One thing that strikes me about Chrome OS and Litl is that neither bother trying to do everything Windows or Mac OS X can do. Not even close. I don’t think either even bothers trying to serve as one’s primary computer.

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So of course there’s some degree of herd mentality in every industry. But I think it’s more pronounced, to a pathological degree, in the PC hardware industry. It was at the root of long-standing punditry holding that Apple (AAPL) should license the Mac OS to other PC makers, or that Apple should dump Mac OS and make Windows PCs.

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John Plunkett, reporting for the Guardian last week, in a story titled “Financial Times Editor Says Most News Websites Will Charge Within a Year”:

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations.

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This whole Jobs liver transplant story really hits the sweet spot for two of my obsessions: Apple (AAPL) and journalism. It’s the journalism angle that I find the most intriguing.

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“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
– John Gall

If there’s a formula to Apple’s (AAPL) success over the past 10 years, that’s it. Start with something simple and build it, grow it, improve it, steadily over time. Evolve it.

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Scenario: You have an idea for something, start a new document in an appropriate app, and then work for hours before realizing you haven’t yet saved the document? Typically, it’s a chuckle–ha, guess I should save this thing. Occasionally, it’s a disaster, because you only realize you hadn’t yet saved your work when the app crashes or the power goes out.

I’ve had the disastrous version happen a few times over the years. What strikes me as odd, though, is that I still catch myself doing it occasionally. I call it “Untitled Document Syndrome,” because when I catch myself doing it, it’s almost always with a new untitled document window, not an existing file with unsaved changes. All subsequent saves after the first one require nothing more than a quick Command-S.

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Anyone involved in Mac software development is familiar with arguments over whether a particular app is “Mac-like.” In the early days of the Mac–the first decade or so–the entire Mac community was largely in agreement about just what this meant. To be un-Mac-like was to be ignorant of the fundamental concepts and norms of the Mac OS. It was something you could spot in an instant–software designed by engineers who just did not get it.

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If I could travel back 20 years and show my then 15-year-old self just one thing the future of today, it would be the iPhone. It is our flying car. Star Trek-style wireless long-distance voice communicator. The content of every major newspaper and magazine in the world. An encyclopedia. Video games. TV. Etc.

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Monday’s message is pretty simple: Apple is going for iPhone market share in a big, big way. The iPhone 3G seemingly only has two major hardware additions: 3G networking and GPS. The battery, I suspect, might be stronger (and, given the shape of the back of the iPhone 3G, perhaps a stronger but bigger battery. No front-facing camera. No video from the rear camera. Instead of building a better $400 iPhone, they worked on halving the price of last year’s phone.

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Along the lines of can’t-really-be-answered-but- gosh-they’re-fun-to-ponder questions like, say, “Who’d win in a fight, Batman or Spider-Man?” or “Star Destroyer vs. U.S.S. Enterprise?” here’s one regarding the iPhone: What historical Mac is a current iPhone most analogous to, spec-wise? I.E., complete this sentence: “An iPhone is like having a tiny ____ in your pocket?”

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