Another conversation I was recently party to had an interesting opening post, that people should only comment in reply if they have a positive mental attitude. Knowing the scenario, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a sly reference to me in there, as only earlier in the day there had been a less than positive repartee going on between myself and the opening poster.
So I got wondering how much of a positive mental attitude is involved with innovation.
A disclaimer: I’m not just an innovator, I’m an implementer too – usually as a programmer; a lot of what I do when looking at innovation is finding the holes in things, probing, assessing them, whittling down the issues until I’m left with something that improves the status quo without making more issues.
The result of that is I’m often considered abrasive, even harsh, and very cynical, and very blunt; these are all the consequences of diving right in and not messing around with finding the heart of a problem.
It also gives me a distinctly non positive appearance, and frequently the assumption that I approach everything with a negative mental attitude. I don’t call it ‘negative’, though, I call it ‘realistic’ or ‘pragmatic’, but to a third party it often sounds similar.
That attitude is what draws out my best work as an innovator; by being ruthlessly critical of things, you can strip away the layers and diversions and dig down to what needs to be changed to improve the current environment.
It means you can take an idea, iterate through generations of it, and pinpoint where it falls down before you ever get that far, so you can iterate through those issues too. For me, then, having a negative mental attitude, if you will, is the secret ingredient in my recipe.
It’s not the only thing, though, far from it. As hinted at above, innovation isn’t the only thing I deal with – I have to make good on it sometime and realise the innovation, which means I get the job of implementation too.
The secret to that part isn’t having a negative attitude, that just makes what should be an enjoyable part into a drudge, wearying and slow. Innovation’s the spark that starts the journey, implementation’s getting to the destination, and the last thing you want is additional detours.
Plus, I find the implementation part takes much, much longer than the innovation part, generally, so I want to make that as painless for myself as possible.
So, generally, positive mental attitude for the implementation part, an a slightly negative one (or at worst, a pragmatic, no-nonsense attitude) for the innovation part.
At least, that’s my take on it, I’ve encountered people who demonstrate visible angst at themselves and their work during implementation, fretting over every line of code, that each line must be perfect, that every aspect must be perfect, which I usually find to be an overly negative attitude to work with, that no matter how much goes in, it’s still not perfect and can’t be so, no matter the end result.
That said, it is the exception rather than the rule that those who make innovation have a strong tendency towards either positive or negative attitude; I’ve found that typically it is the pragmatists who make the strongest innovations, those who can see the merits and flaws of a given system for exactly what they are, and have the vision and temerity to bring it to fruition.
Steve Jobs, in my estimation, is one such person: he can see the merits and flaws in the devices that led up to the iPad, for example, and in the competition that’s building at the moment – such as when he infamously declared that 7″ tablets were impractical, and isn’t afraid to bring about the vision he has for computing; recently a comment from Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak suggested that Jobs had been contemplating, even dreaming of, an iPad like device since the foundation of Apple in the 1970s. Right there: there’s vision, and bringing it to fruition… it was a whole new product in its own market and position.
And yet, I don’t see Jobs as having a positive mental attitude. At heart, I think he’s a cynic, with imagination, inspiration, vision and the balls to put it together – positivity not required.
On the whole, I’ll have to agree. Most of the time lack of innovation springs from people who are ‘happy with the way things are’. Glazing over the problem with a grudging acceptance isn’t ever going to solve it.
Neither is being too worried about stepping on toes an ideal mindset to innovation.
I have quite a few 7″ screen devices. I like them. Portable (if not pocket sized – which would mean a terribly small screen). Anything bigger and they wouldn’t fit in the bags I usually carry them in.
That’s certainly been my experience: being unafraid to try new things is the first step to innovation, and add the unfear of not being content with something that isn’t ideal, and that’s the way to go (but if it’s “good enough” a variation of Amdahl’s Law will kick in: spending ever more effort on solving something that will use less effort to accept means it may be time to stop)
On the subject of 7″ devices, I can see his point: how Jobs sees the portable environment is that the “pocket” size is suitably small for, well, pockets – this gives you the form factor for mobile phones. There is also only so big you can make a phone before you go beyond the point where you can practically use it as one, which is about the 4″ screen size, I believe.
Going bigger than that, it depends on what you’re planning to do. The 10″ factor is ideal for general use, such as web browsing, reading, video watching and all the other things that you can do on an iPad. (Incidentally, when I first saw an iPad, I remember thinking they were too small to be useful with my chunky-sized fingers. Then I discovered how efficient Apple’s UI could get to be.)
The 7″ form factor is interesting: it’s too large to be a phone, too small to be practical as a tablet, given how big fingers are and how small the UI can get, at least that’s my perspective, which seems to be in line with what Jobs was getting at: having used one, I find the display and UI to be physically too small, which was not a limitation I found on the iPad (while it *seemed* too small, using it quickly disspelled that notion)
If apps were properly adapted for its form factor, as some of the more specific reader type tablets have (eg the Kindle), I suspect the form factor would be appealing, but as it is, the non specific tablets in that form factor tend to be oversized phone apps or undersized iPad style apps, trying to fit their content into a space where it doesn’t really work.
That’s where the 7″ form factor falls down for me: it seems to have only a few uses that are geared for that size of device, something I don’t see shared by the 10″ form factor.
