I feel like I’ve been misled over the past 8 years of formal education that I’ve been a part of. I don’t know if the education system or American culture is to blame, but there seems to be this permeating school of thought that may be a large contributor to the unemployment numbers we’re seeing today. And, incidentally, this was a revelation to me in that I finally nailed down why entrepreneurship is so hard. The answer, as usual, is pretty simple…
Society doesn’t care how hard you work. If you don’t produce anything of value that they’re willing to spend money on, it is your loss. The amount of invested time, money, blood, sweat, and tears only matter in your own eyes at the end of the day. Consumers reward the smartest workers, not the hardest workers; and if you think you can work at something for a little while just to sit back and take in the cash you’re sorely mistaken.
The grade school and corporation frame of mind tell us that if we try hard or if we do as our boss tells us enough to not get fired that we deserve that paycheck every Friday. Obviously, this is exactly the opposite of how people spend their money, and people with their own companies will tell you first hand that you ask yourself every day if what you’re making is going to provide enough value. Not only that, even those that have launched successful products still have to be on the leading edge to stay afloat. ”Trying” on my calculus homework didn’t get me nearer to coming up with revolutionary solar technology or cars that drive themselves, but my grade told me that it did. People take pride at staying late on a Friday to cap off that 60 hour week, as if their team got the benefit of having 1.5 employees for just 1 salary – highly misleading.
Try asking your boss if you can work on something that will provide more value to your customers. See what they say.
I haven’t had time to sit down one-on-one with an iPad until about an hour ago. Luckily for me, NCSU’s library bought a bunch of them and are loaning them out to students for free. This was especially good because it comes without the promo software that the devices in the store have, and it wasn’t a friend’s personal device. Long story short, I could have my way with it and not feel guilty (or get arrested).
In the lead up to the iPad, Apple did its thing pimping the App Store as much as humanly possible – they even went as far as to make the iPad backward compatible with all existing iPhone applications. You could even run them in “double pixel” mode to get it to run full screen. Although this sounds great in theory, it was not at all what I had hoped for in terms of Apple-esque delivery. On the contrary, the apps built specifically for iPad – 3rd party and by Apple – were fantastic in their visual experience and supreme leverage of the newfound touch screen real estate. Observations are below.
Good
- SDK additions for new layout and program flow: the split column and “large view pane with small bar on side” approach both make for great experience with a large area for the important stuff and your necessary navigation always available. Pandora was fantastic, as was YouTube and other items like Settings and Address Book
- Responsiveness: rotation, touch, swipe and pinch, everything worked well and worked more snappy than the 3GS. Moving from an iPhone 2G to and iPhone 3GS yielded amazing results in overall experience – Apple has continued that with the iPad.
- Gaming: I played one game called Aurora Feint for about 5 minutes and was absolutely enthralled. Hats off to the game developer of course, but there’s something to be said about the iPad fitting into a nice form factor with 100% touch screen. Throw in stunning graphics and headphones and it’s a very inclusive gaming experience equal to that of a desktop computer. If I ever get back into gaming it may just be on the iPad.
Bad
- Typing: I’m not sure if I’ve yet to figure this out, but I now have iPhone and iPad both on my S-list for typing. I’m still at the library and the kid across from me is typing like a fiend as if his iPad were a keyboard. No clue how well he’s doing, but the lack of tactile response just plain sucked for me. The sad part is that I don’t know how or even if this will be remedied anytime soon – we may be seeing the raw limitations of efficient human input.
- Running iPhone-only apps: this just plain sucked as well. It’s literally a (double-pixel)-ing done with software with no sense of what/where text is, attempt at graphics interpolation, etc. They seem to have done it just say that “out of the box this thing runs 200,000 apps”. I’m not surprised, just upset that it was way oversold. Also, MapKit is broke in the Transloc App. Hopefully we’ll want to buy an iPad to fix this…
- Ergonomics: it’s cumbersome to hold. My only advice is to sit somewhere that you can prop your feet up with your knees highest in the air and rest it on your legs. I was able to have it rest part on my legs and part on the edge of the table that I’m at to form a pretty little 45 degree angle. My neck started to hurt after a little bit so I laid it flat on the table to use it after that.
That is all. I may buy one when the 3G version comes out in order to assess what we want to do with it in terms of Sound Around. My biggest interest, though, is how much of a development machine (or tool) I can turn it into. iPhone has been out for 3 years and hasn’t come up with anything to take the developer community by storm – I’m not going to make the same judgement for the iPad just yet.
The past 9 months – especially the last 4 – have taught me a lot about how much of a lifestyle doing startups is. In particular, the time and emotional requirements are enough to make even the most “hard working” techies flee back to their comfy IBM cubicle. One unfortunate side effect of this time commitment is my gradual removal from needing to entertain myself or “kill time” – it just doesn’t happen anymore. There’s way too much to do to be bored. And, even for those times where I do need a break to be entertained, I’m doing something productive with people or a book – I’m not buying “things”.
Girls buy shoes and clothes, guys buy video games and lifted trucks, people who start companies bring sandwiches to their part time jobs so they can keep the development server up and running. This removal from personal consumerism can be somewhat discouraging in so far as we’ll “miss the boat” or become too “disconnected” with how people are behaving and what trends the dollars are moving toward. Just because I find entertainment in working on my company doesn’t mean that others will, in fact most of them don’t. Also, my lack of consumerism doesn’t take away from the entertainment value provided by entrepreneurs like myself that are working toward providing something that the world will enjoy. Regardless, my job is to figure out how to be enough of a participant to stay relevant, but be enough removed that I can effectively stay focused.