Shades of Twitter
I just read Tyler Neylon’s appeal for support for math notation on Medium. Can I add my plea for a smaller font size for use with footnotes and quoted text as well?
Medium seems to take forever to implement the tiniest improvements. It reminds one of Twitter, and not in a good way.
As Erin Griffith noted in her Fortune article (“Fixing Twitter,” March 15, 2016), “Many of Twitter’s most innovative features, including the hashtag, @reply, and retweet, were actually invented by users.”
Hope we don’t have to wait for users to make improvements at Medium. Over time, startups become ossified and resistant to change. It’s a strange malady, and it’s beginning to affect startups earlier and earlier in their life cycles.
Like Twitter, Medium is probably bursting with engineering talent. But something somehow gets in the way of getting the simplest things done.
This happened all the time at Apple before Steve Jobs came back and rescued the company he’d co-founded.
I’d seen firsthand what the old Apple culture was like. Twelve thousand Apple employees could agree on a new direction, only to be stymied by the passive resistance of one or two people who opposed the initiative. Once those individuals dug in their heels, the company couldn’t budge.
Dan Eilers, our chief marketing officer at the time, called this “exercising the pocket veto.” Eilers, an inspiring leader who went on to join Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, always said this was one of Apple’s greatest weaknesses.
There were times when life at Apple reminded me of an iconic scene from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett, two guys on their way to Las Vegas, are in the cockpit of a corporate jet. The pilot (Jim Backus) has passed out drunk in the back of the plane.
The tower controllers get a local pilot (Paul Ford) to try and talk Rooney and Hackett safely down out of the sky. The first thing this local pilot does is ask them who’s flying the plane.
“Who’s flying the plane?” Rooney says fretfully, scared out of his wits. “Nobody’s flying the plane.”
That was what it was like at Apple in the bad old days: nobody was flying the plane. Until the summer of 1997, when Mr. Jobs came back and took over the company.
“We’re gonna run this place like a startup,” Jobs said, standing up there on the stage in his shorts, flipflops and Issey Miyake mock turtleneck, satanic eyebrows quivering. Things started to change from that moment.
Apple became a nimbler company overnight. We had fewer meetings, for one thing. Issues that took months to resolve started getting decided within days, if not hours. Or minutes.
I’ll give you an example of this. We had an editor who insisted on using a capital E and a hyphen in the word email. It looked archaic, but her word was the law in matters of corporate style. Until Steven Paul Jobs said otherwise.
Mr. Jobs saw the word E-mail on an Apple business card. He wasn’t happy. So he sent a two-sentence companywide email telling Apple employees to stop using a capital E and a hyphen to spell email. And E-mail became email from that day on.
Hopefully we’ll see such speedy action with support for footnotes and math notation at Medium. If we’re lucky, there’ll be some adult at Medium who has the power to say, “Make it so.” I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
