An article on TUAW about the history of the MacBook Air prompted me to think back in early 2010, when I was comparison shopping for a lightweight laptop. My search had come down to four choices:

• the Toshiba Portégé M800,
• the Panasonic Y5,
• the Lenovo ThinkPad X301, and
• the MacBook Air.

At the time, these light-weight machines were premium-priced products that were selling between $2000 and $3000. So only after painfully extended deliberation did I order the Lenovo X301 because of its inclusion of the DVD drive. However, Lenovo cancelled my order in the spring of 2010. And that has made all the difference.

I have always despised that convention unique to PCs of appending a bunch of numbers to the name. Fittingly enough, I would have been fine just choosing the MacBook Air on that criteria alone. But practically, I wanted a very light machine with as minimal a power brick as possible. And I could not make that personal compromise about my DVD drive very easily. The funny thing is that I ended up buying a SuperDrive, trying not to make that compromise at all. I used it once since I purchased it. Smart compromise, Apple.

To round out the experience, the support for my MacBook Air has been fantastic, with only one battery issue between the two machines I owned (side note: I was a bit impetuous when the late 2010 MacBook Air refresh came out with the 4GB of RAM that I really wanted in order to run VMWare smoothly).

I have been asked about my favorite product before, and it is hands down my MacBook Air. I choose to remember that the past was filled with backache and heavy messenger bags loaded up with power adapters and extra batteries. I know that a better way exists, and that the right compromises were hard to accept but necessary for each of our sakes. Looking forward to 2012, I want to make products that solve people’s problems and to make the right compromises in the process. It will be a tough road, but definitely worth traveling.

Addendum: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/15/the-macbook-air-four-years-later/

I just don’t understand why the idea of web properties sponsored by advertising continues to be news. In fact, this quote from Alicia Eler from RWW sums it up pretty well:

If you pay for a product, you’re a customer. If you don’t, you’re the product. On Facebook, you are the product.

It’s applicable to just about any product or service you do not pay for. From a product management standpoint, every feature introduced is intended to maximize the value of the product. If the relationship is such that you’re paying, then the product is attempting to improve its value to you.

Conversely, if you are the product, then value is being squeezed from you. Incidentally, the advertisers are the consumer in this model. If you think that’s nefarious or shady, try an alternative. And if you find that hard to swallow, remember that the juice presser that’s squeezing you is deliberately very hard to leave.

If Samsung is not willing to extend the life of its hardware for its customers, won’t those customers be less willing to buy Samsung again? Won’t those customers just be dissatisfied with Samsung? I’ve used customer satisfaction metrics in the past to qualify areas of improvement in live products, and with Samsung’s situation, I would do exactly the same thing. Based on this J.D. Power and Associates report issued only recently, performance and ease of operation were identified as two top customer satisfaction factors. And certainly, both can be addressed by both hardware and software changes.

Samsung probably weighed the ROI of developing new hardware as opposed to the ROI of developing a version of TouchWiz on top of Ice Cream Sandwich. Given that Samsung is supposed to have a competitive advantage in terms of hardware development, I can imagine that they concluded that making a new phone is simply more profitable than investing resources into extending the life of the Galaxy S. To me, that’s a shame since it leaves current customers in the cold.

Although the smartphone industry is still maturing, this move could be interpreted as the inflection point where commodification of Android hardware is simply standard operating procedure, in contrast to the typical Apple iOS hardware lifecycle. Considering that it’s easier and cheaper for consumers to realize value in new software on their existing phones as opposed to setting their apps, preferences, and data on a new phone, I wonder if this will be a hard lesson for Samsung to learn in short order.

When it comes to product development, a customer on your books is worth more than two who are just browsing around. And I’d bet that customer on your books will be more likely to buy from you again, as long as you don’t treat them like dirt.

As a product guy, minimum viable product is one important method with which to organize product development efforts, and to maximize the amount of benefit derived from scarce engineering, development, and management resources. In agile development circles, Product Owners work with the team to consciously choose to release “MVPs” frequently, or release a bunch of them together in an integrated package or manner. My take is that “minimum viable product” is the set of features that satisfy the core needs of your target champion audience and provides the team with the greatest return in both actionable feedback and revenue/revenue potential. More than one can go live at a time!

