Windows ex-honcho Jim Allchin on WIndows Vista in 2006: I would buy a Mac.

I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate into great products.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. ... Apple did not lose their way.

--Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft platforms, in 2006 on a private email thread with BillG

JimAll was the top guy on Windows back when I was at Microsoft. I had never heard this quote until now.

I can't help but wonder what was the true failure of Vista. Was it really lack of leadership? Or was it just pure numbers? Windows had at least a thousand engineers with commit access -- possibly more. OS X must have had still several hundred -- several times fewer.

Keep it lean and you can move faster. Be small, and do big things. That's what I learned the hard way in my time at Microsoft.

There's space for innovation everywhere, even where you least expect it. Like your vacuum cleaner.

via telegraph.co.uk

Sir James Dyson has unveiled a new motor. He's got 50 guys working on it in the UK. At first glance, vacuum technology seems like the least sexy thing in the world to be working on. Yet Dyson's team has created the fastest motor in the world, and all so that you can make your house or car cleaner.

I think this is a testament to how much there really is left to be done in the world. No, it's not easy. No shortcuts. But you can create anything, and if it's good, it will sell. The world desperately needs this kind of innovation. And it can happen in almost any market, sexy or not. The Dyson motor is a wakeup call and reminder to those who want to build great things: There is so much to build, and so much to make better.

What will you do?

Merlin Mann talks about getting off your ass and just getting your ish together -- start creating.

via maximumfun.org

Here are my semi-verbatim notes out of this great 27 minute talk (listen, it's good for you!) --

Don't worry too much about the process.

Before you become awesome at something, you've got to do something. And you're going to suck at it for a long time. It's just the rest stop to being awesome, though.

We create mental barriers around ourselves before we get started. E.g. if I just had this one little thing that was a little different, I'd feel so good about starting this project. I can't begin to start on this project before I work out the tagging taxonomy!

There's a part of you that is incredibly afraid of people seeing you sucking at something. You see people who seem to create great things the second they touch the keyboard, but actually they're just used to letting other people see how much they suck.

My fingers have to move for about 20 minutes before anything good comes out. You have to write your way out of a thinkng block but you can't think yourself out of a writing block.

Stop creating barriers for yourself that it has to be awesome your first time around. There's a mean Dad voice in your head shouting you down -- I don't have the right tools, I have to watch this video, I don't know how to do ___.

Trick from 43folders: I'm not allowed to go to the bathroom / go to Reddit / get a drink of water until I ___ -- e.g. write 100 words, etc.

Constraints matter. You can sit in your office for 16 hours and not write a word. But if you say you're only allowed to write for 2 hours, then you'll get a lot more done.

Develop an insane amount of tolerance for having no idea something is turning into. Don't sweat monetizing it. Don't sweat AdSense. You don't know what it's turning into. If you let your brain give you ideas, then you can execute on them.

You have everything you need right now to start. You don't need that crazy space pen or that Tablet PC.

Once you get past starting -- you've got to start polishing. You have to start, then have something, and only then add the judgmental part of it. If you judge before you create, then you'll end up just leaving mean comments on people's blogs. (LOL)

"I gotta go make something now, and I'm not going to take any more input until I make something." Stop reading wikipedia and stop doing research.

"If I only had a little bit more time, this could be really good." We put ourselves in self-defeating scenarios -- that's why we turn papers in late. We have an excuse this way.

Great talk -- reminds me of Ira Glass on storytelling

Jeff Bezos breaks with tradition when he sells the Kindle. Emotional marketing at its best.

via wired.com

Jeff Bezos is a trailblazer of the first order. In this Wired article he explains why the Kindle breaks from the traditional business models of subsidized hardware (e.g. cell phones for 99 cents)

It makes so much sense for Kindle. People are willing to pay more up front if it means no hidden fees later (no monthly fees for the connected Whispernet service, and no additional markup on each book). We are opened up to the unlimited nature of this sliver of a device -- imagine, every book at our disposal for cheaper than we'd pay for the treekilling one!

The alternative sucks. Yeah the device is free, but I gotta pay for connectivity and even more for books? Yechhh.

It's emotional marketing at its best.

Simplicity, explained in about ~145 slides. Simple is not simple.

via nexres.posterous.com

A great addition to this explanation would be some discussion about modes.

A few examples they present include: a) a Microsoft Windows wizard experience, b) date choosers that use two separate month and year combo boxes instead of just one combined combo box.

In both cases, you take away control while introducing additional modes, which are invisible states that the user must divine through context clues around the implementation of the user experience. That's partially why engineers can make such truly awful UI -- but it makes sense to them because it matches their mental model.

Wizards encode modes into the fixed, rigid "choose-your-own-adventure" style of navigating seemingly disconnected questions that don't connect me with what is really happening. (GROSS!)

Ultimately the most telling slide is the one around progressive disclosure -- hide things where people will find them.

