Many blame Google for snapping up good talent and then letting their original projects die. There is definitely truth to that as the guys behind Sparrow knew what they were doing from a Usability and Technology perspective. Sparrow was both elegant and performed well. It was so good that it has become my primary mail client on the Mac. So I can see why Google wanted them.

But today AppCubby points the blame squarely at the economics of the app store:

From our experience, a $2.99 app in the App Store needs to hover around #250 in the top paid list to sustain two people working full-time on the app….And that’s the Sparrow problem, break-even was not sustainable. They had to find a way to turn a profit — lot’s of profit — to provide their investors a decent return.

So he concludes with:

Given the incredible progress and innovation we’ve seen in mobile apps over the past few years, I’m not sure we’re any worse off at a macro-economic level, but things have definitely changed and Sparrow is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end. It’s just not sustainable at the absurdly low prices users have come to expect. Sure, independent developers may scrap it out one app at a time, and some may even do quite well and be the exception to the rule, but I don’t think Sparrow would have sold-out if the team — and their investors — believed they could build a substantially profitable company on their own. The gold rush is well and truly over.

This has been my experience as well. For that apps that I’ve released in the app store, you really can’t make much of a living off them, let along build a business around them, unless you can consistently hover near the top. And most of the revenue is short-lived with a big spike in the beginning.

Maybe it’s time for developers to return to the world of web-based SaaS and subscriptions and give up on the app store goldmine?

iDoneThis is a part of the slow web movement. After you email us, your calendar is not updated instantaneously. But rest up, and you’ll find an updated calendar when you wake.

They actually advertise that they are slow. I’m not sure what the “slow web movement” is, but oddly I find it comforting. Slowness gives the impression of attention like a slow craftsman or a slow meal. In this world of realtime twitter and the 24 hour news cycle there’s something I like about the slow web movement. Maybe they will start a trend and everyone will slow down a bit.

The soft overcomes the hard. The slow overcomes the fast. Let your workings remain a mystery. Just show people the results.-Lao Tzu

Microsoft recently extended “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6 applications through the full lifetime of Windows 8 (see this month’s Editor’s Note, “Old Soldiers Never Die”). Visual Basic 6 first shipped in 1998, so its apps will have at least 24 years of supported lifetime. Contrast that with the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0 (2002), which is incompatible with Windows 7 (2009).

Because as we all know VB6 is an inferior language. It’s like coding with kid gloves on and a blindfold. You can only do threading with Dan Appleman’s support and by reading lots of Don Box books. Yet now it will last fully through Windows 8. At this rate, we will be coding from our jetpacks before VB6 disappears.

Maybe it’s time we redefine what it means to be a “bad” language because while it did not have all the bells and whistles of C#, what VB6 did have was raw productivity. If you needed a quick line of business CRUD app to track your sales of car mustaches VB6 was your BFF.

And for most line of business CRUD apps that would never be used by more than 20 people, VB6 was “good enough”. No need to overengineer. It satisfied the goldilocks priciple by having just enough and no more.

The real question is when VB6 finally dies, what language will step up to fill its shoes? It’s certainly not VB.NET which ironically may die before VB6…

If you were going to build something new today would you aim for the long term or try to piggy back on the social wave?

Steve Blank says VCs have already made up their mind:

If investors have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay them nothing for fifteen years or a social media application that can go big in a few years, which do you think they’re going to pick? If you’re a VC firm, you’re phasing out your life science division.

Kind of a scary thought. It’s almost akin to Hollywood where they follow the money and copy-cat as much as possible. Spiderman made a lot of money? Great! Let’s make 20 more superhero movies. They’re bound to succeed!

The good news is that now, more than ever, you can create an internet startup with very little capital so maybe we don’t care that the VCs are chasing social.

And as Nicholas Taleb warns in his famed Black Swan book, just because Facebook made $16 billion in social it does not mean that it will ever happen again…

A recent article at forbes makes this proposition:

Over the past twenty years, the technology industry, led by companies like Microsoft, have given us powerful databases, operating systems, networks and software applications that have made it easier for us to accomplish more tasks than we did before with less people. And it’s not just Microsoft who you can blame.

