garry’s posthaven

Google’s dependence on hardware and carrier partners puts the final product out of their control — and into the control of companies whose histories have shown them to be incompetent at design and hostile to users.

Windows Mobile was a failed experiment in relying on hardware vendors, partners, and carriers to build a great consumer device. There were too many cooks in the kitchen. There were too many integration points.

Case in point: Bug fixes from the field. To get a device to market, there was the core device team, then a mobile operator/commercialization team, and finally the carrier's support / deployment team. There was no shared database of bugs. No shared responsibility. When schedules were stretched thin and the device was failing even simple tasks, it was too easy to point fingers. Oh, that's the carrier team's fault. That's the OS team's fault. That's the commercialization team's fault. Hardware's fault. Nobody took the reins to ensure a quality product was being created.

The Palm Pre team is doing it right. Google would do well to take note here. Building cool techie platform toys that let you create nifty Powerpoint decks is all well and good. But it's all a huge waste until there's a satisfied user using your awesome phone that works great.

It comes down to responsibility. Someone has to be responsible. If you're creating a device, and you want it to succeed, it better be you and your team.

Usually I hear about new music from friends, or Pitchfork Media, or any number of other venues. But not radio. Never radio. Til tonight.

I heard Handlebars by Flobot tonight on Live 105, and I had to stop my car to listen to the rest of the song.

Finally... a song ABOUT something real. Compelling. Visceral. Hope there's more from where that came.

Originally built as a Quicken-competitor, Mint.com just became a lot more interesting. It's a case study in having aggressive terms of service that declare company ownership over data. When you own data, you can do a lot more than just provide a service to a web consumer.

Like make aggregate graphs like the above. Mint has direct access to the realtime spending habits of all their users. As such, they are able to forecast consumer spending *AND* revenues of large public companies sooner than everyone else. It's almost like insider trading. They will have information nobody else has access to. If you see Mint CEO Aaron Patzer making a killing on the stock market, I wonder if the SEC will come calling.

Mint proves that when it comes to making money with user-generated / user-provided content, opportunities can come in unexpected ways.

In the case of Arctic Monkeys, Riley explained, it took multiple visits with the band to show them demos and explain what the Guitar Hero franchise is all about to get permission.

This is pretty shocking. Some bands should be paying Neversoft to get placement into Guitar Hero 5, not nickel and diming and hemming and hawing over *allowing* Neversoft to use their music. Getting listed = guaranteed placement and listening by millions of music fans. These people love guitar rock-- love it enough to fill their living rooms with cheap plastic approximations of musical instruments. That's about as targeted as you can get.

It goes to show that in crazy media times like these, many people don't even really know which way the value chain flows. Maybe because now it flows both ways.