Recently in Observations Category

I've heard sentiments like these before. People overspend on things they can't afford or don't need and then bemoan that fact. It might feel like you were duped or compelled as subsequent purchases increase the total expense or the complementary integrations encourage you to buy other products (known as the "halo effect").

But there's absolutely no force or coercion involved here, despite how the author ambivalently characterizes it:

Remember, this is not something that consumers are being forced to pay. They are dipping willingly into their own pockets, because they're essentially slaves to the devices.

…

As for Martorana, his family's indentured servitude to Apple looks like it will continue indefinitely. He is looking to replace his MacBook with a newer model within a year or so, which he guesses will cost at least another $1,300. While he loves the products unreservedly, he sees no way out of the annual Apple tax.

Apple is quite adept at producing compelling products and the fact that so many people spend so much money with it is why they're one of the biggest, most profitable companies on the planet. It's basic economics that these people value Apple's merchandise more than they value the money they trade it for. It's also easy to lose sight of the volitional aspect of all this and the wide range of alternatives available.

We're living in very interesting times. I think we're seeing a fundamental change in organizations as they move more and more towards knowledge work. Nothing matters more than value production—without it you will not have a revenue-generating business.

In the past when knowledge work was more rare, companies produced a physical good for sale or use as an input to other products. There was a tangible object that had some sort of utility to someone. The problem of a manufacturing company is distribution: how can I get this product into the hands of paying customers that want it. When organizing the employees of such a company, a rigid hierarchy works well because it generates efficiency. That leads to cost reductions, which translate into profits.

But in a knowledge organization, the fundamental problem is producing something of value. Since the product is intangible, anyone could generate it and you're fighting a human tendency to undervalue non-physical goods and services. There's a constant struggle to get customers to actually pay for your product; distribution has become trivial due to the Internet. Everyone in a knowledge-based company must be tied to value production as there's not much opportunity for cost savings since the inputs are typically mental. Efficiency comes from shedding non-producers.

This has implications for career development that are just starting to come to light. For example, your career needs to be horizontal. No longer must one climb the ladder to build a career. Sidesteps and expansion of responsibility without title changes are just as viable in a modern organization, if value production is the key. This makes you more valuable to the company.

And that's the path to a long, fruitful career.

Reading yet another article bemoaning the terrible state of Internet surfers today, I once again grew weary of the self-righteousness of that whole genre.

People don't read substantive articles, these scolds complain. Or books. Or the classics. They surf the Internet looking at cat pictures and their textual equivalents. Why can't they read good things that elevate their minds instead of predigested pablum. (Another variant will complain about what people watch on TV. Still another what they listen to on the radio. I don't think there's anyone griping about what people prefer to smell or touch, but I'm interested if you know of them.)

My general stance, after I roll my eyes, is "to each their own." People eat junk food, but that doesn't have any meaningful consequence to your diet. If people choose to subsist entirely on the intellectual equivalent of that, why are your knickers binding? Your nose is missing no skin. If you find value in high-brow long reads, more power to you, sir! If you like chick lit, so be it.

For this reason, I cannot lament the fact of the Internet. It is an unmitigated wonder and its net effect on the world is exceedingly positive. Never in all of human history has it been easier to learn anything, have better access to experts, or publish your writing. The audience for all of this is global and ubiquitous. The New Yorker and TMZ.com can peacefully co-exist, neither acknowledging the other, with their readerships overlapping to whatever degree they may.

As Gandi said, "be the change you want to see in the world." And the author of that piece, after his ironical lament of linkbait—of which he is one of the pioneers as a former editor of Gizmodo, suggests exactly that and commits to living the life he wants others to. (Though that didn't seem to last long given his author page.)

Don't worry about humanity, worry about yourself. People will read, watch, and listen to whatever they want and your chastising isn't going to change that behavior one whit. Eat your organic, healthy mental food and stow your smugness.

Back when Steve Jobs died, I found this quote in an interview with him from 1995. There were many important things that he said over the years, but this one really resonated with me.

Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that "I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that." Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

I used to do little electronic kits when I was a kid—we couldn't afford Heathkits—and I, too, think they had a profound influence. Not only do you realize that there's no magic in everyday things, you discover that they're actually far more amazing.

