“We’re not using mortar. We’re using glass and steel.” — Steve Jobs response to Larry Ellison when, after touring the Apple prototype store for the umpteenth time, the Oracle founder quipped “Don’t you read the newspaper? Bricks and mortar are dead.”
Felix Salmon, doing a bang up job documenting the train wreck Facebook IPO:
All of which means that the winners in this whole game were you and I: the quiet skeptical masses who simply sat back and watched the farce unfold. In the game of Facebook IPO, it turns out, the only winning move was not to play.
PS. I did not play.
Mike Shatzkin, writing to the DoJ about the Apple/publishers/Amazon collusion thing:
In a nutshell, without uniform retail pricing, Amazon can effectively disintermediate the publishers, but the publishers can’t effectively disintermediate Amazon.
This is true. Welcome to the network.
An oddly appropriate line from Mat Honan’s piece on how flickr died at the hands of Yahoo. Reading the post is like watching an autopsy: painful and dreary, but necessary in order to grok what went wrong.
This broke my heart:
Flickr is still pretty wonderful. But it’s lovely in the same way a box of old photos you’ve stashed under the bed is. It’s an archive of nostalgia that you love dearly, on the rare occasion you stumble across it. You pull them out, and hold them up to the light, and remember a time when you were younger, and the Web was a more optimistic place, and it really was almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.
And then you close the box.
That’s from ETSY CEO Chad Dickerson’s post on how ETSY has become a B-corp (and raised another $40m).
Etsy is more than just an online marketplace. Etsy is a beacon in the world for running businesses sustainably, responsibly, and profitably, with people at the center. The kind of sharing and cooperation you see on Etsy — what has been called a “sharing economy” that is part of a broader “quiet revolution” — can help businesses change the world. Etsy is helping power that revolution, and although we’ve been at it for seven years, it feels like we are just getting started.
I’ve loved ETSY from the day it went live. Happy to see their network intensify and spread.
Beginners is the movie I’d want to make if I was a director. And Mike Mills is the kind of director I’d want to be: thoughtful, kind, and honest.
This may be my new favourite, pushing aside The Hours and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Gasp!)
“It makes me think that the thoughts I have in my head that make me feel the most lonely because I don’t think anyone else thinks them are also the thoughts that have the most potential to make me feel connected.” *
Forrester CEO George Colony states the obvious about post-Jobs Apple in Forbes: they will coast, then decelerate.
When Steve Jobs departed, he took three things with him: 1) singular charismatic leadership that bound the company together and elicited extraordinary performance from its people; 2) the ability to take big risks, and 3) an unparalleled ability to envision and design products. Apple’s momentum will carry it for 24-48 months. But without the arrival of a new charismatic leader it will move from being a great company to being a good company, with a commensurate step down in revenue growth and product innovation. Like Sony (post Morita), Polaroid (post Land), Apple circa 1985 (post Jobs), and Disney (in the 20 years post Walt Disney), Apple will coast, and then decelerate.
(It’s no wonder big brands rely on Forrester for piercing insights.)
John Gruber defends Apple, as he is won’t to do, by picking up this thread:
Disney is the comparison I like best. And he’s right, Disney sputtered a bit in the ’70s and ’80s, post-Walt. But look where they are today: the leading family entertainment company in the world, right where Walt left them. Apple should be so lucky 40 years hence.
This made me wince. Disney didn’t sputter. It failed spectacularly on its core offering (animation) and only survived by making money from “anything else that isn’t animation.” When it DID revitalize it’s core, it was only through what amounted to be the reverse takeover of Disney by another company. Pixar. A Steve Jobs company.
Which is all to say, Steve—we miss you.
Kurt Vonnegut to Charles McCarthy, after the administrator authorized the burning of all his school’s copies of Slaughterhouse Five:
Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
From Tumblr’s updated ToS:
You have to be at least 13 years old to use Tumblr. We’re serious: it’s a hard rule, based on U.S. federal and state legislation, even if you’re 12.9 years old. If you’re younger than 13, don’t use Tumblr. Ask your parents for an Xbox or try books.
Stumbled across Last Night, a gem from first-time director Massy Tadjedin. We both loved it: subtle direction, smart script, solid cast—and a silky cut under the measured hands of Susan Morse.
Last Night stands in stark contrast to the comparable—and wretched—Closer, which was over-cast, over-directed, under-written, and utterly pretentious. Closer desperately wants you to FEEL something, damnit!, but never rises above platitudes. Last Night avoids the spoon feeding and lets everyone (performers included) decide their moral centre. Can’t wait for Tadjedin’s next film.
Two different blogposts featuring people I admire collided today and came to the same conclusion: getting somewhere often requires that you not be too specific about where you’re going.
From David Fincher, talking about Dragon Tatoo and his approach to making films:
I always feel that the best things come out of having just enough time to get into some serious trouble and not enough time to navel-gaze endlessly.
And Paul Graham, on being careful not to be too visionary:
I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You’ll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don’t try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.
The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.
This shot of Lauren Bacall.
A new sourdough loaf I tasted just moments after it left the oven.
Opening the mail to find my wife’s royalty cheque and remembering how she’s wanted to write since she was five.
Playing Sarah Jaffe’s Clementine in the car at obscenely loud levels.
Tyler. He always makes me smile, even when I’m cursing his name.
An email footer that included the sign-off: Sent from my awesomeness called Emily
The New Girl. God I love that show.
Noticing that my pants included an orange seam of thread on the inside that only I could see.
Rooney Mara’s reaction to Colin Firth’s description of her at the Oscars.
A joke Adam made. I can’t remember the joke, but I remember it made me feel good.
Sending Rob chocolates from SOMA because he was feeling insane.
Vive l’Oscars!
“The alchemy of becoming your self is the ultimate act of leadership.” — A VC: The Management Team