Borg’s Blog

I am a Star Trek junkie like so many people of my generation. This is not a bad thing though as the series provides some remarkable role models. Captain James T. Kirk and Lean Luc Picard offer great examples of leadership. No one better exemplifies living logically than Spock. My favorite Star Trek character though is Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. It is he who served me well as a role model in my personal journey through engineering leadership. Any success I may have had is due to the wonderful people who worked on my teams and this role model. I had the distinct pleasure of telling James Doohan how important his character was to my own career once.

My favorite Star Trek scene is from the feature film The Search for Spock. Scotty is on the bridge as the Enterprise NC-1701 is stolen. The Excelsior tries to pursue her but fails to engage transwarp speed. Scotty proudly remarks “the more they overtake the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain.” This is so true.

Listen to David Pogue as he talks about the current state of computer technology and the need for simplicity in design.

Why is it so many new products fail to satisfy the needs of their users? Engineers talk to other engineers too much and to real people far too infrequently. Its easy to get out of touch. The real joy of the work is in seeing the joy your work brings to your customers but who takes time and care to notice? Darn few!

Apple Corporation has had wild successes doing just what the competition didn’t anticipate. When competitors notice Apple’s success they move to emulate it but Apple has moved onto the next innovation by then. They can’t keep up. Apple’s secret is a witch’s brew of imagination and observation. They watch real people doing what comes naturally to them. Voodoo has brought us wildly colored computers because someone noticed people decorating their computers to distinguish them from every other computer in their environments. Black magic brought the iPod because Apple engineers noticed so many people were jogging with a walkman strapped to them. Again and again Apple innovates while the pack emulates.

That’s not the only secret of Apple’s success. The other is keeping design simple. David Pogue gave some excellent examples of that in his talk.

And like Spock says -

Do “live long and prosper.”

The iTunes store has been a great resource for educational pods and vods for sometime. I’ve been incorporating their podcasts in all of my Blackboard courses for some time now. The biggest problem I’ve had it navigating around the podcasts to find material which made the process more time consuming than it needed to be. However, the rewards far outweighed the pain.

Thanks to Steve Jobs and his friends I can now sit more comfortably because he has made the iTunes store more user-friendly by adding two new features.

The first is a back-button like then one on your web browser. It works that same way too so you won’t need any training on this feature. It may not seem like a big deal but I spend a lot of time at the iTunes store and it’s more than worth its weight in gold.

The more exciting new feature is iTunes U! Apple has recognized how significant their podcasts are to the education community and so they’ve reorganized the store to make shopping easier for educators. Thank you Apple!  

Click here to check out the iTunes U online announcement.