About the best one can say is that she's no Ken Lay or Bernie Ebbers. But like many imperial CEOs, she embraced and perpetuated another kind of corruption that is damaging the American economy.
Call it "uncreative destruction," where the incentives and distortions in today's capital markets are wrecking jobs and companies.
"It's not an issue of what technology you use," Ratib says, "but what you do with it."
Karen Epper Hoffman, "Of MRIs and iPods," TechnologyReview.com, 11 Feb 2005
Some complaints turn out to be not failures, but features that are difficult to use, said Brian Moody, road test editor for Edmunds.com, the auto information site. Systems that combine many tasks into a single controller, like BMW's iDrive system, draw lots of complaints in Edmunds's online forums. "It feels broken to them because they can't figure out how to use it," Mr. Moody said. BMW says it takes an ordinary driver about a month to become comfortable with iDrive. To help new owners, the company suggests that they bring their cars back to the dealer after two weeks for an intensive training session.
Tim Moran, "What's Bugging the High-Tech Car?", New York Times, 6 Feb 2005.
What started out as one schoolboy's exercise in minimalism, with a nod to Google's back-to-basics obsession, has tapped into a growing desire for simplicity among ordinary computer users....
Firefox the browser is an impressive piece of software. It's easy to use, easy on the eyes, and safer than IE - partly because it's too new to have amassed a following of evil hackers. Firefox the phenomenon is something much bigger. It's a combination of innovations in engineering, developer politics, and consumer marketing.
The goal was modest: no bloat. Inspired by Google's simple interface, they set out to build a stripped-down, stand-alone browser, a refutation of the feature creep that had grounded Netscape. "Lots of Mozilla people didn't get it," Ross recalls. "They'd say, 'This is just the product we have now, but with less features.' Meanwhile, the Mozilla product at the time had about 10,000 options. You basically needed to know the secret handshake to get anything done. It sounds corny, but it was important to make something that Mom and Dad could use."
... authentication expert Richard E. Smith has observed, the logical conclusion of most “strong password” policies—don’t use names of family members or pets; don’t use birthdays or calendar dates; use randomized sequences of special characters; don’t use your password for more than one or two sites; change your passwords several times a year; don’t put your password(s) in your PDA or cell phone—is that passwords should be impossible to remember and should never be written down.
Michael Schrage, "The Password Is Fayleyure," Technology Review, Mar 2005
The objects, however, manage to do what Graves has always wanted his buildings to do. When you look at his cooking implements, or at his chess set or Monopoly game or wall clocks, they seem exactly right. They look like the images we have always had of these familiar things but feel fresh at the same time. And almost all of them do something that is wonderful for any object to do, which is make you smile.
Paul Goldberger, "Scale and Whimsy," Metropolis Magazine, 1 May 2004
Also see: Linda Tischler, "A Design for Living," Fast Company, Aug 2004
"Music," he explained, "is different" from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But neither is it just "a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread." The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. "We are just troubadours," Tweedy told me. "The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves."
Lawrence Lessig, "Why Wilco Is the Future of Music," Wired, Feb 2005.
"Marketing is the key," Hirschhorn says. "The technology aspect needs to be stripped out of the equation. People need to understand that they can take their music with them, they can take it on the bus."
Eric Hellweg, "Gunning for iTunes," Technology Review, 25 Jan 2005
I began by counting things. The very thing that had attracted me to the diary in the first place was also the thing that made it difficult to work with. I mean there's just so much. The diary is a long accumulation of workaday entries. And so I had to find some way to get control of the information so that I could find patterns in it.
The Mac was more like a back-to-the-roots thing. Really the reason the Mac succeeded was the people were passionate and brilliant and motivated and devoted their lives to it. Whereas, the Lisa maybe had a little bit of that, but it was much more corporate, and a job, as opposed to a passion.
....
When you look at the last 20 years of PC development, are you surprised at how much has changed, or how little?
Both. On the hardware side, how much. Moore's Law predicted it, but then to actually see it play out in such a stunning fashion. I mean now the computer I'm using every day has literally 8,000 times the memory that the original Mac had. The hardware is so capable compared to that, it's almost like a dream. Whereas the software is where it's disappointing. The basic software since the Macintosh has evolved at a snail's pace and in some ways it's even gone backwards in usability.
The metaphor of the interface has hardly changed at all.
That's right. That's not because of a lack of possibilities. It has to do with the business dynamics of the industry--essentially Microsoft getting the monopoly and being anti-innovation and establishing an environment where innovation was crushed rather than rewarded. That's the PC industry the last 10 years.
....
How do you feel about the iPod being closed now?
The same way. I think Apple is making a blunder not licensing FairPlay. Ultimately, when you boil it down, it comes to respect for your customer. I think Apple is showing disrespect to the customers by locking them in.
Mac fans are often described as fanatic. What is the "cult of Mac"?
The cult of Mac, I think what it is...is essentially passion. It starts with the designers and the people in the company being passionate about what they're doing. It starts with the designers making something that they want for themselves more than anything else in the world, that's the single secret. As soon as you're making something you want more than anything else, you don't have to do research about the customers. You just look inside yourself. You run the risk of being wrong about it, but at least you make something that has integrity.
Maybe even a better word is love. You fill the product with love and then people will love it.
Scott Ard, Interview with Andy Hertzfeld, "How the Mac was born, and other tales," CNet, 11 Jan 2005