I follow the logic, and to an extent, it’s true – just not in my case. Camera case to be specific. I can put my 7″ multimedia reader or my 7″ Kobo in there no problem.
I can read pretty small print and a 10″ screen would be kludgey for what I use it for. Namely reading and portable picture/video viewing. A 7″ inch screen is about the size of a 4×6 print – but you can zoom in. Video could be larger, but you’d have to download the (sometimes non-existent) HD version for it to be worth it.
I won’t argue that there is something about the 7″ form factor that makes it useful – but it’s far less useful, in my opinion, than the mainstream media are claiming, and don’t forget that the mainstream media just love to disagree with Steve Jobs!
I can read small print too, but when I’m using an iPad for reading books, I find the extra space welcome, personally – just because I can read small print doesn’t mean I *want* to read small print all the time. That said, I’d be willing to bet the e-books I read typically in landscape would look just fine on a 7″ in portrait mode and be similarly sized.
That’s the thing: if a device is marketed as a multi-function device and I buy it for multiple purposes (like an iPad, but could be any other multimedia tablet), I want to be able to use it for all those purposes, rather than buying it for a single purpose and ‘making do’ with the others, which has been my, admittedly limited, experience of 7″ devices.
Don’t forget as far as video goes that the iPad has access to iTunes for video, something the other similarly sized tablets cannot boast, which means access to HD content is not that uncommon at all. (Yes, I’m well aware I’m sounding like a fan-boy at this point. The fact remains that the iPad is the market leader in the 10″ form factor for several very good reasons, not least of which is that it has the iTunes library available to it, including video content.)
That said, I know multiple people who find holding something iPad sized a little wearing and uncomfortable, and something in the smaller form factor would almost certainly suit them better in that respect.
I guess, like everything, it’s about assessing your needs, now and future, and moving to solve those. For me, 7″ devices do not adequately solve my needs, because they are either too big or too small for what I need – and Apple seems to take the same line.
Your needs, however, are different to mine – and you aren’t so in need of multi-function devices, such that you can get a good 7″ device that’s tuned to its use, rather than a 10″ that’s designed to cope with many different uses.
Going back to the original comment: Jobs clearly takes the view that 7″ isn’t practical a form factor for him and for Apple as a whole – and that’s in no small way related to the fact that Apple’s journey now and onward is related to higher-end content consumption (higher use of HD, as well as Apple TV) and encouraging content creation on their different platforms, spreading that from the Mac desktop which has always been geared to content creation, and now pushing that on the mobile platforms too.
Taken in *that* light, 7″ is very definitely not a viable form factor, it’s just too small to really get into content creation.
Well most of the YT videos I watch still do not have HD (or if they do – don’t benefit from it anyway). I’d have to save them to my computer and copy them over first, but they’re still on 7″ device and playing
If I like it – I would save it – as my current Internet is *noticeably* usage based billed.
Text on a 7″ reader can be scaled up in size to the point where two paragraphs (in your comment) would *barely* fit on a page. A lot more page turns that way, but with e-ink the battery life doesn’t suffer for it. At smallest size, it would still take a page and a half for your comment directly above.
As far as Apple goes – it’s good to have a clear vision and stick to it. Right or wrong (or at least excessively dogmatic).
That’s the thing again: different strokes for different folks. While, yes, YouTube is fully accessible on the Jobsian platform, it isn’t really the expected primary vehicle for video; they want you to use iTunes.
Sure, you can scale text on a 7″ reader, just as I can on my iPad. The thing is, whether I want to, or should have to. I find that I don’t need to squint or concentrate on reading small text on a typical e-book, that its size is what I’d naturally like to read, while the typical text on the same e-book on a smaller tablet meant I had to start by scaling it up before I went any further if I wanted to spend any real time reading, which doesn’t seem particularly comfortable.
As for Apple, that’s the thing. Jobs has his vision and he sticks to it. I doubt he came to it through thinking happy thoughts, but by being cynical about it. A true businessman would have noticed the apparent gap in the market for something between the iPhone/iPod and the iPad form factors – the 7″ – and added that to the product line. Jobs, however, isn’t that businessman, he’s not driven by the bottom line, he’s driven by his gut, and he feels that the 7″ is impractical – so Apple doesn’t do it.
It’s not impractical for everyone, as you’ve so wonderfully demonstrated, but that it is for some as I’ve tried to indicate. There wasn’t a positive way for him to tell this one, though, so he made it characteristically punchy.
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I’m not sure about your ‘scale’ comment. It’s a certain scale of text. Like most Internet browsers it’s listed as “Smallest, Small, Medium, Big, Biggest”. You set it and it remembers. It re-organizes the pages (wrap around, page breaks) so nothing looks out of place. 5 pages on Smallest size would contain about 5-7 paragraphs but would turn into 60 pages on Largest font size with about 2-3 paragraphs per page. That is, of course, the extreme ends of the spectrum.
It isn’t quite as nice for PDF files though – that’s zooming in to make it bigger which results in scrolling around the page. Which is ugly and unfun is that is less then ideal for that screen size.
I have similar choices, and can use them at a whim – the difference is, that the bigger screen naturally makes the text bigger. It’s more a reply to your original comment about being able to read small text – I shouldn’t have to read small text if I don’t want to, and I have enough screen real-estate to have text at a comfortable size, and still show a decent amount of text around it.