As the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put it: “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”
Nikolas Westerhoff, "Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard," Scientific American, Dec 2008www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=set-in-our-ways via a tweet from Scobble and ZDNet
It gave it a slimmer design and more storage, but there are a lot of things Amazon could have added, but didn't. Things like a color display not only would make the device pricier and give it a shorter battery life, but would also make the gadget uncomfortable to hold.
"One of the great things about Kindle is it doesn't ever get hot," Amazon Vice President Ian Freed said in an interview at Amazon's downtown office here. That's important, Freed said, given that the company has one main goal with the Kindle--making the product as invisible to users as possible when they are reading.
"The most important thing for the Kindle to do is to disappear," Freed said. That was the goal with the first device and was also a key factor in deciding what would go in the sequel, which started shipping on Monday. There are the obvious factors, like the thinner, sleeker design. But there are also things like an improved cellular modem. As a result, Kindle users will find themselves out of range in fewer places to get updates or buy a new book.
Ina Fried, "Designing the Kindle 2," Beyond Binary - CNET News, 24 Feb 2009, news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10170310-56.html.
Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.
And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.
On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”
He knew — the where and the who.
Timothy Egan, "Stegner’s Complaint," Timothy Egan Blog - NYTimes.com, 18 Feb 2009, egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/.
Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best.
Massimo Vignelli, The Vignelli Canon, /www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf via northtemple
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
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.