Posts tagged Apple

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Steve Jobs (via Henrik Werdelin and Andrew Chen)

The quote comes from a wide-ranging 1996(!) Wired interview that’s worth reading in full.

In fact [Apple], if you want to break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T? For god sakes, they make your amazing phone unusable..as a phone!
Jon Stewart

How valuable is a new product ‘scoop?’

This is a screencap of Gizmodo’s big scoop taken around midnight PT.  The post’s been up about 15 hours.  Two things strike me about this picture.  (1) Giz pulled in 4M visitors to this one page in about 15 hours, and (2) there’s only a single ad on the whole page, and it blends right in.  

I don’t know what to make of that. On one hand, Gawker is pushing to become a more legitimate news community, so maybe they wanted to deliver a pure “scoop” for their readers.  Of course, 

On the other hand, the post immediately preceding this one got only 18,000 views in the same time frame.  Here’re Gizmodo’s pageview stats through this year (thanks, Quantcast):

Pretty solidly cyclical with regular dives on weekends (clearly a workday site).  Crazy spike for the iPad announcement in late January, but no lasting effects.  We can see that one-off pageviews bonanzas don’t seem to create loyal leaders on their own, so the strategic benefits of a big news item appear minimal (I know it’s just one data point, but it makes intuitive sense).  

At a micro level, though, we can pretty easily value a “scoop” from this chart.    During the iPad reveal in January, Gawker they nearly tripled that number.  For a site that does about $5k/day in ad revenue, that’s pretty big.  I’m sure today’s traffic will end up looking very similar.

So much about this is interesting.  Many narratives to think through.  I need to sleep now, but I’m excited to see what happens with Gizmodo’s traffic… 

The iPad is so much more enjoyable than my MacBook. The only reason I’m not using it right now is because every site I want to look at is in Flash
My future wife, looking at wedding dress makers, a set of websites that Steve Jobs probably didn’t think about when he decided to pick a fight with Adobe
Microsoft, still dominant as ever.

Microsoft, still dominant as ever.