Om Malik argues that Bezos is the inheritor to Steve Jobs’s crown. I agree. Not because Bezos has copied anything Jobs did, but because he has not. What he’s done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.
Category: blog
-
-
Tweet of the Decade
Though, I admit, perhaps a bit insensitive of me to post today. Nonetheless.
me, just now, looking at google calendar: Patriot Day? What is… Oh my God, those bastards attacked us on PATRIOT DAY.
— Alison Forns (@alisonforns) September 11, 2012
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXr1kmuqGcU
Apple has been known to poke fun at itself by showing a comical video before an event. Something tells me they won’t be showing this one though.
Wow. Just. Wow.
(via @StevieWLevin)
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
-
I’ll say that again: Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman in Congress, and George Wallace, the most notorious segregationist politician of the 20th century, worked together to raise wages for domestic servants, probably the most abused and unregulated sector of the workforce. (Chisholm’s immigrant mother, in fact, had been a domestic worker, while her father toiled in a factory that made burlap bags.) Was that an unrepeatable one-off event based on a bizarre personal connection, or an example of a cross-racial, North-South, class-based political coalition that might have been? We’ll never know, although it’s tempting to imagine the revolutionary potential of a Chisholm-Wallace ticket – the disabled good ol’ boy and the steely-eyed schoolmarm – which really might have caused the American political universe to explode.
-
I am the organizer for the world’s largest annual convention of elevator manufacturers. Although our attendance rates have their regular ups and downs, Rebecca Watson has been the number one reason that our attendance rates have dropped significantly. She keeps putting down elevators and it’s starting to push all my buttons. What used to be one of the fastest rising attendance rates in the industry has slowed to a halt. It’s like we’re starting out at the ground level. Our convention started in 2000 and we’ve had events every year since. Now however, thanks to Watson, it’s starting to look like will have to skip ’13. I hope we’ll be able to resume in 14 and up, but I don’t have the highest hopes right now. This whole thing is just wrong on so many levels, but I’m trying not to let it get me down.
-
TO JUDGE solely by its high number of blasphemy cases, Pakistan seems to be a nation of wanton profanity where the Koran is routinely desecrated and the prophet Muhammad insulted. Yet given that the crime of blasphemy is punishable by death, that 97% of Pakistanis are Muslim, and that the remainder are an intimidated and largely impoverished sliver, then the country’s many blasphemy cases more obviously represent an abuse of both religion and the law.
-
Last year, there were more than two dozen Android tablets launched into the marketplace, and nobody bought ‘em. Why? Because they’re gadgets, and people don’t want gadgets anymore. They want services that improve over time. They want services that improve every day, every week, and every month.
Like Jobs, he gets that it’s not just about the specs of a toy, it’s about an experience. Apple focuses on the hardware experience, Bezos/Amazon is claiming the service experience. But both reject the “spec war” in favor of making something for human beings to use.
-
-
[I]t’s apparent that Democratic conventioneers remain more enthusiastic about Barack Obama than Republican convention-goers ever got about Mitt Romney. Deval Patrick wins the night’s up-and-comer laurels, but Michelle Obama out-shined the entire line-up by a few billion lumens. Mrs Obama’s speech was paint-by-numbers, but the painting happened to be the Mona Lisa.
-
I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.
Obama Plays to Win, in Politics and Everything Else – NYTimes.com
I am amazed whenever I read about how almost-maniacal these presidents and presidential candidates are. It really does take a very rare, insatiable drive and ego to do this.
-
If Obama survives, the shifting composition of the electorate will also be a—and perhaps the—critical factor. In 1984, whites without a college degree represented 61 percent of all voters, and college-educated whites just 27 percent. But by 2008, noncollege whites had plummeted to just 39 percent of all voters, and college-educated whites increased to 35 percent. Noncollege white men, consistently the GOP’s best group, fell from 28 percent of all voters in 1984 to just 18 percent in 2008; the waitress moms also slipped from 33 percent to 21 percent over that period. White men with a college degree, who traditionally lean Republican but did so by smaller margins in the past two elections, essentially maintained their share of the electorate over those years, increasing from 16 percent to 18 percent.
But the biggest gains have been recorded among two groups that favor Democrats. With women now earning about three-fifths of college degrees, college-educated white women have increased their share of the vote from 11 percent in 1984 to 17 percent in 2008. (These upscale, Democratic-leaning women could conceivably cast more votes than blue-collar men this year.) Minorities have grown even faster, rising from 12 percent of the electorate in 1984 to 23 percent in 2004 and 26 percent in 2008. Recent analyses of census data show that minorities make up 29 percent of 2012’s eligible voters (although it’s unclear whether that population growth will produce comparable gains in the electorate.) And with that burgeoning population, Republicans now see very few openings.
-
Not Loyal Enough
Steve Coll compares Chris Christie’s keynote speech to Obama’s in 2004, and finds Christie sadly wanting.
Obama came to Boston as an unknown and left as a rising star. Christie came to Tampa as a rising star and obviously hoped to acquire Obama-like momentum as the Republican Party’s “truth teller,” a more salable alternative in competitive “purple” states than Paul Ryan will be in the next election, if Romney loses this one. (Christie even wore a purple tie.) …
More interesting than the hard truths Christie purported to deliver from the podium in Tampa were the truths he revealed implicitly: that he is unoriginal, divisive, and not loyal enough to be worthy of the platform Romney gave him.
In a way, this piece reminds me of the only thing I think I’ll ever agree with RedState’s Erick Erickson about, when he called out Jon Huntsman for being untrustworthy. His reasoning was that he proved his disloyalty as a person and as a representative of the United States when he was obviously planning to set himself to challenge the president who had appointed him to his ambassadorship; a president who, one presumes, was relying on him to do that job without having to worry about being undermined by an electoral opponent.
This is similar, in that it calls out Christie for failing to do the job to which he was appointed, and instead using it as a platform for his own advancement. The logic goes, I think, that if you can’t do what you’re supposed to do here, of all places, and you look to overshadow and even undermine the guy who put you where you are (in that moment a least), why on Earth should you be seen as worthy of the office you’re blatantly gunning for?
-
We’re in a panic, as a nation, that we don’t work hard enough, and blame this iniquity for our “decline.” God—the one who blesses America—is withdrawing his favor. Hence the sanctimoniousness with which the topic of work is approached. If you don’t work as hard as people think you should, you’re not just morally inferior, you’re committing a kind of spiritual treason. And if you deny the value of work as a matter of principle, you’re treated like a heretic.
That we’re dealing here with something like a national religion is proved by one of its most cherished articles of faith. If you work hard enough, the maxim goes, you can do anything. This is one of those notions that is so stupid it has to embody a deeply held belief. If you work hard enough, you can be a poet. If you work hard enough, you can play for the Knicks. If you work hard enough, you can become a brain surgeon, a model, the president. Obviously no one believes those things. That it doesn’t occur to anyone to consider them means we must be dealing with a matter of dogma.
-
Romney advisers so trusted Mr. Eastwood, 82, that unlike with other speakers, they said they did not conduct rehearsals or insist on a script or communicate guidelines for the style or format of his remarks.
Romney Aides Scratch Their Heads Over Eastwood’s Speech – NYTimes.com
Political malpractice of the highest order. I had to wonder whether Eastwood had given them an approved text but then went rogue. Now we know that they knew he was just going to wing it. If Romney himself didn’t okay Eastwood doing an unvetted speech, then whoever did should be fired. Jaw-droppingly stupid.
pav alexander 