A definition

Deckhead : noun - pejorative term for describing the kind of executive bozo for whom a point worth making isn't really a point worth making without the crutch of a 90 minute by sixty-slide PowerPoint presentation when only three would do.

Usage;

1. "That guy's a total deckhead, dude can I, like, get the last hour of my life back?"

Apple's Dumb TV Strategy

In many respects the TV industry is in exactly the same place the mobile phone industry was in 2006, before Apple launched the iPhone and redefined everything; reasonable hardware married to pathetic software and UI design and driven by a physical push-button interface model. 

Most of the predictions about Apple's anticipated entry into the smart-tv market predict some form of physical gesture based interface model like Microsoft's Kinect, and or a Siri based voice control interface model and basically iOS in a TV. 

However, given the much slower frequency with which people change their TVs compared with their smartphones, it's unlikely that Apple will enter this market with a basic product offering that they then iteratively refine over three of four version updates as they did with the iPhone. It has to be pretty much perfect and fully baked at launch, which is probably why they're not rushing to get something out to market. Besides, it's likely to depend significantly on high bandwidth connections and the longer they wait, the faster and more broadly available that becomes.

But broadband aside, if I was tasked with defining Apple's much anticipated TV strategy, I'd abstract most of the brains out of the display and into smart tablet device, like an iPad. 

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This would address a number of things.

• Kinect type interfaces are great but they're not perfect. How they deal with multiple moving bodies in a wide field of view without generating lots of false gesture reads is still patchy, I'd say. Not quite ready for primetime.
• Equally, driving a TV through a Siri voice interface model also sounds like hell on wheels, not least because the microphone would be based in a device that's likely to be pumping out lots of sound, generating perfect conditions for a distant voice direction to be misheard.
• Abstracting most of the brains, UI and control to a smart remote like an iPad combines both a touch and gesture based UI along with near field voice control, as well as dumbing down the display and mitigating the chance of obsolescence. 

Apple shouldn't build a smart-TV, they should de-risk the purchase for the consumer by building a dumb TV and focusing all the innovation and soft updates to a smaller, iPad like device. The only cleverness the TV will have is the ability to handle Airplay content both ways. As well as receiving content from an iOS device as with Airplay today, I'd guess they'll Airplay transmit conventional TV programming from the onboard tuner to the mobile iOS devices so that you can watch your regular TV programming anywhere in the home in your lap.

Existing TV manufacturers are centralising all the complexity and technological redundancy inside a big, expensive display unit with a shitty UI that will be obsolete inside of two years. Apple will go the other way with a dumb hardware display with minimal onboard intelligence combined with an iOS remote device.

That would be my bet. Indeed, I'd double down on that and say the next generation of iPad will bring a TV app and co-incide with the launch of a bunch of large Apple dumb-TVs.

Wherein Tech Becomes Art

Kindle 4 lit with lamp on lighted case.

Moon

Twitter and focus

Twitter recently fundamentally changed both their web app client and iPhone app UIs. Many people, including me, don't like the new iPhone app at all. Commentary says they did it to carry Twitter to a new, less tech savvy audience in order to monetize. On first reading it's odd that they so casually swept aside the interests of long standing power users, but I've since concluded that they knowlingly did so as an implicit invitation (implicit in the sense of being just one half of a notch away from explicit) to their third party developer community to build power apps to satisfy the hard core.

Like a product management leap of faith which on the surface looks crazy and ill considered (not to mention impolite), but is actually quite smart. As Steve Jobs said, it's all about focus - choosing what leave out is often just as important as what build in.

I wouldn't regard myself as a power user but I thought the old Twitter iPhone app was perfect and the new one is shit. However, I'm also in the category of user that doesn't follow hashtags or respond to Promoted Tweets and so it's fair to assume that Twitter makes zero dollars from me. In spite of the fact I'd probably pay to have Tweetie back (Tweetie was the iPhone app purchased by Twitter a couple of years ago), but that's just impractical in Twitter's business model and I'm therefore unmonetizable.

Bonus (and totally unconnected) Observation

Some CEOs employ agents to tweet on their behalf to give the impression they're down with the kids. It stands to reason therefore, that the inverse must also be true and that some CEOs are really Twitter agents who employ other people to do their day jobs for them. Different sides of the same coin.