ARTS & FARCES internet

If you’ve worked in any techology-related field for any length of time—or probably in any other field, for that matter—you’ve spent a lot of time wondering how Steve Jobs manages to pull one great product after another out of his hat.

Leander Kahney sat down for 90 minutes with former Apple chief executive John Sculley, who should have a pretty good idea how Steve Jobs does it. Sculley, for the youngs, is the guy who Steve Jobs lured away from Pepsi by asking, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” Sculley is also the guy who later won a battle for control of Apple against Jobs.

Sculley, remarkably, unveils Jobs’s “first principles:”

1. Beautiful design
2. Customer experience
3. No focus groups
4. Perfectionism
5. Vision
6. Mimimalism
7. Hire the best
8. Sweat the details
9. Keep it small
10. Reject bad work
11. Perfection
12. Systems thinker

Master those dozen principles and you’re well on your way to doing great work. Of course, it helps if you actually have the authority to employ those five principles; few of us do.

I find the customer experience principle the most easily applicable and find myself on every project saying to the project’s stakeholders: “You may sign my check, but I’m working for the users.”

The no focus groups principle is the most compelling. If you’re creating something completely new, how can you possibly ask someone else what that new thing should be, look like or work like? They, understandably, don’t have a clue. Kahney quotes Sculley as saying Jobs “... believed that showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go because it was just too big a leap.”

The perfectionism principle is probably the hardest sell. In brainstorming and prototyping, I’m a strong advocate of an iterative approach—failing early and often—of continually improved refinement. But when it comes to a final deliverable, I believe in doing everything as close to absolutely perfect as possible. Good enough never is. Lately I’m finding myself being told that my “standards are just too high.” That’s crap and a convenient cop-out.

Sculley tells Kahney what I think should be the first of the “first principles” when it comes to Steve Jobs’s success: “He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. That is something you don’t see with other companies. They tend to focus on their piece and outsource everything else.”

It took three months, but I’ve finally found a replacement laptop backpack. As I wrote earlier, my almost-four-year-old Booq Boa XL blew a zipper last May. Booq failed to honor its warranty and I’ve been searching, off and on, ever since for a non-Booq replacement.

I’m tough on my bags, but I don’t mind paying for quality and expect them to last. I have Tumi and Tenba bags that are 20 years old and still in excellent condition. They’re terribly scuffed and dirty, but all the parts still work. That’s what I expect. Tumi has even sent redesigned replacement parts for two of our bags (wheelie pop-up handles) because they were seeing unusually high rates of failure. That was years ago. So far, only one of the bags needed the new part.

I need a backpack because I want both hands free and I want the weight of my bag distributed as I tend to walk fairly long distances—the enormous University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus (I still can’t believe how much physical space it takes up) is distributed between two campuses about seven miles apart, and the College of Design occupies buildings on both campuses.

Today I bought a Briggs & Riley 17-inch clamshell. It’s as well constructed as any of my Tumi bags and even more thoughtfully designed. I couldn’t decide between the 17-inch clamshell and the Glide. I liked the straps on the Glide better, but I liked the interior design and water-resistant zippers of the clamshell. And the middle section of the Glide didn’t go all the way to the bottom (it’s taken up by a cable compartment at the bottom). And there was a US$50 price difference. The owner of Luggage World (highly recommended; don’t let their website fool you—they have a lot more in stock than they show) offered to give me US$30 off on the clamshell and I bit. He said if I didn’t like it, I could run it over a few times with my car and he’d still take it back with a full refund. And Briggs & Riley comes with a no-questions forever repair warranty, even if the airlines mangle the bag.

I haven’t had it out in the field yet, but so far I like it. Because it’s a clamshell, making my way through airport security will be a breeze (the laptop can stay in the bag; the bag opens like a clam to pass through x-ray). And it holds just as much as the Booq and is a full inch less deep, at 6.5 inches. Most of the other bags I looked at were at least twice as deep. You might think a deeper bag is better (hey, look at all the shit I can put in here), but it’s significantly worse. Just because you can put all that crap in there probably means you will. And then you’re looking at hoisting and carrying 50 pounds of all that crap around. A smaller depth bag forces you to pack thoughtfully.

Sidney Jourard was one of the brightest shining lights of humanistic psychology. He was fond of saying, repeatedly, that all human behavior is based on either maintaining or enhancing the self-image. There is, of course, a corollary in US law. Call it the prime directive of American jurisprudence: All law is based on maintaining or enhancing corporate profit.

What, you don’t believe that? Here’s three very recent examples.

Victoria Espinel, the US intellectual property czar, has finally released her “Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement” (.pdf; 892KB). It’s an entertainment cartel wet dream, complete with secret treaties, pirate nation watchlists (entertainment cartel executives can nominate countries for inclusion), and evaluations of claims of piracy losses (the US Government Accountability Office has already dismissed these claims as total fabrications).

