Everything Was Breakin’

Neal Conan: “You had solar panels (on your sailboat) for electricity.”

Matt Rutherford: “I did, but they broke.”

Neal: “They broke?”

Matt: “One by one.”

Neal: “I think you had a Kindle for reading books.”

Matt: “I did. It broke in a storm.”

If there’s a better betrayal of the weakness of our modern, connected, age – it is this story. The tools we are so entranced by are quite fragile and weak. A stark contrast to the relentlessness of our own will to survive.

CD-ROMs Part 2

“And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital. Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica.” – Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review.