Instead of pushing products and services at customers with the attitude of “You take what we make!”, Apple and Amazon proceed from the view, “We are want to understand and solve your problems.
Why No Apple In The Food Industry? - Steve Denning - RETHINK - Forbes
Why is it that journalists always hold up Apple as a shining knight of consumer friendliness? While I don’t deny the author’s premise that Apple and other “transformational” “innovative” companies typically succeed by “delighting” their customers, I think it’s inaccurate to describe Apple as a shining example of flexibility and consumer mindedness.
At Apple, the iTunes store is decidedly designed to make money. In fact, MP3 players were not greatly successful until someone attached a money making business model to them. The entire user experience across Apple products are a “you take what we make!” proposition. No flash, broad Apple control third party applications, counter cultural design/UI decisions (single button mouse, the death of the scrollbar).
Yes, Apple is very good at understanding its customers’ needs, and much of its success can be attributed to resonance with consumers. But, Apple is an exception, not a model. It produces a superlative product and wins market share simply because more often than not its “innovative” choices are right. Apple deserves much credit, but I’m tired of journalists grasping for unrequited love and looking to Apple as a their knight in shining armor.
Kill the pigs! (via Daniel Damon’s Photos - Mobile Uploads)
In the past six months the median price of a home in Palo Alto has risen 24% to $1.2 million, according to DataQuick. Dreyfus says his own statistics in May showed only a 27-day supply of homes for sale — assuming one home sold per day. A year earlier, supply was three times that.
Don’t call it the next tech bubble - yet - Big Tech - Fortune Tech
Tech is raging. Get while the getting’s good.
The meaning seems clear. The future is here. Cash is in decline.
What’s a “sun dog”?
“An example of parhelia, sun dogs are triggered by sunlight being refracted (bent) off hexagonal ice crystals about 25,000 feet above the ground. Cirrus clouds act as billions of microscopic prisms, bending white light into the colors of the rainbow. Pretty cool.”
(via TYWKIWDBI (“Tai-Wiki-Widbee”): Sun dog “double sunset”)
And so we vacillate between anxious self-branding and the self-negating practice of seeking some higher authenticity: we have to watch ourselves become ourselves in order to be ourselves, over and over again. This futile process crystallizes in the irrepressible ideal of youth, the time when all that reflexivity seemed like second nature, was authenticity itself.
America's Wall
Happy Fourth!
Medicaid and Medicare have not caused our rising health care costs but are victims of our fragmented and failed market-based model of health care financing. Shifting the cost of health care from the taxpayer to the patient will not magically make these health care costs disappear or become sustainable.