I think about this every day. I drive to work in a vehicle comprised of thousands and thousands of parts from all over the world, designed by a company in England; assembled in a factory in Germany; powered by decomposed dinosaurs dug up in the Middle East and turned into fuel by Texans; and listening to songs selected randomly from a library of thousands on a device that is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful computers of my childhood. And all I had to do was go to a couple of stores and plunk down some money, an amount that I considered very reasonable.

I mean, who needs fantasy or science fiction? Harry Potter's wand doesn't hold a candle to the productive wonder of global capitalism and the power of the human mind.

The other reason why this hit home for me is that I have kids and I want to impart this sense of wonder to them. It reminded me of Richard Feynman's father. We watch How It's Made and MythBusters and I patiently answer their "why" questions no matter how trivial. I am careful not to overwhelm them or impose my interests on them; I realize that this parenting thing is a marathon and I'll get to everything I know and love eventually.

School can be boring.

Let me put the emphasis where I mean it: school can be boring. So can work. So can life.

I'm not going to say that the purpose of school is to be tedious. But learning and mastery aren't supposed to be effortless. You have to learn things that maybe you don't want to because they're a) foundational and b) important. For a child, it'd be great to stick only to what interests you and skip the math drills. And it's tempting to think that a child-centered education might result in more engagement and thus more learning.

But that's not how life works. You can't only work on the fun projects at your office; someone needs to wipe out the toilets; and there's always paperwork to be filed. There's going to be a boss and he's going to tell you to do things. If you cut and run because man that guy's always droning on about the proper sequence to assemble the widget, then you're not going to be employed for long.

Knowing how to handle being bored and follow directions is a life skill. Finding the value in relationships with people unlike yourself (or maybe even beneath your level of intelligence) will serve you for the rest of your life. School is a great place to acquire and practice those skills. If you indulge your child's self-absorption, you're not doing him any favors and disappointment is going to be a theme throughout his life.

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple years how prophetic Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is. Many have noted the parallels, but one that I haven't seen made anywhere are the ones between Colorado of the book and North Dakota of today.

In the midst of a widespread recession, North Dakota is booming. The oil industry is leading the way with ripples in air traffic, rail traffic, lodging, and even higher education. It's attracting industry and the industrious just like Colorado did in the fictional work.

In the book, what did Colorado desperately need? Reliable rail transportation. The government and its crony capitalist collaborators fought tooth and nail against the heroes of the story, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, as they tried to supply it to the state.

And in real life, we have the spectacle of Obama "delaying" the start of the Keystone XL pipeline. Aside from linking the booming shale oil industry in Canada with the Texas refineries, it was also going to be a vital transportation vehicle for the Bakken Formation.

I'm more than a little worried to see what else might come to pass from Atlas.

It's really tough: I read Steve Yegge's description of the perks of working at Google Kirkland and I'm torn. On the one hand, damn! Can you imagine working in a cushy environment like that? It's the lap of luxury and you don't even have to be a billionaire to enjoy it—you just need to get hired by Google!

On the other hand, damn! Can you imagine working in a cushy environment like that? It seems like you'd get so soft because of the coddling and you'd really have to work to avoid feeling entitled. It seems that Aaron Swartz may have been on to something with his critique of life at Google. It certainly appears that Larry Page might have second thoughts.

Personally, I like the work. All the music studios, dog parks, gyms, and such seem like distractions from work. Don't get me wrong: you definitely should take breaks but a walk would suffice. Moreover, free food and all the rest cost a lot of money. It doesn't come out of salaries or capital expenditures, seemingly, but it's got to come from somewhere. My guess is that Google's generating cash out the wazoo and the cost of perks is not yet registering on shareholders' radars.

The effects of this sort of coddling poses a real threat both to Google and the employee. When there comes a time to reduce the perks—and that seems inevitable—the business risks alienating employees who have come to expect the perks. For the employee, he or she will have a difficult time at the next company if they can even find one comparable in pay. Personally, I say no thanks. I'll take my generous pay, excellent benefits, flexible schedule, and reasonable perks any day.

