I like to be a contrarian, so I thought I'd pen something about Nokia on the day of the iPhone debut. Personally think that Nokia and Microsoft are going to do quite well in the long run, if for no other reason than the fact that there are few other places Apple could go but down from where it is now. The first crack in Apple's cement started to show through today with the iPhone 5 map app fiasco, which Nokia cleverly responded to. The simple fact is that Apple is just not that good at making software. Anyone who has tried to be productive in iWork or manage their images in iPhoto should know this. Even the exulted iTunes is pretty clunky. 

Apple's mediocre software chops have been masked by it's insanely great design and hardware capabilities and a series of smart partnerships like the original maps partnership with Google. Even the very intelligent choice to adopt a Linux based operating system shows that Apple doesn't really do software. It’s just not their focus. Apple does the integration of software and hardware beautifully, but Microsoft and Google clearly beat Apple on the software side. Apple should remember that its many partnerships like Google Maps on the iPhone--despite the downsides--allow Apple to focus on what it does best, which is melding hardware with the software. No company or person can be a master of everything. It’s a hard and important lesson--one that I’m still learning.. More >>

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop didn’t mince words when he penned the now infamous burning platform memo that very publically initiated Nokia’s rapid transition from their own Symbian operating system to the Microsoft based Windows Phone 7 OS. 

“We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour... The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.”  

The many choices made during Nokia’s transformation, since 2011 are questionable, but the need to act was clear. Nokia needed to make many decisive, far reaching, and dangerous choices very quickly, if it was going to survive for much longer. More >>

Do you have screen upon screen of iPhone/Android apps? Maybe you've got so many apps that you've started using the questionable categorization feature on your phone to bucket large groups of apps together. If so, you probably are long overdue for an app Spring cleaning. I just did clean sweep of my phone and I feel 100% better about my relationship to technology.

Below are some of the apps that I kept:

Work: OmniFocus, Evernote, Salesforce, Starbucks, PayPal

Reading: Reeder, Kindle, iBooks

Learning: iTunes U

Running: Nike App

Music: iTunes, Pandora, Sonos

Of course I kept the standard apps, but that's pretty much it. Keep your tech simple, so you can live life. More >>

I'm planning to dive into SAS JMP (pronounced "jump") for the next few weeks and figure out the ins and outs of serious data visualization. Up until now, I've done most of my visualizations in Excel, which is quite useful, but rather limiting for more advanced visuallizations and large data sets. As a first step in this process I reviewed the SAS webinar, "Visualization of Data and Models," by John Sall, co-founder and Executive Vice President of SAS. In this slightly geeky overview of the JMP visualization capabilities Sall walks the audience through a variety of different visualization scenarios: Napoleon's march on Russia; Hurricane patterns; crime stats; selecting the optimal percentage of material to create a tire tread; etc..

More over, he actually manipulates the data live as he is presenting. If you have ever tried to do live data manipulation during a presentation, you will appreciate how difficult this can be! However, Sall is trying to reenforce the idea that data is best presented and manpulated right in JMP without using a slide deck. This is a nice idea, if only I could figure out how to get my IT department to install JMP on our conference room computers... However, for we lesser folks with limited JMP access, the tool does offer Flash exports of "some" visualizations.

The following are some of my key takeaways and screen captures from the presentation.

Sall notes that you can get the same linear regression for wildly different sets of data and we humans are quite excellent at detecting visual patterns, so creating a graph is a handy way to quickly see what's going on with your data.

More >>

It's sad but true, the best products don't always win. Take for example my recent shopping experience. About a year ago I bought a great pair of Sure headphones from the Apple Store, because the salesman told me that they were the most durable and had the best sound. I got them and I was impressed. They did sound great and they are as good as new after over a year of heavy use. More >>