How I Refresh my memory

refreshlogoMy friend Paul Tyma (ex-Google, creator of Mailinator, occasional stand-up comic) released a mobile product this week and one thing I find interesting is the difference between how he describes it and how I describe it

Paul:  “Let’s say you had an important meeting with someone you really want to impress. A smart person would probably spend a non-trivial amount of time scouring the internet for information about that person. What are they tweeting about? If you’re LinkedIn to them, then go check out their LinkedIn profile. If you were really interested you might go look up their house on Zillow. Or see how their company’s stock price faired today on Yahoo Finance.”

Bob: “Let’s say you […]

By |September 27th, 2013|2013, Companies, Internet, Phones, Social Media, Software, Startups|24 Comments
Read More

Apple is greedy says Fallon Cringely

My son Fallon, who is six and still hasn’t lost any teeth, has a beef with Apple, iTunes, and the iOS App Store. “Apple is greedy,” Fallon says. But he has come up with a way for Cupertino to improve its manners through a revised business model.

Fallon would like to buy more apps for his iPod Touch, but the good ones cost money (what Fallon calls computer money) and he has been burned in the past by apps that weren’t really as good as the reviews suggested, probably because the reviewers weren’t six.

“If I buy an app and I don’t like it, I want Apple to give me my money back,” says Fallon. “Or maybe they […]

By |November 26th, 2012|Companies, Software|92 Comments
Read More

Intercontinental Ballistic App Store

I’ve been thinking about Apple’s App Store and the industry paradigm shift it represents. Apple loves to change the game like this, simultaneously unseating previously entrenched adversaries while building for itself a defensible system for the future. The trick to making it work is to not appear to be too greedy and I think Apple is accomplishing that. They are greedy, of course, but as Fernando used to say, “It is better to look good than to feel (or be?) good.”

Apple’s original App store was for the iPhone — a portable and for the most part cloud based method of distributing and updating iPhone apps. This was followed by Apple’s App Store for OS X, which did much the same for Macs. Both are […]

By |June 22nd, 2011|2011|123 Comments
Read More