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Apple Insider has a thoughtful article on market disruption in the context of Apple products. Most interesting to me was how they broke down market disrupting products into 3 categories:

• New Market Disruption: create a new product that no one knew they needed
• Better Product: disrupts the high end of the marketplace by bringing new features that drive customers to upgrade
• Lower Cost: disrupts the low end by decreasing the cost for customers who are already serviced in the marketplace

Their observation is that grabbing the low end is easier, but not necessarily more valuable. Apple has succeeded when they take new markets and make better products, then fill in the low end eventually.

This quite succinctly captures why I long for Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Vudu, iTunes, and others to take over.

The Harvard Business Review had a commentary on why winners keep winning. The gist of it is that a good win gives you access to things that make the next one easier. These can be broken up into a few groups

• It feels good to win: your mood’s better, you better mood causes you to interact with people more, and you’re less defensive so you evaluate what you can do better more critically
• You’re left alone to do better: when you’re winning, you get less interruptions to do the next thing. This is from yourself with negative self-talk, and then peers and bosses who intervene at moments of doubt.

The Wall Street Journal had a piece a while back on Apple’s four keys to success. It can be summarized as:

• Say no more, not yes, to focus
• Make complex stuff simple
• Be willing to do something different
• Either be the best at it, or don’t do it

Guy Kawasaki has posted his thoughts on Steve Jobs. He listed 12 principles that Steve followed to success

1. Experts are clueless.
2. Customers cannot tell you what they need.
3. Jump to the next curve.
4. The biggest challenges beget best work.
5. Design counts.
6. You can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts.
7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.
8. “Value” is different from “price.”
9. A players hire A+ players.
10. Real CEOs demo.
11. Real CEOs ship.
12. Marketing boils down to providing unique value.

An article flew by yesterday that highlights e-mail folders as a waste of time. This is the philosophy behind the GMail inbox.

Filing email in folders is a waste of timeIf you file your emails into folders in your email program you’re wasting your time, according to a study by IBM Research. The 345-user study found that people who used the search function in their email program could find relevant emails as easily as those who had categorised each email into folders.

Finding emails by searches took on average 17 seconds, versus 58 seconds finding the emails by folder. The likelihood of success – that is, finding the intended email – was no greater when it had been filed in a folder.

More studies keep coming out that show a decoupling from CEO pay and performance. From this study:

The researchers studied how three levels of incentives affected performance of different tasks. Confirming their hypothesis, but likely confounding those compensation-setting boards, the academics found that while performance often improved from low-incentive to midlevel-incentive, it decreased across the board when incentives were at the highest level.

Rather profound for a comedian.

Lane Kenworthy has posted an excellent write-up on whether high tax levels affect GDP. He walks through a comparison of the United Stats vs Denmark vs Sweden and observed that, despite higher tax levels in Denmark and Sweden, the countries have very similar metrics on economic growth.

Lane sums up with:

A challenge

At what point does the harmful impact of taxes on the economy kick in? And how large is it? The Danish and Swedish experiences over the past generation pose a challenge for those who believe the answers to these two questions are “somewhere below 50% of GDP” and “large.” It’s a challenge that in my view has yet to be met.

I take no position on tax policy other than there is absolutely zero data being injected into the conversations happening in Congress right now. Any battle being fought on dogmatic terms instead of with data is doomed from the get-go.

Hat tip to Economist’s View