The New York Times has a profile of Steve Jobs that features the following quote: "His is not a product-design philosophy steered by committee or determined by market research. The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct."

This stands in marked contrast with the current state of the entertainment ( Read more... )

I tweeted about this earlier, but since both Twitter and Tweetdeck are being unreliable pieces of junk (trying to access the MT online editor in Chrome isn't much better; the rich-text editor doesn't even come up when I select it from the dropdown ostensibly because something refused to finish loading; the concept of a  "robust web application" ( Read more... )

Remember when I said I'd discuss the "Creator Doesn't Always Know Best" issue in another essay? This is that essay. And I'll start with the most blatant and obvious example that could ever be coined.

George Lucas.

(Put gold stars up next to your names if you saw this coming.)

It's almost mandatory, in fandom, to rag on George Lucas for taking a ( Read more... )

An interview with producer Richard Zanuck, mostly about Jaws and Alice in Wonderland, sported this incredibly telling phrase:

We had a date long before we started, a release date. The picture was actually booked in thousands of theaters long before we started, so my aim obviously was to make that date and it was very close.

Emphasis mine. The ( Read more... )

How will the news business survive? From the look of it, Dave Winer doesn't think there will be a news business . At least not a corporate one:
Enough of this How will the news business survive? mess. That's not the question. The question is How can we make news work much better given the new realities? That's a great question and the guy who ( Read more... )

Am I leery about Google getting into publishing? Yes, still.

Welcome to their newest wrinkle:

Internet Evolution - Robert McGarvey - 'Google Editions' Could Transform Publishing
Google also may want to reshape how and when we buy books, says O'Leary. What he envisions is a Google search for, say, cats and fleas. Traditionally, results would be a ( Read more... )

So what's killing good literary fiction? It's not just a surfeit of navel-gazing authors, according to this fellow, but editors too scared to rock the boat:

To encourage writers to write about big issues is all well and good, but writers in an open society are going to do that regardless. The best writers write because they have to, but the best ( Read more... )

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Roger Ebert reviews the new Bong Joon-Ho (The Host) movie Mother (word is uniformly excellent) and has some totally smack-dab-in-the-dead-center-of-the-target things to say about movies of this ilk:
[It is] an adult film, not in the sense that it contains X-rated material, but in the sense that it appeals to intelligent grown-ups. A bright 10- ( Read more... )