You as a business person can’t go around and say “When is this going to be done?” Because as soon as you say [that], you drive a message into the heart of any innovative person, which is the schedule is more important than the creation.

Deadlines don’t kill creativity. Values kill creativity.

I’m still young, which means I certainly haven’t seen it all, but I’m sure this is one of the most devastating things in the creation of any kind of product, system, service, or process.

People virtually always seem more concerned with the when rather than the what. When you’re going to create something, isn’t it important that, you know, the thing you’ll be investing time and effort in is actually going to be worth it?

As far as experience goes, it appears the answer is no. I guess I must be the crazy one.

There are three frequently recurring annoyances:

1. I’m using a temporarily unstable or unavailable WiFi connection. My iPhone or iPad chooses to stubbornly keep trying the WiFi route, even though there is a perfectly working 3G connection waiting to be used.
2. I leave home or work while using my iPhone on WiFi, and it keeps trying to use it, even though I’m clearly already out of range. Sometimes I even have to manually disconnect or it’ll keep trying.
3. I switch places at home, which requires me to switch access points. But, of course, my iOS device tries to hang on as long as it can to the original one. This also often requires me to switch manually, probably because I’m not yet completely out of range.

As appears from the latest iOS 6 beta, we’re going in the right direction. From AppleInsider:

If you’ve ever jumped onto a WiFi hotspot from your iPhone to grab a faster connection only to see it bog down and grind to a halt moments later, Apple feels your pain.

A new feature that appears to be making its way to iOS 6 this fall aims to automatically detect these hiccups and toggle your iPhone back to cellular data until the WiFi network clears up. This way, some of your most important data and applications will keep on syncing.

With this, I expect that annoyances (1) and (2) will be solved. For (3) however, it seems I’ll still end up cursing at my iPad now and then.

It’s kind of sad really. Yes, I know, programming network connections is difficult and error-prone. But for devices that are all about mobility, these issues should have been solved a long time ago.

So, being the good guy that I am, I send him an email asking for some more details about his problem. I also send a copy to my brother; that way he knows I’ve kept my promise.

The next day, my brother tells me: “I saw you sent him an email. You should be careful about addressing people by their first name. Especially people like lawyers.”

Screw formality. I despise it. It accomplishes nothing. It’s one of the other reasons I hate the enterprise.

Why don’t we talk naturally, like people instead of like machines? Why don’t we address each other with first names? Why don’t we wear whatever we feel comfortable in? Why don’t we loose all the ridiculous job titles?

And please, spare me the ‘it shows respect’ bullshit. The only thing it shows, is that you’ll brainlessly follow rules you were once learned. If it really is about respect, try genuine politeness and helpfulness for a change.

Apple has a purpose for everything it does, including this lawsuit. There can be no doubt that Apple has some clever, perhaps industry changing products in the pipeline over the next few years.

Although none us know for sure what those products are, if they are truly disruptive, like the iPhone and iPad, it’s in Apple’s best interests to stop Samsung now. This will effectively cut off the worst offender of companies copying its products in their tracks.

While everything he says makes sense, I can’t believe this is the root of their motivation. I’ve always believed their pride is at the core of all this.

1. Apple changes the entire world of mobile devices.
2. Suddenly everyone is doing what they are doing – the concepts they developed through years of research, are copied. This pisses them off.
3. Some companies decide to take it even further – their actual products are copied. This makes them furious.

I know it would piss me off. We know it pissed Steve Jobs off, and given the repeated use of “ripped off” during the trial, we know it pisses off Tim Cook and every VP at Apple.

And I think that’s what motivates them to keep going after Samsung, even if it means revealing some of their thoroughly kept secrets.

1. Jonathan Ive in an interview with The Telgraph:

Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product.

2. Marco Arment in a tweet:

If you sit on, sleep on, stare at, or touch something for more than an hour a day, spend whatever it takes to get the best.

3. Michael Lopp in a tweet:

Status reports are the last resort of failed leadership.

4. MG Siegler in “Love The New Site,” Said No One Ever:

Aversion to change is human nature. Most people take comfort in familiarity. But stagnation is the ultimate killer.

5. Seth Godin in Understanding stuck:

One approach to getting unstuck is the clean sheet of paper. Now, instead of needing an unanimous vote to remove something, merely demand that you need a passionate voice to add something.

6. Kontra in Apple’s hardware dilemma:

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

7. Philip Tetlock in Not so expert:

We believe in experts in the same way that our ancestors believe in oracles; we want to believe in a controllable world and we have a flawed understanding of the laws of chance.

8. Jack Daniel in a tweet:

If your reaction to new ideas is simply “that won’t work” instead of “I wonder if we could make it work”, line up with the dead dinosaurs.

9. Michael Lopp in Someone is Coming to Eat You:

The future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.

10. Alan Cooper in a tweet:

It is amazing that teachers tell children not to do the very thing that the great innovators did to achieve their insights.

Having experienced your services and support in many situations, I can’t stop but wondering:

Why don’t you care about your customers?

Why do you screw them over as long as you have the chance?

Why don’t you let them know they’re spending a lot more than they actually have to?

Why do you ask them to not advertise that cheaper price plan to others too much?

Why do you make them feel stupid when they’ve purchased a phone your stores can’t carry?

Maybe I just talked to the wrong people. But I doubt it; and it doesn’t even matter. I feel like you will jump at any chance to put yourself in a better position, whatever that means for your customer.

