Via Google Operating System, the creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, on product development:

So what’s the right attitude? Humility. It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. (…) What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren’t. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery.

Check out what the internet looked like in 1996.

In 1995 I had a summer job working for an early ISP in New Zealand. We had banks of 28.8k modems which shared a 64kbps connection managed by a Sun workstation. The company only had four people including me and I was the customer support department. Getting connected in those days was difficult for most people so I used to go to each new customer’s house or business and configure their system, and explain a few things. Most people’s PCs didn’t have a modem so the first step was to install one, and then install copies of Netscape for the web and Eudora for email. We charged by the megabyte. I remember that people had trouble grasping the concept of the “back” and “forwards” buttons. They didn’t understand that you can’t go back until you’ve visited at least one prior page, and you can’t go forward until you’ve gone back. I also once trained a bunch of Toshiba New Zealand executives about how to use email and the web.

Good times …

I want one of these and I want it now … 3D virtual desktop using head tracking. Keep watching past the geeky explanations towards the end where he gives a demo of the thing working, it’s amazing.

(HT: FSJ).

When I was a kid I thought Etch a Sketch was cool. One of these whiteboards would be much cooler:

I thought it would never happen. I’ve been using computers since I was a baby. My first spoken words were “syntax error”. My kindergarten teacher scolded me for writing “goto” instead of “go to”. I first used the Internet on Windows 3.1 when you had to pay for a copy of the Netscape browser. I remember when tables were first introduced to HTML, wow, what a revolution that was for web designers.

Anyway … I thought I was on top of all this tech stuff, and then I found this site. It’s another social networking site, or something, but the thing is, I can’t quite understand it, and the interface makes me dizzy. It’s really happening — I’m getting old and falling behind the tech curve. I used to think that my kids would never tease me for not being able to use whatever new gadget came out in 2013 like I teased my father in 1983 for not being able to program the VCR. But it seems it’s really going to happen, something really does change when you hit 30.