Apple TV Has Landed

"In the end, these early attempts to bridge the gulf between computer and TV perfectly reinforce the conventional wisdom about Apple: Apple TV offers a gracious, delightful experience — but requires fidelity to Apple’s walled garden. Its rivals, meanwhile, offer many more features — but they’re piled into bulkier boxes with much less concern for refinement, logic or simplicity. Put another way, these machines aren’t direct competitors at all; they’re aimed at different kinds of people. Microsoft’s young male gamers probably couldn’t care less that they can’t change the slide-show speed, and Netgear’s box “is for people who are more experienced,” according to a representative. “This is not for the random person.” Apple, on the other hand, is going for everybody else, random people included (at least those with HDTV sets). And that, perhaps, is Apple TV’s real significance. To paraphrase the old Macintosh advertisement, it’s a computer-to-TV bridge for the rest of us."

David Pogue, "Apple TV Has Landed," New York Times, 22 Mar 2007,www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/technology/22pogue.html.

failure can be a good thing

Companies like Dogster that constantly examine user data - especially the discouraging stuff - are finding the information increasingly vital online. 'Instead of working on a feature for months trying to get it perfect,' Rheingold says, 'we'll work on something for two weeks and then spend two or three days listening to users and fine-tuning it.'

Tom McNichol, "A Startup's Best Friend? Failure," Business 2.0, 1 Mar 2007, money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/03/01/8401031.