Content & Technology - Pixar gets it

I’ve always been interested in technology. I got fascinated by it, really, because I didn’t want to become a dinosaur. Then I realized that technology and content creation were the same business. When you ask for a business plan, you ask for a script. One in 10 will succeed there, one in 10 will succeed here. We as creative people have a fear of physics and math. Technological people have a fear of, well, we can’t write poetry, we cannot write a script. They have a fear of content. But they have to join hands.

The one company that understands this is one of the most successful animation companies in the world, Pixar. Pixar completely understood that when you write your software hand-in-hand with the creative people writing the story, you are creating a revolutionary company. The new (entertainment) companies will not be film studios, they will be technology companies. Google, as an aggregator, is already going into content creation. Apple is, Microsoft will have to be one. Cisco — fundamentally a plumbing company — will get into new media. I have a fund in new media in which Cisco is an investor.

Shekhar Kapur (Hollywood and Bollywood director) as quoted by John Murrell, Good Morning Silicon Valley, 26 Nov 2008, blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2008/11/quoted-933.html

Full Article: John Boudreau, "Famed Indian film director keeps a foot in Silicon Valley," SiliconValley.com, 26 Nov 2008, www.siliconvalley.com/ci_11075690

Put back

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

Aljean Harmetz, "Paul Newman, 83, Magnetic Hollywood Titan, Dies," NYTimes.com, 27 Sep 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/movies/28newman.html.

Learning for the joy of being edified

One of the giant steps in maturing and acquiring knowledge and experience is when we learn for the joy of being edified rather than for the pleasure of being entertained.

Robert D. Hales, "The Journey of Lifelong Learning," BYU Education Week Devotional, 19 Aug 2008, speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1788.

Don't stick too closely to your plans

Everyone knows that innovation is risky, and it’s rare that you arrive at your expected destination. But maybe that destination isn’t so important. Maybe what you should be paying attention to are the little detours you take along the way: It’s down those back roads and byways that the real payoff usually is found. Maybe, in fact, the biggest risk in innovation lies in sticking too closely to your plans.

Danny Hillis, "Stumbling into Brilliance," Harvard Business Review, Aug 2002, harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?value=BR0208&ml_subscriber=true&ml_action=get-article&ml_issueid=BR0208&articleID=R0208L&pageNumber=1.

Nothing happens without a clear goal

But the key thing was to be clear about where we were headed. I’ve certainly seen R&D groups, typically funded by large corporations, where they bring together a lot of smart people and nothing happens. And the reason nothing happens is that they don’t have a clear goal.

Ed Catmull interviewed by Gardiner Morse, "Innovation, Inc. (Pixar)," Harvard Business Review, Aug 2002, harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?articleID=F0208C&ml_action=get-article.

logos

The odd saga of Microsoft’s nascent $300 million rebranding campaign brings to mind this nugget of genius from Paul Rand:

“A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it represents is more important than what it looks like.”

This holds true not just for logo marks specifically, but also in the broader, more abstract sense of brands in general. No brand is better or stronger than the products and experiences it represents. A good brand is strong because it is true, not because it is clever.

John Gruber, "There's Nothing There," Daring Fireball, 18 Sep 2008, daringfireball.net/2008/09/theres_nothing_there.

Evolutionary design is healthier

Stop defying time and put time to work. Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design.

Stewart Brand, Part 1 - Flow, How Buildings Learn, BBC series, 1997, www.truefilms.com/archives/2008/08/how_buildings_l.php (quote is at 22:52).
I learned that the series was available on line via Adaptive Path. How Buildings Learn is a great book.

Simplicity

When it comes to user interface, Firefox and Safari have both struggled to balance the desire for new features with the simplicity that contributed to their early success. As the version numbers increase, this kind of pressure is inevitable. What's the best defense against this sort of thing?

Google Chrome makes the argument that Safari and Firefox did not go far enough in their subtractive design approach....

