2015-03-01

Profiles of Jony Ive and Satya Nadella

By coincidence I recently read a pair of very good, meaty, and surprisingly complimentary articles.  The first, a 19-page article in the Feb. 23 / Mar 2. issue (the 90th anniversary issue!) of The New Yorker magazine, is about Jony Ive - the well-known Apple designer.  Not just about the man himself, but his recent involvement with Apple Watch and the tantalizing hints of an Apple self-driving car, his friendship with Steve Jobs and Lauren Powell Jobs and a behind-the-scenes look at Ive's design studios at Apple.  Plenty has been written before about Jony Ive, but this was one of the most accessible and interesting profiles I've read, and I highly recommend it.

The other article, in the February issue of Wired magazine, is about Satya Nadella (who? I know, right?), Microsoft's new CEO, and the corporate culture changes he's bringing to the company.  Things like, adopting open source code (!) and reaching out to collaborate - not acquire, necessarily - promising start-up companies.  He's also convinced the old boys in Redmond to pursue cloud services, after Microsoft fumbled the meteoritic rise of mobile computing.  Microsoft's big new thing now is Project HoloLens, and it sounds like it may bring a true paradigm shift in functional and comfortable 3-D personal technology.  What interested me about the article wasn't Project HoloLens so much but the switch in Microsoft's approach to their products - less obsession with dominance and bludgeoning, and more on the user experience.  We'll see how that goes.

Reading these two articles has newly re-kindled my curiosity for what's to come next in the realm of personal technology.  To infinity, and beyond?

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