Archives for August 2013
неизбежный урон
15 August 2013 | Apple, Google, Hardware, Software | No Comments
опять, да, да, о фрагментации, — оттого что это не просто телефоны или планшеты, а самый натуральный бизнес.
вот один аспект, например:
Fragmentation continues to crop up on Android in weird ways for devs but now is going to the next level—affecting the ecosystem. Tomorrow Apple is no longer just about integrated hardware / software, it’s about an entire integrated ecosystem. The software is built in advance while hardware is designed and spec’ed, developers have your APIs and it all just works together in tandem. To some extent Google can do this with products it controls and distributes like Glass and Chromecast (via OTA updates), but fragmentation will start to hurt Android more and more in smartphone web services which it doesn’t develop.
а вот другой:
It’s not even funny how bad fragmentation will hurt Android and Google in location based sharing and payments apps, short range sharing, and the type of things developers build on top of iBeacon (e.g. payments). Fragmentation doesn’t matter as much when you are the only one person affected, people deal with it. But when your Android phone won’t communicate with others or at POS terminals (tablets / iPads) it will be tough to rationalize. Bluetooth LE in Android is happening now, but fragmentation is a deal killer for devs, and this ensures that state of the art apps around local discovery / wireless will rarely support Android[1]. It’s already happening — Tile has raised about $3M from 50K backers and there will be no Android support (these are tagging devices running Bluetooth LE that help you find lost keys etc).
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пир духа, натурально:
For some reason fragmentation always elicits the “too many screen sizes” example—but issues such as those can be overcome with responsive design. The real trouble comes in different ways – e.g. a friend I know has been seeing a lifecycle bug crash the keyboards on ALL Samsung phones. It’s not an Android version issue, it crashes the app across revs; it’s something non-standard Samsung is doing to Android itself. These are the types of problems that slow down developers and cause them to reevaluate Android support next time.
becoming a digital citizen
15 August 2013 | Art, History, Photo | 1 Comment
и еще — на этот раз фонд Пола Гетти открывает двери:
The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.
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Initially, the images available through the Open Content Program are of works in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collections. Over time, images from the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute will be added. Museum images can be found on the Museum’s Collection webpages or on the Getty Search Gateway. Those available as open content images are identified with a “Download” link. Images provided are JPEG files at a minimum of 300 DPI.
хорошие.
дележ добычи
15 August 2013 | Apple, Google, Software, The Great Game | No Comments
так же, с бюджетным iPhone 5C пересекается еще и другой сюжет:
As much as Apple will benefit from getting new customers with an entry level iPhone that benefits their ecosystem so will Google. We know Google makes more on iOS than Android and interestingly an entry level iPhone will likely help Google’s bottom line as well. When you dig through the numbers on how profitable iOS is to Google’s search revenue, Google may be the biggest cheer leader for a lower-cost iPhone.
что, интересно, думают в Apple по этому поводу? и какой поисковик будет установлен в этот раз?
насколько дешево?
15 August 2013 | Apple, Economics | 3 Comments
о цене:
Apple will never compete with anyone in a race to the bottom. Those customers are simply not valuable in the grand scheme of things and arguably not worth competing for. And luckily those who just want cheap are only a percentage of the overall consumer segment. The fallacy those who think price is all that matters fall into is believing that all consumers value the same thing. It is incorrect to believe that its hard to compete with free. It is easy, all you do is create a better product, experience, or solution, and market it to those who will value it.
я не большой поклонник iPad Mini и — oh, well — предполагаемого iPhone 5C. но даже в этих бюджетных нишах Apple все равно придерживалась (и насколько можно судить, будет придерживаться и дальше) вышеозначенной максимы: они создают продукт лучше, чем конкуренты, и продают его дороже.
потому что, знаете, далеко не всем нравятся дешевые вещи.
следом
14 August 2013 | Art | 1 Comment
в поисках чудесного
13 August 2013 | Literature | 1 Comment
Роберт Гулрик в статье о Томасе Пинчоне:
The second book, The Crying of Lot 49, <...> is filled with manic hilarity and vast cleverness, but it’s a sad book, like picking through the tattered contents of an abandoned house. Coming at the slag end of a bright and poisonous decade, it tells of a woman who looks for the hope of late-sixties America, and comes up empty-handed and grasping for straws. In search of what we always called The American Dream, she finds instead the detritus of American reality; faithless, hopeless, entropic.
лучше не скажешь.
via.
