Great insight: "The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates - Bill was brilliant too - but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection.”
What has always interested me in this vein is the intersection between Jobs' own "Real artists ship" and his obvious and well documented details-oriented perfectionism. It seems to me the real power of Jobs intellect is in that ability to know that the product has reached some critical mass of good enough to ship (and improve later).
I think what sets Apple apart is an unshakable belief in the quality of their own products. While Blackberry etc. release a whole armada of smartphones, as if to say 'we hope variety can make up for a lack of quality,' Apple typically release one model with some minor variation, as if to say 'we tried to make the best, and we know we have, so here it is. There's no point in releasing anything else.'
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
"A word about style and efficiency. As you will see, I tend to write programs in _VERY_ small, easily understood pieces. None of the procedures we'll be working with will be more than about 15-20 lines long. I'm a fervent devotee of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Sidney) school of software development. I try to never do something tricky or complex, when something simple will do. Inefficient? Perhaps, but you'll like the results. As Brian Kernighan has said, FIRST make it run, THEN make it run fast. If, later on, you want to go back and tighten up the code in one of our products, you'll be able to do so, since the code will be quite understandable. If you do so, however, I urge you to wait until the program is doing everything you want it to.
I also have a tendency to delay building a module until I discover that I need it. Trying to anticipate every possible future contingency can drive you crazy, and you'll generally guess wrong anyway. In this modern day of screen editors and fast compilers, I don't hesitate to change a module when I feel I need a more powerful one. Until then, I'll write only what I need."
Norvig's pet peeve: 'Programmers and product managers who can't think about their product from the user's point of view. As Alan Cooper puts it, "The inmates are running the asylum."'
I doubt that Norvig would endorse Cooper's even more insane idea for fixing the problem, though, which is to create a ruling class of "designers" to stand between programmers and users.
Yeah, can you imaging hauling around 2,000 glass plates on your next vacation? Or a professional photographer lugging 5,000+ plates and trying to get some candid shots at a wedding? Digital helps people take better shots. Resolution isn't everything!
This applies even to film. The fact that you had to switch film when going from inside the church to outside receiving line to inside reception is lost on most photographers today. Not only were glass plates inconvient, but so was film!
Not to mention that most glass plates are hand coated and very slow.
However, the media and the camera that shoots it is a tool. Large format glass plates are not the right tool for a wedding. They are better suited to portraiture or landscapes.
Sure, but the megapixel war is pretty silly... Even when applied to analog. I believe the minimum resolution for digital cameras used by nat-geo photographers stands at 6mp.
I disagree. Rounded rectangles are a signature Mac OS user interface feature. Thanks to post-Steve Jobs Apple, there is renewed interest in everyhing Apple, and rounded rectangles are truly everywhere. You would have a hard time finding a popular web site not using them.
What is really interesting in this story is not the algorithm itself, but how Steve Jobs convinced Bill Atkinson by taking a walk outside with him to show how common rounded-corners are in "real-life".
A story can be satisfying because of its relevance. I think that is the case here. The topic is interesting to developers who want to understand how Apple approaches design, even though the story's structure might have some flaws.
It does not matter how relevant you find some aspect of this story, it's still poorly told - and this should be especially clear if the focus on the the interaction between Atkinson and Jobs is what you consider key. Half of the story is about details of an algorithm that simply don't matter if the core of the story is Jobs badgering Atkinson into being willing to code rounded rectangles.
The background about the algorithm helps you understand why Bill is reluctant to go back and implement a new different drawing primitive. His reluctance is the reason why Steve needs to work hard at convincing him, which demonstrates the theme of the story.
I agree that it's probably too detailed in the first bit, but I don't see it as a major flaw for a series of articles about the development of the original Macintosh. The intended audience consists of hackers and developers who get intrigued by technical details.
I still remember the day I compiled an example program that came with Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ compilers. This program was designed to showcase Borland's text-mode user interface library called Turbo Vision, and apart from the programming language used, it ran exactly the same.
Turbo Pascal took just a few seconds to compile the example (no surprises there), but Turbo C++ took several minutes. This was back in the 90's. It seems nothing has changed since then. Sad.
Might have something to do with the fact that university donors love to build new buildings instead of just giving the university money to be spent on HR. (And then the university doesn't have a guaranteed funding source for a top professor? Yikes!)
Endowed chairs work a bit better, but those usually don't go towards new recruitment.
Isn't that, in turn, perhaps because oftentimes donors then get to name the building? At least this seems common in the US, but that's just an observation from the outside.
My university did exactly this. (Supposedly) spent anywhere between £5 mil and £50 mil on a new building; £80,000 on their opening ceremony with lots of local celebrities; and then left all the students with 4 year-old hardware for design/video courses.
I really appreciated the sterile white-washed building for creative courses while attempting to use After Effects on a G5 iMac :|
A free plan is often a replacement for advertising spending. It gets you users who wouldn't otherwise consider using your product, and you hope that they would tell their friends about it, and some of those friends would eventually pay.
Here is an extreme example: If I remember it correctly, MySQL's conversion rate was quoted as about 1 in 1000. If they didn't distribute the entire product for free, they would have much less market penetration, but certainly earned much more. Had they chosen that route, they wouldn't be able to sell the company for a cool billion.
Nothing in life is free. If you want a lot of users, and don't have the advertising budget for it, you give some or all of your product away for free.
