The Macalope Weekly: It’s a living
Apple does not build products that satisfy a feature checklist. It does not pointlessly jam in technologies that have little practical application (see: NFC). While you might be able to buy products in the same category for less, you often can’t buy name-brand products in the same category for less and you can never buy name-brand products with the same high build quality and user experience. Further, Apple products generally provide a lower cost of ownership.
This is partly to play with Spotify’s embedding.
Ten years on, Turn on the Bright Lights has surely stood the test of time.
Facebook’s ‘Next Billion’: A Q&A With Mark Zuckerberg
So for the next five or 10 years the question isn’t going to be, does Facebook get to 2 billion or 3 billion? I mean, that’s obviously one question. But the bigger question is, what services can get built now that every company can assume they can get access to knowing who everyone’s friends are. I think that’s going to be really transformative. We’ve already seen some of that in games and media, music, TV, video, that type of stuff. But I think there’s about to be a big push in commerce.
In The End of the Public Library (As We Knew It)?, Eli Neiburger of the Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan talks about an approach they are taking to the licensing of electronic books for their users.
Their general approach is to license the content for a given amount of time at a fixed price. The content is available to library users from the library’s servers for the time agreed. At renewal time, the library can choose to pay again or remove the books from their servers. They stipulate no DRM and no limits during the licensed period.
There’s a lot of angst over whether Apple can continue to lead the pack after Steve Job’s death. There’s something strange about all this: many people outside Apple are worried on Apple’s behalf. They’re rooting for Apple as if they themselves somehow depend on Apple.
Thing is, outside Apple’s walls, what happens to Apple doesn’t matter. Arguably, Apple will stop being successful when someone else starts to out-perform them. As a consumer, this is just awesome: someone has come along producing better products! Better things produced through competition.