Magical act in branding & miniaturization. Charistimatic builder of great business with attitude. Sony Walkman, Sony Handycam. "It's a Sony" slogan. Build Sony from scratch, turning the tiny setup into the crown jewel of Asia, and the darling brand of the world.
Dedication, tinkering persistence, passion & strong vision to make horseless carriage a reality. "Car for the people". "Assembly manufacturing concept". Years of consistent dedicated act, tinkering and passion. One of the greatest, finest and bravest tinkerer of all time. Modern mobile society as the result.
Passion for excellence & master of continous magical act. Make things happen greatly with style. Leaders with strong sense of vision and with "no limit" nor "no boundary" for next great cultural possibility to explore. Mac. Next. iPod. iPhone. Apple. Next. Pixar. Think Different. Mix innovation & culture at its best. Modern digital culture is born, and consistently turns greater under his act. 
The greatest people manager and most charismatic people-centric business leader of all time. Think. Respect to individual. People first. Under his great leadership turns the tiny IBM into a mighty organization of its time. The "king" in the annal of "business kingdom". A rare business person with great business persona and legendary people-centric attitude of our time.
Arvino is currently experimenting with Posterous. Hence, if this week I'm not very active sharing, probably it's because I'm still posterousing! :-D
Do take a look and give posterous a try. http://arvino.posterous.com You might find it useful, in a different way. :-P
Ada-ada saja. Recent news says that Steve Sheraton, maker of iBeer application that we highlighted a few months ago, sue Carling beer over 'iBeer'.
The background of the story is this: Steve Sheraton created the iBeer application. Carling beer find potential commercialization of the idea, and invite Steve Sheraton to popularize (and commercialize) it together. Steve Sheraton says No. Carling beer then create its own version of the "fun yet actually useless application" -- and name it iPint.
Later on, as the word goes, it happen that iPint become immensely popular. Being able to be downloaded for free, people download iPint and leave iBeer in the dust. Total number of download was 6 million people!
Knowing about such, Steve Sheraton becomes unhappy. He sues Carling beer over iBeer. His logic: 6 million people download iPint for free, which translate to a loss for him at the amount of $12million for his iBeer -- because he sell his software is sold at around $2 a piece.
My view about this: Mr. Sheraton ingenuity in developing iBeer is totally respectable. It is truly genius and original indeed. But perhaps somebody probably "iDrunk" to think that 6 million people would be iDrunk enough to spent $2 on a cute, funny yet actually not so useful application such as iBeer.
If iPint is not available for free, and the other choice is only the $2 iBeer, ... then perhaps not even 1,000 people may be would buy iBeer at $2 a piece!
So, suing the company over iBeer -- which is not a yet a proven application that can be sold and purchased successfully in the market -- seems totally iLogical, iRrespectable, and iStrange.
Without promotion, campaign and branding and hardwork to make the product sold well in the market, it is wishful for someone (who created something) to think that his/her product would just sell by itself. A great massive effort to sell, promote, campaign a product is always required to make things happen.
On the other hand: why not the offer from Carling beer was taken in the first place seriously?
Since the beginning of time, people that understand the complete cycle between innovation and marketing already "know" that focusing on innovation and creating a product only is not enough. Beyond invention and creation, people must put same great effort in marketing and selling the product too. Only when such big job to invent something genuine, and to sell it successfully to the market is done in tandem, then the real success that everybody dream of could/might happen. (Still there's no guarantee though).
As such: suing a company over something that is not marketed, promoted, nor sold well is totally unbelievable. It might show an early indication that these days too many people uses legal-approach too much, suing people over something that is out of substance, instead of using their working capacity at its best to make their invention, product and innovation successful in the marketplace.
Work hard, instead of "play hard". It takes both innovation & marketing/selling effort to create a product that becomes a complete success.
Of course I am excited and awe by genuine innovation such as iBeer. But I do hope that the world doesn't become iDrunk enough to use legal law to block possibility future innovation forward by patenting and suing over too many things that actually better become part of social commodity as a whole.
History shows that only when society can collectively share some part of its intellectual properly, then the entire society advanced forward, rather than if innovation is being stiffle by "protection" that makes the innovation stagnant.
Case in hand: Disney would not become the huge Disney if it can't create animated movie on top of "Snow White" story -- which is folk-story that belongs to the community. The web would never happen if a physicists named Tim Berners-Lee not created the "http" protocol and "HTML" we're so familiar with today. The firefox browser would never happen if Netscape sues Firefox over its button and display/window approach etc.
Indeed innovation is tough, yet some level of insanity would be required to precisely know when to "sue" something over intellectual property, and when to just contribute some part of such innovation to enrich the intellectual capacity and innovation capability of the world societyas a whole.
