Mea Vita: Carpe Diem

Kanban

Since the advent of cloud computing, both hardware infrastructure provisioning and software development can all be performed virtually. This gave rise to the integration of development and operations (DevOps) into a single practice. Software engineers can now provision, deploy, and monitor hardware. This led to continuous software development through automation and, specifically, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Agile is a flexible and iterative approach to software development that can be tailored through different frameworks. The shift from Waterfall to Agile methodologies, such as Scrum and Kanban, has allowed for more responsive and efficient software development. The integration of DevOps practices, facilitated by cloud computing and automation, has further streamlined the process through continuous integration and deployment.

Just don't confuse the software development mindset with a specific implementation. Agile is not Scrum.

Solving a problem depends on the context in how we think about it.

Engineer Thinking

Engineers solve tame problems with clear, repeatable solutions. Today's solutions solve tomorrow's problems. Engineer thinking starts with a conclusion and then works backwards.

Business Thinking

Business problems don't necessarily have a right or wrong answer, so the goal of business thinking is optimization... increasing revenue, reach, or profitability is the goal.

Research Thinking

Research thinking involves analysis by starting with a premise and then thin slicing it down.

Design Thinking

Design thinking solves wicked problems. The criteria for success is unclear and constantly changing. You won’t know you've reached the right answer until you found it and you can’t reuse it again. These tend to be inherently human problems.

Design Thinking Solves Wicked Problems

During my Apple talk about what makes Apple different in terms of design and marketing, I'm frequently asked why there's a bite in the Apple logo. Now, I incorporate the following answer into my talk.

Bible?

It's been said that the bite in the Apple logo comes from the Bible story of Adam and Eve. In the Garden of Eden, Eve took a bite out of an apple and gained additional knowledge. Therefore, if you bought an Apple computer, you too could have additional knowledge. It's a colorful tale, but it's not true.

Apple II?

It's also been said that the Apple logo has a bite out of it since the first Apple II had an Apple logo with a lower case "a" slightly overlapping the logo, taking a bite out of it. This seems like a more practical story, but it's also not true.

The Real Reason

The real reason that the Apple logo has a bite out of is because the original graphic designer, Rob Janoff, needed to show scale. Without the bite, people could mistaken it for a cherry or tomato. Since no one would take a bite out of either of those two, it wouldn't be confused with any other type of fruit.

After Janoff came up with the Apple logo, it was immediately noticed that the bite was also a play on words with "byte" which reinforced its memorability. 

Are Logos Important?

While I don't attribute a business's success to its logo, it's always better to have a simple, memorable logo. And, even though what a logo looks like isn't critical, how a logo is used for branding and marketing-communications is of paramount importance. Today, at Apple, you'd never see what we saw with the Apple II; today we'd never see the Apple logo next to the word "Apple" because that's redundant (Apple = Apple Apple).

Why a Multi Colored Apple Logo?

The reason there are six different colors in the Apple logo is because, in 1977, when the first three modern personal computers were introduced, only the Apple II had a color display. The TRS-80 Model I had gray/white characters on a black screen and the Commodore PET has the traditional phosphorescent green characters, like an oscilloscope, on a black screen.

Out with "i" – in with 

We will probably see the Apple logo appearing in more product names since Apple can't trademark the letter "i." Apple TV is now branded as TV and iBooks was rebranded, this past June, as Books. This will avoid the branding confusion we saw with the iHome product line. The iHome was one for the first combination iPod docking speakers and alarm clock, all in one. Many consumers mistook the iHome for an Apple made product, especially since it was sold in Apple retail stores. Preventing brand dilution is key. 


PS: On macOS, you can generate the "" character simply by pressing option-shift-K at the same time.

Apple Park

1. Apple Design
2. Apple Marketing
3. Apple Talk


1. Apple Design
A good base metric for usability is both how long it takes to accomplish a task and how many actions it takes (clicks, taps, etc). Although good UX, involving human-machine interactions, typically involves familiarity, it doesn’t necessarily have to be familiar to be intuitive. (Think about the first time you saw the rubber band effect on the iPhone as a user scrolled to the top or bottom of a list – that was unfamiliar, yet intuitive.)

Fitts’s Law, named after USAF Lt. Col. Paul Fitts, puts a finer point on usability and ergonomics using simple formulas that relate the distance to a target with the size of the target. Fitts’s formulas date back to the mid-1950s and they apply nicely to computers and cockpits.

