In the footsteps of Bruce Nussbaum, another backlash article, this time against Apple (no surprise, it had to happen some time). Peter Merholz has a nice critique of it, with some of his own thoughts, including the importance of the organization and culture of Apple, as determined by Steve Jobs.

I have a quote that I use fairly frequently in presentations:

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.

A designer didn’t say this. Steve Jobs did.

That’s the type of thinking that it takes to create the quality of work that Apple does, on a consistent basis. You can get a one-off hit by being lucky (alignment of personalities, vision, budget and schedule), but to maintain quality over the long haul design must be seen as integral to product definition and development, not a superficial add-on that can be applied after the “real” work is done.

 

 

And so, those of you who have gray hair may remember that Toyota came into our market in the ‘60’s with a crummy, rusty, subcompact model called the Corona that no self-respecting non-college student would think of owning, and now they make Lexuses.
- Clayton Christensen

 Toyota has just passed GM for the first time ever as the global leader in automotive sales, selling 2.35 million vehicles to GM’s 2.26 from January to March. As the Detroit Free Press notes,

The idea of GM being passed by Toyota is something many longtime Detroiters thought they would never see. GM accounted for more than half of the U.S. market when B.J. McCown, a 71-year-old GM retiree from Taylor, started working at the company in 1955.

A few  days beforehand, Toyota announced by far its most expensive vehicle ever, the Lexus LS600h L, coming in at over $104,000, competing with Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7 Series, and Audi A8. As ever, the doubters say that no-one will pay that much for a Toyota, but that’s what they said when the Lexus brand was launch in the first place. Undoubtedly the 600h L will be a niche seller, but it will be interesting to see how it does compared to the non-hybrid version. Yes, this most expensive car is a gas-electric hybrid, just like its lowly Prius cousin. That’s what the badge circled in red in the photo above indicates. (Close-up at right.)

It still gets crummy mileage, though a few mpg better than than the standard LS460 in town. On the highway, the V8 LS460 actually does signicantly better than the hybrid due to the massive 887lb weight penalty that comes from the hybrid drive. But it will be an interesting experiment to see how the high end of the market reacts to hybrid technology.

GM has had intriguing speculations on new drivetrain technologies, such as the Hy-Wire concept, but is woefully behind Toyota on bringing fuel-saving technologies to market. At this rate it has a massive amount of work to do to recapture its #1 spot.

(The Christensen quote above can be found in the transcript of his talk at the 2004 Open Source Business Conference, and is also available as a podcast. It’s a very long talk (hour and 45 mins), but is basically a Clif Notes version of his book The Innovator’s Solution. It’s a fantastic talk. I listen to it once about every 6 months and always find something new in it. Put it on your iPod and listen to it on your next flight. In general, it’s worth browsing through a lot of the stuff on IT Conversations.)

I’ll be in San Antonio to speak at the ToyCon conference April 1-2. It’s the annual conference for executives in the toy industry, put on by the Toy Industry Association, and I’ll be speaking on current trends in design. Should be fun!

For a company that deals in the realm of communication, RIM has been remarkably ham-fisted in its response to the massive outage of its email service on Tuesday. They could take a lesson or two from JetBlue about how to deal with a service meltdown, as JetBlue did a little while back after severe storms interrupted hundreds of flights.

The AP reports that:

After two days of silence about a lengthy outage in its Blackerry email service, the company that makes the mobile device issued a jargon-laden update indicating that a minor software upgrade had crashed the system.

The statement Thursday night by Research In Motion Ltd. said the outage from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning was triggered by “the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine” designed to optimize the cache, or temporary memory, on the computer serves that run the BlackBerry network…

The failed upgrade apparently set off a domino effect of glitches that the company referred to as “a compounding series of interaction errors betweent he system’s operational database and cahce.”

[F]rom the time the e-mail ceased flowing Tuesday evening, it took RIM more than 12 hours to issue a vague three-sentence statement acknowleding the disruption. No further updates were provided until the statement late Thursday, prompting criticism in online forums and blogs.” 

Oookay. 

RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie “downplayed the criticism of the company’s communications as unfair, because the focus was resotoring service, and the primary means of contacting users was unavailable. ‘The issue is just how do you tell people what it is when it is email that people are counting on, and that every communications path is down.’” Leaving aside the fact that the BlackBerry is not the only way that people receive their email (and text messaging was still working), I looked at the BlackBerry and RIM sites both a couple of days ago and again today, and there is not a peep on either of them about the outage. Wouldn’t the web be an obvious way to keep customers up to date on what is going on, what caused it, and when service will be restored? And to communicate how sorry the company was for the outage?

No real apologies or contrition have so far shown themselves. This smacks of arrogance, something which I’ve noted before from RIM. This is particularly dangerous right now, because even as their growth has been rapid (1 million new subscribers in the last quarter, now 8 million total), there are more competitors than ever snapping at their heals, many of them based on Microsoft’s platform. Then of course there is the iPhone, though for the time being that does not appear to tie into corporate networks.

Compare this to the sword-diving that came from JetBlue’s executives after their service meltdown in February. As JetBlue founder Joe Neeleman said, “We had a problem. This is a defining moment in our company. We have learned a painful lesson …. It has really affected us to our core. We are determined to put in different processes to make sure it never happens again.”

Gary at 37 Signals posted about his first-hand experience at JFK with the delays, and had mostly good things to say about JetBlue’s staff’s initiative at communicating status updates (though the website was notably lacking). This type of minute-to-minute management of the problem, pitching in from all levels of staff, and contrite communications are all things RIM could learn from.

As analyst Richard Levick put it, “They have to stop thinking like engineers and start thinking like a utility. When the telephone lines go down or the power goes out, the first thing these utilities do is try to fix the problem while simultaneously communicating with the media and customers. Why does RIM think it can’t do two things at once?” 

It’s not often that a project I work on gets so much publicity in high profile places, so forgive my indulgence. The Turbochef Speedcook oven that I was involved in developing at frog has been featured in two different venues:

• Entertainment Tonight featured the oven on their show last Friday
• The May issue of ID Magazine has a nice 2-page spread with some complimentary words about how well the oven cooks. 

Couple of other sitings:

• Luxist
• NY Times (Times Select subscription required)