firehose

I’d like to propose a new term in the business strategy lexicon: a strategy credit (if something similar exists, let me know!). It’s basically the opposite of a strategy tax. As I wrote a few weeks ago:

A strategy tax is anything that makes a product less likely to succeed, yet is included to further larger corporate goals

An obvious example is last week’s release of Office for iPhone, but not iPad. I don’t have any visibility into the thinking here, but clearly it’s best for Office to be on as many platforms as possible, but better for Windows that Office only be available on Windows 8.

Anyhow, this morning saw the opposite of a strategy tax with Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy (emphasis mine):

Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

You can almost hear it now:

How admirable! Golly gee, Apple is such a better company than those hypocritical evil-doers at Google! Why can’t everyone treat customers so well?!?!? Apple good. Google bad. Facebook worse. Pant pant design pant pant focus pant pant.

The truth is this is nothing more than a strategy credit:

Strategy Credit: An uncomplicated decision that makes a company look good relative to other companies who face much more significant trade-offs. The canonical example is Android being open source

User information of this type isn’t important to Apple’s business model, so they “choose not to retain it.”¹ There’s nothing worth praising here – or denigrating – but it’s worth acknowledging.²

In the meantime, though, Apple will happily score rhetorical points in the court of public opinion for a decision that wasn’t difficult at all.

1. They do, however, happily retain all of your credit card information, to choose one example
2. Before you say that all companies should have Apple’s business model, I suggest reading Free by Dr. Drang

The post Strategy Credit appeared first on stratēchery by Ben Thompson.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Monday’s civil unrest in Brazil had the slightest of sparks—a $0.09 rise in the price of a single bus fare in Sao Paulo. Officials justified the rise, pointing out that it was well below inflation, but it still triggered the biggest protests Brazil has seen in over 20 years—up to 200,000 people on the streets in 11 cities.

But Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro residents are not on the streets out of solidarity with Sao Paulo bus users. To them, the issue is synonymous with a much larger problem: the state of Brazil’s economy.

First quarter economic growth was a mere 1.9%, industrial production shrank 0.3% and inflation was 6.46%, prompting the central bank to buck the global trend and raise interest rates, further dampening household spending. The country’s economy is suffering, and external reasons are only partly to blame.

President Dilma Rousseff, who inherited an economy growing at 7.5%, has made an effort to stimulate recovery by hiking up public spending, minimum wages and encouraging bank lending. Her attempts at reform have been welcomed by Brazilians—who gave her a near-80% approval rating in March—but her influence is limited and her popularity falling, as it becomes increasingly clear that  Brazil is stuck.

Many protesters are upset about what they see as a disconnect between high taxes and poor public services. “We’re massacred by the government’s taxes, yet when we leave home in the morning to go to work, we don’t know if we’ll make it home alive because of the violence,” one protester told the Associated Press. ”We don’t have good schools for our kids. Our hospitals are in awful shape. Corruption is rife. These protests will make history and wake our politicians up to the fact that we’re not taking it anymore.”

Lavish public spending on the 2014 World Cup stadium has further annoyed Brazilians. The $14.3 billion project includes an over-budget stadium in an isolated city surrounded by rainforest. Worse, it is being built with 6,700 tonnes of steel smelted in Portugal and shipped half way across the world, to be constructed using American and Chinese cranes.

So when the streets began to fill and word on social media spread, the disillusioned masses appeared, many spurred on by videos of a heavy-handed and violent police response. And it all started with a $0.09 fare hike.

Established in 1968, Sterling Cooper & Partners (SC&P) is one of the leading advertising agencies in New York, NY and is the result of a merger between Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (est. 1963) and previous competitor Cutler Gleason and Chaough. SC&P's current list of clients includes Chevrolet, Mohawk Airlines, Manischevitz Wines, and Ocean Spray and Sunkist (which is a conflict of interests). When first merged, the agency attempted to adopt Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Cutler Gleason and Chaough as a name and SCDPPCG as an acronym but soon after settled on the name Sterling Cooper & Partners honoring the original partners, Bertram Cooper and Roger Sterling Sr. (current Roger Sterling's daddy), who had founded the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency in 1923. Yesterday, the agency introduced its new logo through a press release issued for immediate release. No design credit was given.

Press release.

Logo detail.

The previous logo worked nicely in that it was four letters neatly arranged in a tight grid of rounded-corner squares but in order to make all the letters fill out the squares the typography has been stretched, making the "S" and "C" particularly aggravating. I will blame it on the nascent technology of phototypesetting that allows far more play with the fonts than ever before. But the agency should know better than letting technology drive their aesthetics. Five years makes a big difference and the SCDP logo — name change notwithstanding — was starting to feel out of date in this drastically changing decade. The new logo drops the seriousness of its predecessor with a custom monogram of the abstracted initials and an ornamental ampersand. The monogram letters are nicely executed with the same proportions and counter-spacing used in the taller letters ("S" and "P") as in the shorter one ("C"). The supporting wordmark comes in a remarkably nice bulbed sans serif that hints back to the original sans serif but clearly points forward. Overall, I don't know if this logo communicates all the ideals expressed by the partners in the press release but it is definitely a major improvement that establishes SC&P as an edgier and more contemporary agency.

