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Jeff Bezos on innovation - GeekWire

> When you look at something like, go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago….  There you just have to place a bet. If you place enough of those bets, and if you place them early enough, none of them are ever betting the company. By the time you are betting the company, it means you haven’t invented for too long. > > If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company. AWS also started about six or seven years ago. We are planting more seeds right now, and it is too early to talk about them, but we are going to continue to plant seeds. And I can guarantee you that everything we do will not work. And, I am never concerned about that…. We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up. > > But. if you get to a point where you look at it and you say look, we are continuing invest a lot of money in this, and it’s not working and we have a bunch of other good businesses, and this is a hypothetical scenario, and we are going to give up on this. On the day you decide to give up on it, what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stopped investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?
via [geekwire.com](http://www.geekwire.com/2011/amazons-bezos-innovation)
Sometimes I think Bezos is one of only a handful of CEOs out there who are even close to Steve Jobs’ level of understanding when it comes to vision.

People aren’t wrong when they say a possible Amazon Tablet would be the one product to give the iPad a run for its money. It would certainly destroy every other Android/Palm/RIM/whatever out there. And while I don’t think it would “kill” the iPad, by any means, a tablet that comes from one of the world’s greatest retailers, that has an established set of media stores, and is being driven by someone with the mind of Bezos has a great chance of carving its own niche of success, at least.

The trick for Bezos will be establishing that differentiation. Why buy this instead of the iPad? Will it be cheaper? Will it have access to more content? The Kindle isn’t the most elegant piece of hardware on earth, but it’s selling very well, because it doesn’t try to compete with the iPad or iPod touch. It’s a great reader—nothing more. And it’s relatively cheap. So what will make the Amazon tablet special?

This is the product to watch out for over the next several months.

TSA stands by officers after pat-down of elderly woman in Florida - via CNN.com

> The TSA released a statement Sunday defending its agents’ actions at the Northwest Florida Regional Airport. > > “While every person and item must be screened before entering the secure boarding area, TSA works with passengers to resolve security alarms in a respectful and sensitive manner,” the federal agency said. “We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure.”
via [cnn.com](http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/26/florida.tsa.incident/index.html?eref=rss_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+Top+Stories%29)
I’ll say it again. It’s not the TSA agents. It’s the fact that the leadership of the TSA considers this stuff “proper procedure” that scares the heck out of me.

If we had rogue agents abusing the system, that would be a problem, to be sure. But it would be an easy problem to fix. This issue is embedded in the very core of TSA’s founding principles. The only way to solve this is to disband the agency altogether. Or at least rethink it from the ground up.

We need law enforcement that knows the good guys from the bad. The TSA clearly doesn’t.

A familiar pattern (re: Final Cut X)

Happens every few years.

  1. Apple releases a new version of something that is more than just an incremental upgrade. It’s more of a complete rewrite of the entire product. As such, it usually ends up missing some key features from the original.
  2. A very vocal group of people scream bloody murder for several months about it. Tech writers suggest that Apple has gone too far this time, that they may have finally made a fatal mistake.
  3. The following quarter, Apple reveals that more people than ever are using said product. The loud bashing dies down, and most of the biggest complainers eventually come around as Apple brings back some of the more glaring missing features from the new product. Some of the more obscure features never come back, but most people end up realizing they didn’t need those, anyway.

This is how Apple rolls, people. This is why OS X wasn’t Vista. It’s why the new Final Cut X is taking advantage of all the new features of Lion, while Photoshop won’t for another decade.

You want 64-bit? You want Grand Central Dispatch? You want an app that actually takes advantage of all those extra cores and all that RAM you’ve been sticking in your machine for years? Then you need an app that was rewritten from the ground up. And that means shelving some features permanently, and others temporarily, so that you can get it out the door and into people’s hands.

Apple is literally the only company innovating right now. Because they are the only company with the guts to do this. Everyone else is tacking on features to an already bloated set of products. You can’t have it both ways.

It always sucks when it’s one of those products you personally use that gets a reboot, but you have to suck it up and realize that you’ll be much better off in the long run. In the meantime, keep using the old version until the new one gets the features you need, if you must. Just be ready to move on eventually, or someone else will come along and replace you, too.