Pascal's Wager of Social Networking: setting up integrations so that posts on one social network automatically get cross-posted to every other social network.

GAH! If you can't pick one place for me to read your content, I will pick one place where I will follow you and hide all of the others.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

– Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech (text)

I've never been much of a career planner. I just try to do work that interests or fascinates me for as long as I can. Once it starts to get boring or I start getting wanderlust, I look around for opportunities to seize or work on creating my own.

Sometimes, though, I get a little down on the distance between where I'd like to be and where I am. That Steve Jobs quote, from a commencement address that I listen to more regularly than I ever would have thought, reminds me to not worry about it and to trust that great things are afoot.

After more than four years—incredibly—I got caught speeding. I got a 2011 MINI Cooper S Convertible back in October and it is way sportier than my previous one, Buzz. Let's just say that I frequently drove it rather rapidly.

It was just a matter of time before I got another ticket—going over 100 MPH was not terribly uncommon and I once got it up to 131 MPH. Unfortunately, I was clocked going 92 MPH in a 65 MPH area. The patrolman was generous and wrote it up for 85 MPH so that it wasn't criminal speeding.

Because it had been so long since my last one, I was able to take a defensive driving course to expunge it from my record. I had heard from other perps colleagues that you could take them online now, so I checked out the available schools in my county. I was prepared to go to my usual one, the Arizona Chapter of the National Safety Council, when I spied The Improv Traffic School.

Genius marketing! If I had to choose among approved schools teaching the same curriculum, one that promised to be funny would stand out from the pack. Intrigued, I signed up.

There were a couple of chuckles but they weren't any better than what a decent driving instructor would provide. The quizzes were exceedingly easy and it took four hours, which is required by the courts. (I thought about trying to defeat the mechanism that prevents you from completing early, but decided that I'd done enough already and toed the line.)

So now I'm on the straight and narrow for the next two years, driving like a "normal." I just might make it, thanks to cruise control.

Every year, I have a ritual I do about a week or so before my birthday: I make my birthday private on Facebook. The reason? I don't want the onslaught of hollow birthday wishes on my wall or in my inbox. Unlike this person, I think birthday recognition on Facebook is worse than not recognizing another's birthday at all.

The author contends that there's very little difference between writing down someone's birthday in a calendar as a prompt for subsequent years and Facebook notifying your friends that it's your birthday today. I emphatically disagree.

A person who takes the time to notice your birthday, write it down somewhere, and then follow through on the day of (or planning ahead if there's lag time) is head and shoulders above entering your birthday into your profile and then Facebook prodding people to make an empty gesture.

Sure you can customize the greeting, and that should be the least you could do. What about taking the time to get a card or a gift or even do something nice for that person? In this day and age of doing the minimum, such effort becomes that much more valuable and appreciated.

So maybe you should take a moment to scour through your Facebook friends and plan something real for their birthdays. Resist the urge to thoughtlessly post something electronic.

Statists may want to tiptoe around the N-word, but when the federal government buys equity stakes in private firms and dictates how they should be run, that's nationalization.

I'm a sucker for time-lapse sequences. Maybe it's my inner historian, but I love seeing the effects of time without taking a lot of it. I can still remember the day when I first encountered Noah Kalina's pioneering 6-year daily photo montage: I contemplated starting down that road myself but I quickly realized that I didn't particularly care to put forth the effort. I forgot about the genre until about an hour ago.

It was then that I caught Andy Baio link to Dan Hanna's Photo Aging Project wherein he took two photos a day for 17 years:

HOLY CRAP! That's some forethought and work. I was impressed. And so I started looking for similar, though less-formidable, videos. Boy did I find them!

[Programming note: I'm really torn between just providing links to the videos and actually embedding them inline. If I put them inline, then this is going to be one slow loading and long-ass entry. But if I just link to the video, then you're going to be a-clicking all day. I wonder which one I'll choose.]

