Broadcasting Brain

I don’t normally dig into the tech mainstream in this blog, but Mike Arrington’s Techcrunch article on his woes with Apple devices and services does catch my attention for the following reasons:

1. It’s a pretty high profile complaint about Apple.

2. I am quite surprised about the number of failures that he lists in his blog post.

I have very little experience with Apple’s products, although I know a number of people who absolutely love them.

For my part, I’ve never found a compelling reason to switch from the Microsoft world to Apple, mainly because my work environment is 100% Microsoft and I’m very comfortable with that.

It does concern me that Mike is using his personal experience as the yardstick to base a significant part of his opinion. However, he isn’t alone in expressing these opinions.

For my part, I’ll be curious to see if Apple reacts publicly to Mike’s article. My gut says no, but we’ll see.

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Two key terms that I learned while studying for my business degree were efficiency and effectiveness.

Efficiency is a measurement of your results in relation to the work and materials your use to get your results.

Getting the same results with less work and materials normally equates to an increase in efficiency. There’s a heck of a lot of interest out there in efficiency.

Image by sara.atkins

Effectiveness is a measurement of how successful you are in achieving your goals: did your hard work lead to the desired result.

Does your work, your use of time, and use of materials lead you to accomplish your goal? If so, then you are effective in accomplishing that goal.

There are plenty of rewards for being effective.

Image by jonrawlinson

Which is better - efficiency or effectiveness?

I’d far rather be effective than efficient. I’d rather know that my efforts, however imbalanced, were accomplishing what needed to be accomplished, rather than maximizing the output of every single activity.

A lot of software/Web applications seem to be focusing on efficiency: doing more with less.

But are they making us more effective? Can they?

What do you think?

For the 15 or so people who aren’t paying attention to Apple’s WWDC spectacle, I thought I’d offer something different for you to read. Actually, it’s more about a common topic that the blogosphere talks about, either directly or indirectly: the high expectations that we have for free Web services.

Mark Evans brings the point to the surface in his post The Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Whining where he writes about the way that people complain about Twitter’s now famous up-time and stability problems (which, it should be noted, appear to be improving) - remember, of course, that no one actually pays to use Twitter.

People, we’re talking about a free service that, for the most part, is all about entertainment, vanity and killing time. Read the rest of this entry »

Unfortunately, I don’t have my laptop here with me, my usual writing platform. I’ve actually been reading (from paper) most of the evening.

In conjunction with the podcasts that I’ve been sampling and some of the other browsing that I’ve been doing, I’ve been reading up on a couple of blogs.

GestureLab

Newsgang

Steve Gillmor.

After Steven Hodson’s (WinExtra’s) commentary about one of Gillmor recent Techcrunch posts, I was intrigued enough to read up on SG.

I’m continually in (virtual) school these days and Gillmor’s stuff is … educational. To me, anyway. His writing is not easy reading at the best of times because there’s a fair amount of underlying context that’s not immediately visible, but which does reveal itself in bits and pieces over time.

I like reading something with character, even when I might not agree with it or understand it.

EDIT:  the written Gillmor is a different experience from the podcasting Gillmor.

Any suggestions on other people that I should be reading in the realm of technology, etc?

While I was cursing my former hosting company with silent venom last week, I wandered over to the revitalised Fast Company magazine website and created a blog there because I had something to say about technology.

The post wouldn’t have really fit in with this blog, so odds the difference, but it’s an interesting new platform to speak from.

I’m sharing the link to that post because it’s about a topic that I feel a number of people are forgetting about in this day and age:  tools vs. solutions.  Tools can lead us to cool results, but sometimes we take tools and go sprinting after problems with the intent of fixing them with the tool, regardless of whether or not it’s the right tool.

Sometimes I think we need to spend more time defining the problem or opportunity.  Once we know what that is, then we should go looking for the appropriate solution. 

What do you think?   Do we sometimes “get the cart before the horse” instead of determining what the real problem is?