Greg McKeown, writing for the Harvard Business Review, presents the idea that strategic minimization of opportunities will maximize one’s chances of success:

Instead of asking, “How much do I value this item?” we should ask “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” And the same goes for career opportunities. We shouldn’t ask, “How much do I value this opportunity?” but “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?”

Thought-provoking.

Below are this site’s statistics following the ninth month of regular publication. Past stats can be found for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, and August.

Most Visited Posts

• You Can’t Forget What Isn’t Over
• “Best Wishes, Jim” - Howard Schnellenberger
• Nike+ FuelBand Review
• How To Auto-Post On Facebook
• Blogging With Second Crack

Most Visited Linked Posts

• The Day After
• My Dog: The Paradox
• ‘This Wouldn’t Have Happened Under Steve Jobs’
• Meteorologists Aren’t Dolts
• Apple’s Favorite Blogger

Visitors

• 1,000 page views (21,587 for 2012)
• 531 unique visitors (12,864 for 2012)
• 71% visits were from U.S., including all 50 States + D.C.
• Top international traffic included Germany (8%), United Kingdom (6%), and Canada (5%).

Platforms

• Windows (47%, up from 41%)
• Macintosh (45%, down from 52%)
• Linux (8%, up from 7%)

Browsers

• Chrome (45%, up from 35%)
• Safari and WebKit (24%, down from 30%)
• Firefox (20%, up from 19%)
• Internet Explorer (8%, down from 9%)
• Mobile Safari (2%, down from 3%)
• Other (1%)

Once again, I appreciate everyone who visited the site and offered feedback via Facebook, Twitter, and email.

If you have any suggestions or comments, do get in touch or feel free to follow me.

David Chartier debunks the oft quoted and misguided “Steve Jobs would have never …” meme:

Sometimes betas are ok, sometimes Apple employees makes mistakes. But there’s only one person who could truthfully claim to know what Steve Jobs would or would not have done, and he unfortunately passed away nearly a year ago.

Steve Jobs presided over a whole bunch of things “Steve Jobs would never have shipped.” Here are just a few:

Paul Graham on startups:

Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you’re not committing to solve any specific problem; you don’t know for sure which problems are soluble; but you’re committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don’t discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.

Matt Drance on the lack of NFC support in the iPhone 5:

It’s not the technology that matters — it’s the utility that the technology provides. There are plenty of solutions to the mobile payments problem. NFC has not delivered, and Apple has no incentive to change that. By shipping NFC in the current climate, Apple would implicitly take responsibility for making that technology a success. That means not just building a first-class iOS experience, but working with businesses to accelerate adoption around the world.

Unless it’s a solution they create, Apple has never really built on the promises of other companies technology. Drance is spot-on.

Apple CEO, Tim Cook:

At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

Apple was right to directly address the shortcomings of their new built-in Maps application and apologize for the degradation of usability. As others have noted, the timing was a matter of necessity. However, the following statement seems a little weird to me:

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

That suggestion seems slightly incoherent given a preceding assertion that the more customers use the app, the better it will become. In telling users to try alternatives to the default option, people will become further hesitant to use Apple’s solution. How will people know when the app is “improved”? If people are busy using other apps, how will they contribute to crowdsourced data improvement?

This is the first major PR issue under Tim Cook’s sole reign of Apple. I like that they are addressing it publicly and hope they follow through with the promise of a better experience.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t mention Steve Jobs. Never forget he allowed MobileMe and Ping to ship. Apple is comprised of humans - humans make mistakes regardless of who is leading them.

Chris Armstrong, writing for The Industry:

I recently bought an iPhone 5, so now I have a 4S which isn’t receiving much use. I decided to give it newfound purpose by comparing certain parts of iOS 5 with their counterparts in iOS 6. There have been a great amount of UI changes, some very subtle, in this update.

Armstrong compares the small changes between iOS 5 and 6 and makes a compelling argument for the new status bar behavior - an argument I am inclined to agree with.

(via: The Loop)

John Gruber:

Whatever chance there was for Apple and Google to agree to a longer-term deal for iOS to continue using Google Maps, the effective deadline for Apple to make that decision was earlier this year, not next year when the existing deal expired. Apple wasn’t going to wait to negotiate until their backs were to the wall with the currently-shipping version of iOS reliant on Google Maps when the old deal expired.

Makes sense. It seems the decision was tough and the risks/rewards were calculated. In the end, the switch had to happen and it had to happen now. The next step is to see whether Apple bet correctly on their ability to quickly iterate and improve map data.

Peter Gray, writing for Psychology Today, on recent study that found American schoolchildren are becoming less creative:

In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world.  But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes.

Steve Kovach, Business Insider, on the tired cliché used for new Apple products and their perceived shortcomings:

I’m sick of it. It’s lazy writing, a cheap way to criticize Apple for the sake of criticizing it. Before he died, Jobs made it clear to his successor Tim Cook he didn’t want him wondering “What would Steve do?” with every decision. It seems like Cook is doing a good job at that. But hey! Comparing him to Steve Jobs grabs reader attention, so why not?

Amen. Steve Jobs oversaw the release of several awful products (see Ping, MobileMe). Walter Isaacson’s book revealed that Steve Jobs had influence on potentially three years (or more) of future products in the Apple pipeline. So anyone who uses this phrase is either lazy, has bad memory, or is clueless as to how product development cycles work. If Apple releases a product that lacks the expected polish, it is because they released a shit product and not because employees are meandering aimlessly waiting on the ghost of Steve Jobs to provide input.