The document’s section on secret treaties—like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)—is especially disturbing. The section starts out by acknowledging the need for transparency and outlines the Obama administration’s plan for it. But the very same section ends with a complete reversal: “... including consideration of the need for confidentiality in international trade negotiations to facilitate the negotiation process.”

As Cory Doctorow notes, intellectual property treaties have traditionally been handled openly and transparently by the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization. The negotiations were made private by George W. Bush’s ACTA. Obama and his administration have eagerly embraced ACTA, going so far as to intervene in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the text of ACTA itself, claiming a threat to national security.

State pension funds—including the one in which I am a member, the Minnesota State Retirement System—are in serious trouble. But instead of dealing with the problem head-on, politicians are pulling out the oldest play in the book, apply cuts to those workers who have yet to be hired. Mary Williams Walsh, reporting for the New York Times, writes, “Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired. Though heralded as breakthrough reforms by state officials, the cuts phase in so slowly they are unlikely to save the weakest funds and keep them from running out of money. Some new rules may even hasten the demise of the funds they were meant to protect.”

Colorado has cut benefits for current workers and on retirees. The cuts to retirees is facing a legal challenge. Colorado argues that a 1961 US Supreme Court ruling held that pension cuts for current workers is allowed when “actuarially necessary.” It hopes to stretch that ruling to cover retirees as well.

IBM lowered its pension benefits at the precise time most of its older workers were scheduled to see a bump in retirement benefits. The workers brought legal action, but a federal appellate court in 2006 found that IBM was within its rights (.pdf; 119KB) to cut the pension benefits. The IBM plan, the court noted, was “almost, but not quite, a defined-contribution plan.” Pensions are, by definition, not defined-contribution plans, but rather defined-benefit plans. The IBM employees also made the mistake of bringing the legal action on the basis of age discrimination under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) when everyone knew, as the court affirmed, “all the terms of IBM’s plan are age neutral. Every covered employee receives the same 5% pay credit and the same interest credit per annum.”

Minnesota isn’t waiting for the outcome of the Colorado case. As of 1 January 2011, post-retirement adjustments are lowered from 2.5 percent to 2.0 percent, there’s a six-month waiting period for initial post-retirement adjustments, the interest rate on future refunds is lowered from 6 percent to 4 percent, interest on suspended benefits (for those who return to the workforce) is eliminated, and the vesting period is increased from three to five years.

The question—that hopefully the Colorado retiree case will resolve—is if membership in a state pension fund is a contractual relationship. “An employer is free to move from one legal plan to another legal plan, provided that it does not diminish vested interests” or benefits already earned, wrote the court in the IBM case. In the case of my employer, the University of Minnesota, employee contributions to MSRS are mandatory.

Usually I only review or mention products I like. This is an exception because I had such high hopes that were so terribly dashed.

Need a bag for your laptop? Of course you do. I don’t know anyone that plunks themselves down in an office and works there all day. Not any more. There’s just too much to do.

From 1992-2006 I carried a Tenba shoulder/messenger bag. I’m pretty sure this was the original Tenba laptop bag. It was (and remains) bullet-proof save for a minor design flaw where the unpadded shoulder strap sometimes slips. In 2006 I started work at the University of Minnesota. The newly-formed College of Design is spread across two campuses, a few miles—and a 15-minute bus ride that always seems to turn into a 30-minute ride—apart. I wanted a backpack, so both of my hands would be free on my morning bus commute and as I walked across both campuses.

I don’t mind spending a good bit for a great bag. I own several Tenba and Tumi bags that are 15-20 years old and still going strong. I’m hard on my bags and expect them to be durable and long-lasting. Bite the bullet, buy ‘em once and forget about ‘em is what I do.

I purchased a Booq Boa XL on 26 July 2006. When it arrived, the bag appeared to be fairly well constructed of quality materials, although I was immediately concerned about the zippers. The zippers were much less heavy-duty than those on my Tenba or Tumi bags. Nonetheless, I was happy with the bag.

Sure enough, one of the critical zippers on the Booq bag failed catastrophically last month. No problem, Booq offers a limited five-year warranty and I was only four years in. I’ve never had any problems with my Tenba or Tumi bags, although Tumi once sent replacement parts for two of our wheelie bags that were prone to failures; the original parts have yet to fail. I tend to scan warranties, not study them. I should have paid closer attention to Booq’s warranty policy, because while it seems reasonable, the company doesn’t honor it. Booq claims, “if the bag is found to be defective, booq’s only obligation and the Original Owner’s sole and exclusive remedy is the replacement of the bag with the same or comparable bag.”