Loosely Coupled

I recently purchased a new laptop preloaded with Vista (Home Premium). Given the choice I'd have preferred to stay with XP, but I had more than enough hardware to support it, so I thought "what the heck". Now I feel like I'm in one of those Mac commercials . Here are some of the issues I'm facing. When I first booted up Vista, I made the mistake of setting what I intended to be my personal user ("Vinnie") as the Administrator. I was told this is not a good idea for security reasons so I renamed the Administrator account to "Admin" and created a new "regular" user reusing the "Vinnie" account name. On the surface everything appeared OK until I wanted to find the files associated with my account. There are user folders for "Vinnie" and "Vinnie2". The "Vinnie" folder corresponds to my Administrator account. The "Vinnie2" folder corresponds to my "regular" account. When ...

David Berlind recently started a new podcast series entitled " Technology Shakedown ". In it, he exposes technology that isn't as good as it could be. He talks about products that work great 80% of the time, but provides major headaches the other 20% - when the average user can't figure out why the product is misbehaving and must spend time concocting convoluted workarounds. A much better description can be found here . Apple has rebuilt it's business capitalizing on the shortfalls of mediocre technology products. A superior experience is the reason people will shell out $150 for an iPod compared to $30 for a generic MP3 player. And it's the same reason Apple can charge a premium for a Mac compared to the average Windows computer. People love Apple because their products simply work the way they're supposed to - making their users lives more productive and enjoyable. Why more product managers don't comprehend this is beyond me. ***** The discove...

Just to touch on Apple and Microsoft again... I've watched the conversation between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from this year's D5 conference a number of times. The thing that keeps amazing me is that these guys, earlier than almost anyone else, got that it's all about the software. They realized that we had this great, new technology... but it was way too hard for the average person to use. Gates referred to a speech that Jobs gave years ago where he said, "We build the products that we want to use ourselves." I always hear successful people say that the key to success is being passionate about what you're doing and what you're producing. Microsoft and Apple are two examples where this approach has obviously worked. I'm convinced these giants are more similar than different. It would be foolish not to apply these ideals into our own software projects. To have a successful project we need to become our target users. Think like they think. Le...

I'm pretty excited about the latest consumer tech products I've seen from Apple and Microsoft. Although they seem to target slightly different segments, both have new offerings which push user interface and interaction to a new level. iPhone Early this year, I watched the Macworld video where Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I was blown away. It was easy to see the new possibilities offered by this device. I mean, the phone I have now offers many advanced features that are clumsy and frustrating to use (web access, email, text messaging, etc) . The iPhone makes these tasks intuitive (and it looks fun). As the average user gets a hold of this, I'm guessing we'll see a spike in web traffic as mobile computing goes mainstream (sort of like what the iPod did for digital music). It will forever change the way people interact with the Internet and our products. Microsoft Surface Computing Yesterday I watched a video demoing Microsoft Surface Computing. I don...