Posts tagged Jobs
The Steve Jobs Statue & the Four-Dimensional Visionaries of BIM
Dec 22nd
The world’s first statue of Steve Jobs was unveiled today, but it wasn’t in Apple’s headquarter city of Cupertino, California. No, it was erected in Budapest, Hungary – and with good reason. In Budapest you’ll find the headquarters of a company called GRAPHISOFT, early innovators in a fascinating field called BIM.
BIM stands for Building Information Modeling. The field has the potential to give the Apple-like treatment of high-design, efficiency and pleasing user experience not to our mobile devices, but to all the buildings we live and work in. Statue patron GRAPHISOFT had its own important connection with Jobs, but the field in general is one to look at if you’re interested in what Jobs did to mobile devices and computing. BIM is trying to do similar things to the whole civilized world.
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BIM is a relatively new field, having emerged over just the last 30 years. It’s an architectural practice of designing, co-ordinating between all the parties involved (design, builders, client and others) and monitoring the creation and lives of buildings. It’s four-dimensional when you include time. It’s a beautiful concept, and Steve Jobs was moved enough by it that he provided early support to GRAPHISOFT after seeing the company demo at the world’s biggest electronics show, CEBIT in Germany, in 1984.
In 2008, Anthony Frausto-Robledo, the Editor in Chief of Mac-loving CAD pro publication Architosh, argued that Apple should acquire the German company Nemetschek that had just acquired GRAPHISOFT a year earlier so that the two companies could combine forces and challenge design giant Autodesk.
GRAPHISOFT is today like the Mac to Autodesk’s Revit, the leading BIM tool for Windows machines. It should be no surprise that it was a Jobs-aided BIM company that put up the world’s first memorial for the man. The field of BIM is likely to feel Jobs’ influence far into the future. We’ll feel it too when a number of factors come together: increasing computing power, the cloud and mobile – all enabling BIM to make the construction and use of built space a more Apple-like experience.
Right: GRAPHISOFT’s BIMx for iOS.
Half the construction work in the US is now said to use BIM and the UK government has mandated that all government construction meet sophisticated BIM standards within 5 years. BIM companies are pushing the cloud and mobile is expected to become an important part of this work as well. (See, though, this Summer’s Debunking the Myths About BIM in the “Cloud” by GRAPHISOFT CEO Viktor Várkonyi.)
BIM helps professionals work with space, time, resources, built and natural environments in order to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration in the creation of the rooms and buildings we live, work and play in.
BIM is said to be poised to eliminate 30 to 40% of the historic workload of an architect through automation of much of the revisions of technical drawings that architects do and by enabling clients and builders in the field to access real time information in synced representations of a building, its components, its circumstances and more. BIM helps professionals work with space, time, resources, built and natural environments in order to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration in the creation of the rooms and buildings we live, work and play in. It’s all about computer assisted design, literally.
“If we think how we work now, when we finish a project, we have a big box of drawings, a big box of specifications and we give it to a client and it sits in the corner and it is dead,” Rob Charlton, chief executive officer of Space Group, said at a London BIM event last month.
“What will be happening in the future is we will be giving clients access to an iPad or similar device.
“They will be able to view it, update it — client information on buildings, asset data will be kept dynamic, it will be constantly updated — and very importantly you will be able to do reports, to see how well your building is performing.”
The fluid nature of a construction project, as well as a building’s performance over its life, are something that can be perilous to ignore. As Building Information Modeling expands in adoption and capabilities, while dropping in price and effort required, inefficiencies in energy consumption, user (inhabitant) productivity and Total Cost of Ownership of a building may no longer be taken for granted someday but may become as clearly troubling as a bad phone is today next to an iPhone.
The Culture of BIM
High-quality design for elements on BIM canvases is already entering a space of commoditization, accessibility, creativity and global online community. There are, for example, places to buy and sell creative 3D furniture for BIM and CAD projects for cheap.
GRAPHISOFT’s leading competitor, Autodesk’s Revit, even has a prolific but anonymous Twitter account (@RevitFacts) set up to post mocking critiques of its shortcomings for practicing architects.
UK-based BIMJournal reports that the first legal dispute over BIM has already hit the presses.
The first American dispute involving BIM related to the construction of a life-sciences building at a major university [name undisclosed].
