The Coolest Guy in the Room

One discussion I’ve been having a lot over the last few weeks (and an awful lot over the last week) was whether iPods were still cool to the 18-28 crowd. Like the famous Supreme Court ruling, we often know cool when we see it but it’s  a lot harder to quantify.

We do know that there’s nothing worse than something that’s not cool trying to be cool.

I’ll suggest there’s at least two types of cool, perhaps you can think of more. One type is stuff that’s short lived, trendy and comes and goes pretty quickly. In fact, that type of cool, often looks pretty silly just a short time later. Think Leisure Suits” from the 70′s for example. But there’s another type of cool that’s different. It’s timeless and transcends generations, demographics and genders.

Think Sean Connery as James Bond, Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry or Steve McQueen as, well, Steve McQueen. It applies to products too. Most 45 year olds think BMWs are pretty cool cars. So do most 25 year olds (although they might not be able to afford them). While I agree that every generation has a unique voice, there are some types of cool that just go beyond just demographics.

I’m pretty sure Steve Jobs is also in that category. Pretty sure iPods are as well. At least for now.

Feedback loop or loopy feedback?

I get a lot of e-mail from folks, like most of my colleagues or anyone who offers public opinion and analysis. Lately it seems that some topics are very sensitive with some folks and are provoking rather harsh responses. For some that means posting a comment here on the blog, for others, it seems they prefer a more direct response via email.

Now, topics, like bashing Microsoft, are always cool. No one reacts too strongly and people generally like stuff like that which is probably why it’s done a lot. Other topics, like Apple, Linux or Firefox seem to bring out strong and often nasty responses for anyone who dares to criticize them. Now I’m all for discussion and the honest exchange of ideas but let’s face it, calling someone an idiot in your opening sentence usually doesn’t further the discourse.

So in that spirit, I’ll address some of the emails I’ve gotten over the last few weeks right here.

For those of you who have written offering intelligent and alternative views to my own, thanks it’s been a pleasure conversing.

To the rest of you, I’ll collectively answer what seems to be the biggest question on your minds. "Yes, my parents were indeed married prior to my birth".

Finally to the kind soul who blessed me, "to be fruitful and multiply". Thanks for the kind thought… Even if those aren’t the exact words you used in your e-mail.

We weren’t insightful enough to recognize what we had inside HyperCard

Reading an old interview with John Sculley, he recalls a number of things but one them struck me was his views on HyperCard. (long a favorite program of mine that’s disappeared into the mists of history)

“As I look back on things that I wished we would have done differently when I was at Apple, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities, and it was on my watch, so I feel responsible and disappointed that we didn’t do more with it, was HyperCard. It was created back in 1987 by Bill Atkinson, Apple’s first software programmer. We could never figure out exactly what it was. We thought it was a prototyping tool. We thought it was a database tool. It was actually used by people as a front-end communications device for TCP/IP to connect the Internet to large Cray computers. We weren’t insightful enough to recognize that what we had inside of HyperCard, essentially, was everything that later was developed so successfully by Tim Berners-Lee with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). We didn’t call it that. But essentially, we had all that hypertext, radio buttons and linking capability architected in the original HyperCard. In hindsight, I wish Apple had recognized that we had a huge opportunity to go take our user interface culture, and our know-how, and applied it to the Internet. I think we would have had a very different story for Apple during the 1990s. But that, of course, is hindsight.”