat and be with my friends. Same thing with software and with websites. I came there to read and to learn and to be inspired. The website can help, but it isn't the show.
Nightfall, a short story by Isaac Asimov (1941) nicely answers this question:
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?(Emerson)
Do we value the pursuit of knowledge, discovery, and innovation into the mass-information age? do we want our children to grasp and manipulate the world first-hand? are man-made objects as equally accessible as natural entities?
Coy Doctorow is angry with Apple's path: The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."
He is on to something significant.
ben fry:
There's simply no reason to prevent people from installing anything they want on the iPad. The same goes for the iPhone. When the iPhone appeared, Steve Jobs made a ridiculous claim that a rogue application could "take down the network." That's an insult to common sense ... The $499 iPad that has no data network hardware is not in danger of "taking down" anyone's cell network, but applications will still be required to go through the app store and therefore, its approval process.
Computing platforms need to remain open. Tinkerers explore and innovate. Apple will lose this battle.
