March 15, 2009

| Snark by Snarkwest: Interface Lessons from Game Design >>

Matt’s experience at South by Southwest suggests that a lot of the big social networking companies actually don’t have (or won’t share) a whole lot of insight into what their users are doing on line, or how it’s changed their lives. But is this because their systems are too simple (they just host/carry what other folks are doing) or too complex (too much information, too much noise — they can’t monitor it all)?

Clive Thompson’s new article on netbooks and cloud computing suggests that it might be a little bit of both:

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen famously argued that true breakthroughs almost always come from upstarts, since profitable firms rarely want to upend their business models. “Netbooks are a classic Christensenian disruptive innovation for the PC industry,” says Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied both Quanta’s work on the One Laptop per Child project and Asustek’s development of the netbook…

A really powerful application like Adobe Photoshop demands a much faster processor [than a netbook’s]. But consider my experience: This spring, after my regular Windows XP laptop began crashing twice a day, I reformatted the hard drive. As I went about reinstalling my software, I couldn’t find my Photoshop disc. I forgot about it