Fitts’s formulas:

Index of Difficulty = log₂ (2 x distance to target / target width)

Throughput = (Index of difficulty) / (Average time to complete the movement)

Throughput is important with computers because you don’t want a user to hit the wrong button and then have to backtrack to fix their mistake. While a computer can be very forgiving, in an aircraft, you don’t want to put the ejection button next the landing light switch so as to not accidentally hit the wrong one. 

Thanks to Fitts’s Law, this is why, on macOS, the menu bar for the active window is along the top of the screen, whereas, on Windows, the menu bar is attached to the top of each window. Having the menu bar on the top of the Mac’s desktop screen gives the target (File, Edit, View, etc) an infinite height because a user can’t move their mouse pointer beyond the edge of the screen, no matter how much they try. This is why macOS’s four corners of the screen make great hot spots. It is extremely easy to move a mouse pointer to any of the four corners to, say, lock the computer (requiring a password to unlock it). This, effectively gives the pixel, in each of the corners of the desktop, an infinite width and height, off the screen.

And while Fitts’s Law is great, design does have a bit of an artistic aspect to it. Good UX is designed with people in mind.

2. Apple Marketing
The goal of marketing is to match customers with products to generate revenue. A novice mistake new entrepreneurs make is to focus inward on what they think is important, instead of focusing on the customer experience. For example, many entrepreneurs will spend a lot of time and money designing their logo. Customers don’t do business with companies based on what their logo looks like. In other words, “No One Cares About Your Company Logo.” However, how you use your logo is very important; it’s critical to stay on brand in order to prevent brand dilation.

There’s a lot of noise out there, so a company’s marketing communications have to be clear and concise. This starts by leading with a product’s benefits before its features.

What’s the difference between a benefit or feature? The key features of a product (or service) enable the benefit for the customer. In other words, use a product’s key features to summarize its key benefit.

One of the best examples of leading with the benefits before the features was the introduction of the first iPod in October 2001. I believe, if any other company had created the iPod, such as HP, Dell, or Microsoft, they would have marketed it as “a 6.5 ounce MP3 player with a 5 GB hard drive, measuring 4” x 2.5” x 3/4”.” Even as a software engineer, I would have to breakout a calculator to figure out how many songs a 5 GB hard drive could hold.

Instead of touting the features, the slogan for the first iPod was, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Elegant.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Lead with the benefits, before the features.

3. Apple Talk
So, what is it I do? I've detailed that here:
http://blog.joemoreno.com/2018/06/the-apple-way.html

More info on my talk, The Apple Way of Design and Marketing, here:
http://joemoreno.com/talk 

I woke up to my alarm at 1:15 AM, yesterday morning, and I was on the road, from San Diego to San Jose, about an hour later. There's something very relaxing about driving through Los Angeles at 4 AM, without any traffic. The sunrise's subtle changes in lighting, in California's San Joaquin Central Valley, is unseen, yet clearly noticed.

The lip (red arrows) wrapping around the sink looks like styling, but it isn't.

Good design is apparent.
Great design is transparent. 
– Joe & Joe (Sparano & Moreno)

Styling is concerned with surface treatment and appearance – the expressive qualities of a product. Design, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with problem solving.
– "Design of the 20th Century" by Charlotte & Peter Fiell

One day, I plugged up the sink on the right with a stopper and stepped away while I left the water running to fill up the basin. I quickly forgot about it until about 20 minutes later. As I hurried back to the kitchen, I could hear the water spilling over before I could see the sink. In my mind's eye, I envisioned how much of a mess of water I'd have to clean up on the floor. Guess what? Not a drop spilled onto the counter or ground. I was floored when I saw that every drop of water had overflowed into the sink basin on the left, thanks to the lip around the sink. For all these years, I simply thought that lip was styling; it turns out it's functional. It's a design element that solves a problem – the exact problem I created by leaving the water running until it overflowed.

Presented with a gift of a Chinese fan stamped with their company logo.

I was recently invited to the Bay Area to give a talk to a group of business people from China about Apple's marketing and design philosophies. Putting together the presentation was simple, since I've written and discussed what makes Apple unique, in the past.

The interesting part was speaking through a translator – a first, for me. I'm not sure exactly what the translator said when she introduced me, but the group seemed impressed.

The best part of this gig was how quickly it came together. A woman I never met contacted me on a Tuesday and asked me if I was willing to fly up the following Tuesday to give my talk. When I agreed, she immediately transferred half the payment to me. She paid the second half to me at breakfast, before I spoke. No contract, SOW, schedules, or exhibits. It worked out so well that we'll probably do it again. I can get used to this.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Last night I went to an event where Gary Ware chatted about following your life's dreams. What would you do if you didn't have to work on a daily basis? Nearly everything he mentioned I was already doing.

