If everyone designed products with this sort of discipline...

Q: What are your goals when setting out to build a new product?

A: Our goals are very simple — to design and make better products. If we can’t make something that is better, we won’t do it.

Q: Why has Apple’s competition struggled to do that?

A: Most of our competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new — I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us — a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better.

… then maybe, FINALLY, I could drop the label of fanboy. It’s easy to tell when someone’s pushing and asking what the device is about, and when someone’s running off with a successful form factor and adding some marketing taglines.

The unbeatable iPad.

The other potential scenario, though, is far less optimistic for Apple’s competitors. It’s the iPod model. In this story, Apple begins by releasing a novel, category-defining product. Then, as rivals scramble for some way to respond, Apple relentlessly puts out slightly better versions every year, each time remaining just out of reach of the competition. Meanwhile it lowers its prices and expands its product lineup, making its devices more accessible to a wider audience. Then, to finish the game, it finds a way to boost its position through network effects and customer lock-in. (In the iPod’s case, it accomplished this through the iTunes software and built-in music store.) Put it all together and you have a device that’s unbeatable.

It’s becoming harder and harder to see how this isn’t the most likely outcome. The only other tablets to move at any volume are being sold AT A LOSS. That’s not going to fly, not with the margins Amazon and the like hold in the content world.

Wake me up when someone can move units AND make some money while they’re at it.

Why We Gloat

parislemon:

5 years ago, I made a bet. Two bets, actually.

The first was with myself. I bet myself that if I devoted serious time to it, I could become a great technology blogger. It wasn’t an easy bet to make. I knew it would require upending my life at the time. And it did. 

The second bet was related to the first. I knew that to become a key tech blogger, I would need a focus. As a relatively new Mac user myself, I decided that focus would be Apple. Yes, I was coming later to the party than some, but Apple was still a company at the time that was scoffed at by many. But drawing from my own experience, I truly felt that the company was on the cusp of changing the world. Again.

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More Than Half

Man, that 4S was one hell of a bust, guys!

parislemon:

Tom Krazit for paidContent:

In the first quarter that Verizon Wireless was on board with Apple for an iPhone launch event, the company sold 4.2 million iPhones, accounting for more than half of the 7.7 million smartphones that its customers purchased in the fourth quarter.

We already knew the massive 4.2 million number. What we didn’t know was Verizon’s overall numbers. Now we do.

Every single Android phone that Verizon sells — dozens of models — combined could not outsell the iPhone last quarter. When you consider that Verizon sells plenty of BlackBerrys (and a few Windows Phones here and there) as well, this is even more incredible.

Yes, it’s just one carrier in one country. But it’s the biggest carrier in the key battleground country.

The only thing not looking good about this post from June of last year is the incorrect assumption that it would take the iPhone 5 to reverse the Android surge. It “only” took the iPhone 4S.

These numbers aren’t based on analyst checks. They aren’t based on store traffic guesses. They aren’t based on units shipped. These are Verizon’s stated quarterly sales numbers. And the iPhone dominated.

That reminds me.

This post reminded me of my time wrestling with dissertation project ideas, and the one idea that had me spellbound, but was totally unfeasible. Perturb every known miRNA (up or down, drawbacks aplenty either way) and generate full mRNA and miRNA profiles for each condition.

Putting aside the very real issue of off-target effects, the advantage to this over the Califano method would be a far cleaner signal of what modulating this one molecule does to the genetic makeup of a cell.

Would it be worth it?

It’s about time someone devised a good method for integrating existing transcriptome and miRNAome collections into a network of functional predicted functional interactions, as well as miR-mRNA target prediction based on sequence and anticorrelation. Which makes it even more unfortunate that they pulled an “Pujols-on-a-hit-and-run”-esque whiff on presenting their results. Yes, the complexity is staggering, but the the manuscript, and especially some of the early figures, were borderline impenetrable.
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It’s about time someone devised a good method for integrating existing transcriptome and miRNAome collections into a network of functional predicted functional interactions, as well as miR-mRNA target prediction based on sequence and anticorrelation.

Which makes it even more unfortunate that they pulled an “Pujols-on-a-hit-and-run”-esque whiff on presenting their results. Yes, the complexity is staggering, but the the manuscript, and especially some of the early figures, were borderline impenetrable.

Source: cell.com