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."

The best products aren’t the ones with the most features

The best products aren’t the ones with the most features. The best products are those whose features are tightly integrated with the solutions they provide, making them the most usable.

Apple Inc, "Making Design Decisions," Apple Human Interface Guidelines, 9 Jun 2008, p. 28, developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGDesignProcess/chapter_3_section_3.html.

from the user in

"Leopard is magnificent code architected from the user in, rather than from core technology out."

Tom Yager, "Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade," InfoWorld, October 17, 2007.

field studies - wider range of behaviors

"But field studies are still invaluable; they show us a wider range of behaviors than we see in the laboratory and let us assess the impact of changing contexts and other ethnographic variables."

Jakob Nielsen, "Intranet Usability Shows Huge Advances," Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, 9 Oct 2007, www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet-usability.html.

Details

Of course, too much detail can undermine credibility, for the same reason: we know there’s only so much a person can remember about a scene or event, so we believe they’re making stuff up when they start overwhelming us with detail. (Plus, we get bored – a very important thing to keep in mind!) In On Writing, Stephen King, whose been known to create a sticky idea or two in his time, puts it like this:

Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Overdescription buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium. It’s also important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling a story.

Too much detail distracts from the point, which is getting your audience to believe something.

Interview: author and ex-Microsoft manager Scott Berkun - The Jem Report

Interview: author and ex-Microsoft manager Scott Berkun - The Jem Report: "Successful innovation depends on understanding people and their problems more than it does the ability to create technological wonderments."

learn from the periphery

"Every industry and every company needs to learn from the periphery rather than the core. Change always happens at the periphery."

Jessie Scanlon, "Chrysler and the Innovation Basement: What Robert Nardelli needs to do in order to change the Big Three automaker into an innovator," Business Week, 8 Aug 2007, www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2007/id2007088_296221_page_3.htm.

People come back to places that send them away

"People come back to places that send them away."

It's the basic trust proposition of the Internet. People will only trust a service that gives them complete freedom to come and go as they please. Further, they'll want to come back if you send them to cool places. It's why people like Facebook today, and why they'll be tired of it tomorrow, if it only sends you to places within the Facebook silo.

Dave Winer, "Lock-in and the web, day 2," Scripting News, 3 Aug 2007, www.scripting.com/2007/08/03.html.

They're Beautiful!

They're Beautiful!: "The Florists would like to know that you are not a robot. Please type these letters in the box below."

NASA - Space - Cosmos - Inventors and Inventions - New York Times

NASA - Space - Cosmos - Inventors and Inventions - New York Times: "Much of mechanical innovation boils down to finding just the right compromises to such puzzles. Many of us think of invention or innovation as a wholly conceived, brand-new, big-leap-forward creation unlike anything that has preceded it. But much of mechanical success involves fiddling with the inherent conflicts within a device until you find a tiny interstice among the countervailing forces, that sweet spot, where the device suddenly does what you want it to do. In the case of the glove, the sweet spot is the precise tradeoff of restraint and flexibility that will allow for maximum dexterity."