The Architect and its Mechanical Electrical and Plumbing (MEP) Engineer used BIM to design the MEP systems which were to be installed into the ceiling void. However, the design team failed to tell the Contractor that the extremely tight fit of the components depended on a very specific installation sequence. The work was approximately 70% complete when the Contractor ran out of space, and all parties involved blamed each other for the problem. The Client sued the Architect, the Contractor sued the Client, and the insurance company sued the MEP Engineer. It seems that a resolution was reached. The parties involved, and the value of the settlement, remain confidential. However, the Architect, the MEP Engineer, and the Contractor were reported to have shared costs amounting to several millions of dollars.
By making each little step, each component and each block of time quantifiable, trackable and thus manageable, BIM aims to reduce friction between all the creative professionals involved in creating a physical space today.
That reduction of friction through collaborative design tools benefits the designers, but it may benefit contractors and clients far more. Stephen Hamil, Director of Design and Innovation and Head of BIM at RIBA Enterprises, said earlier this month, “research indicates that client:contractor:designer benefits of #BIM are of ratio 60:20:1″
User/consumer/inhabitant benefits of a well-designed world would presumably be even bigger.
That joy you feel when you hold and use the iPhone or iPad, imagine if you, your work, your play, your ecological footprint and your physical and mental social space as you walked through the world all felt that way because they were designed with the aid of beautiful machines.
That’s the idea behind BIM. That’s why it makes sense that this ambitious young industry, so dedicated to user experience, would be the first to celebrate the life of Steve Jobs.
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Google Zeitgeist 2011: Rebecca Black, Lego Alien & Steve Jobs
Dec 15th
Google released the Google Zeitgeist 2011 today. Google made several lists this year and even broke them down by country. You can play with the interactive lists at googlezeitgeist.com. Those in the picture above are included in the “fastest rising searches” category, including Rebecca…
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Where to Land the Best Paying SEO Jobs [Infographic]
Dec 1st
New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are home to the most open SEO positions, according to Onward Search infographic SEO Salary Guide for the Top 20 U.S. Markets. Using job posting data collected from SimplyHired.com, they put together a list …
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Where to Land the Best Paying SEO Jobs [Infographic] – Search Engine Watch
Dec 1st
 Search Engine Land |
Where to Land the Best Paying SEO Jobs [Infographic]
Search Engine Watch New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are home to the most open SEO positions, according to Onward Search infographic SEO Salary Guide for the Top 20 US Markets. Using job posting data collected from … Infographic: NYC & LA Tops For SEO Jobs & Salaries By Specialty |
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Infographic: NYC & LA Tops For SEO Jobs & Salaries By Specialty
Dec 1st
New York is the capital of SEO, with Los Angeles just behind, based on job volume measured in those cities. Those working in SEO earn anywhere between $27,000 to $148,000 per year. The lowest pay goes, ironically, to those who often do the most important job in gaining rankings: link builders….
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Steve Jobs Wins: Adobe to Give Up Mobile Flash for HTML5
Nov 8th
Sources close to the news have told ZDNet reporter Jason Perlow tonight that Adobe will announce soon that it has given up on the development of mobile flash and will increase its investment in supporting HTML5. The company will say, according to an email published by Perlow, that it will encourage app developers to work with the cross-platform Adobe AIR platform to be distributed across mobile app stores, a caveat that could mean the news is less dramatic than it might seem. Rather than building with AIR for mobile, though, it seems likely that more developers will focus on HTML5 instead.
Feisty Twitter user Counternotions quotes Adobe’s CEO from 2010 “Technology problems [w/ Flash] Mr. Jobs mentions…are ‘really a smokescreen.’” Apple’s refusal to go with the glitchy, gloppy proprietary protocol that performs poorly on Apple devices had to be a big part of what turned the tide. Adobe prints giant piles of money from sales of its Flash authoring tools.
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Appple CEO explained why he was opposed to the inclusion of support for Flash on Apple mobile devices in the Spring of 2010. Sarah Perez summarized his arguments as follows:
- It’s proprietary.
- Most Web video plays on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad
- Who needs Flash games? We have apps for that.
- Flash has poor security.
- Flash doesn’t perform well on mobile devices.
- Flash negatively affects battery life.
- Flash was designed for PCs, not touchscreens.
Adobe contested those arguments of course, and Google was happy to support Flash on Android. The European Union went so far as to consider forcing Apple to support Flash on the iPhone.