Leaving the legacy code behind

> Yes, it means acquiring a copy of Windows and yet another copy of Quicken, but it does provide you with a version of Quicken that’s more feature-packed than the one Intuit’s shipping for the Mac, you’re likely to get new features sooner with a Windows version, and, unlike with your current situation, your copy of the application won’t go the way of the dodo because of an operating system upgrade.
via [macworld.com](http://www.macworld.com/article/160497/2011/06/lions_nixrosetta.html)
I find it odd that of the many solutions offered here in Breen’s piece, none of them is “dump Quicken.” He spells out the options of sticking with Snow Leopard rather than upgrading, dual booting from two OS X versions, complaining about Apple dumping Rosetta in vain, and installing Windows via Boot Camp or virtualization software and then running Quicken through Windows. But nowhere does he mention what is to me the best alternative. Keep moving forward, and dump any software that doesn’t keep up with the times.

If Intuit is too stupid, too arrogant, too in control of this market to see an obvious trend towards Apple’s products, then they deserve to go the way of the dodo. Instead we’re rewarding them for their lack of vision.

Now, I understand Breen’s position, because a lot of his readers no doubt really do feel with products like Quicken that there aren’t any viable alternatives. It’s fair to explore a Windows partition as one alternative to this situation.

But before screwing up every other aspect of my computer workflow, installing alternate operating systems, sacrificing file space, peace of mind, the latest and greatest features etc.—before embarking on anything that inconvenient, I’d make DAMN sure there truly weren’t any viable alternatives.

Heck, I’ll do my finances with an abacus and pencil before I let Quicken take my iMac hostage in this way. Maybe I’m in the minority of Macworld readers who would agree, but why not at least mention the possibility?

Intuit clearly doesn’t care about Mac users. That message is clear. So how many years does this inconvenient kludge of a solution buy you? How long do you put up with Quicken through VMWare and Windows before finally realizing that you have to move on? If Quicken isn’t bothering to keep its Mac version up to date in the face of the Mac’s consistent outpacing the industry in growth, what are the chances Quicken will ever make it to the iPad, which will likely be our main computers a few years from now? Are we going to keep an old PC in the garage running just to keep Quicken alive?

My point is, sooner or later you’ll give up Quicken. Why not do it now?

Extinction is part of the natural evolution of the software industry. Don’t help products marked for extinction limp along; kill them faster, and better alternatives will appear sooner.

Me, I’m already looking for replacements for Photoshop and Illustrator, two programs that I rely on every day, which aren’t nearly as behind the Mac curve as Quicken, but that I’d love to see dead sooner rather than later. Why? Not because I hate Adobe, but because these products have thrived too long because they are a necessity, rather than a benefit to the ecosystem. They are holding back innovation, plain and simple. And the more we finance them, the longer they live to abuse us. Who knows how many years it will take before Photoshop takes advantage of any of these cool new Lion technologies: Versions, Auto-Save, iCloud, etc.?

I don’t plan on sitting around to find out. I may not have found my “Photoshop killer” yet, but I’m investing in all the alternatives, encouraging them to keep working on it.

Did Facebook miss an opportunity to be integrated into iOS? I don't think so.

Some folks are pointing to yesterday’s iOS 5 Twitter integration annoucement and suggesting that it could have just as easily been Facebook getting that integrated treatment. Clearly Zuckerberg didn’t want to play nice with Jobs, the thinking goes, and that was a missed opportunity. 

I’m not so sure. While the benefit to iOS is obvious, what did that Twitter integration do for Twitter? Sure, it makes it far easier for users to tweet photos, links, etc. And that leads ultimately to more users and more activity.But is not having enough users Twitter’s problem? And more importantly, does this deal make money for Twitter? Furthermore, how would this sort of integration benefit Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg’s obvious goal of replacing the entire Internet browsing experience with his Facebook walled garden? Zuckerberg doesn’t want people using proprietary apps on their iPhones to access, or even to create, Facebook content. That’s why there is no native Facebook client for the iPad. He wants people glued all day to their browsers, with their Facebook pages up and running in that browser 24/7.I actually respect Facebook for this. They know how they make money, and they want to secure their financial future. They need iOS users, but in their browsers, not in Apple’s Photos app. Twitter is still figuring out how to make money, and the horse left the stable with third party apps taking over the Twitter experience for many users long ago. Trying to lock everyone into a browser now would be suicide for the service. So why not be deeply integrated into iOS? It doesn’t hurt, but it sure doesn’t help Twitter make money from all those tweets. Mark Zuckerberg is more aligned with Google in this regard. He believes the future of the Cloud is the browser. Apple sees specialized apps connected to Cloud services as the future. Both approaches make perfect sense for both companies. But they are fundamentally incompatible with each other. The only thing Zuckerberg and Jobs have in common is that they are both freaks about control. So a marriage between Facebook and Apple on any level is unlikely any time soon.