I left corporate America in 2007. Since then I've written code, prose, and poems. I've been a journalist, blogger, and author; on my own terms. I learned how to fly and bought an airplane. After reflecting on this I wondered if Gary was living his dream? Perhaps he is, I only met him last night. But that thought, in turn, led me to a more important realization. Why or how did I end up doing nothing? That's when I realized the jump from corporate rat race to peaceful bliss, where everyday is a Saturday, requires a trigger. In my case several triggers.

Ready, Aim...

My first trigger was about 15 years ago when I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Realizing there was a real possibility my life could end before it started made me focus on doing things I enjoyed. (Miraculously, after six months of chemo, I was 100% cured, to the point that it's like I was never sick.) They key is to do the things you enjoy without being selfish. This means not doing something that lessens someone else's quality of life or satisfaction. A great way to avoid this is to find the good in people and cheer them on. But it has to be genuine.

The second trigger was ten years ago when I was doing humanitarian missions in East Africa where I saw people living simply. Yes, they were poor, living on less than $3/day, but there was a beauty in their lives. In the traditional corporate career you work hard. Nowadays, we work harder than ever before. Luckily our society makes the rest of our life easier since we don't have to milk the cows or harvest the fields. But we replaced that free time with more work. So, we feel we have to keep moving up the corporate ladder to make more money. But... and here's the key question... why do we need to make more money? On the surface, we think it's so we can have more financial freedom. But what happens is we end up buying more stuff that adds more complexity to our lives. A bigger house, a new car with more technology, etc. It actually makes our lives more complicated. The more complex our life becomes, the more brittle and fragile it ends up being. If you lose a high paying job you'll have to find another high paying job to be satisfied with your lifestyle.

Hiking Torrey Pines is a fine way to begin each week.

My third and final trigger was two fold. It was working at Apple when my father unexpectedly passed away. Since then, I focus on turning a crisis into an opportunity. Working at Apple was key because they went from near bankruptcy, the year before I joined them, to the biggest company in the world. Also, Apple was my trigger for understanding simplicity. More than anything else, Steve Jobs cared about making great products and he did that by simplifying them. Instead of engineer-ugly products with every possible feature, I learned the supreme elegance of simple design.

Simplification is the ultimate sophistication

But, to be truly appreciated, all this has to be earned, not given. So, today, I enjoy life. I really enjoy it and have been for as long as I can remember. I wake up early or sleep in. I read, write, and snap photos or attend events. I enjoy sunsets, food, friends, and family. It's a good life with simple pleasures. It doesn't mean I'll never go back to working a job where I've had scores of people reporting up to me, but it's nice to have life options rather than career obligations.

How do you innovate on a book? Sure, you can update the content, but it's still a book. You could always make a coffee table book about coffee tables that turns into a coffee table, but that's fiction, not fact.

About a year and a half ago I reviewed a beautiful book, ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation. The author, Jonathan Zufi, who is also the creator of The Shrine of Apple has published a collection of over 650 unique Apple photos. His book included not only virtually every Apple product, but prototypes and packaging too. Zufi recently republished an updated book with more than a dozen new pages and photos. But that, alone, wouldn't be enough to make it innovative. His latest edition is ICONIC: The Ultimate Edition. This magnum opus is delivered in a clamshell case with a custom printed circuit board (PCB) designed to pulse an LED embedded inside the case. The result is that the LED in the case cover respirates like a sleeping Apple computer when the book case is picked up.


What makes life interesting is the story behind the story. In the case of The Ultimate Edition, it's the elegantly designed and incorporated PCB that makes it uniquely interesting. Unique in the truest sense of the word.

The circuit is powered by the high-performance, low-power Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller which combines 1KB in-system programming flash memory, 32B SRAM, 4 general purpose I/O lines, 16 general purpose working registers, a 16-bit timer/counter with two pulse-width modulation channels, internal and external interrupts, programmable watchdog timer with internal oscillator, an internal calibrated oscillator, and 4 software selectable power saving modes.

In true fashion, ICONIC: The Ultimate Edition is designed with the tender loving care and attention to detail only seen in Apple products.