As an aside, I've been quite impressed with how Slideshare and Scribd have made Powerpoint docs super accessible. It's simply unprecedented how easy it is to absorb information in bite-sized chunks from such beautiful and well designed presentations.

Trent Reznor quits Twitter -- Trolls win.

via stereogum.com

Stereogum has republished Trent Reznor's final note to the raving masses that have driven him from his social media experiment.

With over 600,000 followers, Trent Reznor flexed the star power that comes with being the voice of a several generations of angsty youth. It seems as though a tiny fraction of his fans have ruined the party.

Could it be that the classic Hollywood fear of over-engagement be true? Celebs are struggling to figure out what role they want Twitter, Facebook and their social media presence to play. Reznor says:

I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and "human"... If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you've projected on me, fair enough - it's probably time for you to leave.

Figures of music represent lifestyles and amorphous identities. It's hard to be larger than life when you're also a real person. Is the NIN frontman the first casualty in a trend? We'll see.

Think about the scale -- at worst the trolls numbered fewer than 600 people, or 0.1% of his followers. Given any large enough collection of people, you're going to have some ugliness. But suddenly these 600 had a way to reach out and ruin someone's day.

We're definitely still figuring out this computer thing. For now, trolls win.

I miss low fidelity in games.

At the risk of sounding like a geezer reminiscing about the good old days... Remember Monkey Island? I ran across a link on Hacker News today that just blew me away. It was a step-by-step tour of Monkey Island by its original creator. Man, was that ever fun. For the uninitiated, Monkey Island was an 'plot-based adventure game' -- they just actually don't make these anymore. It had pixelated cartoony graphics, a great story, and very witty dialogue.

Games of that era (Monkey Island was released in 1990) had such a profoundly different feel than games of today. Then, there was room for much more creativity -- in fact creativity was mandated. Computers just weren't that powerful. So a game designer basically HAD to create games that revolved around 50 pixel tall sprites!

There's something pure about this. I am not wowed by the graphics, or taken aback by the technical wizardry, leaving me to concentrate on the story. It's not that the graphics are bad -- on the contrary, they're phenomenal for a a typical screen of that age (640x480).

Sometimes when a robot looks a little too human, it creeps us out. A robot can actually be worse off than something supposedly more low fidelity. This is known as uncanny valley. I think games are arguably in this valley as well. Everything is so high res, but the ray tracing and rendering is still yet obviously not realistic. We know we're in a game, and a game that costs multi-million dollars no less.

There must be great low fidelity stories that can be told. Games yet to be made, and low fi game worlds to be created and conquered.

Or maybe all it takes is low res sprites. Would you rather play as High Fidelity Guybrush Threepwood?

or this old-school Guybrush Threepwood?

Strangely, after all these years, I think I'd still go old-school on this one.

The real innovation of Web 2.0 (it wasn't all hype!) and the case for more open API's in Twitter clients

It's well acknowledged that markets are more efficient, and therefore create more value than non-markets. If I have 5 people bidding for the same project, I'm free to choose the best vendor for the lowest price. Without choice, then there's no virtuous cycle. I have to live with whatever there is.

Well, with Web 2.0, API's really do drive innovation. Because suddenly social media became pluggable. Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Digg, Reddit, MySpace, and even Google products can work with new products in ways their creators could not have anticipated.

We've seen this before. As Charles Mann points out in the recent article Beyond Detroit, the PC revolution was fueled by the interchangeable nature of every component of a computer. I could choose the best graphics card, whether it was ATI or Matrox or later on 3dfx or nvidia. I could get the fastest hard drive for the lowest price from Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, and the like. Intel vs. AMD vs Cyrix was another big decision. But everyone from hobbyists to the bulk buyers at Dell could choose the best. Because there was choice, everything got better and cheaper, faster.

Why? Standards. And we need more of them in Twitter clients. Right now, there are none, to the detriment of consumers and the Twitter ecosystem alike.

In Firefox, if I want to add a search engine, all I have to do is click the little tab and I can manage and add new search engines. The user has control. Yes, there are pre-set defaults, but it's not a closed system. If I want to use something, I can. It doesn't have to be in the box. I can add it myself.

The Twitter clients haven't done anything like this. Each list of URL shorteners, picture posters, and every integrated service is a custom list that is hand-picked by the creators. Arguably they have no reason to open this up. Exclusivity is power. In a selfish, self-interested world, each rational actor only has to act in their own interest.

Firefox allows plugins and modifications to their browser for critical features because they're a non-profit, and aren't bound by profit motive. Microsoft had to include the ability in Internet Explorer because the government forced them by rule of law in 2001 for being anticompetitive.

Somebody call Dave Winer -- we need a common standard and someone to rally behind! After all, Twitter is the new RSS.

Ev and Biz, maybe you can help? Twitter clients are playing in your playground. You have control of the API and ultimately you guys are the only ones who can make sure the playground remains a fair place for everyone to play -- not just the kids with extra money who can pay to play.