Google's approach with Chrome is different. Rather than removing features from existing web browsers, Google has taken its brightly colored forearm and swept the table absolutely clean. Forget about menu separators; why even have a bookmarks menu? Hell, why have a menu bar at all? Start with nothing. Assume nothing. Add features only as needed, and only in service of a well-defined design concept.

John Siracusa, "Straight out of Compton," Arstechnica, 2 Sep 2008, arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/09/02/straight-out-of-compton via Rich Goade.

enthusiasm & pulling the plug (at Pixar)

One strategic direction after another -- many of which seemed unlikely at the time -- was embraced with vigor and intensity by Jobs, and his ability to at least briefly convince others that it was right and certain to work (using his famous reality distortion field) is interesting and impressive. But in many ways, I am more impressed with Jobs' ability to quickly drop an old strategy when there was good evidence it was failing, and then turn to the next one with equal enthusiasm.

This may sound sort of crazy, but I also think it is how skilled strategists act when what they are doing carries a huge risk. You need to build enthusiasm about what you are hoping to accomplish, as energy and the self-fulfilling prophecy increase the chances that a risky idea will succeed. But you also need to be equally skilled at pulling the plug when your current tactic is failing

Bob Sutton, "The Pixar Touch: A Great Book by David Price," Work Matters Blog, 1 Sep 2008, bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/09/the-pixar-touch-a-great-book-by-david-price.html via Lynn Monson.

Taking Risks (at Pixar)

Then again, if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job. We’re in a business whose customers want to see something new every time they go to the theater. This means we have to put ourselves at great risk. Our most recent film, WALL·E, is a robot love story set in a post-apocalyptic world full of trash. And our previous movie, Ratatouille, is about a French rat who aspires to be a chef. Talk about unexpected ideas! At the outset of making these movies, we simply didn’t know if they would work. However, since we’re supposed to offer something that isn’t obvious, we bought into somebody’s initial vision and took a chance.

Ed Catmull, "How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity," Harvard Business Review, Sep 2008, harvardbusinessonline, via Adaptive Path

What was the last experiment you did at work?

What was the last experiment you did at work?

Experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo: you are doing something for which the outcome is uncertain, and doing it on purpose. It's that uncertainty that creates the potential for big positive change.

Scott Berkun, "Do You Experiment at Work?," Harvard Business, 24 July 2008, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/berkun/2008/07/do-you-experiment-at-work.html

Microsoft increases focus on user experience

Apple: In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises. We’ll do the same with phones—providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences.

....

Third, we are going to reinvent the search category through user experience and business model innovation. We’ll introduce new approaches that move beyond a white page with 10 blue links to provide customers with a customized view of their world. This is a long-term battle for our company—and it’s one we’ll continue to fight with persistence and tenacity.

Kara Swisher, "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s Full Memo to the Troops About New Reorg," D: All Things Digital, 23 July 2008, kara.allthingsd.com/20080723/microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmers-full-memo-to-the-troops-about-new-reorg via Rich Goade

Making good things

One telling anecdote in my research into innovation history is this striking observation: inventors, creators, and leaders, the people who earned fame for the work other people call innovative rarely used that word themselves. Instead their vocabularies leaned heavily on words like problem, experiment, solve, exploration, change, risk and prototype. Powerful words. Words that are either verbs, or imply a set of actions. And more to the point, they care less about being innovative than they do about making things. Making good things. Forget creating a breakthrough: it's hard enough to make a really good thing that people will love to use. Most markets are in desperate need of affordable, high quality goods that live up to half the promises their advertising make for them.

Scott Berkun, "Why Innovation Is Overrated," Harvard Business Online, 14 July 2008, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/berkun/2008/07/why-innovation-is-overrated.html.

learning by doing

“The source of Google’s competitive advantage is learning by doing,” said Hal R. Varian, Google’s chief economist.

