Tales from the Inner Genius

Since the Kindle has made it very easy for me to digitally extract noted passages, I have decided to try experimenting with a new type of content. In the coming days I will be randomly selecting noteworthy passage from various books and then trying to create a new article based on those concepts. For example I could take the following two passage and combine them into a new article:

“Your future is up to you, not your employer. You have to get better in order for your circumstances to get better, and that must be done on your own time.” - Larry Winget from It’s Called Work for a Reason!

“One, don’t differentiate without a difference. Don’t introduce improvements whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage.” - Andy Grove from Only the Paranoid Survive

Larry’s quote could be boiled down to taking responsibility for your future career, and Andy’s quote could be boiled down to focusing on your customer rather than your competitor. Combining these two topics into one article should produce a new article where the main focus is taking responsibility for your future by focusing on your employer and/or customer.

Somehow I was one of the lucky few to get one of the precious Kindles before Christmas. After using it for a couple of months now, I am finally ready to provide my feedback on it.

The week before the Kindle was announced I picked up the Sony Reader and had gotten a feel for what an e-Ink reader was capable of achieving. I was a little hesitant at first about getting another book reader so soon but after seeing the amount of titles available in the Amazon store I was ready to plop down another $400. When the Kindle launched it had over 88,000 books available. The Sony store only had about 22,000. Amazon had a familiar and intuitive interface. The Sony was painful to use. Amazon is compatible with any OS and the Sony is Windows only. As an added bonus, the prices on Amazon seem slightly lower than Sony. These prices are usually always lower than the price of a physical copy of the book.

I didn’t place my order instantaneously, but after an article came out touting the virtues of the Kindle, I became convinced. Somehow, my Kindle was miraculously shipped the next day. (I like to think that all my years of devotion to Amazon and Amazon Prime had something to do with it. Alas it was not so. An order placed the next week did not ship before Christmas.)

To begin with, the Kindle arrived in a beautiful package shaped to resemble a book. Compared to the plain old packaging of the Sony Reader, this was a nice pleasant touch. The package included a nice leather cover and elastic strap to hold the Kindle within. Unlike the cover on the Sony, the Kindle could be easily inserted and removed from the cover. The leather itself was much softer.

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This post is based off the politeness criteria mentioned in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.

One way to produce quality software is to design it to behave like a good human workmate. Good human workmates are polite and therefore polite software should have the following human characteristics:

• It is interested in me. When people are interested in other person they will remember things about the person. Software should function similarly. If I set an option or open a file in a particular location, the option should remain set and the file location should be retained the next time I open the program. 
• It is deferential to me. The software should let me do what I want. It does not shoehorn me into doing something in only one way. While the software should be able to offer its opinion on an action I take, it should never judge me. 
• It is forthcoming. Common options are readily available and information is always available. Any information related to the user’s end goal should be intelligently presented. Any tools that would be implicitly available to perform the end goal should be available without making a special request to the software. 
• It has common sense. Common options are not intermingled with uncommon options. Harmless options should not be freely mixed with irreversible options that only a trained professional should use. 
• It anticipates my needs. A software program should be able to use its idle time to get ready for my future actions.

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