в поисках
12 August 2013 | Literature, Wine | No Comments
а вот подробнейший Style Guidelines for Beer, Mead, & Cider [PDF]. хотя можно и проще, конечно. сам я, впрочем, чаще предпочитаю вино — у Леонид Юзефовича в романе “Костюм Арлекина” была чудесная цитата:
[Я] ему говорю: «Давайте пришлю вам в камеру вина, чтобы не скучно было. Вы какое предпочитаете, белое или красное?» Он как-то искоса взглянул на меня, говорит: «У нас в Болгарии есть тысяча песен о красном вине. А о белом — только одна. Знаете, как она начинается?» — «Откуда же мне знать!» — отвечаю. Он опять посмотрел на меня и говорит: «О белое вино, почему ты не красное?..»
именно.
кактусы
11 August 2013 | Art | 2 Comments
it’s quirky and it’s different
10 August 2013 | Google, Lifeform | 1 Comment
ну да, мы часто задумываемся, что же такое суть компания Google, в чем ее исключительные признаки — и вот, например, отличное исследование, взгляд со стороны:
On top of this quick-turn bias there’s the cultural training of Google’s senior management. Most big companies end up being run by professional managers who came up through business school or finance, where they get trained in the rhythms and personality of traditional big business. They learn a shared vocabulary and set of values that are very familiar and comfortable to investors. By contrast, Google is completely controlled by engineering PhDs. They speak the language of science rather than business, and they’re contemptuous of the vague directional platitudes and reassuring noises made by modern finance and marketing.
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One key element of the engineering mindset is the use of scientific method: you encourage a Darwinian marketplace of ideas, you test those ideas through controlled experiments, and you make decisions based on experimental data.
действительно, если принять это наблюдение, то многое становится очевидным — скажем, почему с такой легкостью убили Reader:
When an experiment is completed, you either choose to follow up on it, or you terminate it and move on to something else. A scientist doesn’t get emotional about this; it’s the way the system works, and everyone knows that it’s all for the best.
и правда, к чему переживания? к чему задумываться об определенной успешности? это просто эксперимент, не больше. и он выполнил свою цель. аналогично, кстати, и с покупкой Motorola Mobility — в известном смысле, это тоже эксперимент, и кого заботят потраченные миллионы?
The second unusual aspect of Google is its ownership structure. Never forget: Google is not really a public company. Sure, it has stock and all the other attributes of a normal public company, but 56.7% of Google’s voting shares are held by cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. As long as they remain friends, they can do whatever they want with the company, and they cannot be fired.
сегодня им около 40, а значит еще минимум 35 лет продуктивной работы во главе компании. кто знает, может к тому времени и правда случится обещанная сингулярность? что ж, у AI тогда и в самом деле оказалась бы исключительно богатая выборка данных, лучший источник для познания мира.
очень хорошая статья, да: о странностях, о слабостях[1] и о будущих инвестициях.
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например:
Google is much less effective when its original goal in a market changes. Because of its quick-reaction nature, Google frequently launches projects that seem very important at the time, but later turn out to be not so critical after all. The market evolves, priorities change, maybe a competitor becomes less prominent. When that happens, the Google projects are in danger of cancellation, and nobody likes working on a canceled project. So the teams frequently start iterating on their goals the same way they would on their features. Usually they end up chasing the latest trendy issue in search of a revenue stream and continued existence.
That’s usually the road to hell. Once a project starts changing goals, it’s almost impossible to diagnose the cause of any problems it has with market acceptance.
или так:
Google’s strength in science and quick response makes it very fast at incrementally improving the performance and reliability of its products. But that same process makes it almost impossible for Google to lead in features or product ideas that can’t be proved or verified through research. That’s why Google struggles in user experience, creating new product categories, and fitting its products to the latent needs of users: all of those are intuition-led activities in which it’s very hard to prove ahead of time what’s right or wrong. Even if there are people within Google who have extraordinary taste and vision, it’s very hard for them to drive action because their ideas can’t pass the science-style review process that Google uses for decision-making.
dancing about architecture
9 August 2013 | Architecture, Lifeform, Literature | 1 Comment
изумительный подход:
Great architects build structures that can make us feel enclosed, liberated or suspended. They lead us through space, make us slow down, speed up or stop to contemplate. Great writers, in devising their literary structures, do exactly the same.
So what happens when we ask writers to try their hand at architecture? At the “Laboratory of Literary Architecture,” a course I have taught at the Scuola Holden, a creative writing school in Turin, Italy, and also, this past semester, at the M.F.A. writing program at Columbia University School of the Arts (SOA) in New York, I encourage students to find — or, rather, extract — and then physically build the literary architecture of a text.
там же есть и живые примеры.