In the Internet marketplace, Mr. Varian notes, users can easily switch to another search engine by typing in another Web address, so there is no tight technology control, as there is with proprietary PC software. Similarly, Mr. Varian says, advertisers and publishers can switch fairly easily to rival ad networks operated by Yahoo, Microsoft and others.

But economists and analysts point out that Google does indeed have network advantages that present formidable obstacles to rivals. The “experience effects,” they say, of users and advertisers familiar with Google’s services make them less likely to switch. There is, for example, a sizable cottage industry of experts who tailor Web sites to get higher rankings on search engines, which drive user traffic and thus ad revenues. These experts understandably focus their efforts on the market leader, Google — another network effect, analysts say.

Steve Lohr, "Google, Zen Master of the Market," New York Times, 7 July 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07google.html. Via Items shared by Robert Scoble.

creative without change

The irony of creativity is this: people want to be creative without change. They want innovation with no risk. They want a new result with the same exact behavior. They can talk for hours about how passionate they are about creativity, but when it comes to actually changing anything, they’ll find a way to repeat the same thing again and again. That’s why books, seminars, courses and lectures on creativity rarely translate into much actual creation. No one can make change happen except the person who must accept the fears, and consequences, of change.

Scott Berkun, "The irony of creative change," scottberkun.com, 24 Jun 2008, www.scottberkun.com/blog/2008/the-irony-of-creative-change.

illuminate the things I don’t know

The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know.

....

I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss. I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.

Michael Lopp, "We Travel in Tribes," Rands in Repose, 15 May 2008, www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/05/15/we_travel_in_tribes.html via NorthTemple.

bottom up vs top down design

JV: Have you seen challenges in being a designer at Google, a very sort of technology-focused and -centered company?

IA: It is challenging. I think in a lot of conventional companies, design is kind of a top-down process. Where you think about who are your target users, what’s the market you’re going after, what are their needs. You do requirements-gathering, and then you design the experience around that, and then you tell the engineers to go build. Here, the way products are conceived a lot of times, it’s an engineer has some kind of idea and then starts building it and then — as it gains momentum — a product manager and a designer might become attached to it. So it’s a very bottoms-up kind of process, which is very different to how designers are trained to think about product development. Yet I still think that there are ways that designers can work within that environment and still have products be use-driven and design-driven, but the ways in which you go about getting yourself inserted might be quite different than [at] other cultures, [which] are maybe more top-down, or product- or marketing- or design-driven.

Jeffrey Veen, "Chatting with Irene Au," veen.com, 7 Feb 2007, www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000961.html.
Also listen to a podcast at itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1758.html

Savor the Surprises

Q: How do you find the paradigm shifts, the really big changes that even the customer doesn’t know they want yet?

A: Or they may know they want, but they can’t verbalize it yet.

Two things. And we teach our people how to do this. One is to spend time observing customers. I love market research. It’s nice. But even better is to go out and watch with your own eyes customers or prospects in their native environment; in their home or in their office. Watch what they do and ask them about what they do and don’t do.

As you do this, second point, savor surprises. Be open for the unexpected. Look for the unexpected. What didn’t make sense? What didn’t agree with the paradigm that we all have in our mind? Because it is those surprises that typically are the market speaking to you about a problem they have that we haven’t discovered yet.

Transcribed from Nir Eyal, "Scott Cook, Founder of Intuit," iinnovate podcast, 28 Apr 2008, (quote starts at 15:30), iinnovate.blogspot.com/2008/04/cook.html

Happiness

1. satisfying work to do 2. the experience of being good at something 3. time spent with people we like 4. the chance to be a part of something bigger

Jane McGonigal, "Alternate Realities," SXSW 2008 Keynote, March 2008, podcast - 2008.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php/2008/04/02/keynote_mcgonigal slides - www.slideshare.net/avantgame/alternate-realities-jane-mcgonigal-keynote-sxsw-2008/ blog post - avantgame.blogspot.com/2008/03/keynote-speaker-jane-mcgonigal-doing.html

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

If you haven't yet seen Randy Pausch's Last Lecture take 76 minutes and watch it. You will be moved - it is very good.

