Steve Jobs, speaking at the D8 conference, explains how Apple chooses the technologies to include in their products:

Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources of everybody in the world, and the way we’ve succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride really carefully – technically. We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future, and that are headed up, and, you know, different pieces of technology kind of go in cycles. They have their springs and summers, and autumns, and then they, you know, go to the graveyard of technology. And, so we try to pick the things that are in their springs.

And, if you choose wisely, you can save yourself an enormous amount of work vs. trying to do everything. And you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform, rather then just okay because you’re spreading yourself too thin.

Sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they’e going to be the right horses to ride going forward, and Flash looks like a technology that had its day but is really waning, and HTML5 looks like the technology that’s really on the ascendancy right now.

Video: Steve Jobs Talks About Flash (D8)

Later in the interview, when asked how he’d respond if someone said the iPad was missing something by not including Flash, Jobs talked about products as “packages of emphasis”:

Things are packages of emphasis. Some things are emphasized in a product; some things are not done as well in a product. Some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product. And so different people make different choices, and if the market tells us we’re making the wrong choices, we listen to the market. We’re just people running this company. We’re trying to make great products for people, and so, we have at least the courage of our convictions to say, “We don’t think this is part of what makes a great product. We’re gonna leave it out.”

Some people are gonna not like that. They’re going to call us names. It’s not going to be in certain companies’ vested interest that we do that, but we’re gonna take the heat ’cause we want to make the best products in the world for customers. We’re gonna instead focus our energy on these technologies, which we think are in their ascendancy, and we think they’re gonna be the right technologies for customers, and, you know what, they’re paying us to make those choices. That’s what a lot of customers pay us to do – is to try to make the best products we can, and if we succeed, they’ll buy ‘em. And if we don’t, they won’t. And it’ll all work itself out!

[Audience Applause]

The full video is available on iTunes. There is so much good information in this interview, you won’t be able to multitask while listening. Give this one your full attention. It’s worth it.

Apple’s announcement of a new Apple TV device with 99¢ TV episode rentals could have an impact on the cable TV industry much like the impact that 99¢ songs had on the recording industry.

To understand this, lets’s start with a quick history lesson on music sales. Some bands produce true albums, where the entire recording is meant to be listened to as a unit. Other musical acts record songs, but don’t necessarily produce albums. When music sales were dominated by the CD, record labels tried to make every collection of songs into an album, and they would promote a few “singles” – songs meant to top the industry charts and market an artist. The rest of the disc would be filled with a hit-or-miss assortment of songs that might be good, but all too often sounded like work in progress. In order to get the hit singles, one had to buy the whole disc, so it sold like an album, but wasn’t a true album in the sense of the art form.

When Apple introduced the iTunes store with songs priced at 99¢, it changed the “single” part of the music landscape, by allowing consumers to buy only the songs they wanted. The Album part of the music landscape still works in much the same way: artists who are known for producing Albums still do so, and fans still buy entire albums. According to a 2003 press release from Apple, announcing the sale of over 1 million songs in the iTunes Store’s first week:

Over half of the songs were purchased as albums, dispelling concerns that selling music on a per-track basis will destroy album sales. In addition, over half of the 200,000 songs offered on the iTunes Music Store were purchased at least once, demonstrating the breadth of musical tastes served by Apple’s groundbreaking online store.

What the iTunes Store did was allow consumers who want just a single song to get it without all the added filler music that used to come on CDs, without killing sales of true albums. It essentially added a new way to reach consumers with a particular type of buying pattern, and build a long-term relationship with them by offering a growing library of content to suit their interests.

Why can’t we subscribe to individual cable channels? This is the question people have been asking about TV for years, because a cable subscription is analogous to the CD: you have to buy the entire package in order to get the content you want. Individual TV episode rentals available at 99¢ might be the beginning of an answer to that question. It places greater onus on TV producers to make shows people will deem worthy of a 99¢ rental, but it also frees shows from the need to be massive hits on the primetime schedule in order to stay in production. A show that’s not a ratings hit, but is loved by its audience, could conceivably have a greater shot at sticking around as long as episode rentals sustain it.

The rental model also poses a parallel marketing challenge to networks (I’m not assuming the primetime schedule goes away anytime soon). Right now, new TV shows are scheduled before or after hit shows in order to build audience, but this won’t work in the rental model, where people explicitly choose the episodes they want to rent. One way networks could handle this is to bundle a free episode of a new show with the 99¢ episode rental of an existing hit show.

Rentals also present an opportunity to entice an audience to stick around for the season. A full-season of episodes could conceivably be offered as a discounted iTunes Season Pass for rent. (Several networks currently offer a Season Pass whereby consumers can purchase an entire season of a TV show at a discount.) For example, rent a 10-episode season for $7.99 or a 20-episode season for $16.99. At those prices, rentals are a close match to DVD prices, but with the advantage of no hardware, packaging, and shipping costs.

In addition to the news about rentals, the new Apple TV got a significant hardware update. It is one-quarter the size of its predecessor, and comes with a new processor. The Intel Pentium M processor used in the previous Apple TV has been replaced with the same A4 processor used in the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. This indicates that Apple is deepening its commitment to developing its own, in-house processors. It may also mean that the new Apple TV is running a version of iOS, the operating system now running on the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and (in a modified version) on the iPod nano.

This sentence about Bloomberg’s purpose exudes clarity and confidence. No “mission statement” jargon gets in the way of what it’s there to convey. It’s ambitious, and makes you want to be part of the action.

Guy Creese, Research VP at Gartner, on using his iPad during a family vacation:

The interesting thing is that from a feature point-of-view I could have done the same thing with a 3G notebook. However, it’s the usability of the iPad (instant on, weighs very little, tablet interface, custom built tablet apps) that makes all the difference. What would have been a laborious, “Let me wait three minutes while my laptop boots up and then I’ll start typing” process turned into, “Let me open up my electronic book and then I’ll just do a little pointing and clicking.”