Without such wisdom, we are all probably just being iDrunk about money, and forget one key essential essence about business: that the reason businesses and new businesses is being created in the first place is actually to contribute, to advance, and to improve society for the better.
Business and intellectual capacity is a very powerful weapon in the digital and knowledge based society that we live in today. We should handle such tremendous power, capacity and capability with wisdom, and heart. Never with greed.
The MacBook series finally being revealed today, and it shows a totally different aesthetics and handsome new design.
The spirit and key ideas behind these new design is really really awesome and great. The detail thought that Apple put into the every element of its new notebook is really something that I truly admire.
They are trying to make:
Not only these improvements makes notebook experience truly great and wonderful, it also makes Apple notebook the best notebook ever created, as it gives people the best feel, sense and experience, in every aspect and element it is being touched upon.
Such would make more and more people eventually decisively (or admiringly, or passionately) moves to Apple notebooks.
The era of dull, boring, so-so machine is over.
ps:
It says:
Apologies - our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented
demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams
are
trying to come up with a solution.
Thank you for your patience.
Probably this is what happened when millions of people start to download an increasingly great, useful product, at the same time?
Go OOo. Go. Through "OOo3" make the next-possible-great-thing in office desktop computing really happen.
On my recent trip, I happen to spent some time in Hongkong, and in one occasion exploring the Blackberry Bold -- the actual device. It was a huge disappointment.
While the teaser and marketing material for Blackberry Bold has been excellent, the real product was totally lauzy.
So many things seems so "wrong" about it: it's too thick, it feels thicker and bulkier than the Blackberry curve, the keyboard is sticky, the pointer is still as uncomfortable as before, and the software "innovation" is really so-so.
I really have a high hope for Blackberry Bold since a couple months ago. Looking at the flashy marketing material, I would expect it to be reasonably sized, with tactical keyboard that is very convenient to type on; I would expect it to be reasonably thin; All in all -- expecting it to be a product that could elegantly provide better alternative to iPhone doesn't feel too much.
Yet, after seeing the the real product, it could perhaps be concluded that if the next product releases from Blackberry still looks like this "fatty thicky crampy beast", the golden era of Blackberry devices might eventually be over.
While for many Joseph C Wilson
might not as famous nor as familiar as Thomas J. Watson, Sr (of IBM),
nor Henry Ford (of Ford Motor Company), nor Akio Morita (of Sony),
Joseph C Wilson is indeed one of the great innovator of modern office
systems -- and modern way of people working/living.
Without his
years of struggle to make Haloid -- the small little tiny company that
many times almost go broke to daringly pursue its research and vision
-- and to make its "crazy idea" of photocopying happening, the photocopy
machines, the photocopy business model, and digital modern office
systems that modern offices rely on today around the globe would never
been happening.
Innovation matters. In many ways, innovation seem indeed
change society for the better, either directly through the massive
business it created, or through influencing others (in the next
generation) via its spirited dream.
If J C Wilson don't build Xerox into reality as it could become, Steve Jobs perhaps would never had seen XEROX PALO ALTO, and Bill Gates probably had nothing to "imitate something from Apple" to become Windows later on. Without such, our would then would have been so much different.
In that retrospect, the great dedication passion and work of Joseph C. Wilson is something that we -- innovators and inventors of next generation office systems -- shall always need to admire and remember.
No modern office systems might have been happening without the initial dedicated work, steps and dream of Joseph C. Wilson. In many ways, he's probably the father of Modern Office Systems. Among the first person that instinctively understand the power of documents, the business model around that document systems, and the power of people working together (through documents that being exchanged).
In the similar tradition of following the amazing struggling years of Pixar, following the story of tiny almost broke yet dedicated and never surrender Haloid to become a gigantic Xerox company, and the entire new business model that it created and invented along the way is indeed very respectable. It's amazing to see how this people who was once considered "crazy" because of their pursued dedication, dream and vision, many years later after their years of passion becoming successful reality, their "crazy ideas" become the new standard of how the world function, live, work and operate .. until today.
Innovation matters. It change society for the better.
Powerpoint is one of the modern communication tool that is often being used "wrongly" and "abusively".
Because powerpoint makes it very easy to produce (power) points, people often use too much of these in their presentation.
As a result: instead of "presenting key ideas right", presentation audience often being "awfully bombarded" with endless talking points that is short in substance.
That bring us all to the next idea of powerpoint usage: Couldn't we just start presenting ideas with less less (bullet point) text and -- use pictures instead?
But yet too many pictures without words is also meaningless.