Making money is a crucial component for any company. But there are better ways to do it.

A while ago I found Quotebook, a great app for capturing and organizing quotes. It allows me to keep the best and most important pieces of articles or books, along with the author and source.

Then I realized I have these all these great quotes sitting here, waiting for the same person to read them over and over again – while there are so many others out there who could learn from them. (Or discover the great writers behind them.)

So today I publish a first collection of the kind of words I’ve learned a lot from and live my life by.

1. Kyle Baxter in scoping the bigger problem:

Sometimes, obstacles we run into while designing something are because we have our eyes so close to the ground, the detail blinds us to a larger truth. It’s useful all of the time, but especially when you can’t seem to figure out a design issue, to consider the greater intent of what you’re designing.

2. Seth Godin in don’t expect applause:

Accept applause, sure, please do. But when you expect applause, when you do your work in order (and because of) applause, you have sold yourself short.

3. Peter Thiel in one of his classes at Stanford:

Competition can make for better learning and education. Sometimes credentials do reflect significant degrees of accomplishment. But the worry is that people make a habit of chasing them. Too often, we seem to forget that it’s genuine accomplishment we’re after, and we just train people to compete forever.

4. Matt Gemmell in apps vs the web:

No matter how commonplace and mundane computers have become, we still exist in a physical world – and our experience continues to teach us that the best tools are dedicated.

5. James Montgomerie in Apple, failure, and perfect cookies:

What you have is what it is, it’s not the effort that was put into it. If it’s not worth keeping, it’s not worth keeping.

6. Seth Godin in hard work on the right things:

I don’t think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it’s not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

7. Dieter Rams in a talk on design in 1976:

(This entire talk is full of impressive material, especially since this speech was given in 1976. Every bit of it is as good as the quote below.)

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people. It must be ergonomically correct, meaning it must harmonise with a human being’s strengths, dimensions, senses and understanding.

8. Patrick Rhone in mea culpa:

The next time someone points out something you have done wrong – a loved one, a boss, a coworker – Own it. Don’t deny it, don’t try to defend it, don’t make excuses. If there is any truth whatsoever to the accusation, take the blame.

9. Mark Wilson in the three whites lies behind instagram’s lightning speed:

There’s no reason a computer should ever be waiting for the user to hit “submit” to start the data upload process.

10. Jonathan Ive in an interview with The Telegraph:

People’s interest is in the product, not in its authorship.

FIFA said it will introduce the goal-line mechanism at the seven-team Club World Cup in Japan in December, with plans to use it in Brazil at the 2013 Confederations Cup and 2014 World Cup.

Two different technologies will actually be used: a goal-line camera system (Hawk-Eye) and a chip/sensor based mechanism for tracking a ball (GoalRef).

This means that for any match in which this type of technology is used, we’ll always know whether a ball really did cross the goal-line or not. While that is a good thing, it only solves one specific problem.

How about offside situations (which lead to goals)? How about judging whether something was foul play or not? How to decide on the appropriate punishment?

There are countless examples of situations that are judged badly by referees (sometimes even deliberately), heavily influencing the game as a consequence. It obviously doesn’t have to be this way, as this announcement proves. However, like in most situations, technology isn’t what’s holding us back:

FIFA previously blocked using technology to help referees make decisions.

The thing is: These changes will happen, it’s just a matter of time. Sadly, people only tend to be open to change once something terrible has happened. I guess we’ll have to wait for some similar big-impact situation to occur for further improvements.

But, from a product development point of view, there’s always been one reason that made me hate and avoid it more than anything else: users don’t decide for themselves. In the enterprise market, it’s perfectly possible to make a piece of shit product that’s still a commercial success. I’ve been saying for a while now that I want to make things that people want to use.

Until yesterday, I hadn’t heard anyone say something similar. Yesterday, while testing Apple’s newly released podcasts app, I came across an interview at the All Things Digital conference from 2010 in which Steve Jobs said exactly this.

And what I love about the consumer market – that I always hated about the enterprise market – is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. […] It’s really simple. As where the enterprise market, it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves. And the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people, and having them tell us by how they vote, with their wallets, whether we’re on track or not.

I had never seen this interview or heard this piece before. Somehow, it’s great and fascinating to see that one of the most inspiring people in the industry was motivated by the very same reason.

Yesterday, paying little attention to the England-Ukraine match playing in the background, I was reminded of (one of the reasons for) why that was. Ukraine presumably scored, yet after 90 minutes there’s still a disappointing zero on their side of the scoreboard.

In my opinion, football should be about the game in the first place. Three specific things come to mind:

• Teams should get all the points they’re entitled to.
• Teams shouldn’t get any points they’re not entitled to.
• Aggressive, dangerous, deceptive or any other type of inappropriate behavior should always noticed and punished accordingly.

With the technology that’s available today, this isn’t all too difficult. All that’s needed is an acknowledgement that things aren’t what they should be today. All that’s needed is a willingness to change.

In yesterday’s case, for example: hundreds of cameras are watching the ball and the players – the information of whether or not the ball had crossed the line is absolutely and immediately there. Yet that information is not used at all. (Or, as I think, simply consciously ignored.)

In real life, football seems to be more about theatrics – deception, violence, referees rushing to the scene and sticking colored cards and flags up in the air, etc.

While that certainly appeals to a large number of people, it’s not what sports should be about.