Randy Pausch's Site: www.randypausch.com

Randy Pausch's Lecture: www.cmu.edu/randyslecture

focus

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve go to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

Steve Jobs quoted in Betsy Morris, "Steve Jobs speaks out," Fortune, 17 Mar 2008, money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.jobsqna.fortune/6.html via Rich Goade.
Also see John Moore, "Knowledge Nuggets from Steve Jobs," Brand Autopsy Blog, 19 Mar 2008, brandautopsy.typepad.com/brandautopsy/2008/03/knowledge-nugge.html

product-development voyeurism

Actually Subaru is a lot clearer about what the 2009 Subaru Forester isn't. Apparently it's not a Honda CR-V, Mitsubishi Outlander, Saturn Vue or Toyota RAV4. And that's a good thing.

There is no confusion on Subaru's part, however, about who buys the Forester, why they buy it and how they use it.

In developing the 2009 model, Subaru conducted consumer clinics as early as 2004 to determine what Forester owners thought. Even more telling, according to Tom Caracciollo, Subaru of America's director of product planning, was what was learned after the clinics. By observing participants as they drove away, Caracciollo and his team learned about the ways people actually equipped the Forester and used it, even simply peering inside to see what kind of items were lying around.

This product-development voyeurism was extended further by searching for Forester owners who posted pictures of their adventures on Flickr.com, a photo sharing site. There were the inevitable dog lovers, cross-country skiers and hikers, but the most prolific poster was a guy who posed his Forester in front of the entrance sign to the many national parks he visited. And then there was the couple who stuffed a calf in the back of their Forester to deliver the animal to a relative's farm.

From all this, Subaru was happy to discover that owners loved and trusted their Foresters, but it also took to heart the areas that needed improvement. For example, Subaru eliminated a major source of wind noise by making the crossbars for the rarely used roof rack an optional item. At the same time, load capacity of the crossbars has been increased to 175 pounds, so if you do use them, you can carry more.

In addition, cupholders have been incorporated into the door panels to stow the ubiquitous oversized water bottles that were observed to be a necessary part of the Forester active lifestyle. Interior colors in easily soiled light beige and ivory have been replaced by a more user-friendly shade of gray. And a retractable "snack tray" holds food and beverages for rear-seat passengers.

Patrick C Paternie, "First Drive: 2009 Subaru Forester XT," Edmonds.com, 26 Mar 2008, www.edmunds.com/apps/vdpcontainers/do/vdp/articleId=125348/pageNumber=1

Give Engineers Room

Google engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally. This means that if you have a great idea, you always have time to run with it.

It sounds obvious, but people work better when they’re involved in something they’re passionate about, and many cool technologies have their origins in 20 percent time, including Gmail, Google News and even the Google shuttle buses that bring people to work at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

If your 20 percent idea is a new product, it’s usually pretty easy to just find a few like-minded people and start coding away. But when the thing you really want to work on is to make a broad change across the whole organization, you need something new — you need a “grouplet.”

These grouplets have practically no budget, and they have no decision-making authority. What they have is a bunch of people who are committed to an idea and willing to work to.

Bharat Mediratta as told to Julie Bick, "The Google Way: Give Engineers Room," New York Times, 21 Oct 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/jobs/21pre.html

Every time you add something you take something away

"What’s the most ignored paradox in software development? Every time you add something you take something away.

Screen real estate. Interface clarity. Simplified testing. Shorter development time. Certainty. Agility. Managability. Familiarity. Adding anything dilutes everything else. That’s not always a bad thing, just be aware of it. Be aware of the trade-offs.

The dilution effect is why maintaining a clear vision for your product is so important. Without a clear understanding of the limits and boundaries of your product, the product will morph into something you no longer recognize. Or worse, something you can no longer manage or control.

