Nosce te ipsum

Apple's close-knit, in-house design and development of its products are two of the critical secrets to the company's success, Peter Burrows writes in an online column for BusinessWeek.

In a day and age where companies outsource everything they can in the name of cost cutting, Apple's approach bucks that trend and helps the company deliver in areas that competitors cannot. Apple CEO Steve Jobs "argues that the cost-savings aren't worth what you give up in terms of teamwork, communication, and the ability to get groups of people working together to bring a new idea to life," Burrows wrote. The company's vertical integration--controlling virtually all of both hardware and software design--also gives it a leg up in delivering innovative products that have consistently set the tone of the entire industry.

Added design guru Donald Norman, who left the company in 1997 around the time that Jobs returned, "If you follow my [guidelines], it will guarantee good design. But Steve Jobs doesn't want good design. He wants great design, and my method will never give you that. That takes a rare leader, who can bring both the cohesion and commitment and style. And Steve has it."

So as part of my new years resolution to get more active in my local area Macintosh Users Group - I attended our monthly meeting last night for the Colorado Macintosh Users Group, held in Boulder Colorado at the The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) - the facility is totally amazing - located literally near the top of a mountain overlooking Boulder.

There was probably around 50 people there last night, the audience ranged from a senior citizen who just purchased her first Mac to actual programmers from Apple and a little bit everything in between. I'm excited about getting to know the group - they've really got their act together. They even webcast their monthly meetings for those who can't make it.

Thanks go out to my friend an co-Apple Geek Rob Randtoul over at Plasma Design - home of greatest high resolution backgrounds for big screens for his kind words about yours truly:

"....I would also like to formally thank my good friend Jeff Powell over at Nosce te ipsum for loaning me his considerably scripting talents and for helping me make numerous improvements to the members area."

Glad that I could be help Rob. He's now got a slew of open-source goodness powering the website on the server side.

If you are not familiar with Plasma Design, they offer a nice variety of beautiful wallpapers for extremely high resolution monitors such as the new 30" Apple Cinema display that Rob and I are both fortunate enough to get to use on a daily basis.

Every digital master piece that rolls out of Rob's studio in England is 100% made on Macintosh and when he's not busy realizing his next creative vision - Rob's busy exposing the hapless masses of Windows users in his region to the virtues of Macintosh. It's just too bad that Apple doesn't have some sort of Affiliate program. We could probably put our kids through college just on the commissions! - Dream on.

I found this to be inspiring. Imagine that, a company that's actually successfuly by listening to the needs of their customers, recommending very cost effective solutions and then sticking around to support them - what an idea!

Con Zymaris runs Cybersource, an IT service company in Melbourne, Australia. Cybersource started as a one-man Unix shop in 1991 and has gradually evolved into a decent-sized Linux/FOSS-based business that serves a client base Zymaris says is now 20% government, 20% corporate, and 60% small/medium-sized businesses

...and while we're on the topic Linux, I just finished listening the 3/9/2005 episode of the Linux Link Tech Show which featured a decent interview with Doc Searls of Clue Train fame. While the Clue Train is a few years old now, if you are not familiar with it - you should be. Agree or disagree - you really should open your mind enough to let some new ideas seep in. Ironically, in my own experience, the people that I've ever really heard complain about about the ideas outlined in the Clue Train are the kinds of folks who cry foul at all kinds of other things the more progressively minded folks seem to accept as common sense.

Today's iPodder downloads brought in some great listening. Thank God for Doug Kaye over at IT Conversations for doing what must be just a huge amount of work in bring us all of these great shows. On the plate this morning was a great presentation by David Pogue from the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference.

Doug's got a huge library of shows that he's produced over the years so give IT Conversations a look - it might just turn out to be your next favorite podcast.

A few words from the Pogue presentation:

...It took 17 years to go from System 1.0 to Mac OS X[sigma] from 128K of memory to 128 megs[sigma] from a 400K disks to 40 gigabytes. What will the Mac look like in another 17 years?

In this half-crazy, half-serious presentation, best-selling Mac author and New York Times columnist David Pogue takes a funny, whirlwind look back at Apple[base ']s greatest (and dimmest) moments[sigma] pauses to analyze the promise and perils of Mac OS X[sigma]and then fast-forwards to 2020 to imagine what Apple[~]and Microsoft[~]might bring us on the road to Mac OS XX.