At Apple, the engineers are the talent. They're the ones who innovate. And, thanks to great designers, technology is turned from engineer-ugly into intuitive elegance. All the consumer facing products used to go through Steve. If you ate lunch, every day, at Caffè Macs you'd probably see Steve eat there once or twice a week.

Steve once sat one or two tables away from me with a developer. It surprised me how quiet Steve was. He simply asked the engineer questions and then listened, very closely. It was a one-on-one brain storming session about integrating services across different products. Steve would ask, "What if we did this?" or, "How would that look?" Steve focused on his conversation and was immune to the casually intense glances from passerbyers.

I worked as a software engineer at the Apple Online Store. We'd have an annual online store summit that lasted a couple days, usually in Apple's Town Hall auditorium. The high point was if and when Steve would speak to us and take our questions. Just before lunch, the last year I worked at Apple, we were told that Steve would be holding a Q&A session.

Excellent! This was spring of 2007 and the iPhone had just been announced but it wasn't yet shipping. The iPhone was on everyone's mind. When Tim Cook spoke to us at our summit he whipped out his iPhone, for a moment, and said, "This is so cool!" Our mouths watered.

Since Steve would be meeting with us, this was a perfect time for me to ask him about iPhone marketshare. He had forecast, during the Macworld Keynote, a few months earlier, that iPhone would sell 10 million units the first year. This seemed a bit high, to me, since it would only be available in the U.S. in 2007; and only on Cingular which had 58 million subscribers. To my ear, it sounded like Steve was expecting one out of six Cingular subscribers to shell out $499 or $599 for an iPhone.

One secret to corporate success is to never embarrass your boss. So, during lunch, I gave a heads up to my boss and the director of the Apple Online Store that I'd be asking Steve a question. We chatted about it, briefly, and it was a perfectly sensible question. So, I was cleared to ask away.

Just before Steve entered Town Hall we were told not to ask any questions about future products. We were also told that we'd have to give him a standing O when he was done with the Q&A. No problem. Steve walked in to the Town Hall. This was a rare time that I've seen Steve take the stage from the back of the room, rather than from backstage. He spoke for a little while and then it came time for questions.

One of my coworker engineers asked Steve a question that stumped him. Or, perhaps, he didn't want to answer it candidly. "Steve, what companies do you admire most?" Steve thought about it for a long, silent, half a minute.

"I don't know. I'd have to think about it," Steve answered.

I'd really like to know what he was thinking. Was it simply that he couldn't think of any companies he admired or was he worried that his answer would be made public?

Then it was my turn to ask Steve a question.

"Steve, you mentioned during your iPhone Keynote that Apple would sell 10 million iPhones the first year. That would mean one in six Cingular customers would be using an iPhone. That seems like a lot of marketshare for the first year," I said.

Steve simply clarified what he said during the Keynote. The 10 million unit statistic was at the end of the first full year of sales – in other words, at the end of 2008, not 2007 – and, by that time, Apple would be selling the iPhone in Asia, with other wireless carriers.

I doubt that his answer could have been any less climactic for me. Questioning Steve is easy when he's right.

Of course, Steve's 10 million iPhone estimate was a bit low. Better to under-promise and over-deliver. By the end of 2008, Apple sold more than 17 million iPhones – 70% more than his initial estimate.

A single moving part: the rotor, compared to hundreds in a typical engine.

You can't unsee a Tesla once you've seen it – it's simply beautiful and elegant.

The Model S has a single moving part: the rotor, which is a powertrain tucked between the rear wheels. There are no belts, carburetors, catalytic converters, radiators, etc. With no engine to take up space, that frees up storage both under the hood and in the trunk.

The entire front panel is a touch screen with Internet access sans video.

The Model S starts at $70,000 and the one I sat in topped out around $114,000. The interior is simple in true minimalistic style. The dashboard has a single button to open the glove compartment and the rest of the controls are handled through a touch screen with Internet access.

The car can be fully recharged at home in about eight hours using a standard 240 volt outlet that powers a washer or dryer. A big selling point is that you can fully recharge your Tesla in about 45 minutes or less, for free – yes, free fuel for life – at any of the public Supercharger charging stations.

The battery is the vehicle's only Achilles heel. All batteries are expensive and heavy for the power they deliver. As a Marine supply and fiscal officer for an infantry battalion, the single biggest expense I'd budget for field exercises (maneuvers) were our batteries.

