Product Managers play a very important role in the success of a product because they allow the specialists to focus on their role. An designer is good with UX and UI but doesn't necessarily want to create product requirements. An engineer is mostly interested in code but is not really tuned to what the customer needs.
Designers, Engineers, Sales perform well when they have deep narrow focus and goals. The Product Managers' job is to allow them to excel in their specialist role much like the conductor of a multi-piece orchestra.
I see nothing wrong in Musk defending his position vigorously because he had complete faith in the car but more so because the logs clearly indicate Broder forgot to top-off. The NYT review is damaging not only to Tesla's sales but also questions the viability of electric cars. I am ok with how Musk handled the situation and I don't think Tesla is going to lose any more goodwill in the long run any more than Apple lost during Steve Jobs' response during 'Antennagate'...the difference is that there is no damning evidence against the Tesla.
More importantly I feel that this incident has heralded a new era in media communications where the press can no longer wield this one-sided power over companies, now the companies are in a position to retort back.
I don't think Broder was violating his journalistic integrity but I do think he fell into the confirmation bias trap. He took the car for a test drive with the preconceived judgement that electric cars are not ready yet esp. in cold weather conditions. Then he subconsciously starts doing things to support his hypothesis, hiding behind his flawed reasoning that this is what any common person would do. The experiment was doomed to fail from the start. I can very easily create a similar situation with a gas-powered car -- it really isn't very hard to run out of gas if you are not vigilant about how much gas is left and where the gas station is located. In this case the charging stations are no where as widespread as gas stations are.
I don't think its just a matter of economics, Netflix doesn't have a choice if they have to survive long-term. Thanks to the internet, the power is shifting from content providers to content creators and they risk turning into a dumb pipe at the mercy of whimsical broadcasters who can choose to stream their show directly to their viewers. Reed Hastings has said that it is a race for how fast Netflix can become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix. They need to produce their own shows else soon they will only get access to B-grade content.
I have worked both on a hybrid team (colo + remote) & a completely remote team (no office) and I can emphatically say that the hybrid team is one of the worst experiences in my career. Decisions were made in some other parts of the world, really really early morning calls and a general sense of frustration for all.
In a completely remote team, you are forced to optimize for coordination and communication. Obviously you suffer the downsides because there is no water cooler, no joint information dissemination sessions, no war room accountability though you can achieve some kind of co-creation using skype, join.me, git and trello. However you gain some big advantages in terms of finding the right resource at the best cost, undivided focus if remote team members are given work packages and ability to exploit the timezone difference for a 24hour work cycle. Not to mention the humongous personal flexibility which it affords at an individual level.
A point to note is that this remote vs. colo experience really can come down to the individual members and their personalities. There is no one size fits all.
TL;DR Go completely colo or completely remote, half-colo + half-remote = half-ass. Team personality is a very strong variable in this equation.
I think most people have trouble visualizing effects of policy because the changes are not immediate and hence not discernible. So instead of trying to convince people why gun control can help reduce mass shootings, lets do the opposite. Let me try to convince you to legalize the use of bazookas, a portable antitank weapon. Do we feel safer in this new world? You need to draw a line in the sand for controlling the use of lethal weapons and I think that line starts with assault weapons - rifles that can mow down an entire room in a minute.
Another flawed argument is that these incidents are small anomalies which can't be controlled by regulatory changes. Yes, if you can categorically prove that this is just a blimp on the charts. Anecdotally it feels like this is spreading, increasing in frequency. At what point are you going to put your foot down and push for changes? Some social behaviors tend to be pretty viral, inspiring a new set of perpetrators. Lets treat this with caution and not bury it under the carpet of data & statistics.
This is a new phase of the tablet wars. During phase 1, an iPad was not only more polished (both hardware and software) but also much cheaper than the competition. In 2009, no other tablet maker could match iPad on cost for equivalent specs because Apple had completely optimized the supply chain. Non-iPads mostly sucked!
Fast forward 3years, tablets are no longer a novelty and users have figured out that the product is more function based rather than status driven - unlike Phones where brand plays a part in the purchase esp because majority of the usage happens in front of other people.
One sign of this change in consumer behavior was signaled by the launch of iPad 4 within 6months of the iPad 3. Felt like Apple saw a glitch in the matrix and had to make sudden changes. Q3 earnings confirmed that iPad sales were down.
What now? Well, the door is wide open. People will pick based on personal preferences as there is no clear "objective best": iPads, Kindles and Nexuses are all interchangeable.
I have an iPad but it is primarily a consumption device and after a couple of hours it starts to feel like I have reached 'the end of the internet'.
A light laptop with a really fast browser and a physical keyboard is paramount so I can write, comment, chat, email and multitask. This Chromebook really hits a sweet spot for me both with size and cost!
You will find that Steve Jobs (aka Apple's) path to success aligns itself very well to Gladwell's 10,000hour rule. Gladwell proposed that it takes almost 10year to become an expert as you go through the do, learn, tweak cycle. Steve Jobs took something which was existing but questioned a lot of assumptions to come up with new inventions (an approach which Elon Musk mentions in his "Reasoning from First Principles" interview). On the other end of the spectrum are people like Einstein who clearly wrote the first principle because there was none before that. I am personally encouraged that Steve Jobs was able to bring about massive change in the world with this approach....the valuable lesson for budding entrepreneurs like me is that given time, identification of good ideas and persistence, we could also do something similar though on a smaller scale without being born with an IQ > 140.
I suspect most of the buyers of the Kindle Fire are going to be 1st time tablet users unlike Marco who bought it just to compare against his iPad. I have been using the Fire for the last 2 days and I felt that it has really nailed what a tablet means to me - a consumption device. I started reading my books, watching tv shows, listening to music as soon I switched on the device. The browsing of some websites (cough techcrunch) was surprising quick too. Some of the software and hardware quirks were annoying but I didn't notice because it opened a new way for connecting with content for me....and I paid just 200bucks! There is a lot of focus on usability even compared to my Galaxy Tab with the Honeycomb build. The Kindle Fire is truly an equal to the iPad in an entirely different space -- inexpensive, smaller form-factor, relatively good content & ecosystem -- a space where Apple does not necessarily want to play in.