Brave Doesn't Even Begin To Describe It

Armstrong, moments after returning from his lunar EVA

Samsung's Reputational Damage

There's been some bleating reaction to the Apple vs. Samsung verdict that says either it's bad for consumers because a company can patent rectangles with round corners or that $1Bn is a price worth paying to earn a position of market leadership.

The former is a somewhat juvenile response. Others managed to bring devices to market with similar silhouettes to the iPhone while taking care not to rip off the detail.

And justifying Samsung's penalty on the basis of the proceeds of the crime (beating Motorola and HTC back by mimicking Apple) is at best soulless, at worst an endorsement of theft.

'So what if I got caught and did some time, I still have the awesome VCR I nicked.'

This result protects innovation, it doesn't diminish it. Samsung just needs to hire smarter and more talented people.

Run!

No psuedo intellectual mutterings about software. Just this.

Inspired by http://mofarahrunningawayfromthings.tumblr.com/

THE HORSELESS CARRIAGE

I love the fact that we are living in a time of such profound change that our framework of understanding is struggling to keep up. The word 'phone' makes up half the letters of the word 'smartphone' because the evolutionary path from which the smartphone emerged started with the telephone. While 'phone' might still make up 50% of the word, it probably accounts for 10% (and falling) of what people actually use smartphones for. If the smartphone had just magically appeared in a puff of smoke, fully formed yesterday, we'd probably not put the word 'phone' in its name.

We've seen this kind of perceptual lag before. When the first automobiles emerged we called them horseless carriages because our existing framework of understanding told us that this was what they logically and quite literally were. The precursor to today's car even looked like exactly like a carriage with the horse part missing, but over time the design evolved into the rainbow of form and function we have today.

We often recognise and describe change by what's fundamentally different from what came before, what the principal modifier is. However, the problem with that way of comprehending change is that it limits our thinking for a few years. Our default framework of understanding is historical and not forward thinking.

I'm certain the same thing applies to online software. (If I've just got this - and I immodestly consider myself to be something of a software industry brainiac - I suspect that most online software businesses might not even realise this yet, let alone traditional software businesses.)

Ten years ago, we determined that if a software application was served up through a web browser over the internet, then it was logically and literally just online software and not software operated locally.

Innocuous enough.

Ten years on though, and my sense is that like the previous big shifts, our understanding is only now catching up with reality and we're beginning to recognise that a new, modern software business is here and about the only thing it has in common with traditional software is that they both employ software engineers. The technical delivery, design, marketing, customer support models and possibly most crucially, the metabolic rate is so profoundly different from traditional software business.

And I think we're all just beginning to get that.

The Other Cloud Computing

Scene rendered in 6 hours, 10 minutes in Vue 10. This is at preview quality, final quality would have taken a day on my quad core Mac Pro.

I imagine that harnessing the power of a cloud based render farm will be the way we'll eventually see immersive virtual reality holo-deck stuff.