Digital Rights Management sucks…except for the alternative

Is it possible for both sides—content producers and consumers—to lose the DRM war? Because they both deserve to.
The content producers—record labels, especially—make it so hard not to hate them. Digital distribution is exposing the fact that they add almost no value to the music publishing process they’ve been shepherding for the past fifty years. But [...]

What Apple is Good At

Apple is always given credit for its user-interface design, but I’m not so certain it’s what they’re good at. To be sure, they do a better job than most. But there are no shortage of Apple interface gaffes, and I’ll now take this opportunity to poke a stick at a couple of the things that [...]

OpenDoc

Back in 1995, my first job at Apple was as a Product Marketing Manager for OpenDoc.
“OpenDoc” was a terrible name for an interesting technology. Instead of requiring developers to write huge applications that had to do many things (for instance, any credible word processor needs not just editing features but spell checking, tables, embeddable photos, [...]

Computer Books You Should Read

In the past six months I’ve read two particularly great books on the computer industry. The first, Revolution In The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made is a fantastic account of the team that created the original Macintosh, released in 1984. It’s written by Andy Hertzfeld, who maintains the folklore.org [...]