After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom — fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.
Source: danpink.com
How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.
Paul Graham, “Apple’s Mistake”
Another credible voice joins the chorus decrying the deeply broken approval process for the App Store. Squandering this kind of intangible asset — the hearts and minds of loyal developers — is a mistake it seems Apple would be far too smart to make. And so I have no doubt that they’re aware of the damage being done, but when leveled against disrupting the now $1.2B+ revenue stream that is the App Store, decision paralysis seems to have set in.
Source: paulgraham.com
Better in a world with file-sharing?
The Times Online asked “Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?”
Short answer: yes, unless you’re a record label.
Source: labs.timesonline.co.uk
Simon and Schuster or the Encyclopedia Britannica could have become Google (organizing the world’s information) but they didn’t build a search engine because that’s not what they do. Struggling newspapers could have become thriving networks of long tail content, but they chose not to, because that’s not what they do.
Why?
Seth Godin, The why imperative
Seth offers a great counter-balance to the cult of “core competency.” Focus is key, but don’t become blind to change.
Source: sethgodin.typepad.com
Building yourself a better business model
One is a series of CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 lectures, this talk does a solid job of treating the issue of building partnerships to grow a business; worth watching.
Source: blog.marsdd.com
Facing the (Free) Music
For 10 years, music execs have waged a war against digital file sharing — and software like Napster and websites like The Pirate Bay — which have decimated the industry’s profits. But recently, there are signs from Europe that the battle over free music may be changing.
If you’re interested in how and why the music industry has come to be what it is, you’ll want to listen to this program from NPR’s On the Media. They’ve done a wonderful job making sense of a decade of fear, missteps, willful ignorance and even a few glimmers of hope.
What’s the old movie line from ‘Annie Hall’? Relationships are like sharks; they move forward, or they die,” says Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. “Well, technology companies either move forward, too, or they die. They become less relevant.
Forecast for Microsoft: Partly Cloudy
For whatever criticisms one might level at Microsoft, they rarely receive due credit for being as aware as they are of their own challenges.
The days of build once and milk-the-heck-out-of-that-cow are over.
Abraham Sultan, How to Fail Miserably as a SaaS Company
(via hiten)
Source: hiten
Mobile Apps: Models, Money and Loyalty
The data in this report is computed from a sample size of over 2,00 live applications and over 200 million user sessions tracked each month across Apple (iPhone and iPod Touch), Google Android, Blackberry, JavaME platforms.
With more than 75,000 applications in the App Store, consumers have a vast choice of alternatives to the applications they have already downloaded. And while discovery of new applications is a challenge for consumers, retaining users can be equally difficult for developers. To shed light on the kinds of applications that tend to be used over a longer period of time, Flurry studied user retention across 19 categories over a 90-day period. We monitored if consumers returned to use a downloaded application within 30, 60 and 90-day periods, as well as how frequently consumers used applications over those time periods. Flurry measures user retention by the number of users who downloaded an application, at any time in the past, and used that app within the last seven days.
via (infoneernet)
Source: blog.flurry.com
The social future of television
Ethan Zuckerman:
Herkko [Hietanen of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology] sees a near-fatal embrace between content providers and cable companies. They’re co-dependent, and scared of alienating one another. But this dependency can limit innovation in services. We’ve seen less development around on-demand video, the ability to watch on demand than we might expect than we might expect. Instead, we’ve seen “enhancements” like DRM and the broadcast flag, and heavy litigation against anyone entering the markets. Basically, we see a lot of intelligence added at the center of a network, with dumb, constrained edges that are prevented from innovating.
This is the most succinct analysis of the state of television that I’ve seen in some time, and describes precisely why I no longer participate as a TV “viewer.” Those exceptional few shows that I simply love I’ll acquire via iTunes or, failing that, BitTorrent, with no ads, no hassles and relatively good portability, so long as I can connect the display to my laptop.
In short, I’ll pay you for good content if you get out of my way and let me. For the rest, I just don’t bother any more.
