How Apple is winning the mobile entertainment battle one feature at a time.

Four years ago, Joel Spolky wrote an article entitled Fire and Motion regarding a military strategy for infantry attack and how it applies to business. The main precept of the strategy was that as long as you are forcing the enemy to duck by shooting at him and continuously moving towards your goal, you will win the battle.

Apple is employing this strategy right now against every other company trying to release a mobile entertainment device. With every new iPod and iTunes incarnation, the device and its media controller become sleeker and gain new features. The latest flagship version has a beautiful screen with up to sixty gigabytes of memory and can play full motion video of NBC’s Desperate Housewives. That’s a far leap from 2001, when the device had a screen like a Game Boy and stored about a thousand songs.

Memory increases, size decreases, control refinement, purchasable entertainment downloads, podcasting… the list goes on. Apple is forcing everyone else in the market into a reactive stance by constantly improving the capabilities of the iPod, and as they do, they are subtly moving toward the goal of a total mobile entertainment device that costs about three hundred dollars, one feature at a time.

Video is not the end of the development of the iPod. It is only the beginning.

I been struck by awe like Ted "Theodore" Logan

I've been spending the past few days getting intimate with Ruby on Rails. I have to say, the framework is sick hackable. I'm doing all sorts of crazy ass maneuvers and it's handling all of it with panache. Panache, dude, panache.

It makes me want to go back and learn Ruby cold one of these days. It'll make me a nightmare to work with in a statically typed enviroment like Java or C#, but the kind of nightmare that you reflect on years later and realize was a misunderstood, beautiful dream. Like David Lee Roth.

The temporal, existential decisions we make

Life is too short to spend doing things that you do not believe in. I find myself doing quite a lot of those things lately, so I’ve decided to try to move on to other things that I can believe in. A simple realization really, but one a long time in coming and I feel perhaps rather profound.