| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Wed 25 Jun 2003 Emotional ConnectionCategory : Commentary/emotionalconnection.txt While watching the WWDC keynote coverage, I needed to remind myself that this is not MacWorld. The crowd here are developers. They're the ones who were supposed to have left the platform long ago in droves. Yet they're still here, ethusiastically receptive. They're obviously liking what they're seeing. Steve Jobs seems to have made an emotional connection. That's also the idea he used to describe the design of the iSight video camera. This makes it possible for people to see the other party's full facial expression in a web-cam conversation, and thus more likely that they'll connect emotionally. This is a good example of how Apple "gets it" - that the whole idea of information technology is to improve the quality of human communications. And so it goes, with the shift from computer-centricty to user-centricity in the design of the new Finder. Until I watched the keynote, I couldn't imagine what else Apple could do to improve the user's experience, besides a little improvement here and there. As it turned it, they could still do a lot. Nothing would have prepared me for Expose. Now that we've seen it, it's obvious that that's the prefect solution for managing desktop clutter. And did you hear the crowd gasp when he showed the Mac switching from one user's workspace to another? This is called delighting the customer. I'll leave the last words to Derrick Story at O'Reilly : "Over dinner do you think we were talking about how some Wall Street analyst thinks Apple stock should be valued? No way." These are hard core developers here. "The hardware is robust, the operating system is evolving, the developer base is growing, and customers worth having are taking notice of Apple once again. I call it peanut brittle computing: You have 'salt of the earth' Unix blended with the sweetness of GUI applications. My gosh, what a good time to be an Apple developer." Knowledge DiffusionCategory : Technology/knowledgediff.txt Over the last week or so, there's been a marked increase in downloads of Sendmail Enabler. I know for a fact that somebody in Michigan has used it (he says he's been trying to get Sendmail running on OS X for six months - without success until he found SM Enabler). Then there are the downloads done by people who were referred here by google.de and google.nl (e.g., look at this from MacFreak.org. Can somebody help me translate this? I would like to know what they're talking about.) I've been doing an experiment with this application. I believe it's useful. It does something in under a minute, where I used to take a whole evening. All the knowledge that is needed to turn on Sendmail, PHP, and DNS on OS X is now encapsulated in this application. So I can now clear the space in my brain for other things. Yet I can give this knowledge to other people. And it'll take them less than a minute to use it. I thought of submitting it to versiontracker, but perversiontracker could be where it will end up, so that did serve as some sort of a disincentive. But I was really curious to see whether, and how, it will get picked up (if ever). So I simply placed it on this (roadstead.com) site. About six weeks ago, the site started to show up in Google (how did these guys know?). And I've been watching the downloads. It's starting to pick up. There's a pattern to this diffusion of knowldege, and search engines like Google are important players; they perform a crucial service. (Brandenburger and Nalebuff, in "Co-opetition", would say that your market worth is directly proportional to the value you add to the market.) Life is one Great University. But of that, another time. |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks. |
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