Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
News just in from the department of the extremely obvious - iPhone users can be a little obsessional and, even, delusional. It seems a consultancy has invested a serious amount of time to diagnose what they call the 'iPhone syndrome'. Strand Consulting tells us that the iPhone isn't that great a phone but that users… Continue reading Lost in telecommunication
Perhaps it’s a coincidence, perhaps a conspiracy. Perhaps there’s something in the west-coast water supply but the last week or so has seen a pretty sophisticated debate break out on the use of facts and intuition in design. Douglas Bowman is leaving Google, having been heralded as one of the best things to happen to… Continue reading The numbers’ game
Inspired again this morning by a Clay Shirky twitter (this microblogging might have legs you know) Dear AAPL, re offer to upgrade to iTunes+ at $0.30 a song: Go fuck yourselves. I took yr stupid DRM off myself, too late to bill me now This reminds me (a) of a great gaping void cartoon: And… Continue reading Indecent pricing
I've been thinking about what 2009 holds in store. At this point, I should of course wheel out all of the great reasons one should not make predictions (especially about the future). Or perhaps I should recall the fictional Magrethea in HitchHikers' Guide to the Galaxy, a planet which decided to hibernate through Galactic recession… Continue reading 20 days for 20 years
More news from the department of 'if Microsoft did it, they'd be strung up from a lamp post but if Apple does it, no one cares' department. It seems that you have to be so cool to be a member of the apple app creators' club that you're not allowed to even talk to the… Continue reading Hostage for a fortune
Amid the phenomenal suprise of the new... 3G iphone, Jobs also slipped some other news into the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It seems Apple is re-releasing an old favourite from Microsoft: Yes, it's the sick older sister of Windows '98. The ill-fated 'millennium edition' of Windows which barely made it into the noughties. This new… Continue reading Is it just me?
I've been thinking a lot recently about what it is that companies like Apple actually do to inspire the kind of religious fervour we've seen recently in the lead up to CES, and journalists and fans alike clamber over each other to make wilder and wilder predictions over the next miracle that Jobs will announce.… Continue reading No zealot like a convert
Mobile data and applications have always had a funny adoption curve. Who are the most connected in our society? A few dyed in the wool early adopters may have had 3G cards in their laptops for years now or spent many a wasted train journey like me trying to connect to the internet from their laptops via… Continue reading Africa: outwardly mobile
I've spent the last couple of days at the Forrester Consumer and Financial Services (combined) forums in Barcelona. Some pretty good speakers and some interesting ideas which I'll go into in more detail later. Overall, it seems, a consensus has broken out around the need for brands to embrace the changing nature of media to… Continue reading Proving the rule
As Andrew Orlowski points out, the new iPod Touch (the iPhone without the phone bit) is, on paper at least, an overpriced, locked-down PDA and one without any games or even an email client for when you're on WiFi. It is also, however, the only piece of consumer electronics on the market today that will without fail turn… Continue reading On Tap
Leading product 