In July, I linked to an article about an experiment conducted at IBM to measure the impact of an editor on content. That study found a quantifiable improvement: a 30% increase in reader response to content that had been edited versus raw content.

Besides overseeing and improving the quality of content, editors are also responsible for keeping the trains running, so to speak. In Real Editors Ship, Paul Ford explains, with examples, why projects need editors:

I recently left zineland and did a bunch of freelance work and hooboy do people not know how to ship. A three-year project that yielded only 90-second page load; or $1.5 million down the drain with only a few microsites to show. And I’ve started to find myself going, God, these projects need editors. Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued. These are people who are good at process. They think about calendars, schedules, checklists, and get freaked out when schedules slip. Their jobs are to aggregate information, parse it, restructure it, and make sure it meets standards. They are basically QA for language and meaning.

Ford explains what goes into the daily job of “shipping” All Things Considered, NPR’s flagship news program:

I remember when I used to write for All Things Considered, my editor there sent me a few pictures from the whiteboard they used to put together the show. It changed constantly throughout the day; they kept a webcam trained on it (this was a few years ago; maybe they use websockets and node.js now). There were an insane number of variables that went into creating that big hunk of nightly audio: Recordings created months ago or two hours ago; people working together in a dozen time zones; contracts, permissions, fact-checking. It had to fit together technically; it had to be transmitted efficiently at a high bitrate to maintain quality (but may be sped up or slowed down to the limits of Fourier transforms); it had to be edited to match certain durations; it had to have a certain consistency and flow; and so on. It requires the human equivalent of map-reduce to manage it. And they—meaning editors and producers—managed a release every night, with 12 million users.

Justin Paterno offers a reader’s perspective on getting timely information from knowledgeable sources, that helps explain why magazine sales face significant challenges from the Internet:

For many years, Inc. Magazine was the place to go for information and articles for entrepreneurs and those working in early-stage companies.   As someone working in the early-stage web space, each month I would look forward to the next issue and spend the day reading it cover-to-cover. Then everything changed.  Many VC’s and entrepreneurs began popping up with their own blogs.  Aggregators/Curators like Hacker News and Silicon Alley Insider popped up providing people with fast and wide distribution, and all of a sudden I didn’t have to wait each month to get this information from Inc.

In his advice to journalism students, Robert Niles says the Internet has transformed reporting to a point where they should be thinking about their published work online as a journalism career already begun:

Immediate access to a global publishing medium allows any source to become a breaking news reporter, if only for just a moment. You’re going to journalism school to help you improve the journalism career you’ve already begun, not to launch it.

He says building an audience now is the best way to differentiate yourself when looking for jobs. From the perspective of an editor making a hiring decision:

Do you take the one with the great clips and enthusiastic recommendations? Or the one with the great clips, enthusiastic recommendations, and the 5,000 daily unique visitors to her video blog?

Given that traffic becomes your traffic once you hire her, you take the second student. Every single time. So be that second student. Start building your audience now.

Jonathan Harris thinks the Internet is in the midst of a crisis:

The Internet is causing mass homogenization of human identity, making us all look the same. We use the same tools and social networks, fitting into the same templates, designed by companies to maximize page views and profits.

Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.

Although Harris argues his point well, I don’t think there’s a crisis. There are parts of the Internet that feel overly commercialized – the equivalent of walking through Times Square. But if you go to a different neighborhood in New York, you’re more likely to find yourself among a collection of smaller, independent bars, restaurants, stores, and cafes that pay close attention to the quality of their experiences.

Likewise, the best experiences on the Internet come from websites built by people who, day after day, publish the best pieces of knowledge they can either gather or create. Those sites are worth visiting every day, because they push the limits of the web with original designs, truly interesting content, and an atmosphere that reflects their editors’ rigorous attention to detail. Here are a few such sites: A List Apart, Bobulate, Brand New, Daring Fireball, ideasonideas, kottke.org, Office of Frank Chimero, swissmiss, and Work+Place.

John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, recently linked to an article in which Andrew Orlowski explains why the commoditized, cast-a-wide-net approach that has produced a dizzying array of Android-based mobile devices can’t compete with the product culture of focused devices like the iPhone and Blackberry:

The lucrative end of the mobile device market is a product culture, and it pays to put more of your wood behind one arrow, or just a few arrows; the more you make, the less distinctive each one is.

The same principle applies to the websites that are distinctive because their authors combine content and packaging into a beautiful product that others aspire to recreate. Mega-sites like Facebook, Yahoo!, CNN, and many others designed to keep you moving through content like merchandise racks in a department store will never define the web, because they don’t push it forward. They have the biggest, brightest signs, but can’t match the experience and quality of sites that are the product of craftsmanship and dedication.

From a 2006 BusinessWeek article about Amazon’s investment in a powerful network of data centers to become a cloud-computing service provider:

The result was that Amazon made it much faster and easier to add new Web site features. Small, fast-moving groups of five to eight Amazon employees now could go hog wild with new ideas, such as customer discussion boards on each product page and software to play music and videos on the site. Since then these “two-pizza teams,” which Bezos calls them because each team can be fed with two large pies, have become Amazon’s prime innovation engines. “There’s a huge value in this small, nimble team approach,” says tech consultant and author John Hagel III. “But you can’t do that without this kind of computer architecture.”

Morten Albæk, Senior Vice President of Group Marketing & Customer Insight at Danish wind-energy firm Vestas:

Today, we serve two and only two masters: revenue and reputation. The trick is to position your brand and build your reputation in the sweet spot between capitalism and humanism.