From God's Twitter account, a new set of ten commandments:

1 Laugh.
2 Read.
3 Say please.
4 Floss.
5 Doubt.
6 Exercise.
7 Learn.
8 Don't hate.
9 Cut the bullshit.
10 Chill.

Amen.

Tags: listsreligion

I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say this is one you don’t want to miss.

A few weeks ago, I was scouting office spaces during a particularly ugly snowstorm, and found myself heading to an option located at 220 East 42nd Street.

It wasn’t until I’d parked my car and was walking through the doors that I looked up and realized I was going into the Daily News building…

Home to one of the greatest lobbies in New York City:

In 1927, the Daily News, then the nation’s largest newspaper, began building its new headquarters on 42nd Street. While the building itself was considered an exercise in minimalism, the owners allowed architect Raymond Hood a whopping $150,000 to be spent on the lobby. The result was an art deco masterpiece, centered around a 12-foot rotating globe, as seen in this picture from 1931:

Here’s it is ten years later in a 1941 postcard…

…later still in 1958, decked out for the holidays…

…and yet again in 1978, when it was featured in Richard Donner’s Superman:

And here it is today, miraculously still turning unchanged over 80 years after it was built. As far as I’m concerned, this is as good as it gets.

The Daily News globe is 12 feet in diameter and weighs approximately 4,000 pounds. It makes a full rotation every ten minutes, moving 144 times faster than the actual planet.

The design of the globe is a perfect period piece of its era, and part of the fun is in examining what was once a cutting edge example of world geography in the early 1930s:

Of course, much of the map is now dated. For example, the Spanish Sahara no longer exists…

…and you’d be hard-pressed to find any modern map delineating an area as Manchuria:

But it gets even better. Above the globe, an enormous rotunda made of faceted black glass extends upward, intended to depict outer space:

Here it is rising up over the globe…

…leading to a gorgeous art deco depiction of the sun overhead:

If you look very closely, you’ll see an interesting solar motif etched into the space around the light:

Originally, this area was walled off from the rest of the lobby, giving the space more of a science museum-like feel.

These walls were removed during a renovation in the early 1960s, which significantly opened up the space:

Surrounding the globe is an enormous compass rose, which rose…

…which not only serves as a directional guide…

…but also features distance in miles to various world destinations:

This motif extends far beyond the globe to the bank of elevators around the corner…

…where directional lines continue to tell you how far it is to, say, Queen Maud Land, Antarctica (only 8,475 3,475 miles away!):

The globe is illuminated from below by several rings of lights…

…leading down a mirrored reflection at its base:

A close-up of the mirror:

Several glass panels, added during the renovation, panels give proportional comparisons of the globe to the universe, using New York City geography as a reference point:

Part of the fun is in closely examining the globe itself, which was last updated in 1967 – hence the existence of, say, East and West Germany:

I love the style and design of the map, which feels totally emblematic of its particular period of cartography. The Spanish Sahara no longer exists…

…and you’d be hard-pressed to find any modern map delineating an area as Manchuria:

On the wall behind the globe are a number of meteorological gauges…

…which offer up-to-the-minute readouts of current New York City weather:

It’s best to go on a particularly blustery day, when both the wind direction meter…

…and wind velocity meter will be whipping around like crazy:

Also on display in the lobby is this gorgeous time zone clock, which features New York City time in the center….

…surrounded by 16 miniature clock faces depicting time throughout the world:

Finally, as you exit the building, be sure to look up…

…where you’ll see a gorgeous period clock overhead, one of the last art deco bits not removed during the renoation: overhead:

I scout a lot of lobbies for my job, and most of them look like this:

The lobby of the Daily News building was created in a time when architecture had a meaning beyond nuanced minimalism. It’s exciting. It’s audacious. It literally posits 220 West 42nd Street as at the center of the world. globe.

And best of all, walking through the doors is like traveling back in time to the 1930s.

Want to visit? Just go right in.

-SCOUT

walk right into the lobby.

-SCOUT

In broad strokes, here is my view of Microsoft’s history.

In the beginning, Bill Gates stated the company’s goal: “A computer on every desk and in every home.” That was crazy. The PC revolution was well underway, but the grand total of PCs sold when Gates stated that mantra was, by today’s standards, effectively zero. PCs were for hobbyists. Everyone involved knew they were on to something, but Gates realized, at the outset, that they were on to onto something huge. The industry was measuring sales in the thousands, but Gates was already thinking about billions. Here’s Gates, in an interview from 2010:

Paul Allen and I had used that phrase even before we wrote the BASIC for Microsoft.

