That's a nice app you have come up with. I like it. Here are some suggestions to create a better experience:
1. Use of arrow keys to navigate between the quotes will deliver a much better experience to the users.
2. Providing the users with a filter to browse books by different categories, authors etc. will prove to be a better discovery platform.
3. Use AJAX to load the quotes instead of reloading the page every-time.
Entry(or Discovery) of a player into the market essentially validates your concept and is a proof that their is a demand for your product in the market. Nothing around is perfect and there is always room for improvement ;)
People with a college education are definitely rewarded.
The cultural problem is not that education is not valued, it is more on the lines of that education is often (most of the times) equated to "formal education."
I can empathize, been in a similar situation myself. Most of the git tutorials out there have a problem that they don't explain much of the 'why' and just tell about the 'how'. They are telling mostly about commands and not about the concepts behind it.
Some guy at Harvard wrote a great tutorial[1] on understanding git conceptually. It has been on of the best git tutorials I have read myself.
> This also makes me ask, is the only way to radically change UI to come up with a completely new from scratch paradigm, and if so, is this why we have metro?
Surely, quite a lot of time a design can be tweaked in its current version to make some great changes which drastically improve upon the usability. But on the contrary I think that Windows has reached a stage where some minor tweaks in its current incarnation won't make a lot of difference. It can only be optimized not radically improved until it is completely though from bottom up.
You might like to read about the concept of "Local Maximum"[1] on 52 weeks of UX. Here's a excerpt from the post.
Do you ever feel that your design has become stale and that despite your making lots of little changes to it over time without any big overhaul there is just no way to drastically improve it? If so you’ve probably hit what Andrew Chen calls the “Local Maximum”.
I don't know why they are not doing the same on their own. Anyways they are doing it indirectly by giving the firehose access to companies like DataSift[1].
IMO innovation doesn't always mean coming up with a completely different genre of products. Here's an excerpt from the wikipedia entry on innovation.
Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society.
OSX and iOS are definitely BSD derivatives with an exception that using them for a normal user is not equivalent to herding cats.
Apple is perfect combination of a mainstream and real innovation. GUIs are the best example which were originally developed by Xerox, but it was apple to innovate on top of that GUI concept to make it work for the masses.
Definitely the portrayal may have been too aggressive, but that is the reality of the Indian Education system.
Students here are driven by a lot of social pressures to get into an IIT just with a mindset that this wil l help them get high paying job helping them to lead a cushy life.