It is very rare indeed when I disagree with Seth Godin. He is a brilliant man, a best-selling author, and an insightful coach for the emerging economy, but he’s missed it on the latest announcement from Apple. I don’t blame him. It’s easy to do with all the changes that are bouncing around like a Heisenberg Uncertainty experiment.

Today, in a useful post on his Domino Project blog, he says that Apple did not just make publishing easier with their announcement of the iBooks Author application. He rightfully notes that the iBooks Author application is about authoring books, not publishing them, and there’s a difference between printing and publishing. All true.

However, the iBookstore itself is a new way to publish. In much the same way that iTunes changed publishing first for music and then for movies and TV. And the iOS App Store and then the Mac App Store changed the economics and dynamics of software publishing, so will the iBookstore change the dynamics of book publishing. The iBook Author app is the disintermediation of book creation and the iBookstore is the creation of a publishing platform designed for social discovery and long-tail economics.

Unfortunately, I think that Seth falls into a bit of myopia here due to his experience with and success in both using publishers and creating a brilliant new publisher in his Domino Project. He sounds like some of the doomsayers in the early days of iOS apps.

Publishing will never be the same. Neither will making and selling music or making and selling other creative works. Seth knows this. Perhaps the world changed publishing and Apple is simply building tools for the ride. Regardless, anyone can now create and publish a book. Selling it requires building a tribe, just like it always did, but now you get to do it on your own.

With the passing of Steve Jobs this week juxtaposed against the announcement and release of the new iPhone 4S, the technology media have been atwitter with their views of Apple’s success or failure to continue their recent successes. In reading a wide range of such writing, it strikes me that most miss the point entirely. The reason is ironically the same reason that Apple is so successful: it’s really difficult to understand people and what they want.

Over the past few years I have spent substantial time studying direct response marketing (such as the marketing done by companies who take out those one-page ads for subglasses or the Internet marketing that offers you a free report for handing over your email address). One of the primary tenants of direct response marketing is this: it doesn’t matter what you want or what you think about those who make up your market. All the matters is what they actually want. Figure that out and you’ll be successful. In fact, your success will be in direct proportion to the accuracy of your understanding. Most technology writers and those who live their lives consumed with technology miss entirely the preferences of the vast majority of people. That’s why Apple is successful. It’s also why I have migrated exclusively to Apple products.

The bottom line: most people just want stuff that works. They don’t want to customize it more than putting their own wallpaper on the screen. They don’t want to hack into it or understand how it works. They want to use it, get their activities done, and keep living their lives.

Apple products do this really well. In fact, Siri—the new Apple iPhone 4S’s mechanism for voice interaction—is the opposite of what most geeks say is needed: it will create less interaction with the screen rather than more.

Today, John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote an article specifically about the iPhone 4S and everything the pundits are saying Apple got wrong. I agree 100% with what he says. I expect the iPhone 4S to be the most popular iPhone ever much to the shock of those who think the screen needs to be bigger or that it needs to have a replaceable battery or LTE networking.

It doesn’t. It’s a great upgrade. I’ll have mine in a week and will be sure to let you know what I think after I’ve had some time with it.

What do you think?

Yesterday, just after hitting “publish” on my iPhone 4S recommendation post, I received the news that Steve Jobs had passed away at the too-young age of 56.

I never met Steve, but his uncompromising focus on doing the right thing has influenced me. Today, Ken Segall (I read his blog religiously) shared the impact that Steve had on him, and I must agree, although I never had the experience of working directly with him.

Although I have been accused of being an Apple fan boy, my relationship with Apple is relatively recent and based on only one thing: my use of Apple products has given me a far more productive and pleasant experience than any of the environments I have used in over 25 years of daily technology use.

…and the reason for that is the insistence that Steve had on building products for people, not “users.”

Yesterday, I was struck by how sad I felt when I learned of Steve’s passing. I was rocked when I first saw the news, and found myself grieving far more than I would have expected.

Why?

I think one of the reasons is the rarity of Steve’s insistence on building technology that works for people. Just reading the industry commentaries about Apple products shows this clearly. The complaints are universally about “speeds and feeds,” complaining that this phone has a bigger, higher-quality display than the iPhone or that tablet is available in a 7-inch form factor, missing the only thing that matters: how the product works as a whole. This is why the iPhone is the most popular phone in the US and the iPad is really the only tablet that matters.

So, farewell, Steve. You have inspired me and I am grateful. My commitment is to apply what I have learned from your approach.

Thank you.

Yesterday, the most valuable company in the world (by market value) introduced their latest product. Leading up to the announcement of the new iPhone, the traditional media and blogosphere were rife with rumors, spanning the gamut from the new iPhone only being available on Sprint to very solid rumors that effectively got it right.

Who cares?

The real question is whether or not it makes sense for you to buy one.