Finding the right "balance" might be the "real art" and "challenge" here.
It might took some practice and alot of continuous experimentation. But the end goal is useful: It might someday make the powerpoint slides able to communicate its author ideas better, yet at the same time the audience also able to understand its content and meaning faster, simpler, easier, better.
20 years after powerpoint is "invented", probably it's time for a better, more proper and more creative/more useful use of it. Happy Power-"Picturing". ;-)
ps: Today I browse around and found that Idris Moote happened to write about the 20th Birthday of PowerPoint around 2 days ago. Do take a look. It's a great write up. Idris' idea about the need for a "flexible flow" and "zooming" as the next "powerful powerpoint" feature, is exactly right on the spot.
This is how we are going to interface with our computers and digital information in the future:
Awesome!
Mr. Ballmer recently said and announced: "We need a new operating system for the cloud .. and for now we will call it Windows Cloud".
Technically speaking: What is an operating system for the cloud? Who need such?
Horizontal architecture scaling technique, along with various techniques to achieve reliability and scalability and interconnectivity has been around on the web for years. All these can be built with "existing OSes".
Technically speaking, the web doesn't seem to need a new operating system for it to expand nor operate. HTML/DHTML as a base, popular programming language/script for the web, web API and cloud infrastructure services that the web developer need to do magical stuff on the web is already exist, and widely available.
We now can do cloud computing on Amazon EC2. We can do scripting for the web using many tools and language. We can implement messaging and horizontal architecture to enable scalability.
In the future we might have OpenID for identity, we have facebook API, Google API, and many more things coming in the picture. Combined together, these are "cloud computing infrastructure", that we all already have access to.
While room for improvement for the "next web" is many, there doesn't seem to be a need (nor urgent need) for a "new OS" that is specifically designed for the web itself.
So:
What does Mr. Ballmer really mean by "new operating system for the cloud"? A bunch of new Windows API exposed on the internet? A couple of Silverlight "front-end" components embeddable/mashable on Desktop or HTML pages?
While such might be "cute", .. all these are not technically constitute an "OS" ... These are just would be APIs, or "service in the cloud" -- as may other APIs and embeddable/mashable object available on the web today. Should we call these the "new OS" after all??
So 3 questions remain:
Being "totally confused" by all these, I come to this "assumption": probably this is just a "marketing jargon". Understanding its potential technical irrelevance, "such new gimmick" perhaps need to be created by Microsoft to allow room for Microsoft to define a new "licensing model" for "the web".
That means: the new "OS" probably will come up with a new licensing scheme that would allow hundreds of thousands of Windows to be deployed for massive web infrastructure, with reasonable licensing fee, instead of being bloated by its current traditional licensing structure.
When the market can start to perceive this "new windows" as "Windows cloud", then the pricing & licensing model for that "Windows Cloud" could be made totally "new" , and it won't affect the pricing & licensing structure that "traditional" Windows provide.
At the core of it, although it might have been declared as a "new OS", speculative assumption on the real meaning of this probably is this: This might be just the "same" OS with a couple of Windows API exposed for the internet, and a TOTALLY NEW PRICING SCHEME MODEL attached to it.
Could this be the case?
We will see and understand what this really mean, and what this really is, as the "real" thing being announced by Microsoft shortly -- around the end of this month.
Have you ever really feel of how the world of work around us have really changed alot these days?
Work now literally can be done from anywhere, at anytime. Whether you are at the office (a.k.a the traditional place for work), at home, on the street, on the plane, ... anywhere, the work is ready to be done connected.
No longer we need to be separated from our work, instead we can make it happen with us, anytime anywhere we reside.
In regards with that, today we pre-introduce a new exciting technology today called Woorknet. Essentially it is a system that will allow everybody to work online and connected anytime anywhere, around the globe, in many innovative ways that never been done before.
We will reveal more about the Woorknet system and how it works as we move into the future, but for now we just would like to let you know that changes is coming soon greatly and excitingly to workplaces around the globe.
Woorknet was really being designed and developed -- from the ground up -- since 2 years ago, specifically to address the non-workable aspect and non-practical/boring aspect of office digitalization and work process automation around the globe.
During the development process, some of Woorknet early design and constructions have been consistently winning some of the most international prestigious design and innovation awards along the way, making exciting twist and turns of innovative software development along the way.
Today, this piece of work/process digitalization technology -- which from the ground up was being designed to make work simple, practical; technology that from the ground up was being designed to challenge the old perspective, view, notion and paradigm of how work -- boringly and confusingly -- has been systemized and automated in the past, is ready to be announced.
Let's keep the "prelude" beta information for now. We'll share more with you about it, as and when the time has come.
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