We actually talked about it in an article in — I think 1977 was the first time it appears in print — where we say, “a computer on every desk and in every home…” and actually we said, “…running Microsoft software.” If we were just talking about the vision, we’d leave those last three words out. If we were talking an internal company discussion, we’d put those words in. It’s very hard to recall how crazy and wild that was, you know, “on every desk and in every home.” At the time, you have people who are very smart saying, “Why would somebody need a computer?” Even Ken Olsen, who had run this company Digital Equipment, who made the computer I grew up with, and that we admired both him and his company immensely, was saying that this seemed kind of a silly idea that people would want to have a computer.

He was right. And not only did the first part of the phrase come true, the last three words — “… running Microsoft software” — did too. From the mid-’90s and for the next decade, there was, effectively, a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software. At least 95 percent of them were running the Windows operating system, and among the rest, most were Macs running Internet Explorer and probably Microsoft Office too.

Windows was almost everywhere, and Microsoft was everywhere.

Peak Microsoft was unfathomably pervasive. They won so thoroughly that Steve Jobs conceded that they’d won, telling Wired in February 1996:

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.”

Steve Fucking Jobs said that. He was exactly right. And who knows where we’d be today if Jobs and NeXT Next had not been reunified with Apple the next year.

“A computer on every desk and in every home” was incredible foresight for 1977. It carried Microsoft for 25 years of growth. But once that goal was achieved, I don’t think they knew where to go. They were like the dog that caught the car. They spent a lot of time and energy on TV. Not just with Xbox, which is alive and well today (albeit not a significant source of income), but with other ideas that did not pan out, like “media center PCs” and the joint ownership of “MSNBC”, which was originally imagined as a sort of cable news network, website, dessert topping, dessert, and floor wax rolled into one.

What they missed was the next step from every desk and home: a computer in every pocket. It’s worse than that, though. They saw it coming, and they tried. Pocket PC, Windows CE, Windows Mobile — swings and misses at the next big thing. They weren’t even close, and damningly, Steve Ballmer didn’t even seem to realize it. That’s what’s so damning about that video of him laughing at the original iPhone. Whenever I dredge up that video, drudge that video up, a handful of defenders will write and tell me it’s unfair to mock him for his reaction, that he was actually right — that the original iPhone was too expensive. But what should have scared Microsoft wasn’t what the iPhone was in 2007, it was what the iPhone clearly was going to be in 2008, 2009, 2010. Prices come down, chips get faster. Software evolves. Apple had unveiled to the world a personal computer that fit in your pocket. That was amazing. That the original iPhone left much room for improvement is simply the way revolutionary products always get their start.

Microsoft’s institutional lack of taste had finally come to bite them in their ass. While Ballmer laughed at the iPhone and presumably walked around with a Windows Mobile piece of junk in his pocket, Larry Page and Sergei Brin carried iPhones. Google never laughed at the iPhone; it made money from it by providing web search and maps. Google quickly became, and remains to this day, a leading developer of iOS apps. And it was Google that was fast to follow the iPhone with Android, slurping up the commodity-market crumbs that Apple, focused as ever on the quality-minded high end of the market, eschewed. I don’t think it was ever within Microsoft’s DNA to produce the iPhone, but what Android became — the successful fast follower — could have been theirs if they’d recognized the opportunity faster. The Microsoft of 1984, a decade away from industry dominance, wrote software for the original Mac, and learned from it. When Bill Gates first saw a Mac, he didn’t laugh — he wanted to know how it worked, right down to specific details, like the smooth animation of its mouse cursor.

No company today has reach or influence anything like what Microsoft had during the golden era of the PC. Not Apple, not Google, and not Microsoft itself. I don’t think Ballmer ever came to grips with that. Ballmer’s view of the company solidified when it dominated the entire industry, and he never adjusted.

Hence Windows 8. One OS for all PCs, traditional and tablet alike, because that’s the only way for Windows to run almost all of them, and Windows running almost all PCs is the way things ought to be. Rather than accept a world where Windows persisted as merely one of several massively popular personal computing platforms, and focus on making Windows as it was better for people who want to use desktop and notebook PCs, Microsoft forged ahead with a design that displeased traditional PC users and did little to gain itself a foothold in the burgeoning tablet market. It was easy to see. Windows 8’s design wasn’t what was best for any particular device, but instead what seemed best for Ballmer’s “Windows everywhere” vision of the industry and Microsoft’s rightful place atop it.

