The factor most closely linked to support costs is the extent to which the user interface matches the way the users think and work.

– Don Norman

Mr. Bezos, moreover, has become a proponent of kaizen, which means “continuous improvement” in Japanese…

For Amazon and Mr. Bezos, that balance has always been there. Experiments were encouraged, then the results measured. This combination of loose thinking and tight analysis seems to be very productive.

NYTimes: Curious at Amazon, but Not Idle

This seems a powerful combination. Solid metrics can be eye opening, but they can also stifle innovation. Cultivating a positive, failure friendly environment is key.

Fairly spot on:

To me, driving is not an end in itself. It is just a tool for solving the problem of getting from point A to point B. The less I have to learn about how to accomplish this task the better.

My goal is not to become a car expert. My goal is to get to my destination conveniently. I don’t want to “have greater control over the experience”; I don’t want “more power”; heck, depending on where I’m going, I often prefer to take the bus, where I have no control over the experience at all!

It occurred to me as I read commenter after commenter try to convince me that my own personal priorities were incorrect that I drive a car the same way most people use a computer. They don’t want to know about the difference between ROM and RAM or how many floppy disks you can store in a 6 megabit cable modem. They just want to surf the web, send email, and look at pictures of their grandchildren. (Okay, they may want to do other stuff too, but knowing the difference between PIO and DMA is definitely not on the list.)

The New Old Thing > I Drive a Car the Way Most People Use a Computer

FastCompany has an interesting article: How much does a decent designer make?

The answer: quite a bit (if you’re good).

The New York Times used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to process 4TB of raw image TIFF data (stored in S3) into 1.1 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours at a computation cost of about $240 (not including bandwidth).

NY Times: Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun!

The project was so easy, and so cheap, that the developers ran the process a second time after noticing  a minute error. Just another example of how cloud computing is changing the game.