Blame Sage, who makes Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management software that has enabled businesses to automate their marketing campaigns, build workflows for alerting managers when inventory needs to be replenished and generate workorders and invoices that are immediately emailed without employing teams of people.

Blame Rackspace and Amazon and other cloud based infrastructure providers, who allow us to host all of our business applications on their servers, thereby eliminating many in our information technology departments and cutting back on wasted time from downed computers and security flaws.

He’s got a point — businesses are becoming more efficient with less people, thanks to the internet and software systems. For example, when is the last time you visited a bank teller? I know I haven’t seen one for years because I do all my banking online and through ATMs. When I shop, I do it online rather than local retail stores.

Not only have I contributed to this trend when I buy, but I’ve been a key player in building these job-sucking software systems. In fact, when I worked at Arthur Andersen, I remember a project where we wrote a system specifically to replace a group of twenty data entry people. One member of my team was responsible for getting the “requirements” from the data entry group. This consisted of documenting their job so that we could then implement it in code. Ouch.

Of course, the data entry team knew that our system would replace them and they were a understandably a hostile audience for the requirements gathering. One especially contentious meeting left our analyst in tears. Was she right to be sad that the system we were building would cost these people their job?

But isn’t greater efficiency the definition of progress? For example, 58% of the labor force were farmers in 1860. Through more efficient equipment and growing techniques, that number has dropped to 2.6% by 1990. In other words, many farmers have lost their jobs as farming has become more efficient. Would life be better for the country and the world if more of us were still farming?

I would argue that the world progresses by becoming extremely efficient at one field so its labor force can move onto another (more advanced) field. The problems occurs when people cannot be easily retrained for new jobs and occupations. So maybe the issue is not with the internet and automation, but with the education system?

Thankfully, the internet is about to increase unemployment in the education system as well with the rise of the Khan Academy. But don’t worry, it’s more efficient so it has to be better…right?

To understand what makes Apple special, we need look no further than the words of Steve Jobs at the iPad 2 unveiling:

I’ve said this before, but thought it was worth repeating: It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

In other words, Apple’s secret sauce is making technology not only functional but beautiful. They make technology devices that people want to own not just because they work, but because they are works of art. And, because of that, they have achieved their vaunted “coolness” factor that propelled first the iPod, then the iPhone and iPad to success.

The question is will this marriage of technology and liberal arts remain once Jobs is gone? If history is any indicator, things do not look good for Apple in a post-Jobs world. When he left Apple the first time, the new execs stopped taking the big risks that created the original Apple II and the company tanked. When Jobs returned from the wilderness, the company steadily rose again. You can practically track when Jobs was at the company by looking at when they released their most successful products.

So what makes Jobs special? Job’s special skill is that of taste. In fact, he famously said:

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste

Jobs role at Apple was not really to design anything (they have Ives for that) or code anything, it was that of the great editor. He decided which products Apple should bet the company on and which features should be added or (more often) cut to make a beautiful product that the market would love. He had that mystical “taste”.

So the question now is: does Tim Cook have taste?

Here are the highlights :

• UTC: The time at zero degrees longitude (the Prime Meridian) is called Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).
• GMT: UTC used to be called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) because the Prime Meridian was (arbitrarily) chosen to pass through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
• Other timezones can be written as an offset from UTC. Australian Eastern Standard Time is UTC+1000. e.g. 10:00 UTC is 20:00 EST on the same day. Daylight saving does not affect UTC. It’s just a polity deciding to change its timezone (offset from UTC). For example, GMT is still used: it’s the British national timezone in winter. In summer it becomes BST.

Lastly, the author makes this important point:

Timezones are a presentation-layer problem! Most of your code shouldn’t be dealing with timezones or local time, it should be passing Unix time around.

I recently checked out google+ and I have to say I like it. It’s elegant and finally brings some innovation to the social space.

