johnny won - human

Steve Jobs

(via Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella looks for three traits in leaders — Quartz at Work)

Satya continues to just be incredibly impressive. 

Attribute #1: The ability to create clarity when none exists. 

Attribute #2: A knack for sparking energy. 

Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs

William Hugh Murray has a few provocative thoughts:

Abandon the password for all but trivial applications. Steve Jobs and the ubiquitous mobile computer have lowered the cost and improved the convenience of strong authentication enough to overcome all arguments against it.

Abandon the flat network. Secure and trusted communication now trump ease of any-to-any communication.

Move traffic monitoring from encouraged to essential.

Establish and maintain end-to-end encryption for all applications. Think TLS, VPNs, VLANs and physically segmented networks. Software Defined Networks put this within the budget of most enterprises.

Abandon the convenient but dangerously permissive default access control rule of “read/write/execute” in favor of restrictive “read/execute-only” or even better, “Least privilege.” Least privilege is expensive to administer but it is effective. Our current strategy of “ship low-quality early/patch late” is proving to be ineffective and more expensive in maintenance and breaches than we could ever have imagined.

When the Internet was born, everything was real. Every person behind every webpage was a person. Today, we’re so far removed from that, I think a layperson cannot begin to fathom the amount of bots and phantom activities that exist to make the web as it is today. The darker corners of the web in security, advertising, data-mining have practices that are rampant with fakery. 

So a part of the excitement around blockchain could be attributed to our collective disgust of the bots and fraud in the web today but this suggests it’s less about the blockchain but more of a collective desire to find a sense of security. 

Top: Reforge

Rejected by Nike first. Ouch

Fred Wilson’s wisdom:

Taking money off the table is smart portfolio management. It is very different from selling your entire position, which could be brilliant but is equally likely to be a mistake. Selling a portion of your position, returning a multiple or two (or eight) of the fund, and holding on to the balance works out for you no matter which way the position goes in the future. If the position blows up, you got a lot out and booked a huge gain. If the position goes up significantly, you make even more money on the part of the investment you retained. If it goes sideway, you got a little bit out early. It is a win/win/win pretty much every way you look at it.

Bloomberg

Wired

There’s lots of ways to be as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people, you never shake their hands, you never hear their story or tell yours, but somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something is transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are, and remember what’s really important to us. That’s what is going to keep Apple Apple, if we keep us us.

Steve Schwarzman

(via Will Amazon Kill FedEx?)

This sounds bizarre but I’m buying an iPhone SE. I know, this sounds crazy but it’s fucking art. 

I am currently rocking out with the iPhone 6s+ but I will buy the iPhone SE and put it on my bookshelf as that greatest iteration of what the original iPhone was designed to do. I don’t think I could give up the glorious screen on the 6s+. 

The iPhone SE is worth buying (for me at least) because there was a time before the massive screens, before there was LTE, before streaming everything was something, the idea of a smartphone was a massive Steve Jobsonian idea that touch would work and that something simple with two (!) buttons could outperform every phone in the world. That was the original idea of the iPhone and it’s evolved into it’s end with the iPhone SE. 

With brisk sales of the iPhone 6′s 4.7 inch screen size, I imagine Apple will continue to flagship the iPhone 7 at 4.7″ along with the plus sized 5.5″ but I would bet that Apple continues on with the smaller 4 inch since there is some demand to it. With a unified design language at iPhone 7 or 8, I think we’re at the end of the original Jobsonian vision since it has been a decade from the original R&D of the iPhone in 2006 and we’re well past what the original iPhone was dreamed to do. 

Apple’s future is incredibly bright and I am eagerly awaiting to buy the future Watch, iPhone and other toys but an original vision has lasted a decade and we’re still just getting started with smartphones reshaping media, wearables, augmented reality, banking, mobility and dozens of other fields. 

Bits of glass fused with chunks of metal has changed the course of history and I can think of nothing more beautiful than the original concept going full #Jobs. 

asymco

A perfectly constructed sentence on creativity. The beancounters will lose when management prioritizes not profit but delight.