Perlow, who broke the story tonight, has been a Senior Technology Editor at CBS’s ZDNet since 2008 and was a Senior Editor at Linux Magazine for ten years prior.
The leaked news from Adobe says that the company will “continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.” That doesn’t mean much for future configurations of those Operating Systems.
[Note: This post was written in a hurry but delayed until Flash and AIR apps on my Mac could be force quit. It's running much better now.]
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3 Key Business Lessons From Steve Jobs: Intuition, Reinvention, Focus
Nov 6th
Over the weekend I finished reading the authorized biography of Steve Jobs,
by Walter Isaacson. It’s a hefty 650 pages and spans the entire life and career of Steve Jobs, the iconic Apple co-founder who sadly passed away a month ago. The biography is well worth reading, I gave the book 5/5 stars. I’ll even say that it should be required reading for technology entrepreneurs and anybody who wants to be a leader in our industry. The biography is a sympathetic one, so don’t expect to read a great deal of criticism about Steve Jobs. Despite that, it’s a well-rounded portrayal of a man destined to be remembered as one of the great product visionaries of our time.
There’s plenty to learn from the biography. Here are three of the main lessons that I took from the book. Each comes from an aspect of Steve Jobs’ own personality, which he managed to instill into his company Apple. (Note: don’t worry, there aren’t any spoilers in this post!)
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The unifying theme of the biography was "the creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality." This was also a central theme in two previous biographies by Isaacson, about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.
The Magician Genius
One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so different and successful was his Buddhist and Zen sensibilities. Jobs traveled to India when he was a young man and the book explains how this led to his key business philosophies. I was particularly taken by the importance of intuition for Steve Jobs.
Jobs is quoted as saying, "I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis." He also said that "intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work."
You can see that intuitive sense in Jobs’ incredible ability to foresee – and then design – what users will want next. The iPhone is a great example. The following passage from the book, from 2005 when Apple was looking for the next big thing after the iPod, illustrates how Jobs kept one step ahead of the market. In this case, by thinking about what could eventually usurp the market leading iPod.
“The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone.” As he explained to the [Apple] board, the digital camera market was being decimated now that phones were equipped with cameras. The same could happen to the iPod, if phone manufacturers started to build music players into them. “Everyone carries a phone, so that could render the iPod unnecessary.”
Later in the book, Isaacson describes how Jobs’ Zen training helped him develop his love of simplicity in design:
He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.
I also loved this description of Jobs:
He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power.
A Metamorphosing Butterfly
Another key learning from this book is how Steve Jobs reinvented both himself and his company many times. According to Mike Markkula, who became a one-third owner of Apple in 1977 and went on to be CEO (1981-83) and Chairman (1985-1997), the legacy of HP was a big influence:
They [Jobs and Markkula, in 1997] spent the rest of the time talking about where Apple should focus in the future. Jobs’s ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. “Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business,” Markkula said. “You’ve got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You’ve got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.” Jobs didn’t say much, but he agreed.
That nugget of wisdom eventually led to the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and everything else that Apple achieved in the ’00s.
As an aside, one of the things I learned from the book was that the iPad idea actually came before the iPhone one. The multi-touch interface was perhaps the biggest innovation in the iPhone and it came from a team developing a prototype tablet. Jobs decided to use it in the iPhone and put Apple’s focus on that product first:
That project [what was to become the iPhone] was far more important [in 2005], so he put the tablet development on hold while the multi-touch interface was adopted for a phone-size screen.
This Steve Jobs quote, in which he references his beloved Bob Dylan, is a nice summary of his reinvention capability:
"That’s what I’ve always tried to do–keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying."
Focus
Steve Jobs’ personal intuition helped the company to reinvent itself across many different product lines. Isaacson named seven industries that Jobs revolutionized or reimagined over his career: personal computers, animated movies, music, telephones, tablet computing, digital publishing and retail stores.
Apple achieved all of that because of the focus and decisive leadership provided by Jobs:
One of Jobs’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985 in a failed leadership battle with the CEO at the time, John Sculley. In 1997, he returned to Apple and one of my favorite Jobs stories comes from that time. On his return, he reduced Apple’s bloated computer product range from about 40 to just 4. This passage, set in an internal meeting, describes how he did it:
He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant.
Another part of Jobs’ leadership was creating a remarkable organization chart around him, whereby all of the key decision makers were just one or two steps from Jobs. He also implemented a culture of accountability over the whole company.
