I've always wondered why Apple doesn't put navigation items on the bottom of the screen much the way Android has soft keys on the bottom. It would solve this problem and also make one handed navigation easier (or possible at all).
Completely agree. Had hoped with iPhone X they would move to have interactions at the bottom, since constantly involving reachability (which is now disabled by default) to go to the top menus (since not all apps allow you to swipe from the left to go back consistently). Several apps like Instapaper work great the main navigation actions in the bottom. They have items in the top but those are ones you won't need to access often. And they leave space at the bottom to not interfere with the home button line area. Maybe we will see a push to this UI direction from Apple officially in iOS12 as I imagine iPhone screens will only get larger.
A common warm up question in a coding interview is to write (on the whiteboard) a program that prints the Fibonacci numbers in sequence. Arguably, you can write this fraction and claim this answers the question, though I don't know any programming language where this would actually work without a bunch of more code around it.
Edit: other comments have examples in Python, Clojure and bc.
“But think about the scenario of a loan officer talking to a prospective client. To software people, that looks like voodoo. The idea that you can sit across the table from somebody and get a read on their character is just nonsense."
That is mostly the case for consumer loans. For commercial lending, the parametric score is just one factor of the overall underwriting analysis which, among other things, has loan officers talking directly to clients about their businesses.
Agree "this coming from a VC" but at scale it makes more sense to have something like a community rating system (or algorithm) rather than having to make individual decisions face to face. Doesn't mean mistakes can't be made (by either the loan officer or the community or that it can't be gamed but it definitely provides a benefit)
Marc isn't investment in a large number (relatively) of entrepreneurs. He can afford to take the time to incorporate "across the table" into his decision making process.
(If I've misunderstood your point please let me know..)
I think this is another prime example of building a vitamin instead of building a medicine. Do I really need this? How is this different from FlipBoard?
It seems like it's just a way for Amazon to avoid paying transaction fees on real money. With their margins, this could make sense and be a worthwhile endeavor.
I'm afraid this article will lead people to mis-prioritize their decision making. When doing a startup, all of your focus needs to be on the building the best product possible. If you can do that as a single founder, great! But if you need more people, you should do that if that's what the product calls for. In my opinion, making decisions based on future equity and payout is poor management.
Everyone complains about coporate CEOs who are so focused on the stock price that they forget to make good products. Focus on the product, and the $$ will take care of itself.
I agree, but it's just one of an infinite number of ways to mis-prioritize your decision making. That's the hardest part of entrepreneurship: you have very limited time and you need to make smart choices day after day about how to spend it.
The value of this article IMO is to offer a counter-point to the multiple-founders mantra. A lot of people take that as gospel, but I think if you are spending time looking for a co-founder you're doing it wrong. Rather, if you know the right person to be a co-founder, by all means extend the offer ASAP, but if you don't then get to work and stop fretting.
To maximize your chance of success you have to focus on the greatest ROI at every moment in time. Hiring the right person is the biggest ROI a one-person operation with a lot of work to do can achieve, but on the same token, finding the right people is often nearly impossible.
One could certainly make the argument that Zuckerberg is suffering from a form of business myopia. He's leveraging the main competitive advantage he has, which is the social graph. Perhaps he should think more broadly and take advantage of Facebook's financial resources and intellectual capital. Companies such as Apple and Microsoft thought beyond their narrow set of competencies to become full fledged technology companies. It will be interesting to see if Facebook will move in the same direction.
In all fairness to Zuckerberg, one could also make this argument about Google. While both Google and Facebook dominate their areas because of powerful network effects, nothing lasts forever. Imagine what the Union Pacific Railroad company could have been if they stopped thinking of themselves as a railroad company, and started thinking like a transportation company. It's tempting to stick to riding the one horse you have, but rarely has this worked out long-term in the tech industry.
I don't think Microsoft executives are losing sleep over "Microsoft Hatred" as much as they are losing sleep over "Microsoft Irrelevance". How many college students know how to program on Win32? How many even know what Win32 is? In 10 years, these college students will be the senior developers at their respective companies.
Certainly, any good engineer will choose the best tool for the job. But I find it unlikely that those that know little of MS technology will promote those tools later in their careers.
As Microsoft CSA, Ozzie had to live up to the legacy of Gates while steering the direction of hundreds of product groups. This is certainly no simple task.
Ultimately, he was doomed to fail. His job was to advocate the right technologies at the right time. Yet MS rarely makes the right choices in this area. Technology decisions are made by political GMs who want to hold on to their empires. They are made by VPs who don't want to sacrifice short term profits for a longer term vision.
Steve Jobs made an excellent point at the D conference this year about how Apple tries to pick technologies that are in their "Spring". These are technologies that are on their way up. Certainly Steve has the luxury of not worrying as much about backwards compatibility, etc. But he certainly has the courage of his convictions to pick a path that's best for his company and customers.
I don't think Ray had that kind of fortitude, and unfortunately, I don't think he had that kind of power. Ultimately, the CEO needs to push the technological vision of Microsoft. Leaving it to mid-level managers will only result in further mediocrity.
Exactly! Jobs picked BSD (1977), the NeXT GUI (1985/1988), and an object oriented version of C (1986) that came before C++ (1983)! (OK, BSD had been around a little while by that time, and C++ predated Objective C.) They are mature technologies now, but were all picked relatively early in their life.
You certainly note some fair examples for your point. However, I was referring to Apple's choosing of HTML5 instead of Flash. The easy choice that probably benefits mostly in the short-term is to play nice with Flash. Ultimately, Jobs and his team felt the best customer experience was to ditch Flash much to the malign of developers. Would Microsoft made such a decision? And who at Microsoft makes those decisions? Where does the buck stop?
I would like you to explain a little more how C++ is more "cutting edge" than Obj-C, etc.
BSD is still used in Free/Open/Net/BSD; and Next's GUI was based on Display Postscript, which was easily tuned for PDF (PS and PDF are very similar languages)
What you will notice is that all of these choices were designed by very small teams, sometimes just 1 person was involved in the original design:
BSD - Bill Joy and a few others made the major design decisions
Next GUI - Keith Ohlfs, on top of DPS licensed from Adobe
Objective C - designed mainly by Brad Cox
You missed the Mach kernel, originally a small research project from CMU, Avie Tevanian worked on porting Mach to a multi-processor system in the early to mid 1980s.
Can't fault you on your points -- they're all solid, but I would say there's a glaring omission. Cutting edge user experience (and that includes usability) does underpin Apple's success.
> Certainly Steve has the luxury of not worrying as much about backwards compatibility
Not all the time. Let's not forget about the Universal Binaries (a solution for the transition to Intel) and the Carbon API:
Carbon provides backward compatibility for existing Mac OS X software, while serving as a stepping stone for developers porting procedural applications from other platforms. [1]
A "Universal Binary" is the exact same thing as a "Fat Binary," the only difference is that marketing gave it a new name.
If you look at the mach-o header of a binary that contains multiple architectures (initially, ppc/68k or now, i386/x86_64/ppc), the first 8 bytes will be either 0xcafebabe or 0xbebafeca, depending on your endianness. These values are also #define'd as FAT_MAGIC or FAT_CIGAM in <arch/fat.h>.
If you're on a Mac, you can check this by typing `open -h fat.h` into a Terminal and opening up the binary of a universal app in a hex editor.
"His job was to advocate the right technologies at the right time. Yet MS rarely makes the right choices in this area. Technology decisions are made by political GMs who want to hold on to their empires."
So he had much responsibility and little authority, always a combination that guarantees failure.