Nearly the entire chassis of the Tesla houses the battery and it has an eight year unlimited warranty (even if you brick it). It's nice that a full charge can take you more than 250 miles but batteries deteriorate over time. Even if a Tesla's battery lasts a dozen years, it'll have to eventually be replaced to the tune of $12,000. So, a Tesla's TCO isn't really saving money over a traditional internal combustion engine when looking at these detailed cost calculations, but it really helps the environment.

Until a more efficient source of mobile electricity is developed, electric cars will remain a premium luxury.

Click to enlarge

Amazon has a very distinctive technique for bringing a new product to market. Instead of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, they begin new product development with a notional press release followed by a first cut at the product's FAQ. Keep in mind that the press release will never be published in its original form – rather, it's a guide to keep the business, product, and engineering teams on the same sheet of music. I think of the press release as the high level, 30,000', strategic view of the product and the FAQ as the operational, 10,000', view.

Once the press release and FAQ are created the marketing team can layout their vision which is then passed to the product department to document the functional specifications, wire diagrams, and technical requirements for the engineering team to develop and the QA team to test against.

At the end of the day, though, it's a company's corporate culture that drives the success of their products. At Amazon, their corporate culture focuses on what the customer wants. This "the customer is always right" mentality may seem obvious, but it really does depend on each company's DNA. When I worked at Apple, our priority was to provide the best possible user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX).

Jonathan Zufi sent me a copy of his new coffee table book, Iconic. This magnum opus is as much about Apple's artistic design as it is about innovation. Turning the pages and seeing Apple's products so finely photographed brings nostalgic memories like flipping through a yearbook and seeing old, familiar, faces. For me, many of these products have a deeply personal story behind them.

As a former Apple employee, whom this book is dedicated to, I feel a special connection to every product that was released when I worked at the company. It feels more like a part of me – a personal experience – than simply a look back in history. These products were and are an important part of my life and a day doesn't go by when I don't experience an Apple product. Everything of worth that I've created in the past 15 years started with one of these products from designing web apps to selling digital photos; from creating playlists to making movies; from publishing articles to writing code.

Iconic is an Apple museum, up close and personal. OS X Server and WebObjects, Aperture and iPods, Mac minis and even packaging and prototypes – they're all in there. Iconic is to printed books as Apple products are to electronics: simple beauty.

I love iBooks but nothing beats the durability of a real book. As great as it is to carry around my e-book library on my iPad, it can never compare to the feel of picking up a real book and flipping through it. That's a physical experience sorely lacking on all e-book readers.

So, can the real world feel of a book be duplicated electronically?

Perhaps.. one day... probably. The key is that a digital book would have to feel like a real book. One way to do this is with a digital book made of pages where each is a thin, flexible film, like e-paper, that feel like real pages.

Imagine an e-book full of a couple hundred blank pages made of thin, bendable computer displays. You'd select which book to load and each e-page would display a page of your book. You'd be reading e-ink text on real pages that you could flip through, highlight, take notes, etc.; much like iBooks or Kindle. Just don't dog-ear a page. For books longer than 200 pages, you could just cycle back – page 201 would appear on page one and so on. Now that would be best of both worlds.

The Way to Eden.

I'm reading Ken Segall's thoughts and experiences while working with Steve Jobs. He's had so much interaction with Steve while at Apple and NeXT that he's a cornucopia of best design and marketing practices.

Segall talks about how "one" is the simplest of concepts. It's an intriguing philosophy – there was even an entire episode of Star Trek dedicate to this concept and its followers.

This belief in "one" is why Apple's mice, track pads, iPhones, etc., from the beginning, have only one button. One is where it all begins.

What's the simplest numeral system? It's not base 10 (decimal) since you have to memorize 10 different digits. Is it base 2 (binary)? After all, computers and human DNA use binary to store information (ones and zeros, or A-T and C-G combinations). Certainly binary is the simplest? Au contraire; how many people can convert 1010 from binary to base 10? Not simple... not simple at all.

The simplest numeral system.

It turns out that unary is the simplest numeral system for representing natural numbers – in other words, unary uses just ones. This is how a cave man would keep track of "How many?" things he owed, even before there was written or spoken language. Take a pile of rocks and for each one of something, you move a rock to another pile. Do the reverse when taking inventory.

This is how a bouncer counts people at the door or how the simplest of card counters tries to beat the house at blackjack. We've all used unary to keep track of things when we tally items with four slashes and then a diagonal.

