Haven’t been writing these days in favor of working on product design. But all design and no writing makes Ketan a dull boy, so here are some random revelations:
- Google+ is well designed. Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the development team of the original Macintosh, is a lead designer at Google+. Keep in mind that no single designer can be attributed to the successful execution of a product. It does, however speak to the omnipotence of Apple’s design aesthetic.
- Google+ feels like a trojan horse. If you didn’t pay for it, you’re the product. Not knowing how a thing gets funding should make you nervous.
- Google, Apple and Facebook are taking turns playing the Dark Lord role.
- 37Signals built a $100M business with 4 guys. It now has 30. Facebook has $2B in revue with 1200 employees. Apple has $14B in profit and about 20,000 employees working in Apple Corporate. Google makes $8B.
- Human Computer Interaction is making a huge leap foward. Apple started this process with iOS a few years ago. They’re trying to do it again with iOS5 and Lion. This is big. Things are going to get worse before they get better, but when things settle down, the human race and computers will be one step close to whatever our destiny is.
- Lion was codenamed Linen. Linen is everywhere in the new Apple. And of course Apple is a new company, I bet they get new top people every 6 months as others leave to do bigger things. Apple works like a startup that is constantly redefining itself. In fact, they like to hire people who are highly critical of Apple’s stuff so they can make it better. Change everything you know, everything you were.
- The iPad landed in our hands very softly but even with the tech media throwing a fit about everything detail. Now it controls the newfound tablet market. Just like the iPod commanded upwards of 80% of the MP3 player market. Imagine Ford owned the pickup truck market like that. That’s some serious business, but who really cares, right? The big deal is that now we are starting to see households with 2 iPads, just like households have more than one phone, computer, car, tv, chair, etc.
- I totally get why people want like $10M so they can work for the next 5 years. In that time, the world will have changed and their technology will be at the center of it. Twitter, Dropbox, Instagram. These dudes are going to be at the center of the machine in the future. They’re going to be part of the soul in the machine.
- Life has no interface. There are no abstractions between you your stupid sofa. You use it. It’s obvious. It does not have to shut down and restart. It does not have feature sets. Interface design started as an abstraction between the computer and the human so that the human could easily run a program with a button that has descriptive text like “Upload”. When was the last time you Uploaded anything in real life? Stop thinking of UI so linearly. It’s a system, it’s alive, it grows and adapts until eventually it becomes part of us and we don’t even think about it. The startup and shutdown process should be like waking up and going to sleep. There are no buttons for it. Well… there are pills, but that’s like a machine in the soul. But that’s a whole other thing.
- People in technology quickly lose sight of the difference between the real (physical i guess?) and digital. It’s understandable. We work for companies who may never actually have a physical presence in world. You will never really touch the artifacts that Google has contributed to the human race. Search is a service, an idea. We tend to deal with lines of code and pixels on screen all day.
- The Notes App on iPhone looks like the machine is desperately attempting to imagine what a humans might have used way back when. Remember that short story about the house that kept functioning even after no humans were around for it to serve?
- In the film The Matrix, the machines enslaved the humans and made them into batteries to power their cities. There were large human farms like we have cattle farms, power plants, or oil refineries. But the law of conservation says energy is never created or destroyed, just transferred. We know from the sustainable design that hidden costs of building and maintaining something can equal or sometimes outweigh the yield you might otherwise produce. We humans have avoided this yucky problem by not counting natural resources as valuable. If counted we could be operating lots of things at a net loss. So don’t be surprised if the Machines were operating their human farms at a net loss. Did you really think logical creatures would put all their eggs in one basket? The point I wanted to make was that the Machines were serving humans even after they turned us into batteries.
- I met Mike Matas in California at a bar. “My whole thing is No UI,” he said.
- I met Sebastian de With at a party: “Design for the highest bidder… you’re like a pirate” I told him. “Yea, sorta…,” he replied.
- Managing humans is impossible. And by impossible I mean it’s like being stuck on an island with people who don’t speak the same language and inventing a way to communicate so we can get out of there alive.
- When I get frustrated I like to tell people that I may be critical, anti-social or even mean, but that’s because I’m trying to do my job. The way I look at it, we’re in a war, and I’m afraid you’re dumbass is going to get me and my people killed. Wake the fuck up.
- People are impatient, premature, too serious, too lazy, unreliable, irresponsible. We expect way too much from each other and not enough. I think what I’m trying to say is that there’s a middle ground here and my grandmother was there when she was 25 in India. I want to live with those mental models about life today. We might just be trying too hard sometimes.
- The hardest part of being human is understanding that we are creative creatures. We have the power to manifest shit. We can do anything at anytime for whatever reason. Try keeping that in a task management system.
Revised a little bit: July 17, 2010
