1. When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.

    — Isaacson, Walter - Steve Jobs (p. 219).

  2. While in Santa Fe, NM for vacation this past week, we watched a man blow and form glass into a tumbler.  It’s an amazing thing to watch from start to finish - and see it take shape into the final piece.

    While in Santa Fe, NM for vacation this past week, we watched a man blow and form glass into a tumbler.  It’s an amazing thing to watch from start to finish - and see it take shape into the final piece.

  3. When a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.

    — The Man Who Inspired Jobs - NYTimes.com

  4. When launching a new technology, it’s far better to constrain the capabilities of your big new idea—even if it’s an artificial constraint—than it is to over-promise and under-deliver.

    — Want To Create A Breakout Product? Start With A Narrow Focus | Co. Design

  5. Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact.

    — Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think

  6. I can’t stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to finish songs because they don’t think they’re any good. Well they’re not good enough. Write it! I want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won’t write bad songs. You’re thinking they’re bad so you don’t have to finish it. That’s what I really think it is. Well it’s all right. Well, how do you know? It’s not done!

    — John Mayer, in a talk to Berklee music students via JoelBlog

  7. How to respond to “help, my computer is slow!”

    This past weekend, after using a friend’s computer to book a flight and hotel, I was getting frustrated with how slow her computer is.  She told me that she probably needs to get a new computer soon because it’s so slow.  I decided to try out a few things to see if they made a difference.  First, I noticed the computer was running Windows Vista - or possibly Windows 7, and was running what looked like Internet Explorer 8.  

    My first observation after clicking around on the desktop, start menu, etc., was that the computer itself was not slow, rather, browsing the web was slow - and I mean painfully slow.  Since she was so used to running IE, I decided to try installing Google Chrome Frame - which is supposed to speed up browsing, and make more rich internet experiences to people with IE.  After installing it, and browsing again (namely aa.com, and hilton.com), it was still painfully slow.

    My next thought was to install Firefox, but since I’ve been having issues with it crashing ever since Mozilla updated to Firefox 4, I decided to avoid that headache.  

    I decided to install Google Chrome, which I use as my primary browser at home (not approved at work).  Chrome installed easily, and will upgrade seamlessly in the background without bugging her in the future.  Chrome not only sped up the browsing experience 20-fold, but it also gave her the perception that her computer was dramatically faster than it was before.  Instead of her having to wait 15+ seconds for something as simple as American Airlines’ site to load, it went down to probably 2 or 3 seconds.  At that point, I deleted the shortcuts to IE on the desktop and in the Taskbar, and replaced them with shortcuts to Chrome.

    This absolutely amazed me that hundreds of millions of people are sitting out there thinking that their computers are slow, when in fact it’s just their web browser.

    Here are the morals to the story:

    1. With even the most basic computers being as fast as they are today, it’s highly unlikely the computer is the problem.  Before you jump to conclusions, ask your friend what they do on the computer that is slow.  9 times out of 10, they just use their browser, and Microsoft Office.
    2. If you want to look smart when someone complains their computer is slow, just install Google Chrome.

  8. You actually don’t want people using your product because it’s cool… because then it’s a fad. What you want is people using your product because it’s a part of their life… and they can’t stop using it.

    — Sean Parker, Co-Founder of Napster, founding President of Facebook

  9. Focus is about saying no.

    — Steve Jobs, open Q&A at WWDC 1997

  10. Lessons Learned: Choosing your “contact us” method

    After supporting an enterprise-wide service for a few years now, I have had the opportunity to test support via email, phone, ticketing system, and web-based forum.  Depending on the service you’re actually supporting, the number of users, and the support model you feel most comfortable with, there are pros and cons to each. 

    Something you should keep in mind while making this big decision: In most cases, your goal should be to reduce the amount of support required.  I am not saying to stop picking up the phone, or stop emailing people back, I am suggesting to figure out why people are calling in the first place, and make it so nobody will need to contact you for those reasons ever again.  Each of the following sections will not only contain pros and cons of each contact method, but will also tell you how to use each as effectively as possible.  Hopefully, by the end, you will have the answer to these simple questions:

    • How do I want my customers to contact me?  
    • And more importantly, how do I want to contact them back?

    Read More

  11. If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it, and then show it to people, and say now what do you think?

    If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it, and then show it to people, and say now what do you think?

    — Steve Jobs, per John Sculley

  12. Courage to constantly question the ordinary in search of surprising, long lasting experiences.

    — Bang & Olufsen’s Vision

  13. I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal.

    I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that’s very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, “What will I think at that time?” it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

    — Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, in 2001 on his “Regret Minimization Framework”

    (Source: achievement.org)

  14. Follow vs. Friend

    Our online world was dominated by mutual connections before Twitter came around.  Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have all operated under this model:

    • Person A invites person B to connect
    • Person B gets an email, clicks the link, then clicks accept
    • Person A and B are now connected to each other

    Twitter flipped this on its head and allowed you to connect to someone without them connecting to you - better known as “following” someone.

    On Facebook, you connect with who you know.  On Twitter, you connect with who you want to know.

    Some thoughts

    Connections on Facebook seem to be much more meaningful and useful when you think of it from a psychological perspective.  Friends are much more meaningful to an individual on a personal level - they are people you have actually met.  From a graphical perspective, friend-based networks form a web, where follower-based networks form a hierarchy.  One is a popularity contest, where there other is simply a network.

    Wheat vs. Chaff

    When I open my Facebook news feed, there’s a high likelihood there is something in there that I care about (wheat).  However when I open my Twitter stream, there is a whole lot of chaff.  Most of it is either people whose business lives I am interested in, or news.  Rarely do people I know post to Twitter, and if they do, they typically tweet about news or insights, as opposed to personal things.  I follow accounts that either belong to people I know, or otherwise post interesting things (such as @techmeme).  It’s almost like Facebook and LinkedIn are my personal networks, and Twitter is my news reader.

    Follow = Spam?

    I rarely get a friend request on Facebook from someone I do not know.  Contrast that with Twitter where I get followed by people that I don’t know every day, who a) want to try to sell me something, or b) are hoping I’ll follow them back so they can build their following (typically self-proclaimed “social media consultants”).  That plays back into it being a popularity contest.

    What do you think?

    Share your thoughts on Follow vs. Friend in the comments.  It’s an interesting topics I’m constantly thinking about when working on social/professional networks.