More Macworld I saw the rest of Jobs' keynote today, and I was impressed by how carefully they've been thinking about what people are using their tools for.

Something I've noticed at Lotus is how engineers start by trying to solve a problem, but then notice that the problem is just a particular instance of a larger class of problem, and then they start to try and solve that, until they realize they can abstract that problem to something even broader. By this time any useful application is long gone and they end up producing some piece of infrastructure -- fine to build other stuff on but useless to end users. Which is how Notes feels to me -- ugly scaffolding.

But Apple focused on the applications. There's a reason iChat and iTunes links into rendevous--it makes rendevous useful. Yes they have a database built into the OS, but it handles people, and today I mostly use my computer to share stuff with others. And Sherlock's web services plug directly into every day applications like restaurants and movies.

I actually saw the product Daniel refers too in an Apple store and didn't know what it was, so I looked it up online and discovered it's a $45 volume knob. That clicks. I want one, but only because it's so shiny.