I’m excited about this because it takes the Raspberry Pi and some additional pieces of hardware, puts it together in a kit in a way that an eight year old can understand and start really digging into the world of computer engineering. I know for my own sons, they’re not quite at that age yet, but what’s attractive to me about this hands-on engineering is I fully believe that engineering is going to be a key skill to have going forward, and I want my kids to be able to not be afraid of it, to not be afraid to get their hands dirty whether it’s in playing with circuit boards or writing code. I want them to be comfortable with that.

The idea to get kids involved at a young age, it’s almost like the transistor radio kits of the past decades or maybe some of the science kits that you and I may have had growing up. I’m just delighted that that is shipping. Judging from the Twitter chatter and the reddit conversations, I think a lot of parents are happy about that too.

I think, whoever the designers were on the team that thought through this onboarding process into youngsters engineering, I think they did a great job.

I think they have somewhere in the range of 5,600 startups that they’ve mapped out on a wonderful interactive InfoVis just showing their startup ecosystem. Ten years ago, that wasn’t there. This is something that New York has taken on to add to its power as financial center, as an entertainment center, and frankly, on the East Coast, I think this New York as a startup hub has really started to grow some legs. This website launch which I think is most notable for just highlighting the extent that startup community has grown and investment community there has grown over the past five years, I think that’s really notable.

It fits into a bigger narrative of a number of places including New York City, other cities in the United States, as well as cities around the world trying to compete with Silicon Valley and be the next Silicon Valley. To the degree to which that ambition underpins this, it’s certainly understandable from the standpoint of economic development, the standpoint of looking to the future, but that motivation is so wrong-minded. Barring a terrorist act or barring the climate change, making Silicon Valley in hospitable … I mean Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley and if you look at the biggest tech startups and the biggest what tech companies are going public and they’re still all from Silicon Valley. I mean by just a tremendously disproportionate percentage.

The whole Silicon Alley thing and the … I don’t know how familiar our listeners are with this, but just all of the cabby climbing to try and unseat Silicon Valley is just silly. What New York has done with this website and reflecting their also impressive tech community, like rock on. That’s great, but it’s more of a rising tide lifts all boats situation than something competitive in my perspective.

Part of the reason why I’m excited about Digital.nyc is because it does celebrate entrepreneurs and creating new opportunities even if, generally speaking, they’re a whole long way to go.

It’s more in the context of a business community that might seem like splitting hairs, but what it really gets to is that the types of businesses that are being created around technology are not rooted to place, are not rooted to community, are not rooted to people. They’re more sort of these nebulous extensions of global capitalism. While that’s okay in certain ways, it does lack a lot of the positive byproducts that the more traditional small companies, or let’s use the word small businesses, would provide to a community.

The other vector there too is there’s just a lot more turning of money. It’s not uncommon for people starting businesses in this context to start one and burn through an $100,000 or Y million dollar, fail, spin-off the next one, burn through the money, fail. There’s nothing wrong with failure, but it lacks some of the straightforward building and infrastructure that we go into the more traditional businesses that are just vanishing rapidly. I think there’s a bigger entrepreneurial milieu that would be worth exploring but is probably outside the bounds of the show we’re recording right now.

What that means is that across all the different devices in your tech ecosystem, be it your mobile phone, your desktop computer, your tablet computer, the way windows is intended to work is to provide this unified experience where you can jump from device to device and have this consistency that .. It often does feel jarring for me to be looking at my iPhone and then I’m spending a bunch of time on my desktop. It’s just not quite the same thing. The general idea behind that unified UX I think is a pretty brave experiment because we’ve got all sorts of different pixel formats, real estate is totally different, interactions are different across those platforms.

I can’t tell if the current instantiation of Windows us successful or not, but they are doubling down on this paradigm and according to the announcement, they are actually going in and building this next version from the ground up so that it’s suitable for the cloud as well or it’s meant to work with the cloud seamlessly. Interesting stuff on the UX side happening over at Microsoft which sometimes gets overlooked because of all, or at least, the perceived attention for Apple.

I mean God bless them. I hope that Windows 10 crushes it and totally solves the ecosystem problems across devices and the cloud and the whole nine yards. For somebody to do that well, amen brother. I mean I’ll be the happiest guy alive. Wouldn’t it be interesting if instead of beating their stupid, same marketing advertising bullshit drum, if they just launch the damn thing and instead of already setting expectations high and under delivering as always, what if they pleasantly surprise us once? How would that change our perception of the Microsoft brand? How would that change our interpretation of Microsoft’s position in the computing ecosystem?

I know for me as a user group of one, it would be hugely impactful for the positive if instead of shoving this next, big, latest, greatest bullshit down my throat, just launch it and then get people talking about it. You know what? Microsoft actually killed it here and instead of trying to ratchet it up to be this huge thing, they just took it on the down low, and you know what, they really exceeded expectations. That would be something to be excited about.

That integrative experience would need to be similar and it would all have to happen over a period of time. Also, still to this day, I mean I guess maybe it’s been a year or two now, but when I fairly recently bought a PC, I mean it was like buying a PC from Dell in 1996. It’s just all sort of questionable. There’s this edges to it where you have to do this funky borderline engineering stuff to get it all to work right. It’s not just open the box and the sun shines in. I don’t know, to get me to switch, they just have a lot of work to do. I mean God bless them. I hope they get there.

I mean I’m increasingly disenchanted with Apple both on the product and the business side. I mean the whole … I don’t even have as much problem with the free music, but the whole U2 thing which is such a fiasco where at the big announcement they have u2 perform and then Tim Cook is acting like just spontaneously. He’s like, “Oh God, you guys are the best. I really love you guys,” which right away seemed dated and culturally out of touch. Then you find out that it was all just a big business ploy to promote this collaboration with U2 as opposed to something that’s actually spontaneous and interesting. It’s just another marketing fiasco.

I’m hardly an Apple acolyte these days, but yeah, there’s really not a good alternative. Microsoft has got a long way to go. I hope they get there because I’m increasingly jaded with being part of the hipster Apple stereotype. I like to wear some different clothes.

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