Chromascapes Film

I've been waiting ages to set some appropriate visuals to this beautiful music by Sigur Rós, pleased that I finally got around to doing it.

Chromascapes

Having run out of landscape photos of real places to abstract, I've taken to creating scenes in Bryce 7 (running on Windows XP virtualized thru Parallels) - and then processing them in Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 3. Saves on travel, at least.

Innovation : You're doing it wrong

Marc Andreessen on what makes technology businesses successful

"The core idea we have, the core theory we have, is that the fundamental output of a technology company is innovation and that's very different than a lot of businesses, right? The fundamental output of a car company is cars. Or the fundamental output of a bank is loans. The fundamental output of a tech company is innovation, so, the value of what you've actually built so far, and are shipping today is a small percentage of the value of what you're going to ship in the future if you're good at innovation. So the challenge tech companies have is they can never rest on their laurels with today's product, they always have to be thinking in terms of the next five years of what comes next and if they're good at running internally and are indeed a machine that produces innovation, they tend to do quite well over time. It's when things go wrong internally and they stop innovating, which happens alot, that the wheels at some point tend to come off."

Totally insightful and correct.

The problem for many technology companies is that while great, often opportunistic innovation might have initially sparked a product or service into life, over time and as the business grows either the leadership fails to recognise that lightning might not strike twice or, even worse, the innovation focus shifts from R&D to sales and marketing and if you're not careful, the core competency becomes a kind of hollow product marketing innovation that's designed to extract maximum value from existing IP.

Then the lunatics have taken over the asylum and, most likely, you're screwed.

Yahoo, RIM and Nokia being great cases in point this year, set against the Steve Jobs view that design and innovation should be an almost sacred part of the business that few people are permitted to participate in.

RELATED : Batshit Crazy Paranoid

Indiscreet

If the 21st century will be known for anything I reckon it will be the progressive eradication of a silent corruption that harks back to era when hushed nepotism and turning a blind eye was often how things got done.

One of the results of the last forty years of progressive computerization is the displacement of people and paper from processes. You see, unlike hard-wired processes, people are corruptable. Forty years ago if you got a parking ticket and you knew someone who worked in the traffic department, a phone call could get your ticket magically 'lost'. If you were on a waiting list for something such as a shiny new council flat and you happened to know someone in the housing dept., you might conveniently have your pick of the best flats and jump a few places in the queue while you were at it. 

Good, honest people might argue that there's a clear distinction between an innocent favour or temporary deviation from the rules and all out corruption, but viewed logically it's a pretty fine line. If there's a line at all.

Regardless, it's moot since computers don't respond to requests for favours. To quote that famous line from The Terminator:

It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Perhaps 'dead' is a little harsh in the case of a parking ticket, but you get my point.

So if we, the little people, now have no choice but to co-exist in this increasingly zero-discretion brave new world, it seems to me to be only fair and somewhat satisfying to finally see expenses fiddling politicians, phone hacking journalists and now shyster bankers finally being called to account.

A jaw dropping loss of innocence, maybe, but ultimately a good and timely social course correction.

Aversion Update

The Google IO announcements reminded me that total amount of time I've spent personally using an Android device is probably less than five minutes. Total. As user experiences go, it might as well be a foreign language.

It's no coincidence either. I've deliberately gone out of my way NOT to use an Android device in a way that isn't accounted for merely by my being an iPhone fanboy. There's something about Android that fundmentally repels me and that runs against the grain of me being a so called technologist.

Perhaps it's just that in order to be truly attracted to something you need to equally repelled by the alternative.

UPDATE : I've added more some more thinking in the comments below, basically it's all Microsoft's fault.