Notes

Sur la « bêta permanente » appliquée au design, p. 49 :

Second, we had to become great at consumer product design. We knew we needed great technology, but we also understood we needed a great experience, one you want to engage with time and again. Traditional software design mapped out what developers thought a product should look like in a year’s time, when if would finally go to market. Modern software design involves online products updated through continuous experimentation. Designers offer Web pages in “flights,” so an old version of Bing is delivered to some searchers while an untested new version reaches others. Users scorecards determine which is the most effective. Sometimes, seemingly tiny differences can mean a lot.

Sur l’« âme » d’Apple, et celle de Microsoft, p. 69 :

Steve Jobs understood what the soul of a company is. He once said that “design is the fundamental soul of a man-mande creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” I agree. Apple will always remain true to its soul as long as its inner voice, its motivation, is about great design for consumer products. The soul of our company is different. I knew that Microsoft needed to regain its soul as the company that makes powerful technology accessible to everyone and every organization—democratizing technology.

Sur la concurrence entre Apple et Microsoft, p. 122 :

Seeing me demo Microsoft software on an iPhone designed and built by Apple, one of our toughest, longest-standing competitors, was surprising and even refreshing. Microsoft versus Apple has been such a prominent and even contentious rivalry that people forget we’ve been building software for the Mac since 1982. Today one my top priorities is to make sure that our billion customers, no matter which phone or platform they choose to use, have their needs met so that we continue to grow. To do that, sometimes we have to bury the hatchet with old rivals, pursue surprising new partnerships, and revive longstanding relationships. Over the years we’ve developed the maturity to become more obsessed with customer needs, thereby learning to coexist and compete.

Sur le futur de l’intelligence artificielle, p. 151 :

I believe that in ten years AI speech and visual recognition will be better than a human’s. But just because a machine can see and hear doesn’t mean it can truly learn and understand. Natural langage understanding, the interaction between computers and humans, is the next frontier.

Sur la sécurité contre la vie privée, p. 180 :

The ultimate solution to the privacy-versus-security dilemma is to ensure trust on all sides, which is no glib line. Customers must trust that we will protect their privacy, but we must be transparent about the legal conditions in which we won’t. Similarly, public officials must trust that we can be counted on to help them protect public safety, so long as the rules protecting individual freedom are clear and followed consistently. But building and maintaining both kinds of trust—finding the balance between individual and public obligations—has always defined the progress of institutions. But it may be more art than science.

Sur la différence entre « privé » et « secret », une nuance qui semble échapper à la plupart des dirigeants de la Silicon Valley, p. 193 :

Sometimes I hear people in the United States say that no one cares about privacy anymore. With the rise of social media services, some like to say that privacy is dead—that rather than keeping their information secret, people are sharing it freely online.

But I don’t believe this means that privacy has died. It simply means that people are adopting new definitions and new norms for privacy. Keeping information private increasingly does not mean keeping it secret. People want to control who they share information with and how that shared information is used. And, in the United States, this evolution is occurring against a backdrop that includes a reasonable expectation of privacy because of Americans’ long history of relying on the protections provided by the Fourth Amendment. I find that Europeans tend to be far more sensitive about privacy issues, perhaps in part because they recall how personal privacy was utterly shattered by dictators of the previous century.

Yes, millions of people are increasingly comfortable sharing personal information with their friends—but that doesn’t mean they’re comfortable sharing it with the world.

Notes archivistiques

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