Something Simpler?
Where I disagree with Segall's thinking is when he points out "zero is the only number that's simpler than one." Ironically, this not the case as I learned from my assembly language professor, Mr. Lee. If you think back to when we learned Roman numerals in grade school (I, II, III, IV...) you'll quickly realize that there was no numeral for zero. This is also true in other ancient civilizations' numeral systems such as Chinese and Arabic. As simple as zero seems, it's a fairly complex concept to have nothing of something – just try to ask any handheld calculator to divide by zero and you'll see that it does not compute.

Trying to be simpler than the simplest makes things more complex.

When I worked at Apple, my boss's boss was discussing UI/UX design with Steve Jobs in meeting about the Apple Online Store. Steve commented that contextual menus had become the "dumping ground" for the lazy designer.

After upgrading to OS X 10.8.2, last night, I noticed two things. They weren't new things, but they jumped out at me.

First was that Mac OS X is no longer Mac OS X, it's now just OS X. I had heard something about this rebranding earlier this year, but this was the first time that I actually noticed it. In 2001, when I spoke at WWDC, it was beaten into us that we had to refer to it as Mac OS X.

The second thing - and this one's minor - is that the order of items on Mail's contextual menus could be better arranged - much better arranged.

Specifically, when right clicking on an e-mail account the Erase Deleted Items/Junk Mail should be near the very top. In other words, they should be one of the first choices since they're the most common options selected. Personally, I think the New/Rename/Delete/Export Mailbox options probably don't even belong in this contextual menu since they're so rarely needed.

But, that's just my 2¢. There may be a good reason that I'm overlooking.

Last week, I visited a Marine buddy and I spent a couple days in the small Tennessee town of Portland. My buddy is the seventh generation of his family to live there. When he was a kid, the town's population was about 6,000; now, a few decades later, it's doubled to about 12,000. There's even a street, which bears his surname, that used to be the driveway to his grandfather's farm.

Main Street revitalization board meeting.

After living there for so many generations my buddy knows his neighbors and the town's history. As an attorney, my buddy has an office in downtown Portland on Main Street and he also serves on a couple local non-profits.

While I was visiting, I had the opportunity to accompany him, as an observer, at a board meeting of a soon-to-be-formed non-profit to revitalize the downtown area. Most of the 90 minute meeting was run by a state rep who specialized in helping Tennessee towns implement Main Street revitalization plans focusing on design, history, and the economy.

Portland Airport expansion plans on the drawing board.

The previous day, my wife and I flew into the Portland Municipal Airport. For such a small town, the airport has a surprisingly long runway - 5,000'. But, apparently that's not long enough for Portland. A few hours before the meeting, I read an article on the front page of the local paper, The Shopper, about how the city had plans on the drawing board to extend the runway.

When I walked into the downtown revitalization planning meeting I immediately noticed the airport expansion plans, quite literally, on the drawing board. It struck me as a coincidence that I should see the very plans, at an unrelated meeting, which I had just read about on the front page of the local newspaper.

Portland's future airport plans include lengthening the runway by 200' and adding taxiway access to each end. Large corporate jets should have no problem landing on a 5,200' runway. Currently, pilots have to taxi on the runway to get to the end before beginning their takeoff run (a technique called back taxiing). I hope that a bigger airport means bigger business for Portland.

At Apple, the engineers are the talent and "This doesn't suck too bad," was high praise when I worked there.

Update, May 22, 2012: CNN published an article about this blog post. 

Sometimes, even the science and studies can be wrong. Not because of an error, but because you didn't dig deep enough.

About a dozen years ago we had some discussions at Apple about the placement of the logo on the back of Apple's laptops. As you can see in this Sex and the City scene, the Apple logo is upside down when the lid is opened.

Apple has an internal system called Can We Talk? where any employee can raise questions on most any subject. So we asked, "Why is the Apple logo upside down on laptops when the lid is open?"

We were told by the Apple design group, which takes human interface issues very seriously, that they had studied the placement of the logo and discovered a problem. If the Apple logo was placed such that it was right side up when the lid was opened then it ended up being upside down when the lid was closed, from the point of view of the user. (If you're currently using an Apple laptop made in the past eight years then close the lid and you'll see that the Apple logo will be upside down from your point of view, but right side up when opened)

Why was upside down from the user's perspective an issue? Because the design group noticed that users constantly tried to open the laptop from the wrong end. Steve Jobs always focused on providing the best possible user experience and believed that it was more important to satisfy the user than the onlooker.

Obviously, after a few years, Steve reversed his decision.

Opening a laptop from the wrong end is a self-correcting problem that only lasts a few seconds. However, viewing the upside logo is a problem that lasts indefinitely.