For me, the answer is easy: yes, it makes sense. The devices I use are never fast enough for all I try to do with them, and I am using my voice more and more to interact with my phone, so I am looking forward to having the new Siri assistant so that I can use my phone more consistently and safely without looking at it. With Siri, I will be able to hear and reply to text messages, compose emails, change meetings, and more by conversing with my phone. I’m looking forward to that.

Plus, my daughter had her iPhone 3G stolen this summer and has been waiting for a trickle-down iPhone since then.

For you? It may not be as clear.

Here are the criteria I would recommend you use to decide:

• If you cannot purchase it with a contract, I’d consider waiting
• If you do not make heavy use of smartphone features like email, web browsing, camera, and apps, the iPhone 4S is likely overkill for you
• If you make heavy use of Internet data, the iPhone 4S will be a benefit, but only if you are an AT&T subscriber
• If you’re a heavy user of a camera and either want better quality on your phone or would like to leave your camera home most of the time, the iPhone 4S will be great for you

So, what do you think? Is the iPhone 4S in your future? Hit the comments or Facebook with your thoughts.

I’ll let you know more about what I think after I have had an iPhone 4S for a few days.

After I read about another Google customer losing all of his Google data when Google decided to delete (or at least suspend) his account, I got to thinking about all of the times that Google has made a mistake and deleted user accounts or deleted email for Gmail users, I thought about how the different approaches of the key players in the emerging world require you to make some choices, some of which may be untenable. So, I thought I’d lay them out in clearer form than you will get from the hard-core technical blogs or the companies themselves.

At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference this year (WWDC 2011), Steve Jobs and the Apple executive team introduced iOS 5 and iCloud. During his iCloud introduction, Jobs said this: “We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” This is Apple’s philosophy: the iCloud is the sync-master for  your digital life. It provides the axle to your devices that are the spokes. However (and this is a vital distinction!), your digital content lives on your devices when you are using it. The iCloud, then, is the master copy, but Apple expects you to have copies on one or more of your devices.

This is in sharp contrast to Google. In Google’s world, the cloud is the only place where your data resides. You’ll use your browsers (on your PC, your tablet, or your phone) to access, manipulate, create, and use your content. You may even cache some of it locally for performance reasons (for example, caching the first part of a video so you can watch it without “stutters”). However, the content is in the cloud and your devices are simply windows into it from Google’s perspective.

…and then there’s Microsoft. They want to get in on “this cloud thing,” too, but they really aren’t sure how to do it. Their business is Windows and Office, so how can they use the cloud and keep those lines humming? What they are doing now is having the cloud be a glorified backup service with some of the capabilities of their apps. The best experience, however, is to use their native apps on a PC and hook them into the cloud for backup and collaboration. This means that Microsoft Office 365 is a different perspective than iCloud (which is personal) and Google (which is all about the data being in the cloud only). It’s effectively a hybrid of the two.

Regardless, you will want to make a choice based on these distinctions, because to the cloud you will go, one way or the other.

Yesterday, I heard from David Matthew after he completed a very thorough review of small business accounting systems from Intuit (the company that brings you the venerable QuickBooks) and Peachtree, a long-time PC-based accounting system that has played second-fiddle to QuickBooks.

His review includes a couple of very useful charts to compare the two, giving you a very good way of selecting between the two.

In our conversation, I mentioned to him that I’d encourage an expansion to include my current tool, Less Accounting (http://lessaccounting.com/), which is a hosted solution that I find exceptionally productive.

Check them out and let me know what you think!

I grew up in the Midwest, land of wheat and corn, lazy summer days by the pond, sleds and skis in the winter. As I watched men interact with each other, I learned one thing: the handshake of an honest man is worth more than any written contract any day.

As I moved into my career, I was blessed to meet a group of brilliant engineers during my work with the InteropNet at the gigantic Interop trade show. These men and women were the best of the best, elite network engineers at the top of their game. We worked at the bleeding edge of technology, expecting — knowing really — that things would go wrong and we would fix them. As a result, engineers from competitive companies often worked together to fix interoperability issues (that is, after all, where “Interop” originated). This team was the Interop NOC team (NOC stands for Network Operations Center), and to this day they remain among my best friends and among those I respect the most in the world.

As a team, we operated under the “NOC moral NDA,” an unwritten agreement that was stronger than any written word could make it. When we work together even now, years later, a simple, “this is under NOC NDA” is all we need to be assured of confidentiality. It’s unquestionable. Take it to the bank, it’s trustworthy.

Unfortunately, this is increasingly rare in the world today. It seems that many people are comfortable telling “half-truths” (which is another word for “lies”), breaking promises, breaching confidentiality, and generally playing roughshod with integrity. Regardless of any excuses that perpetrators may offer for this kind of behavior, it’s all dishonest. And done once, it means that the perpetrator can no longer be trusted with any commitment, promise, or communication.

I don’t think the short-term benefit of such a strategy is worth the long-term loss.

For your part, what does it cost for youth give up your integrity?

When dealing with others, I think Ronald Regan’s strategy is the best I’ve heard:

Trust…

…but verify.

