Mark Higginson

staccato signals of constant information

Microsoft: failure to launch

In the same month as Apple release their multi-touch Magic Mouse to buy Microsoft announced a series of multi-touch mouse prototypes that look as though they've flash-forwarded from the 1980s. I was reminded of a post I wrote this time last year that quoted the Counternotions blog on Why Apple Doesn't do 'concept products' which is worth revisiting in light of this example:

"A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products."

One might be tempted to say Microsoft looks less and less relevant as time goes on, but then they always have been runners-up on the ideas front. This time round however they just don't seem to be able to innovate, explore and execute on multiple plans the way they did when they were growing to dominate the OS market.

Porsche Experience Centre

Good day out yesterday. I travelled to Silverstone for a work related meeting and visted the Porsche Experience Centre; it has a great collection of historic cars on display and I also had the opportunity to take out a 911 with one of the instructors. The 911 is an amazing car, not nearly as intimidating to drive as I assumed it to be, even with driver aids switched off. Perhaps I'm stuck in my ways but I think you need a manual box to properly enjoy a car like this but can certainly see how it would be a good fit with the Panamera. Gear changes are super smooth and responsive and I can see how under normal driving conditions it would make for a more relaxing journey. However, this is a 911 and I want to physically swap the cogs to feel as involved as possible.

(download)

Moving to Posterous...

I've had a self-hosted Wordpress blog for a while but my post frequency has dropped right off. I think this may in part be due to a feeling that however straightforward it is to use writing a post is an 'event' I need to set aside time for... hence I never make the time as there is always something more important I should be doing. I'm going to see if trying something new gets some spontaneity back into my blogging so I'm going to try using Posterous, a service where you post by email (note that you can do this with Wordpress too).

Swapping to Posterous has been pretty straightforward. There's an option to import your entire blog which works pretty well. The only thing that doesn't work is that comments don't come across, not a big deal in my case as there weren't many on my old blog so I'll probably include these as addendums to the original posts for posterity. They are apparently working on this.

As I intend to ditch the hosting I pay for I need to make sure the links to the photos in my old posts are changed as these point to my current webspace. I'm only going to use free services so I think I'll use a combination of links to flickr for the better photos and use Picasa for storing other images I want to use.

My next step is making sure everything is formatted properly then switching my own domain to point here.

One nice thing I found was if you email help@posterous.com it's Sachin Agarwal, one of the co-founders of Posterous who answers your question... he does so really promptly too!

Update: there's a good interview with Sachin on Download Squad introducing Posterous. They came through Y Combinator last year. Note how the first question in the comments gets a reply from Sachin straightaway. It's so good to see someone 'on it' like this. Same goes for the other founder, Garry Tan, on this article.