The piece by Adam Satariano, Peter Burrows and Brad Stone provides a interesting look back at competing efforts within Apple to create the iPhone operating system. While one team began with the iPod and tried to move upwards, another team, led by Forstall, focused on the ultimately winning approach of slimming down Apple’s OS X computer operating system for mobile use.

The article also opened my eyes to some of the internal political dynamics that are neatly hidden from the public eye:

Some former associates of Forstall, none of whom would comment on the record for fear of alienating Apple, say he routinely takes credit for collaborative successes, deflects blame for mistakes, and is maddeningly political. They say he has such a fraught relationship with other members of the executive team—including lead designer Jony Ive and Mac hardware chief Bob Mansfield—that they avoid meetings with him unless Tim Cook is present.

Office politics are nothing unusual in Corporate America, nor are ambitious and divisive managers. Even if Forstall is controversial, he may just be what Apple needs now that Jobs is gone—a detail-oriented obsessive who gets things done, egos be damned. “I once referred to Scott as Apple’s chief a–hole,” says former Apple software engineer Mike Lee, who left the company in 2010. “And I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I meant it as a compliment. You could say the same thing about Steve Jobs.”

It will be interesting to see how the leadership dynamics play out at Apple. Does a new “chief a-hole” need to emerge, or can a healthy tension between the remaining executives take shape?

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This story is told in The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift. It may sound a bit dry on the surface, but I actually found it to be a fascinating read. The biggest eye-opener was the fact that even though plans for a coordinated interstate highway system gathered momentum in the 1950s, many of the key plans were formulated decades earlier.

In addition, while Eisenhower is generally credited with championing the system’s creation, Swift highlights the contributions of several more obscure characters, such as entrepreneur Carl Fisher and longtime federal highway official Thomas McDonald. In contrast, Swift portrays Eisenhower as the Forrest Gump of the interstate system, stumbling into various seminal moments in the system’s creation but providing much less influence on the process than he is credited for.

The aspects of the book I found most fascinating were those pertaining to bringing highways to major cities. The two cities I visit most often, Boston and New York, are both bisected by major highways. Yet, I never stopped to think about the fact that the fabric of these – and countless other – cities were forever changed by the highway creation process. A detailed account of the battle between highway planners and community groups in Baltimore was particularly enlightening. Bringing highways through major cities was clearly not a simple matter of clearing slums. In many cases, vibrant neighborhoods were either obliterated or slowly suffocated, often when viable alternatives existed.

The Big Roads filled in the blanks on a number of my curiosities and also got me thinking a bit about the broader relationship between large-scale planned “progress” and organic community development. Moreover, Swift turned what could have been a very mundane topic into a captivating read.

(Find The Big Roads on Amazon.com.)

Over time, I’ve become much more disciplined about my purchases, emphasizing quality over quality. I would much prefer to have a smaller number of really nice things that I use often. Generally, it comes down to a couple of simple questions:

• Do I think I’ll use this at least a few times per week and be happier as a result?
• If I think so now but later find I am wrong, what will I do? (Stick it on a shelf? Sell it on eBay? Give it to someone else who might like it?)

It is surprising how just stopping to think for a moment before whipping out the credit card is half the battle. It is also a battle that is increasingly hard to fight with the likes of Groupon and Woot! challenging our self-control at every turn with great deals on things we didn’t realize we needed. It was therefore quite refreshing when I saw an article on the Outside blog highlighting a new partnership between Patagonia and eBay to promote resale and reuse of Patagonia products.

Outside’s Berne Broudy:

Yes, you read correctly. Patagonia is asking us not to buy their stuff, or any stuff, unless we really need it. And then they’re asking us to buy used stuff when we can. And they’re asking us to sell those still warm puffys and barely frayed packs gathering dust in the back of our closets on eBay, to a troller who will buy an old jacket instead of buying a new one.

The cynic in me sees this program, dubbed the Common Threads Initiative, as some good PR for Patagonia with not much real financial downside. Nonetheless, it’s a corporate ethos that I would like to see more of.

Eat your heart out, Dos Equis guy.

Protip: For an optimal experience, play this in the background while viewing the Putin photos.

(via Kottke.org)

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The first book I read was Ghost in the Wires, a memoir by the famous computer hacker Kevin Mitnick with an assist from Bill Simon. I intently followed the media coverage of Mitnick’s high-profile arrest back in the mid-1990s and also spent a number of years working in information security, so I figured this book would be right in my wheelhouse.

Ghost in the Wires did not disappoint. It was one of those rare non-fiction books that reads like a suspense thriller. It was also quickly apparent that there was so much more to the Mitnick saga than what broke through in the mainstream news coverage of the day. The book is obviously centered on Mitnick’s side of the story, but I was struck by a few things:

• How many of Mitnick’s activities were targeted at the U.S. wireline and wireless telephone networks. (He basically owned them.)
• The degree to which he employed social engineering to trick unwitting employees to give up system access and highly valuable intellectual property (like say, the source code to their companies’ flagship products).
• The fact that he did very little to capitalize financially on the tremendous power he had at his fingertips.

In the end, Mitnick ended up serving five years in prison, including a mind-boggling eight months in solitary confinement. In retrospect, it seems extremely harsh. While Mitnick’s activities were reckless, they were much less malicious than the greed-driven identify theft and credit card scams that future hackers would unleash.

That brings us to the second book I read, Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen. Interestingly enough, Poulsen was a hacker contemporary of Mitnick who actually plays a small role in Ghost in the Wires but later reinvented himself as respected technology reporter for Wired. In Kingpin, Poulsen tells the story of Max Butler (aka Max Vision), an interesting character who roams both the “white hat” and “black hat” sides of the online underground at various points.

Ultimately, the allure of easy money through credit card theft pulled Butler squarely to the dark side. Through clever techniques that included pulling credit card scan data directly from compromised restaurants and retail locations, Butler captured about 1.8 million credit card numbers in total and facilitated the theft and sale of countless more through the online card scammer community he created and moderated. In a classic “no honor among thieves” moment, Butler also hacked every competing card scammer forum site and executed what amounted to a hostile takeover of all but one.

Like Mitnick, Butler ultimately found himself behind bars, where he remains today. However, there is a marked contrast between the bumbling and overmatched law enforcement community that Mitnick ran circles around for years and a much more sophisticated dragnet that comes together to disrupt Butler and the online credit card scammer community.

In summary, both Ghost in the Wires and Kingpin are both really good reads, particularly for anyone who is a technology enthusiast. If I had to pick one to read, I would give the nod to Ghost in the Wires, but both were books that I had a hard time putting down.

(Find Ghost in the Wires and Kingpin on Amazon.com)

• Kill $500 tablet device, since it wasn’t selling.
• Slash price to $99 (likely well below cost) to sell off existing inventory.
• Start making more to “meet unfulfilled demand.”

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I still can’t make heads or tails of this…

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Fortunately, after many weeks of reading about how broken the U.S. patent system is, we were treated to some welcome comic relief today. Apparently, as part of a pending lawsuit between Apple and Samsung over design similarities between the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Apple’s iPad, Samsung cited devices featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey” as prior art that supersedes the iPad. FOSS Patents has the details.

Fantastic.