Category Archives: Innovation

Directory of Attention

This week’s WSJ column (subscription only, I’m afraid) is about attention: If you feel the Internet has both blessed you with an abundance of information and cursed you by drowning you in it, I have one word which might help make sense of it all: attention. (And, if you give me enough of your attention,… Read More »

Old Habits, or New Uses?

Young hospital worker using her cellphone in a phone booth, Jakarta, April 2007 Either she uses the phone booth out of habit from her pre-cellphone days, or else she’s making use of a privacy feature of old technology — the sound-proofing booth — her new technology doesn’t offer. Tags:  indonesia, privacy, cellphones, technology, booths, soundproofing

The Limits of the Ribbon Revolution

The Microsoft Office Ribbon is really starting to take off. I’ve seen it in three applications in the past two days: a mindmapping program (I’m under embargo so can’t say which one), SmartDraw 2007, and even something like Mindomo (tenminut.es review here), an online mindmapping program. Here is a bunch of other programs using the Ribbon:… Read More »

It’s Not the “Death” of Microsoft, it’s the “Death” of Software

Paul Graham writes an interesting obituary of Microsoft, killed off, as he sees it, by applications that sit in your browser. It’s just a matter of time, he says, before every application we need can grabbed off the server. This is the kind of established wisdom of Web 2.0 folks these days that prompts only… Read More »