Horace Dediu captures the change in the industry wrought by iOS and Android in this succinct (and, as usual, well-illustrated) piece from a few months ago, writing:

If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%.

That’s a startling change, and Ballmer never seemed to accept it. Windows 8 wasn’t designed to adjust to the new world; it was designed to turn back the clock to the old one.

---

I think it’s a very good sign that Satya Nadella comes from Microsoft’s server group. As my colleague Brent Simmons wrote today:

Creating services for iOS apps doesn’t sound at all like the Microsoft I used to know. Using Node.js and JavaScript doesn’t sound like that Microsoft. The old Microsoft would create services for their OSes only and you’d have to use Visual Studio.

There’s still a lot of the old Microsoft there, the Windows, Office, Exchange, and Sharepoint (WOES) company. It’s most of the company by far, surely. (I just made up the acronym WOES. It fits.)

But in the Azure group, at least, there’s recognition that Microsoft can’t survive on lock-in, that those days are in the past.

Even if you don’t choose to use Microsoft’s cloud services, I hope you can agree on two things: that competition is good, and that Azure’s support-everything policy is the best direction for the future of the company.

In short, Nadella’s Server division is the one part of Microsoft that seems designed for, and part of, the post-iOS, post-Android state of the industry. A division pushing toward the future, not the past.

Successful companies tend to be true to themselves. The old Microsoft’s Windows and Office everywhere, on every device strategy was insanely ambitious, but also true to their culture. Apple has grown to eclipse Microsoft in financial size, but never set its sights on Microsoft-ian market share. share size. Google is unfocused at the edges, but it’s never tried to act like any company other than Google. Google makes operating systems and office applications, but in a decidedly Google-y way. The last thing Microsoft should do is attempt to be like Apple or Google.

Cloud computing is one potential path forward. The cloud is nascent, like the PC industry of 1980. In 30 years we’ll look back at our networked infrastructure of today and laugh, wondering how we got a damn thing done. The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. Apple and Google each have glaring (and glaringly different) holes among that list of adjectives.

Satya Nadella needs to find Microsoft’s new “a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software”. Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.

TweetA Happy and Healthy Jersey Cow at the P.A. Bowman Farmstead Mike Haigwood is currently the manager of  the P.A. Bowen Farmstead a mixed species dairy operation run by Sally Fallon.  Sally Fallon (who will be on TSP next week)  is the co-founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation along with nutritionist Mary G. Enig Mike grew up in rural Iowa three generations removed from Agriculture. He had an average childhood but always loved the outdoors.  Fast forward, he graduated 1986, tried college but didn’t like it, quit after one semester then started working. Mike then got a chance to work for a guy who started his own traditional lawn care business as a partner in the company, while short lived it started him down a new path. Mike then started school at Penn State University in 1990, got married and had a son and then graduated in 1992 with a Bachelor in Horticulture. He then moved to Mosurris working in the Kansas City area as a Landscape Designer for a Garden Center Chain. With the birth of his daugher and new concerns for nutrition his awakening began.  So in 1995 they moved back to Iowa started their own businesses lawn care, garden produce but ended up closing the business in 97.  In this short time Mike learned a lot about marketing, or the lack of it! At this point he started homesteading, homeschooling, and following the practices in the book Nourishing Traditions (by Sally Fallon) and began interning in the world of agriculture.  In time that led to “bootlegging raw milk” from their own farm.  While successful they grew tired of the dogma around conventioinal agriculture still present in the Midwest. So in 2009 they decided to move east and pursue alternative farming practices. He and his wife (Barb) met Sally Fallon at a conference in 2010 and asked if she knew anyone that could use a management team for their farm.  Her response was, “send me your resume” and now today the whole family is working on Sally’s Farm P.A. Bowen Farmstead. Resources for today’s show… Members Support Brigade Join Our Forum Members Support Brigade 13Skills.com Join Our Forum Walking To Freedom Get TSP Silver TSP Gear The Berkey Guy – (sponsor of the day) JM Bullion – (sponsor of the day) P.A. Bowen Farmstead P.A. Bowen on Youtube P.A. Bowen on Facebook Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK and you might hear yourself on the air.



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