To work backwards a little, agile development and Scrum in particular derive big benefits from thinking in this manner. The reason being that minimum viable product first forces you to think about a set of features, functionality, and fixes that make sense together, and offer your users the greatest benefit. Then, once you arrange things into a bundle, you look for areas where it’s possible to make them bite-sized for the team to work with and to execute on. Let’s say that you end up with 3 minimal viable “products”; that may simply correlate to three distinct milestone dates throughout a calendar year. But not all of them have to go to market immediately, not all of them have to be released as soon as they’re individually done!

Oftentimes, the driving force for product people to tie one minimum viable product to a release is the urge to get something to market ASAP. I say that you ought to resist that urge with all your might! It’s not about the “smallest kernel of your core idea” but rather, how you help your team build a great product iteration that goes to market successfully. It is up to the product folks to exercise some discipline and patience about what exactly constitutes minimum viable product. Anticipating how your users will be delighted by a single button versus a single experience makes all the difference in the world.

In conclusion, for all you product folks out there: Minimum viable product is the set of features that satisfy the core needs of your target champion audience and provides the team with the greatest return in both actionable feedback and revenue/revenue potential. Bundle multiple MVPs if you think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

It is particularly telling that Jeff Bezos is honest enough to state:

We don’t think of the Kindle Fire as a tablet. We think of it as a service.

At this point, Amazon’s not competing with Apple; Kindle Fire to iPad comparisons are oranges and apples (pun intended!). Amazon is instead pursuing its original intention all along, by taking on the entire digital media industry and making Amazon an indispensible, frictionless, and fast service provider to consumers everywhere.

I especially liked two points of his that related to build/iterate/innovate, which were:

• creating space vs. churning features, and
• iterative process – customer feedback

The first, “creating space vs. churning features,” is so relevant to today’s software products that need to scale. Build a simple product first, then layer on convenience and complexity as needed. In contrast, so many organizations end up trying to build in everything, and end up with products like Microsoft Word where so much was invested in every detail, with only a fraction of its capabilities being used.

The second, “iterative process – customer feedback” is so important to maintaining great products. Ultimately, any product that gets launched will inevitably get feedback. Two lessons that I’ve learned the hard way: first, set yourself up to measure everything about your users. And second, always leave room to reinvent the product. It’ll never be perfect the first time around, and frankly, using a combination of KPIs/quantitative data as well as observations in the field will be a huge source of innovation. There’s no such thing as “build it right the first time;” it’s really more like “build it good enough the first time, and be prepared to change.”

The right solution to handle the obsolecense of cash is to give consumers a physical alternative. And I don’t mean printing more money with a different ink; rather, a standalone device that can represent your money aside from a given institution or being networked. It should be a physical object, tied uniquely to some asset. It can be a vault in its own right, embedded with value. I’d envision something like the RSA hardware tokens, used to implement two-factor authentication, to ensure that your money stays with you and you alone. And for goodness’ sake, make sure the battery life is robust! Imagine if you’re just headed to your local coffee shop, and your “wallet” runs out of power. If that local coffee shop doesn’t have an AC adapter for your device, you’re out of luck!

The point is that cash has a lot of advantages that we take for granted: standard value denominations, physical security, intermediary-less (for the most part), and universal transference. If the world moves towards a cashless society, we have to ensure interoperability, security, and usefulness of our electronic currency.

Conclusion: If cash disappears, something just as easy and tangible needs to replace it. And for anyone who asks: No, it can’t have a “low battery” warning!

“We don’t want to lose our direct relationship with our subscribers. It’s at the core of our business model,” Rob Grimshaw told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

To give you, fair reader, some context: Apple’s 30% cut of subscription revenues is a decoy statement, not the real deal like John Gruber states. In fact, it masks the real reason why Apple’s instituting this policy (from this article):

“Customer data for in-app subscribers will remain with Apple, generally speaking, but customers will have the option to send their name, email address, and zip code to publishers. (Opt-in, not opt-out.)”

And the reason why this is important: it’s estimated that 35% of a high-quality content publisher’s revenues come from subscriptions, whereas 65% of revenues come from advertisers.^1,2 If advertisers can’t rely on publishers for reliable demographic/ethnographic data, they won’t justify paying premiums to the publishers. Publishers in turn will get their 65% of revenues knocked down. And who wins? Definitely not the publishers.

Bottom line: Know your business model, quality publishers, because even the pundits get it wrong! Apple is threatening the very survival of curated content on their platform with this approach.