• Ines Everyday: this is the one that got me interested in looking further into this. I guess it had seemed previously like a male thing and this made me realize that there was probably a bunch of interesting characters doing these videos. Main takeaways: she changes her hairstyle a lot and seems to enjoy covering her neck.
• Girl takes pic of herself every day for three years: a solid entry by an Asian lady. Main takeaway: she went through a lot of glasses in three years.
• She takes a photo every day: the 200-day entry in an ongoing project. Main takeaways: she really changes her hairstyle a lot, has a lot of earrings, and was that mime makeup? Yes, it was.
• Growing a beard: well-done piece. Main takeaway: he's a slow beard grower. My friend Larry could have made that video in a week tops.
• Ellora Daily Photo reaches 1282: photos from birth on of a little girl. Main takeaway: I wonder what happened that required her head to be shaved on day 915.
• 9 months of gestation in 20 seconds: it's like watching a bell curve form. Main takeaway: the guy behind it is quite a goober.
• Madeline, Five Years - Photo a Day: nice try, but 198 photos is not "Photo a Day." Still, pretty adorable.
• Lee takes a photo of himself every day for three years: nothing special until 50 seconds in. Yowza!
• Michael takes a photo of himself every day for 1 year: teenage boy going from 16 to 17. Main takeaways: lots of hairstyles and why would anyone have that clown picture on their wall.
• Puppy Photo Everyday: Labrador going from 7 weeks to 6 months and completely busting the "Everyday" claim. Still, it's a puppy. Come on!
• Amanda takes a photo of herself every day for 2 years: watch the transformation from 14 to 16. She's going to really appreciate this when she's older.
• Ryan takes a photo of himself every day for 400 days: a black guy takes on the project. Main takeaway: what's the deal with the purple hair at 23 seconds in?!
• Sven takes a picture of himself everyday for 3 years and Tobias takes a picture of himself everyday for 3 years: twin brothers from 27 to 30. Is it wrong that I only watched one?
• Living My Life Faster - 8 years of JK's Daily Photo Project: high quality with much better stabilization. He's also got the pictures if the video wasn't enough.

I left off the countless parodies, which were often funny. I think they're strangely compelling because the subjects are real people—not a seedling, for example—and they have the nostalgic appeal of a yearbook with the intervening, gradual tweening that's normally missing.

This article on cargo cult management really struck me. I can't say that I've seen much of that sort of thing at Go Daddy—that's the part where Go Daddy is more startup than big business—but I've definitely seen that theme running throughout the business and management literature. Mike Speiser also nailed the identification of Jim Collins' bilge, which I had always considered spurious but couldn't name what bothered me so much about his approach. Now I've got a formulation to use when I see this sort of activity.

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]

I was at QuikTrip tonight when some teenaged girls bought some Red Bulls. This apparently offended the gentleman behind them (and in front of me) because he made some comment to the cashier, who was still muttering to himself and incidentally me when it was my turn. The cashier told me that they're (Red Bull) probably going to be on a restricted list soon because of the twenty-year-olds having heart attacks. Then he said that until then they were perfectly legal and snorted, "Capitalism! Harrumph."

Never mind the irony of the gentleman who originally was outraged by the teenagers' purchase of legal stimulants while simultaneously buying a carton of cigarettes and a six pack of beer. Never mind the cashier spouting off political views to a customer he doesn't even know. Never mind the inanity of seeking a ban on a 12 ounce energy drink that contains half the caffeine of an 8 ounce cup of coffee.

For me the supreme irony was that this cashier disparaged capitalism in its very temple. It is hard for me to imagine a convenience store of such variety and value as QuikTrip existing anywhere besides a capitalist economy. (Side note: I'm not at all suggesting that we live in a capitalist economy—but we certainly are among the freest economies in the world.) Sadly, none of these responses occurred to me at the time.

Facebook released a bit more detail about its Application Verification Program today. While it did not offer specifics, there is one big piece of news that wasn't divulged at F8: there will be an application fee and it will be non-refundable.

The application fee may as well be an application fee because it won't be long before the "Verified by Facebook" logo will be the deciding factor in a user's mind about whether to authorize an application. Facebook applications have a certain taint at this stage because of the hokeyness of a large number of them. Those lacking the badge will bear a stigma, especially if Facebook includes the badge on the authorization popup.