But many will say that half the planet is on facebook, surely they are unassailable?We need only look at the quick demise of MySpace to see that social sites can fail as quickly as they rise. Andrewljohnson on hacker news said it best:

Most businesses can’t “die” suddenly. It’s very hard to turn a $850,000,000 business into a $35,000,000 in just a couple of years, unless something truly catastrophic or industry-changing occurs.

The exception to this rule is social internet companies. Social companies are built in a day and can die in a day – we’ve seen it happen again and again, and Facebook’s scale is no protection.

To beat Verizon, you need a network. To beat Google, you need search technology, data, and great engineers. To beat a car company, you need some factories. But to beat Zuckerburg, all you need it timing and a good strategy, and equivalent engineers. And in this case, Google seems credible on all fronts.

This is the first serious threat to Facebook’s existence.

If google is successful, I won’t be mourning facebook’s passing. It’s served a necessary purpose, but it’s walled garden, “incorporating” other’s technology, and evil PR tricks make it hard to be a fan. Google’s no saint, but at least they are mostly transparent and their motto is “don’t be evil”.

As xkcd explains, google+ may be a facebook clone that is just not run by facebook (and maybe that’s all we need)…

One of the things you often hear about Marijuana is that it’s a gateway drug to the harder stuff. In my opinion, the same could be said about the iPhone.

Will the iPhone cause you to sell all of your possessions and end up living in a van down by the river? Not quite, but once you start on the road to Apple there is no turning back.

I know of many people who were hardcore PC users. At work, they used PCs, in their pocket they had a Blackberry, and they were very satisfied.

Then Apple decided to “reinvent the phone” and it became the new “it” device. Everyone had to have one. And once they tried it, they were happy. Very Happy.

In fact, the iPhone was such a good phone it made you wonder, what could they do in regard to desktop computers? Would they be as elegant and fun to use?

There was only one way to find out. So you dipped your toes in with a Mac Mini — it’s cheap and let’s you reuse your existing PC monitor and mouse. It’s worth a try…right?

And, lo and behold, the mac mini turned out to be a great device. The out of box (oob) experience is extraordinary. It’s clear that a lot of love went into the package design and you feel as if you’re opening something special.

When first turning the machine on you are greeted by a flashy welcome screen and it’s ready to go. Backup is suddenly as simple as plugging in a USB drive and letting time machine do its thing.

Editing pictures of the kids becomes fun again with iPhoto. Now when someone in the family needs a new machine you find yourself recommending a MacBook because you know it will be easy for them to use and less support calls for you.

Then when you see the MacBook you are amazed at how nice the screen looks. In fact, it looks much better than the screen on your high-end IBM laptop and you start to wonder — should I get a MacBook?

For a little bit you resist because you’ve used PCs your entire life. Will it be too much of a learning curve and what about all that new software you need to buy?

But the attention to detail and build quality start to pull you in. It’s the little things like the backlit keyboard which only turns on in low-light; the way it *always* sleeps properly when the lid is closed; the way that the help menu shows you exactly where something is with a little bouncing arrow.

Finally, you decide to throw caution to the wind and visit the Apple store. After trying out the high-end mac book yourself, there’s no hope. You’re a goner. Hooked on the drug that is Apple and wondering how you just spent $2400 on a laptop.

And to think it all started with a phone…

I could just see myself chomping at the bit and thinking — how could he not use windows+e to launch windows explorer–there has to be a better way. My brain would keep wondering why he wasn’t typing something the super efficient way that I knew to do it.

And yet, he started doing things that I didn’t know how to do — so you don’t actually need a GO between those SQL statements? huh — who knew? I guess that means I don’t know everything. And therein lies the key of pair programming. You don’t know everything, and if you pair with someone else who is a good programmer you will certainly learn something from them.

Not only that, but there’s something about the shared energy that comes from both of you working to solve a problem. For some reason, you seem to solve it faster. I think it’s because while one of you is trying one possible solution, the other one is thinking about another way to solve it.

Does that mean that pair programming is a panacea that you should always do? I don’t think so. Not yet, but it’s definitely something that I will plan to do more often because I think it’s a great way to encourage and learn from each other.