That problem confounding others in the industry is easily articulated in an old engineering maxim: "Better is not necessarily better than best." I've (and this is the author's notion) always understood this to mean that adding extra features or improving specs is of no use at all if it doesn't add to the customer experience.

According to a report from AppleInsider, The City Council of Vancouver, Wash., found just that when it switched to iPads at the beginning of 2012. After these last two months, the council has seen a reduction in paper usage to the tune of 40 percent, which amounts to about 50,000 pages of paper over the course of the year.

I've even stopped making printed handouts for meeting attendees. If they want to kill a tree, it's on them, not me.

Today's vehicles are more powerful, more efficient and safer than ever before. In fact, today's car buyer would be hard pressed to spend his or her money on a genuinely bad vehicle. But those overall improvements may have also led consumers to believe there are no real differences between the various products offered by the world's major automakers. According to the Consumer Reports 2012 Car-Brand Perception Survey, Toyota, Ford, Honda and Chevrolet have all seen their scores drop by double digits compared to last year.

It's these companies (with the exception of Ford's small car offering (I'm looking at you, Fiesta) that are focusing on making their car designs as bland and inoffensive as possible in the quest for market share. They're targeting the masses who don't want to stand out and feel comfort in the herd.

It's these companies that I would NOT buy a car from for that reason alone.

Everything tastes better with bacon.

DUH!

(more at the link above)

Sign me up for the trip!

I'm not a fan of those wheels, but otherwise, I'm in love....

The reported change to Flash Player's fate is with the mobile version Flash Player, but it raises doubts about the personal-computer version, too.

This makes me smile. The web is going to suck less and we can move forward.

Steve Jobs was right about the floppy, serial, and parallel ports. He was right about Flash.

The masses in IT, so focused on preserving the status quo and unable to see the big picture are the ones that come out looking like total horses' asses today. That's because, well, they are. IT is overrun by them and in the enterprise, well, the horses's asses infest all ranks and far more often than not, call the shots. That's why consumer IT is driving today's innovation and why, thankfully, geeks are no-longer the tech taste-makers.

That’s lovely, but there’s really only one faith which free societies are expected to treat with scrupulous intelligence, calculation, civility, and decency, and that expectation exists precisely because they might end up being firebombed if they don’t. Goofing on the others may get you some disapproving clucks and a lecture from Bill Donohue on Fox News, but you’ll walk away intact.

peace

When you release sub-par products, you look sub-par yourself. Customers don’t care what platform it’s on, and don’t care what politics are going on behind the scenes at the company. If you release shit, you look like shit. It’s much better to release nothing at all.

THIS, right there, is wisdom anyone creating any product, software, hardware, widgets, cookies, cars, or anything else for that matter, should heed.

Google doesn't get this. That's why, to me, Google's just a steaming pile of elephant shit. They have no style. They have no taste. They have no concept of user experience. And they have no quality assurance program.

At one point, she held one tablet in each hand above her head, and asked a Samsung attorney if she could identify which company produced which. "Not at this distance your honor," said the lawyer, who stood about ten feet away.

Damning