Last week there was another jobs report. The economists wait around their computers to learn whether or not their estimates were right, and the investors and money people make decisions based on those numbers. There’s a real problem with all this that appears to be invisible to virtually everyone: jobs are a myth, those that did exist are disappearing, and there is nothing anyone can do about it!

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in Revelation and Transformation that I had been reading Seth Godin’s books Linchpin and Poke the Box. In Linchpin, Seth makes a compelling case for the cooperation between industry and government to create a large base of reusable employees for factories by building the educational infrastructure to train people to do what they are told, fit in, follow rules, and be efficient. This was the world of our fathers and grandfathers.

The problem is that their world is no more!

Just as quickly as it arrived, it is fading.

If you’re looking for a job, stop. Their time is passing quickly. Instead, find a way to add value to others.

How can you do that?

As I begin a new day, I am thinking about the power of commitments and agreements… When I make an agreement with myself or another, I create a reality that didn’t exist before. The agreement creates a bond between present and future, intent and reality. What happens next?

What happens next is a function of whether or not I keep the agreement and whether or not I’m moving towards its keeping. When I am active in the actions of a plan to complete my agreement, there is a sense of accomplishment and awareness of integrity.

When I am not active in moving towards my promise, I tend to hide from my commitment. I “forget” it, avoid it, and most often procrastinate in creating any plan to achieve it. While I may suppress my sense of integrity lost, it is there, gnawing at my self worth, reminding me that I am untrustworthy, and keeping me from moving forward in my life.

There is a false antidote to this struggle: I just avoid making commitments. If I don’t commit to you that I will do or be something, I can’t fail to deliver. Unfortunately, this means I leave behind in my wake an ambiguous mess of misunderstanding and confusion. “I thought you said…” “No, I never said that! What I said was…” Together with phrases like “I’ll try…” “If I can…” and even “Sounds good!”

But underneath the outward assurance, inside you know. You avoided the commitment, created a sense of agreement to avoid conflict, and built a line of defenses based on waffle-words.

The problem is that we pay the price for this lack of agreement and commitment. We live life out of integrity and feel the weight of deception and doubt. We lose clear priorities. We have no clean lines.

So we look for others to tell us what to do. And we repeat the cycle: You will commit to only what you know you can easily accomplish. You hide from any possible failure by not promising more. You create a bastion of reasons. You’re so busy. Family commitments call. Work needs you. Bad traffic. And on and on we go, spinning excuses and watching life tick-tock, tick-tock to the end.

And we die before our time.

Want to live? Take a risk! Commit to an accomplishment that means something to you. Commit it to yourself, someone important to you, or to God.

Then take the first step: figure out the first few steps on the path to getting there. Create review milestones when you’ll correct your plan, expand it, and clarify it. Get to the end. Pick small promises at first. Take out the garbage. Sort the recyclables. Wash the dishes and put them away. And do what you promise. Create a habit. Then build on it.

Live your commitments. Everything else is noise and smoke.

Sometimes discovery sneaks up on me.

I’ve been fighting lately. I had one of those “big” birthdays recently (one that ends in a “0″) and have been doing a lot of self-examination and thinking about what’s next in this random miracle that is my life. I’ve also been facing really difficult truths. Friends who have betrayed their commitments to me, customers who took advantage of my trust and keep promising payment that hasn’t come, and the pain of mysterious gossip and slander that hides in the shadows every time someone is successful… and I am no exception.

Sometimes, it rears its ugly head and demands attention instead of the brush off I usually give it.

That just happened to me.

Two weekends ago I attended a conference in the mountains west of Golden. Called Men at the Cross, it was a time of introspection, reflection, challenging my deeply-rooted beliefs about myself, and examination of why I do what I do and am who I am. It snowed 6″ (in May??!), I was challenged and took action I normally would have avoided, and faced authenticity from others that is exceptionally rare.

It was great!

As I reflected on the past few years during my time there, I realized that coaching others has its joys, but when I’m not careful, I miss those learning opportunities that show up for me. Such was the case that weekend. Fortunately, I was forced to slow down enough to examine myself and my life in order to see what I might have lost. It was an interesting process as I both went through it and observed myself going through it… There were times I stood off to the side and just watched, others where I lost myself in the process.

I decided to risk believing that the Father had something to show me. He did.

It is an incredible gift and blessing to see clearly, and I did see it. I guess it was time. I saw the stories I made up to myself in the process of trying to understand what was going on and why. I also got clarity about how to deal with it all.

Here’s the deal: if you have something you want to say about someone, say it to them. If you are unwilling or unable to do that, don’t say anything to anyone. Own your own stuff. Don’t blame it on the person who happens to trigger the response in you. It’s yours. Own it.

So, if you’ve got something to say to me, please say it. I promise to listen, whether I agree or not.

I’m going to own my stuff, too, confront those who have been believing gossip and slander about me, and I am going to move forward.

More on that move forward next time. Have you read Poke the Box and/or Linchpin by Seth Godin? If not, you really should.

That’ll be next…!