It's fun (and a valuable experience) to pitch. But in some ways, people sometimes get more out of the 54 hours when there's none of the emotional pre-attachment to your own idea, and none of the resistance to flexing it with insights from the team and the mentors.
So why isn't Google better at search? Seriously. They're like tax legislators, constantly surprised that people game the system. Only they have less excuse, because there's no transparency in Google's 'laws,' and no coherent way to distinguish 'white hat' and 'black hat.'
If you spend your life watching the waves, you're never going to catch one let alone make one.
But if the first time you've seen the sea was when you ran into it with a brand new board, the waves are going to catch you.
I engage in my own startups as if there were nothing else in the world. But the instincts I have come from my own participation, and also by consuming startup news in time I can easily afford.
I'd like to see some posts on practical experiences in cases where there's enough perceived benefit in switching from LAMP to justify the effort. I have experience a generation back, moving from proprietary stacks, and learnt two contradictory things:
1. Re-engineering projects constantly fail the catch-up test (the legacy system picks up speed under threat)
2. Legacy systems kill great companies slowly but surely
In that contradiction you also have the startup gap - if your v1 does a tenth of the incumbent's v100 and you can pick up some market share, you can win on pace and focus alone.
I don't think this piece has taken into account the fact that Nokia isn't jumping onto the "ice cold" Windows Phone right now, but a software iteration downstream.
It looks to me as though Elop has taken the decision that the best chance Nokia has to leverage the assets it has created in its own historic portfolio is through a credible platform it can (at least partly) steer.
The multi-platform guys haven't gone all out for WP7 - why would they? And operators have been tentative. Nokia's arrival in this space is huge for the platform, and huge for mobile network operators all over the planet.
But what's also huge is the risk. Apple's doing OK, but Android is snowballing. 2012 is very, very late to get in to the smartphone 2.0 party.
It's not "very, very late" when you consider that only 1 in 4 American's own a smartphone [1]. The 75% that still own dumbphones are the majority & laggard adopters, who likely make cellphone purchasing decisions in store. The Nokia brand still engenders some goodwill and WP7 is reputably a decent platform. Never mind that Nokia has overwhelming market share in Asia, Africa and South America [2].
The eye-opener to me, visiting Mobile World Congress, was that it's fully plausible that smartphones can hit 80% of developed world phone shipments in 2-3 years.
I'd have laughed in anyone's face who'd suggested that a year ago. But the economics of volume have kicked in big time, and the marginal production cost difference has shrunk while the cost and risk of designing the next featurephone keeps going up.
2011 is volume build year. Nobody expects that Apple can retain its market share. Android needs to be smoothed out a lot, but with the breadth and depth of OEM commitment that will happen this year.
Nokia is banking on the cellphone industry moving slowly as it tends to do. Consumers may move faster.
It's not "very, very late" when you consider that only 1 in 4 American's own a smartphone [1]. The 75% that still own dumbphones are the majority & laggard adopters, who likely make cellphone purchasing decisions in store. The Nokia brand still engenders some goodwill and WP7 is reputably a decent platform.
Maybe a "dumb-smartphone" could be a big win in the American market. Create something that makes the non-savvy user feel smart, even if it means severely limiting features. Repeat Apple's playbook, but for an even lower level of expertise. Basically, create the SUV of smartphones. WP7 and Microsoft with Nokia are actually very well placed for this.
StackOverflow works beautifully - it's hit that "this just feels RIGHT" stage.
It's less clear right now that the StackExchange / Area51 model is working. The process of selecting topics, building support and getting going looks good on paper, but it looks as though it's lost a lot of momentum.
So the StackExchange team need to take seriously the issue that as things stand, the model of building out into new Q&A territories can't depend solely on people who are comfortable with SO (e.g. devs) and take that familiarity into another sphere (e.g. devs who also bake).
I was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week. Believe me, tablets are taking off big time. Not least because while lots of people like Apple products, no-one but Apple likes Apple to lead. Apple's already lost leadership in smartphone, and it's hard to see how they won't be outpaced by the end of the year in tablets too.
Smartphone shipments outran PCs (all kinds) last quarter, tablets are going to head that way too. Nobody loves tablets yet, but a heavy dose of competition and high volume will create the pressure to innovate and create something new and compelling.
The day-to-day experience gain of a tablet should be that it's way more available. I'm not convinced the iPad form factor fully achieves that, but it's at least a great proof of concept.
It's pretty much moot to ask a tablet to do something functional that a laptop can't. Anything a tablet can do today, a laptop can either already do or can do tomorrow.
Similarly, there's nothing a laptop can do that a desktop can't. I used to have a desktop that had carry handles and a keyboard that clipped to the base unit. But somehow, that concept no longer appeals. Not that I've ditched desktops, but I figure luggability wasn't as good as designed-in portability.
