My job is simply to design gadgets that I like Inventors are people who not only curse, but who also start to think of what can be done to eliminate the bother...When I see something that I don't like, I try to invent a way around it. My job is simply to design gadgets that I like. Jacob Rabinow, The Evolution of Useful Things The iPodYou and your user are one innovation
How Microsoft crushed Slack An Article www.theverge.com ...and why the era of worker-centered work tools may be over. What's love got to do with it? Dear Microsoft softwarebusinesscompetition
What's love got to do with it? Slack embodied the belief, so common in Silicon Valley, that the best product would win in the end. “Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software,” the company wrote in its open letter to Microsoft. “How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.” And yet, if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design. In its open letter, Slack famously told Microsoft: “You’ve got to do this with love.” In 2020, looking at Slack’s size, the idea seems laughable. What’s love got to do with it? Copying (is the way design works)Dear Microsoft craft