How IBM and Apple are kicking Google’s and Microsoft’s Butt - The gist is that Apple and IBM have a clear focus on specfic industries and do a better job than either Google or Microsoft at focusing their whole company and a defined goal. This is very true for Apple (the article makes the point that Apple was able to expand to phones while keeping dominance in the mp3 player segment). I think it’s true for IBM in so far that it has more direction and focus than, say google, but in general it could use more. I think the real story here is not so much the focus, but instead it’s the movement away from commodity products and focusing on the premium segments while staying somewhat competitive in the commodity markets.

How the Web and the Weblog have changed writing - Phillip Greenspun is one of my favorite website authors hands down, articles like this one are a great example why. The thesis is the web provides an avenue for publication that allows you to write in very short form or medium length (bigger than a magazine, shorter than a book) with out watering down the content. The filler example kicks ass.

In the 1980s Steve Ward, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, described a sure-fire dieting scheme. “All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil,” Steve would explain. “The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you’ve left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food.”

It’s hard to like Android - This is a run down of the standard issues with Linux vs. Windows. On the upside it’s very customizable, on the downside it needs to be customized. You can fix the problems, but do you want to?

iPhone Application Design Patterns - I hadn’t thought before what kinds of design patterns were being used on the iPhone, I’m curious how this translates to Android and WebOS platforms as well. I’d like to dig deeper into this space.