Fred Brooks On Failure And Design

Wired Magazine features an interview with Fred Brooks, author of Mythical Man-Month and The Design of Design.  My two favorite lines:

Brooks: You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality

....

Wired: You’re a Mac user. What have you learned from the design of Apple products?

Brooks: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.

Read the whole thing. I just wish the interview were longer.

(via Kottke)

(photo: Jerry Markatos/University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

To Be Profitable: Focus On The Customer, Not Profits.

(updated below) I finally had the chance to watch the Steve Jobs presentation on the iPhone 4 antennae issue. You can watch it here. I was impressed by this statement in Job's opening remarks:

We want to make ... all our users happy.  If you don't know that about Apple, you don't know Apple. We love making our users happy. That's what drives us to make these products in the first place.

Look, everyone has an opinion about Apple. And I have no special insight into how things actually work inside the organization. But it's fair to say that Apple's customers tend to be a very happy and devoted bunch. And its huge profits are clearly the result of staying customer-driven, by consistently turning out products people want.

As a result of focusing on the customer, rather than directly on profits, they're very profitable. Students of Lean will understand that this is not, in fact, a paradox. For long-term success in Apple's particular market, "Customer Focus" cannot be just an empty marketing slogan.

Stephen Covey alludes to this in Principle Centered Leadership. Businesses focused on profits will, in the long term, cease to be profitable. Businesses focused on higher principles - the reason they're in business in the first place -- will thrive. Apple seems to be a good example of this in practice.

Bonus Steve Jobs: To follow up on an earlier post about creative problem solving, I noticed when he said: "We want to find out what the real problem is before we start to come up with solutions."

Update:  Is buying Apple a mythical experience?  See this interesting post from Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic.  (via Kottke)

(Photo credit: Apple Store)

When Does Choosing A Better Computer Become Wasteful?

No, I'm not referring to green computing devices. Though, apparently computers account for 2% of the world's carbon emissions. I'm swapping my nearly four year-old PC notebook for a new 15" MacBook Pro. Can you say upgrade? Like many buyers, I'm tempted to get the fastest possible machine with the most memory, given my budget.

But I keep thinking about over-processing. It's wasteful to get a tool that's more powerful than what's needed for the job. Here's some of my thinking.

• How fast? I do minimal multimedia work. Mostly, I access databases and documents on a local network and remotely, create text-based documents, and work on the web. But time is money (my time ends up being my clients' money, to be precise). So, I decided to get the fastest available processor along with a solid state drive. I can always upgrade RAM, but predict 4 GB will be plenty for 95% of my work.
• How much memory? With a 500 GB hard drive I can save data for years to come without worrying about usable disk space. But I've only got 65 GB of data now. So I decided to get the 128 GB drive. I can always upgrade when I near capacity. And who knows what cloud storage options will look like then.

The hardest decision was whether to get a solid state drive. Ultimately, I chose one because they're more reliable (no moving parts) and run cooler (no motor). The result is a more efficient machine, with the related benefit of a longer battery life. I decided to go with the Apple OEM drive rather than with a third party upgrade. There may be better after-market drives out there, but I'd rather avoid any potential problems with warranties and service. If there's a problem, it's Apple's to fix. Period.

Now, it wasn't that hard to identify the right machine for today's work. The over-processing analysis would have been easy from that standpoint. But predicting the appropriate tool for two to four years from now? Given the extraordinary rate of change in consumer electronics and the web -- who knows what we'll all be doing then. That's what made this a challenge.

Has anyone else experienced this challenge when buying a computer? From an enterprise IT perspective, our firm certainly has, and larger organizations must have it even worse.

Pad to the Future

In case you need a break from brainstorming justifications for buying an iPad, let's look forward.  My engineering colleague passes along a future interface.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Admittedly very cool. Still, seems like a lot of trouble and only marginally better than Alt-Tab and a mouse or The Dock.  And nothing yet beats a keyboard for converting language based ideas into digitally usable form (i.e. some form of text). This, of course, seems to be the biggest weakness to the iPad interface. And who -- really -- needs more than 10 windows open at a time?  All those open windows reminds me of this classic from The Onion.

I'm thinking the real future is when we do away with screens altogether and start using glasses and "heads up" displays.  And neural interfaces!

D. Mark Jackson