Thanks to Chris Rooney for the first tip.

Well the garden did change everyone's lives right

At the bottom of my recent post on App Store pricing, I ended a three-paragraph footnote¹ with this:

Abolishing the “top” lists from all App Store interfaces and exclusively showing editorially selected apps in browsing screens would do a hell of a lot more than trials to promote healthy app economics and the creation of high-quality software.

It was really a mental note to expand on that in a full article sometime, which I promptly forgot about. Fortunately, John August didn’t:

The App Store’s best-sellers lists hurt shoppers, developers and Apple. The charts create a vicious circle that encourages shitty business models and system-gaming. They’re a relic of a time when data was scarce. They should go away.

And Nick Dalton presented more alternatives.

The “top” list is a cop-out by Apple: it’s easy to implement and cheap to operate, and its results appear impartial and incontestible. I’m sure Apple thought this was a sweet solution.

But it has three major problems:

• The rich get richer: everyone who downloads an app by browsing the “top” list reinforces or increases the rank of the apps already on it, entrenching their positions and reducing the visibility of anything below the first few pages.²
• It’s easy and relatively inexpensive to game, especially for free apps, as proven by an entire industry of pay-for-rank mass-installation scams.
• It encourages shallow, least-common-denominator apps with rock-bottom prices.

Since the “top” lists are featured so heavily in the App Store interfaces, many buyers appear to be buying from them as their primary store-browsing channel.³ These lists, and their mechanics, therefore deeply affect the entire app market in unsurprising ways.

The race to the bottom. Deceptive low-now, high-later pricing. Scam and clone apps. Shallow apps with little craftsmanship that succeed, but many high-quality apps unable to command a sustainable price. The “top” list encourages all of these — we’d still have them without the list, but to a substantially lesser degree.

Developers will optimize for whatever factor is being rewarded. The “top” list simply rewards developers for getting as many people as possible to buy or download the app once. There’s no reason to optimize for longer-term satisfaction or higher engagement after purchase.

It’s a lot like the Android market. Nobody — not Google, not the manufacturers, and certainly not the carriers — gives a shit if you hate your Android phone or put that cheap tablet in a drawer after a month. They’re optimizing for “top” lists, so they compete on price, flashiness, and huge retail incentives, usually at the expense of quality and long-term satisfaction.

Apple refuses to play that game in hardware. Why are they content to let it dominate their software ecosystem?

You can do better than “top” lists, Apple. Get rid of them and start rewarding great software.

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” asks Lisa Simpson in a vintage episode of The Simpsons. “Piece of cake,” replies Bart, slapping his fingers into his right palm. “No, Bart, it’s a 3000-year-old riddle with no answer! It’s supposed to clear your mind of conscious thought!” says Lisa, losing her cool. Bart makes with the finger slapping again.

The Simpson kids’ dissection of the old koan springs to mind while playing Squaresoft’s long lost space shooter, Einhänder. As those down with the Deutsch will note, einhänder literally means “one-hander.” It’s the name of your blue ship. Shaped like an open hand, your little craft is the most devious weapon in a future where the now-colonized moon is at war with Earth. When the Einhänder guns down opposing ships, it can literally snatch away their weapons as they fall out of the ...

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We’ve seen steadycam mounts that allow videographers to capture the action without a lot of wobblevision, but [Tom]‘s DIY stabalized camera rig does far more with the help of a few brushless motors.

The basis of [Tom]‘s camera gimbal is a Foxtech brushless gimbal originally designed for quadcopters and other FPV aerial vehicles. Instead of servos, this gimbal uses brushless servos for much smoother rotation on each axis as well as the ability to rotate more than the 180 degrees most servos offer.

The off-the-shelf gimbal was connected upside down to a shoulder mount, allowing [Tom] to point the camera manually while also allowing his hands to operate an RC transmitter for pitching and rolling the camera inside its frame. The results are spectacular: [Tom] is able to take absoutely steady shots of him walking down a steep mountain trail.

You can check out [Tom]‘s explanation and demo of his camera gimbal after the break. Thanks [raalst] for sending this one in.

Watch Brian Provinciano's Retro City Rampage talk from GDC originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 17 Jun 2013 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

ChinaSMACK is reporting that a user on China’s microblogging site Sina Weibo has invented “hairy stockings” as a way for young girls to fend off perverts. It’s hard to tell if these are real or imagined but given that some people in China have been putting dogs in pantyhose, these might just be the former.

Super sexy, summertime anti-pervert full-leg-of-hair stockings, essential for all young girls going out.

image via chinaSMACK

via chinaSMACK, Hypervocal

Chicken town, John Cooper Clarke

The best way to tell your Dad you love him is buying him a Market Basket cake. If he’s been a really good Dad this year he gets all the letters on his cake. I guess this year he sucked. I mean really? The one job you have is writing on a cake and you can’t spell FATHER?

Surgeon Simulator 2013 adds support for Oculus Rift, Razer Hydra originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Oculus Rift secures $16 million in first round of investor funding

Oculus Rift secures $16 million in first round of investor funding originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.