At some point, you will pay to be verified because otherwise your app won't be used. I hesitate to call this a shakedown because we don't know the price of the application fee. They could not have instituted the fee at the inception of the developer platform because it would have limited the number of applications. Adding it at the tail end of a rich ecosystem really strikes me as mining. So again I have to wonder why Benjamin Ling didn't mention it at the keynote.

I suspect that it was because the fee would have undercut the user-centric theme at this year's F8. The new profile design, the statement of core values, and the changes to the application developer program all were justified as being necessary to re-establish trust and value for the end user. But this fee plus some of the punitive measures points towards a more "business of Facebook" rationale. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it'd be nice if it was stated frankly.

Prior to attending F8, I believed that the new Facebook profile redesign was motivated by de-emphasizing third-party applications, making more room for ad space, and enabling more integrated ad placement. It was such a radical change and I was aware of the pathetic CPM of the Facebook ad inventory, so I concluded that this move was about Facebook the business.

Having been through three sessions and two keynotes, I now think that the changes are truly user-centric. The justifications presented today by very earnest and sincere Facebook developers and designers ring true to me. In case you didn't want to wade through my copious (and possibly inscrutable) notes from the sessions, the basic rationale behind the radical revamp is to emphasize the feed as a social stream and build user trust by limiting and segregating third-party applications.

They made the excellent point that the current profile easily becomes unwieldy and forbidding after adding just a couple of applications. The tabular nature of the new profile gives the user control over what to emphasize and what to display. The more time I spend with the new profile, the more I like it.

At the same time, I've been working on the open-source framework Facebook.NET in anticipation of the concomitant API changes. At the API level, Facebook has frequently dropped the ball. There are breaking changes, insufficient documentation of other changes, and frequent revisions that aren't discussed unless you happen to notice slight alterations to the documentation. It's truly frustrating due to the flux even though it's supposedly stable and released. I'm hoping that this is the last significant API change for awhile, or, better still, the Facebook platform team realizes the cardinal rule of API design: maintain backwards-compatibility at all costs.

[UPDATE (7/27/2008): I had written this on the plane coming back from F8 but I forgot to publish it when I got connected back on to the Internet.]

The 404 page for Apple's search forums helpfully offers a link to search their forums. If you click it, you get this less helpful screen:

I thought I had noticed something missing recently in the discussion forums, but I figured that the search capability was a figment of my imagination. Now I know that it was there at some point and then taken away at some later point. Very bad form!

[UPDATE (7/16/2008): Oh. They could have at least put a link to that announcement on every page so I would've seen it. Oh. They did. Sorry, Apple Discussions Administrators!]

My ambivalence towards John McCain as president is well-documented. But a thought just hit me that makes me think his presidency might be a net good (but barely): he's opposed by the religious right. As many have noted, the religious right's rise in importance within the Republican Party is worrying and could have positively dreadful effects in the long-term. Anything that serves to limit their influence is promising, no matter how otherwise unpalatable it might be. If he would host Giuliani as his vice-president, then I'll be more optimistic about the return of the GOP to its Goldwater days than I've ever been in my life.

I was reading Clay Shirky's "Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus" today and came across this paragraph that really spoke to me:

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

The larger point of his essay is that we, collectively, waste a lot of time watching television. If even a small portion of that were put to better (maybe different is more a propos) use, we could accomplish a lot. Shirky quantifies it with the entirely-made-up number that a 1% reduction in television viewing is the equivalent of 100 Wikipedia projects. I think that's bogus, but the general point rings true to me.

I think about these things often because a) I grew up watching a lot of TV, b) I am interested in the cultural shifts that the Internet has fostered and forced, and c) I watch too much television as it is. In January of this year, we ditched satellite TV and have limited ourselves to what comes over the antenna. That has severely curtailed the random, idle TV watching but it has largely been replaced with movie watching via Netflix.

Is that really any better? Perhaps, since movies are typically of higher quality and more worthwhile than television sitcoms. But isn't it, in the end, exactly the same? I shudder at all the great books I've neglected, all the music I've never heard, and all the blogs I haven't read—just kidding on that last one—as I fritter away the hours watching Antiques Roadshow or Lost. (Just kidding about Lost: the only way I'll stop watching that is when the series ends.)

I guess it's high time that I got a life.