Towards the end of his life Jobs even counseled the CEO of Apple’s primary competitor, Larry Page of Google, about focused leadership:
"The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up."
What Did You Learn From Steve Jobs’ Bio?
Those are just three of the things that I learned from this biography of Steve Jobs. Although it’s a sympathetic portrayal of Steve Jobs’ life and career, the author Walter Isaacson does point out some of the downsides of these characteristics. Jobs’ drive for focus, for example, often led to callous treatment of his employees.
But we have to accept that Steve Jobs was a unique individual and it’s impossible for anyone else to even come close to being the person he was. The best we can do is learn from what Steve Jobs taught us about product innovation and leading a technology company. If you’re at all interested in those topics, I strongly encourage you to read this biography. If you have already, I’d love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments.
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Apple Plans to Revolutionize Your Living Room Next, Just as Steve Jobs Wanted
Oct 24th
“I finally cracked it,” Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson just months before his death. He was referring to the design and functionality of television, something Jobs had long wanted his company to reimagine.
In the official biography of the late Apple founder that came out today, one of the last topics discussed before Isaacson touches on Jobs’ summer 2011 resignation is how he had hoped to revolutionize the television set.
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“I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” Jobs said. “It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine.”
Apple is believed to already be building prototypes of such a television set, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray. The TV is expected to hit the market sometimes next year, although probably a bit later than previous estimates.
The idea that an Apple-branded HDTV set is in the product pipeline has been the subject of rumors for a few years. Apple patents and sources at some of the company’s suppliers have fueled speculation since at least 2008. In August, one Wall Street Analyst predicted that three Apple HDTVs would be on the market as soon as March 2012.
Trends Already Underway: Social TV and Second Screen Apps
An Internet-connected television set that syncs across devices is an idea that would fit quite nicely with some trends that are already underway. With or without Apple’s help, consumers are supplementing the television-watching experience by discussing episodes via Twitter and Facebook, browsing the Web and even checking into TV shows.
To an increasing extent, they are doing all of this from their smartphones and tablets, a huge number of which happen to be iPhones and iPads. The growing trend of second screen apps is one we’ve been watching closely this year. Apple already enjoys huge success in the markets for second and even third screens. Why not take on the first screen next?
Early adopters and cord cutters are enamored with Web-connected set top boxes like Roku, Boxee Box and Apple’s own “hobby” product, the Apple TV. Yet even as cable subscriptions have started to drop, these types of Internet-only options have yet to take off in a big way among consumers. That’s where Internet-connected television sets come into play, offering both Web content and live TV content in one interface. There are already a number of such TVs on the market. If anybody can take this existing concept, slap an amazing UI on it and end up popularizing it, it’s Apple.
Siri: Coming to a TV Near You?
For hints about what an Apple-branded TV set might include, look no further than Apple’s last few releases. That it will run some flavor of iOS is a given. Jobs himself said that it would integrate with iCloud, as the Apple TV set-top box already does.
If the positive, albeit very early response to Siri is any indication, voice-controlled computing appears to working for Apple. One can imagine Siri-style voice commands being included in an iOS-powered television set. “I want to watch X-Men: First Class,” you might say as you sit down on the couch with a bag of popcorn.
If the movie isn’t available via your pay TV service at the moment, your TV could fire up Netflix and start streaming. Knowing Apple, the television’s UI probably wouldn’t be shy about nudging consumers to buy content from the iTunes Store.
A hand-held remote control is still ideal for browsing through content selections and apps on a big screen, but searching can be more cumbersome. Even the most well-designed tools for searching Web content on a TV set (Boxee’s remote control comes to mind) could have less friction. For certain things, voice control could be the way to go.
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Steve Jobs Was Ready to Go “Thermonuclear” on Android Threat
Oct 24th
In the new biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson, Jobs is quoted as stating that Android’s use of Apple’s ideas equated to “grand theft,” and that Jobs was “willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
Jobs made no secret of his dislik…
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“Grand Theft” Android: Jobs Bio Reveals Intense Anger At Google, But Didn’t Block Search Deals
Oct 20th
We already knew that Steve Jobs felt betrayed by Google’s launch of Android but wow, was he really mad. But oddly, despite vowing nuclear war against Google, as his forthcoming bio reveals, he kept Google as the search default in Apple products. The AP obtained a copy of the authorized Jobs…
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