Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a culture difference. I as a Brit absolutely detest when sales staff are pushy and forcing their way into your purchase decisions. This is generally highly frowned upon in UK culture and is not something the majority like. I do however agree on some of your other points, such as poor selection and useless staff.
Probably a European thing because Belgians don't like pushy sales staff either.
Scott Forstall leaves Apple
291–300 of 335 posts
Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple retail head is one of the most desirable executive positions on the planet. Why couldn't they recruit a true superstar? I think the problem is identifying the superstar in the first place. Quite frankly, there is no company whose retail comes close to Apple, and so there isn't anyone who has a track record of being able to do the SVP Retail job. In addition, the Apple SVP Retail job is different from head of…
> I think the problem is identifying the superstar in the first place. I'd look towards fashion - for example the Japanese clothing store Uniqlo [1]. Their stores are quite similar to Apple's in terms of layout and space, the way that they encourage you to come in and look around, and they always have helpful service on hand. The problem is Tadashi Yanai [2] is too rich and successful to leave his current post. I see…
Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Assuming you're American) what specifically makes retail in the US so much better?
Aside from prices and selection (for some reason the number in USD is equal to the number in GBP for almost everything, even when GBP is 1.6-2.2x the USD), it's size and layout of stores and staffing. There were two main kinds of stores -- pale imitations of Best Buy, Circuit City, and Microcenter (out in the suburbs/small towns) (which is ironic since those businesses have had serious problems in the US market now,…
Completely irrelevant to the discussion
Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Skeuomorphing physical objects designed by Rams is still skeuomorphing.
Skeuomorphic design is rarely as little design as possible which is what makes the podcast design so iconic... er.. ironic.
Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple
#295I'm not an Apple insider. Pushing Google Maps away seems to me like a political decision reserved for someone like Cook, not Forstall. If Cook shoved Google out and tasked Forstall with the impossible task of developing a better maps offering in what amounts to a year, this would be a sign that upper management jumped the shark, not Forstall himself.
Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple
#296Most interesting part: John Browett is leaving Apple So his views on retail really did not fit Apple after all.
Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
(No internal knowledge) I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt. They had some kind of problem with Google Maps, and wanted to build their own capability, which was never going to be easy. He might have been fired if he cheated, by creating a well curated Valley dataset to prove to the other execs what a gr…
If he did get fired over maps, it wasn't because mapping is hard, or that the app didn't deliver. It would be because he over promised and under delivered. Sure, it was embarrassing to Apple to release a half-assed Maps app, but even more so to tout it just a few weeks earlier as being soooo good.
Was he pushed to do Maps, and he told everyone it was going to be a nightmare, and then made the best of a bad situation?
Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
ARM on desktop, perhaps? No one has ever designed a desktop-class chip with ARM architecture, so that's one 'ambitious' direction one could take.
Hahahaha. So you've never heard about what the ARM was originally designed for? http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/A500.html I guess that was a while ago! And it certainly was desktop-class. It beat the pants off a 12 MHz 286.
Re: Scott Forstall leaves Apple
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know when it has been introduced, or even if it was always there and I didn't notice, but iBooks also supports continuous vertical scrolling and it IS much faster than looking at an animation that shows a page turn or a slide. The default mode, "page turn" doesn't make any sense. When I scroll through an ebook through the continuous scrolling, the text appears INSTANTLY, without a perceptible delay and since…
This is a case where I recognize the absurdity of pages in e-books, and yet I still like to have them. Pages give you a sense of progress through the book, and act as a proxy for time spent. They're not necessary as part of the presentation of information, or even telling a story, but I do like having them there. Maybe this is one example of skueomorphism done right, at least from my point of view. An anachronism tha…
Ala swipe to unlock, or elastic scroll-ending. Use affordances, rather than limiting real world analogies.