Jason Fried, "Every time you add something you take something away," Signal vs. Noise, 37signals.com, 4 Mar 2006, www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/every_time_you_add_something_you_take_something_away.php.

it is better ... to grow out of something ...

We believe that it is better for customers to grow out of something than to not be able to grow into it in the first place. And there are a lot of products out there where new customers can't grow into them anymore because they have gotten so complex and have so much stuff that they are too confusing for new people and that is when disruptive businesses can come in and nail the simple side of things, which is always a bigger market there is always more people willing to use something that just works than complex professional stuff.

Transcribed from Jason Fried, "10 Things We've Learned at 37signals," 2008 SXSW Interactive, 8 Mar 2008, audio.sxsw.com/podcast/interactive/panels/2008/SXSW08.INT.20080308.10Things37Signals.mp3, quote starts at 55:25.
Additional references:
Sean Ammirati, "SXSW: Lessons Learned at 37 Signals," ReadWriteWeb, 8 Mar 2008, www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_lessons_learned_at_37signals.php.
Jason Fried, "Question your work," A design and usability blog: Signal vs. Noise, 37signals.com, 17 Mar 2008, www.37signals.com/svn/posts/913-question-your-work.
"SXSW session recap: Jason Fried of 37signals," Hoover’s Business Insight Zone, 9 Mar 2008, www.hooversbiz.com/2008/03/09/sxsw-session-recap-jason-fried-of-37signals.

When in doubt, do something

When we started OpenSocial [a universal platform for social-network applications], we didn't know what the outcome was going to be. But we knew that this was an area where there was an opportunity to do something dramatic and game changing. We asked, 'What's the easiest way to get third parties to build compelling applications for social networks that leverage Google's assets?' We started running a bunch of experiments. We set an operational tempo: When in doubt, do something. If you have two paths and you're not sure which is right, take the fastest path. What's true in physics about objects in motion is true when you're creating a product. It's easier to keep moving and change course than when you're sitting and thinking and thinking.

Chuck Salter, "David Glazer (part of The Faces and Voices of Google)," Fast Company, March 2008, p. 84, www.fastcompany.com/fast50_08/google_david-glazer.html.

okay with ambiguity

I'll ask candidates who aren't engineers how to build a Web crawler. The right answer doesn't matter. I want to hear you think the problem through, because the odds are good that since we're an innovative company, you're not going to know how to do what you're going to be asked to do. You're going to have to figure it out. I want to know that you're okay with ambiguity.

Chuck Salter, "Douglas Merrill (part of The Faces and Voices of Google)," Fast Company, March 2008, p. 77, www.fastcompany.com/fast50_08/google_douglas-merrill.html .

embrace change

Q: What do you think it think it takes to succeed in the sea level of an innovative company?

A: Well, you have to be innovative, which means you have to embrace change. And change is threatening to many people.

I often hear people say they want to be in a company like ours, but they never have been and once they get there the pace of change is very unsettling.

We have taken the Ross Perot approach to evolving the business model. And by that I mean, we try many versions of one thing at the same time and let the market place tell us which thing works best. And then we rapidly iterate on that thing to make it better and better and better and better.

The alternative approach would be to study it ad nauseam, pick one, put the one thing in the marketplace and then slavishly work to improve the one thing. That is not the model we have built the business with.

We pride ourselves on our ability to very rapidly iterate. And to test, test, test, test, test, test, test. And let the marketplace inform us about what works.

Transcribed from "Featured Interview: Barry McCarthy, Chief Financial Officer of Netflix," iinnovate podcast, 13 Jan 2008, iinnovate.blogspot.com/2008/01/mccarthy.html (quote starts at 14:56).

MAYA Design: Papers

MAYA Design: Papers

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry: "According to Paul Roth, AT&T's president of marketing, the carrier is exploring new products and services — like mobile banking — that take advantage of the iPhone's capabilities. 'We're thinking about the market differently,' Roth says. In other words, the very development that wireless carriers feared for so long may prove to be exactly what they need."